In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

He begins his discussion above: The war in Gaza is becoming a major issue in the American political campaign. . . . What we're seeing is a very, very nasty debate over support for Israel, with the hard left of the Democratic Party saying to President Biden that they're not going to vote for him if he continues to support Israel, and there's no way, even if Biden were to abandon Israel, there's no way he would ever give the hard left enough. They don't want a cease fire, they want the end of Israel. . . . They don't want a two-state solution. The problem is that Biden has a two-state solution. His two states, however, are Michigan and Minnesota. . . . He's particularly focused on Michigan, because Michigan, has a population of several hundred thousand Muslims and Arabs, who will never be satisfied with a president who supports Israel in any way, and the ceasefire is just a pretext. This is a continuation of the Democrat dilemma since the 1960s: as ...

I'm a little puzzled at Dick and Liz Cheney. The Buish dynasty's time has come and gone, the Bush family itself seems to have decided to keep quiet, but the Cheneys are raging on. Last week, "Sleazy" Liz Cheney Loses It After Bombshell Report Claims She "Suppressed Exonerating Evidence" With J6 Committee , The story refers to a Mollie Hemingway piece in The Federalist that claims she helped the January 6 committee suppress exculpatory evidence for Trump: Cheney and her committee falsely claimed they had “no evidence” to support Trump officials’ claims the White House had communicated its desire for 10,000 National Guard troops. In fact, an early transcribed interview conducted by the committee included precisely that evidence from a key source. The interview, which Cheney attended and personally participated in, was suppressed from public release until now. Deputy Chief of Staff Anthony Ornato’s first transcribed interview with the committee was co...

While the Senate bill providing roughly $60 billion in continued Ukraine aid remains stalled in the House, the overall picture for Ukraine continues to deteriorate . The French paper Marianne has published excerpts by secret military documents that are causing an uproar in Europe and the world, for dealing with the situation on the ground in Ukraine without the disguise of propaganda that pervades almost all reports on the subject. . . . The greatest takeaway from the documents is that ‘a Ukrainian military victory now seems impossible’. The Russian forces are waging ‘a slow and long, high-intensity war based on the continued attrition of the Ukrainian army’. The defense reports harshly criticize the ‘disastrous’ planning done by western military and Ukraine: “‘The planners believed that as soon as the first Russian lines of defense were crossed, the entire front would collapse […] These fundamental preliminary phases were carried out without taking into account the mor...

I'm still amazed at how quickly this year's campaign timetable is moving. I've been saying for quite a while that even in years where Democrats lost the presidential election badly, McGovern in 1972, Dukakis in 1988, or Kerry in 2004, opinion pieces on how badly the Democrat campaigns were going didn't start to emerge until after the summer party conventions. Rush Limbaugh used to speculate that this was because the big-name reporters who had the inside info wanted to keep it secret until they published their own books as post-mortems after the election. By the same token, the defining images of the failed campaigns, like John Kerry windsurfing in the photo above, didn't come out until fall; the Republican ad featuring him turning with the wind came out in September 2004, as did the September 1988 film of Dukakis riding an Abrams tank. The extended drama of Thomas Eagleton's electric shock treatments took place in late July 1972 following the Democrat convent...

I certainly agree with the consensus expressed by Alan Dershowitz and others over Judge McAfee's ruling in the Fulton County RICO case, that in an effort to be even-handed, he split the baby, but the baby died. But most observers miss the bigger point, which I began to discuss a month ago in another post about incompetence as it relates to Nathan Wade and the eventual progress of the Fulton County case. Jordan Sekulow looks at the edges of the same problem below at 2:57: Sekulow: . . . here's the queation, Andy: If Nathan Wade is removed, the work that he generated, the work product that he generated during this period of time, would be, under the Wong Sun case [371 U.S. 471 (1963)], normally deemed fruit of the poisonous tree. Andy: That's right. Sekulow: There's nothing in the order about that at all. Andy: No, he doesn't think it out, the judge doesn't think it out. Sekulow: What happens, then, to all the -- he was the lead prosecutor. What ha...

For the second time this week: President Biden on Thursday was heard asking for permission from a staffer to “take a couple of questions” from the audience during a campaign stop in Michigan — prompting other aides to quickly move the press out of earshot. “Can I take a couple questions?” Biden, 81, asked a female staffer as he met with supporters and campaign volunteers on the front porch of a Saginaw city council member’s home. “Yeah, we’re going to take a few questions,” the staffer responded. The staffer’s response apparently served as a signal to three other aides, who quickly began to herd up the reporters already positioned on the sidewalk about 20 feet away. “Thank you, press … back in the vehicles,” they shouted, escorting the media away before Biden could take any questions. It looks like the Post reporter saw the same possibility I entertained on Tuesday , that if Joe "asks for permission to take questions", he's really saying it's time t...

I've read enough Bible history to know that Israel was regularly overrun by successive powerful neighbors, beginning with Egypt and leading up to the Seleucid Greeks, at which point the decision was made to ally with the upstart power Rome for protection from all the others. That was mildly successful until Rome took over itself and obliterated Israel at least as successfully as any of the others. Israel's modern history has involved alliance with another upstart world empire, the US, having received assurance from a fading empire, the UK, that it would grant territory for a new Jewish state in territories it controlled under the Palestine mandate. Harry Truman's immediate support for the emergence of the new state after World War II was the key factor in its initial survival. It's beginning to appear, though, that Israel's relationship with the US may wind up more like its ancient relationship with Rome. Just this morning in The Hill : During President...