In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

One question keeps pestering me. We have the most famous assessment of Joe's capabilities from Barack Obama -- "Don't underestimate Joe's ability to [mess] things up" -- but this piece from 2020 on the eve of Biden's nomination goes farther: Interviews with dozens of senior officials of the Obama-Biden administration painted a picture of eight years during which the president and vice president enjoyed a genuinely close personal relationship, built particularly around devotion to family, while at the same time many senior aides, sometimes tacitly encouraged by the president’s behavior, dismissed Biden as eccentric and a practitioner of an old, outmoded style of politics. “You could certainly see technocratic eye-rolling at times,” said Jen Psaki, the former White House communications director. Young White House aides frequently mocked Biden’s gaffes and lack of discipline in comparison to the almost clerical Obama. They would chortle at how Biden, li...

John Hinderaker, whom I normally take as seriously as I take any other Ivy League Republican, actually raised an important point yesterday. First, he cited the Washington Free Beacon : A Rutgers University town hall descended into anarchy Thursday evening as anti-Israel students chanted demands to "globalize the intifada," hurled anti-Semitic insults at Jewish students, and forced the school's president to end the event early[.] Hinderaker then observes , “Globalize the intifada” means that no Jew should ever be able to live in safety, anywhere in the world. He cites shouts of "Go back home!" elsewhere in the story and asks, “Go back home”? Where might that be? Not Israel, evidently. Maybe, like the former “dean of the White House press corps,” Helen Thomas, they want Jews to go “back” to Germany and Poland. But they don’t want Jews here in the U.S., or in Israel. What strikes me in the current outbreak is that since the Holocaust, anti-Semitis...

I'm at a point in my life where I'm ready to make a decision I never thought I'd ever have to make. and that is abandoning the Democratic party. Like Ronald Reagan said, I didn't leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me. . . . I think a lot of people in America are going through an assessment. Many Democrats, people who voted for Democrats, are now saying I can't vote for Kamala Harris, I can't vote for Joe Biden, but they're also saying I can't vote for Donald Trump. They're looking for a third alternative, and there may be some third alternatives. Bobby Kennedy has been very strongly supportive of Israel, and we don't know who the candidate for No Labels will be. He goes on to point out that the current election is likely to hinge on a few critical states, but . . . it will not be Michigan. It will not be the Muslims and the Arabs of Michigan. They will not determine the outcome of this election. Why? Because we wo...

Early in the history of this blog, I brought up the end-of-the-world oppurtunity presented by the notion that the Mayan calendar predicted everything would wrap on December 21, 2012. I said that if anyone believed that, their best option would be to run up their credit cards all that month, because they would never have to pay back the balance. As far as I know, whether people believed the world was going to end in 2012 or not, none of them ran up their credit cards thinking it would. However, what I did think was happening in the wake of the 2020 election was that Democrats, having swept into power on the thinnest of margins, began running up whatever political balance they could on the basis that they'd never have to pay anything back down the road. Last August, I reviewed this : [Speaker Pelosi] expected to enact the Great Reset agenda via a pair of infrastructure bills in 2021, getting it all done before the start of the 2022 election cycle, when by this point conven...

This morning, I saw this: On Tuesday, he had nothing at all on his public schedule. But, as I noted, he looked horrible at his healthcare remarks that he had to deliver on Wednesday and lost badly in a fight with the teleprompter. . . . Biden was late to the event which was supposed to be at 11 a.m. He kept Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and the health care advocates who attended the even [sic] waiting for an hour before he bothered to appear. He didn't show up until around 12 p.m. And when he showed up finally, people noticed that he had CPAP strap marks still very evident on his face. He supposedly sleeps with a CPAP machine helping him because he has sleep apnea. But if he's showing up at that time with the straps still evident on his face, then one has to concluded it's very likely he overslept. Fox's Jesse Watters made this point. "If he has a creasy face at noon, he just got out of bed," Watters surmised. He wasn't up late or doing anythin...

In this morning's Breitbart lead story : Former President Donald Trump declared that the November election will be “Christian Visibility Day” in opposition to President Joe Biden’s declaration of “Transgender Day of Visibility” on March 31, which coincided with Easter Sunday this year. “Election Day, November 5th, will be the most important day in the History of our Country. It will also be Christian Visibility Day, the biggest turnout of Christians in the history of our Country!” the former president declared on his Truth Social account. Axios provides some context : The presumptive GOP nominee is encouraging supporters to buy the "God Bless the USA Bible," which draws inspiration from country singer Lee Greenwood's patriotic anthem, "God Bless the USA." "We must make America pray again," Trump said in a video posted to his Truth Social account Tuesday encouraging supporters to make the purchase. The former president said "religio...

There's been a new effort with Obama, the Clintons, and Pelosi to get behind Joe's campaign. Apparently the photo above was taken just this past March 22, a little over a week ago. There was briefly a fundraising ad on YouTube, which disappeared almost immediately, that looks like it was taken in the same session, in which Joe and Barack stand together to make their pitch -- except that it emphasizes all the more that Obama is quite a bit taller than Joe, and he seems robust, while Joe looks frail in contrast. Joe's YouTube ads have almost immediately reverted to Joe talking alone. (In fact, searching the web for recent photos of Joe with Obama, I noticed that in the past, photographers and editors had been careful to frame and angle photos of the two so that the height difference wouldn't be as clear. Now, it doesn't seem like they care.) Last night, Hillary told voters to "get over yourselves" on the Tonight show: Get over yourselves, those a...