In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Yesterday I ran across yet another set of remarks from a former Obama-era staffer who'd gotten to know Joe as vice president. Mike McCormick, who served as Joe Biden’s stenographer traveling with him around the world including to Ukraine, recently published a book revealing what he saw, which included criminal activity in regards to the Burisma kickback scheme. “The Case to Impeach and Imprison Joe Biden” lays out probably the most comprehensive account ever written about the scheme. I'm less concerned about Burisma, because it really isn't figuring into the current campaign, and I'm still puzzled that the amounts of money involved are so trivial, especially when spread around among Hunter and maybe a dozen other family members. A vice president ought to be getting more than a million here and a million there -- how can this be worth his time? That's the really interesting question, and if we ever get an anmswer, it'll say a lot more about the roots ...

From the Gateway Pundit yesterday : This afternoon, President Trump shared an image of a 2018 letter from Stormy Daniels on his Truth Social Account. Above the image of the letter from the porn star, turned darling of the Democrat Party, President Trump wrote: “LOOK WHAT I JUST FOUND!” He asked, “WILL THE FAKE NEWS REPORT IT??” The image and part of the post are shown above. (Click on the image for a larger view.) It reads in part: Over the past few weeks, I have been asked countless times to comment on reports of an alleged sexual relationship I had with Donald Trump many, many, many years ago. The fact of the matter is that each party to this alleged affair denied its existence in 2006, 20011, 2016, 2017 and now again in 2018. I am not denying this affair because I was paid “hush money” as has been reported in overseas owned tabloids. I am denying this affair because it never happened. This piqued my curiosity, since I posted two weeks ago on Michael Avenatti's repor...

I mentioned David Gelernter, a Yale professor of computer science, Orthodox Jew, and Republican yesterday as someone I've followed in the past for his views on America and Israel. So far, I haven't found much from him on the current situation, but he wrote a 2006 essay that bears on the problem, Why do so many American Jews hate the president who stands by Israel? Here's his key point: For those who continue to insist on voting Democratic, the future is written in a recent column by Richard Cohen--who explains that the "greatest mistake Israel could make at the moment is to forget that Israel itself is a mistake." Who advises Israel to "hunker down," while "waiting (and hoping) that history will get distracted and move on to something else." It is hard to understand why Israel is a mistake if Switzerland isn't--or the United States, or any other nation or (for that matter) human being. Cohen himself is occupying space right now that s...

From the New York Post: Anti-Israel activists were heard chanting “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” at a rally in a Michigan city recently dubbed the “jihad capital” of the US. The sick chants erupted at a rally Friday in Dearborn marking Al Quds Day, in which Muslims around the world denounce Israel, according to a video posted by the Middle East Media Research Institute. They came after Dearborn activist Tarek Bazzi ripped the US for supporting Israel — and told the crowd that “the chant ‘Death to Israel’ has become the most logical chant across the world today. My reaction to this is just a follow-on to the issue that came up in Sunday's post -- the objective of the current wave of anti-Semitism isn't just to wipe out Israel, it's to "globalize the intifada", in other words, to wipe out all Jews. Why does this project seem to resonate so widely? After all, the speaker in Dearborn quoted by the post claims “the chant ‘Death to Israel’ has become...

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...