In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Although the New York courts have announced that they intend to post transcripts of the Trump trial "before the end of the following business day", this so far hasn't taken place, and the most recent transcript on the site is from Monday. Thus, at least so far, I'm having to rely on incomplete media accounts of the record. Here's the version of vesterday's blowup on Breitbart : Merchan then asked Blanche to explain if Trump believed he was not violating the gag order when he reposted the Truths. “I’d like to hear that,” Merchan exclaimed. Blanche tried to explain, but Merchan said, “Blanche, you’re losing all credibility. I have to tell you right now, you’re losing all credibility with the court.” There's a not fully helpful account of the proceedings in reverse chronological order on CNN . The exchange above appears to have taken place near the end of the hearing, close to the start of the day's trial at 11:00 AM. The specific issue, acco...

In the middle of her podcast yesterday, while discussing the Trump trial in New York, Megyn Kelly interrupted the discussion to announce, "This just in! Pecker's up!" and proceeded to giggle. This, of course, was a reference to David Pecker, the former publishing executive who is the lead prosecution witness in the trial. Her reference to his being "up" meant that he was taking the stand as they spoke, but the point, of course, was the bawdy implication that could be drawn from the circumstance. This, it seems to me, is the emerging problem for the prosecution with this trial, and as with anything else, no plan survives contact with the enemy. After more than a week, it's been a bore. During jury selection, we had the usual talking heads outlining the usual defense strategies for choosing jurors, with the usual pontifications about New York juries -- except that the usual things didn't happen. Politico was one of the few outlets to notice: A...

I've kept thinking about a piece I read last week in The Hill, It’s time to retire the laziest cliché in election polling . The author, W Joseph Campbell, is not the better-known Joseph Campbell (1904-1987), the academic quack who promoted myth and folklore. Whether W Joseph even rises to the level of quackery, I'm not sure. His thumbnail says he is a professor emeritus of communication at American University. Here's his argument: Opinion polling has no lazier cliché than “snapshot in time.” . . . [T]he phrase is a refuge or metaphoric shield for pollsters when their pre-election surveys misfire. In such cases, “snapshot in time” is cited in attempting to defend or rationalize polls that careen well off-target, as many of them did in the 2020 presidential election. Joe Biden was elected to the presidency four years ago by margins well short of the double-digit blowout suggested by the polls of CNN, Quinnipiac University, Economist/YouGuv and NBC/Wall Street Jou...

It's taken me a couple of days to absorb fully the implications of Joe's Uncle Bosey remarks, which he gave twice on Wednesday, April 17. Here's the transcipt of the key remarks in the second version that he gave in Pittsburgh, which are also covered in the YouTube clip above: And my uncle — they called him Un- — Ambrose — instead of “Brosie,” they called him “Bosie.” My Uncle Bosie was a hell of an athlete, they tell me, when he was a kid. And he became an Army Air Corps, before the Air Force came along. He flew those single-engine planes as reconnaissance over war zones. And he got shot down in New Guinea, and they never found the body because there used to be — there were a lot of cannibals, for real, in that part of New Guinea. The schoolmarms in the media promptly fact-checked this, and I'm not going to spend time repeating the historical version. But several features of the Pittsburgh episode in particular popped out to me. The first is the dutiful ...

According to Wikipedia , The Buddhist crisis in South Vietnam saw the persecution of the country's majority religion under the administration of Catholic president Ngô Đình Diệm. Several Buddhist monks, including the most famous case of Thích Quảng Đức, immolated themselves in protest. The example set by self-immolators in the mid 20th century sparked similar acts between 1963 and 1971, most of which occurred in Asia and the United States in conjunction with protests opposing the Vietnam War. Researchers counted almost 1000 self-immolations covered by The New York Times and The Times. On November 2, 1965, Norman Morrison, an anti-war activist, doused himself in kerosene and set himself on fire below the office of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara at the Pentagon, to protest United States involvement in the Vietnam War. Wikipedia has a separate entry containing a list of "political" self-immolations beginning in 1948. The vast majority of these took place ...

I was scratching my head about four vignettes featuring Joe over the past few days and trying to put them in the context of the conventional wisdom from Sean Trende of Real Clear Politics : There’s little doubt at this point that President Biden’s standing in the polls has improved. In late January of this year, former President Donald Trump led Biden in national head-to-head polls by as many as 4.3 points. As of today, Trump’s lead sits at just two-tenths of a percentage point. Why might we be seeing this? One answer I might give is that several outlier polls came in over the past couple of weeks that had the effect of skewing the Real Clear Politics average in Biden's favor, which I think was the intent, and Trende for whatever reason is buying into this. In fact, in the first sentence of the quote above, he's comparing apples and oranges -- Trump led Biden in individual polls by "as many as 4.3 points" but he new leads the RCP average by just two tenths. Th...

I've long had an interest in the sociology of what C Wright Mills called the power elite, modified by Ferdinand Lundberg's view that a somewhat smaller cabal of powerful families and their retainers actually controls the planet. Over the past week or so, we've seen a new star rise in what must be that constellation, Katherine Maher, named at age 41 to be CEO of National Public Radio this past January with no journalistic experience, although she has a lengthy resume in foreign policy and non-profit circles. Uri Berliner had little to say about her directly in the critical essay that led to his resignation , except to say, A few weeks ago, NPR welcomed a new CEO, Katherine Maher, who’s been a leader in tech. She doesn’t have a news background, which could be an asset given where things stand. I’ll be rooting for her. It’s a tough job. Her first rule could be simple enough: don’t tell people how to think. It could even be the new North Star. But this is an example o...