In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Fr Mike Schmitz's Bible in a Year podcast in recent weeks has been moving through First and Second Samuel, with its dysfunctional story arc of King Saul and King David. It's hard not to see Biblical reverberations in King Saul, a failed ruler intensely jealous of his eventual successor, David, but there's now the additional parallel that US Catholic bishops, beginning with Cardinal Gregory. are criticizing Joe for being a "cafeteria Catholic", which faintly echoes Samuel's mesaage that God has rejected Saul as king. But an even closer parallel is the story of David and his strange, almost codependent, relatonship with his entitled son Absalom . He was a great favorite of his father and of the people. His charming manners, personal beauty, insinuating ways, love of pomp, and royal pretensions captivated the hearts of the people from the beginning. He lived in great style, drove in a magnificent chariot, and had fifty men run before him. Absalom ha...

Things haven't been going well for Team Biden in recent days, not least because Hunter's "sugar bro", Kevin Morris, has told associates he is tapped out . According to Politico, Kevin Morris, a Hollywood entertainment lawyer who has long supported the president’s son, has told associates that he has run out of resources to help fund Biden’s legal defense, according to a person close to Morris who was granted anonymity to discuss private conversations. Whoa, let's parse this one out. First, I live in Hollywood, and I know something about the place. Tinsel Town is built on hype, and Kevin Morris is nothing if not a creature of hype. Here's the standard line as printed in the New York Post as of 2022: Morris is a successful lawyer and big-money Democratic Party supporter who has become Hunter Biden’s newest fixer and “sugar brother,” allegedly loaning the president’s son $2 million to help pay off his overdue federal taxes. . . . The lawyer, who counts C...

I think the single most cogent and succinct take on Biden's announcement that there will be debates is from New York WOR radio host Mark Simone in the clip from the Kudlow show above. At 1:55, he says, Whenever somebody suddenly demands debates, it means they're way behind. If he's behind in the rigged public polls, he must really be behind in the private polls. I think Saturday is what made this happen. I think that panicked them that Trump got 100,000 people. We've never seen 100,000, I think that really scared them. Now, why so early? We've never had a debate before the convention. I think the Biden people know he could be a disaster, and they'll need time to fix it if he is. And also, the people running Bidenworld, they gotta decide if they're gonna keep him. If they switch, it will be at the convention. They wanted to test him out. Pollster Richrd Baris said on his People's Pundit Daily podcast on Rumble at 37:15: Biden's team...

Fox reported Peter Doocy's question to Karine Jean-Pierre yesterday: "Why do you think Americans are so down on President Biden?" Doocy asked. "I know you don't like to talk about polls like the five of six swing states that he is losing right now to somebody who is a criminal defendant, but more broadly, it doesn't seem like anything you guys are doing is making [Biden] more popular. Why do you think that is?" Doocy is putting this in the context of the latest New York Times/Siena poll, but Byron York made the situation plainer in the Washington Examiner : On Nov. 5, 2023, the New York Times published a story headlined, “Trump Leads in 5 Critical States as Voters Blast Biden, Times/Siena Poll Finds.” Focusing on the states most likely to decide the 2024 election, the New York Times reported, “The results show Mr. Biden is losing to Mr. Trump, his likeliest Republican rival, by margins of four to 10 percentage points among registered voters in A...

The headlines want to pretend there's something new here, Trump now leading in 5 battleground states — all of which Biden won in 2020: poll , but the polls have been the same for months. In April, according to Reuters , Republican Donald Trump leads President Joe Biden in six battleground states in the 2024 U.S. presidential election, according to a Wall Street Journal poll released on Wednesday that cited concerns about the economy and Biden's performance. Trump garnered a lead of between 2 and 8 percentage points among voters in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina on a ballot that included third-party and independent candidates, the Journal said. The results were similar in a one-on-one matchup with Biden, it said. In Wisconsin, a seventh state where the contest is expected to be close, Biden was ahead by 3 points on a multiple candidate ballot and tied in a head-to-head contest with Trump, the Journal said. In February, According to Mor...

Biden ally and Democrat US Senator Chris Coons was on ABC’s “This Week” with Martha Raddatz yesterday to spin Joe's acknowledgement Wednesday night that he was pausing military aid to Israel. But this attempt at damage control came between Trump's Saturday rally in New Jersey that was estimated to have drawn 80-100,000, and Michael Cohen's anticipated appearance in Trump's New York trial, which will likely focus all of this week's media attention on Trump as well. Poor Joe's handlers can hardly get a word in edgewise. The odd part about Coons's defense is that it walks nothing back, despite commentators calling Biden's move a " terrible miscalculation " that threatens the loss of the Jewish vote from the traditional Democrat coalition. Instead,Coons tries to shift the blame onto Netanyahu: RADDATZ: So, you’re saying he’ll stop offensive weapons? . . . So are you saying offensive weapons should be stopped? COONS: Look, I think wha...

Thinking about my last several posts on Dershowitz and Netanyahu, I'm puzzled why it is that if I do a web search on "Biden Israel betrayal", I get so many hits, like at the UK Telegraph, Biden’s sudden betrayal of Israel is a terrible miscalculation . This was neither sudden nor a surprise, or at least it shouldn't have been. It almost certainly wasn't sudden or a surprise to Netanyahu. Yesterday I linked to a 2016 article at the Times of Israel that said, "On January 20 — Inauguration Day — President Barack Obama will exit the world stage, and with him the specter of vindictive action against the Israeli government." Netanyahu fully understood where he in particular stood with Obama and any of his Democrat allies. A 2015 story at CBS made this plain: President Obama sent top political advisers to Israel to influence the election's outcome and prevent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's win, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio said Tuesday. ...