In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

The one thing I've noticed throughout this election cycle is how early everything has been taking place vis-a-vis all the other presidential election cycles I've lived through. I've mentioned here several times that previous leaks from insiders that a losing campsign isn't going well tend to happen in late summer and early fall; this time, we saw calls from influential Democrats for Joe to withdraw as early as February. Just this past week, the Biden campaign issued the ad linked above, which is a last-ditch play to win back African-American voters by taking out-of-context remarks from Trump as long ago as 1989 to prove he's a racist. This reminded me of Jimmy Carter's failing campaign in 1980 and his desperate attempt to brand Ronald Reagan as a racist -- except this took place that September , not in May, which Biden is doing this year: It was a mistake, tactically, to call Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign racist. Reagan’s opponent, Jimmy ...

It's hard to enumerate all the takeaways from Trump's Bronx rally, which seems to have dominated yesterday's news. It's a contrarian's paradise. Let's go to what almost nobody's mentioned, the attempt by the left at a counterdemonstration : When I exit the park, I happen upon dozens of police officers in riot gear. Young men and women—draped in keffiyehs and many in N95 masks—are standing behind them on a giant rock, shaking a sign that says, “[redacted] Trump / [redacted] Biden / The people of the Bronx / We run this [redacted].” “They don’t give a [redacted] about you,” the protesters chant at the Trump crowd, clapping between words. The police were there in riot gear to anticipate any contingency, but my impression from the few accounts in the media is that there simply weren't enough potential counterdemonstrators there to start a riot, much as they would have wanted one. I imagine that the media was disappointed, too -- a riot wo...

I've long thought the whole public narrative about Kevin Morris, Hunter Biden's "sugar bro" who is generally reported to have "loaned" Hunter upwards of $6.5 million to settle his tax case and pay his rent and legal expenses, just doesn't fit. For starters, I'm not his accountant, but he and his wife have eight-figure homes in both New York and Malibu, he has a private jet, and their living expenses have to be through the roof. Morris himself is a failed writer and doesn't seem to have worked as an attorney for years. Nobody like that has $6.5 million in mad money. I posted last week that sources close to Morris had told Politico that he could no longer afford to pay Hunter's legal bills. My suspicion was that Hunter's lawyer Abbe Lowell, who is reported to bill as much as $1500 an hour, had secured liens on Morris's New York and Malibu properties to be sure he gets paid, and Morris's wife, the Hollywood agent Gaby Morgerman, ...

Let's face it, the whole New York hush money trial has been a distraction. Each day has new breathless headlines: will there be a hung jury? will Trump testify? what if Trump is convicted? what will Judge Merchan do next? None of this matters. If there's a hung jury, Trump's progress will continue. If he's convicted, the pattern up to now has been the one since last fall: every time he's lost in a New York courtroom, his poll numbers go up. If he's jailed, I suspect his sons and other surrogates will campaign on his behalf, and his poll numbers will go up even more -- except I think even his opponents recognize this would be a disastrous outcome for them. T his view from the far left actually outlines the real issue with surprising insight: [A] sizable number of voters either don’t remember or misremember the four turbulent years of the Trump administration. But paradoxically, educating voters about the potential consequences of a Biden defeat could...

It's been a long time since I've seen anyone in church, in a store, or even on the street, wearing a mask; it was a long, slow process -- but it's also irreversible. In fact, LA County tried to reinstate masks in health care environments just this past January, at a time when I was having to go to Kaiser pretty frequently. So starting then, I put a mask in my pocket just to be sure -- and Kaiser had in fact put up masks-required posters here and there. But when I got to the waiting room, I asked the assistants if masks were mandatory, and they said no -- in fact, they weren't wearing them, and most of the people in the waiting room weren't, either. Even Kaiser, specifically ordered by the health department to reinstate masks, tacitly ignored the order. The county dropped it again a month later . We've actually entered a belated period of official, or at least semi-official, never-mind acknowledgement of a COVID moral panic. For instance , Testifying...

Via the Huffington Post : Chaos enveloped Donald Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan Monday afternoon after a defense witness verbally tangled with Judge Juan Merchan, causing the courtroom to be cleared ― and earning a severe rebuke in return. The drama began when the witness, an attorney and longtime Rudy Giuliani associate named Robert Costello, appeared to be upset at Judge Merchan for sustaining a series of objections from the prosecution about his answers. . . . [T]he judge asked the jury to leave the room while instructing Costello to remain seated. “I want to discuss proper decorum in my courtroom,” Merchan told Costello. “I’m the only one that can strike testimony in this court,” he said. “You don’t give me side-eye, and you don’t roll your eyes. You understand that?” Wait a moment. I'm not an attorney, but I'm a big true crime fan, I've watched lots of trials on TV from Perry Mason onward, and I've seen several trials in person as a juror and in the ...

The RealClearPolitics headlines are usually tepid, cautiously juxtaposing a slightly right-of-center piece with a rabid left winger under the pretense that they're somehow bipartisan, reflecting someone's wish dream of conventional wisdom. But for some reason, this morning's titles are oddly unanimous: 7 Theories for Why Biden Is Losing (And What He Should Do) by Ezra Klein at the New York Times, Alarmed Dems Run From Biden in Battleground States by Alexander Bolton at The Hill, Biden Can Save America From Trump by Dropping Out by Jeremy Mayer at USA Today, and How Lawfare Turned Trump Into a Superhero Frank Miele at RealClearPolitics. None of them mentions the national popular-vote poll aggregate, which always tops RCP's list. Some of them mention the battleground-state aggregates, but even then with some skepticism. As Ezra Klein puts it in the lead piece, Biden is losing to Trump. His path is narrowing. In 2020, Biden didn’t just win Michigan, Pennsylva...