In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

PROOF OF LIFE? Biden shuffles out of his motorcade, mumbles incoherently at reporters, and ascends the stairs of the smaller AF1. It's Biden's first public appearance since the coup to force him off the ballot. pic.twitter.com/lPUGnF0C5e — RNC Research (@RNCResearch) July 23, 2024 Although there was more apparent confirmation on various alt platforms yesterday that something hinky took place with Joe in Las Vegas last week, polite opinion hasn't yet mentioned it. About as close as it's come has been Newsweek, which debunked what was basically a straw man claim : Right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk has posted a rumor that President Joe Biden had a medical emergency in Las Vegas last week and may be in hospice care, claims which have been debunked. The post contradicted the official account of the president's COVID-19 diagnosis and has sparked widespread speculation, but what are the facts? . . . He wrote: "Got a weird lead on a story that people sho...

Last night, as I sometimes do, I woke up with a start and asked a question that had been developing in my mind all the prior day: why were Obama and Pelosi so anxious to replace Joe with Kamala, who at best is no better a presidential candidate than Joe, and is potentially worse? MSDNC: Kamala doesn't fare any better against President Trump than Crooked Joe did — and Democrats' hope to the contrary is "based more on hope than it is on numbers right now." Brutal! pic.twitter.com/EBZftusTAv — RNC Research (@RNCResearch) July 22, 2024 The received versions of how Joe came to withdraw from the race differ. Yesterday I cited a CNN version that has Joe meeting with key advisers who simply told him he no longer had a path to 270 electoral votes. A competing version outlines a sense of increasing urgency from Democrat leaders in the weeks following the June 27 debate: Pelosi, a Dem California rep and former House Speaker, had tried a different tactic befo...

On succeeding to the presidency following Nixon's resignation, Gerald Ford said in part. I believe that truth is the glue that holds government together, not only our Government but civilization itself. That bond, though strained, is unbroken at home and abroad. In all my public and private acts as your President, I expect to follow my instincts of openness and candor with full confidence that honesty is always the best policy in the end. My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over. In that case, Nixon had resigned, a final and unambiguous act, and the electorate was at least tentatively willing to believe that the problem was specific to Nixon, and it culd be solved simply by replacing Nixon with Ford. But if one thing is plain from Joe's withdrawal as a candidate for the November election, the nightmare isn't ending, and Joe's mere withdrawal as a candidate is neither final nor unambiguous. Trump, whose instincts over the past year have bee...

The problem nobody wants to face is twofold: first, JD Vance as Trump's running mate is stepping right into the role Nixon played for Eisenhower and Agnew played for Nixon, the low-road campaigner, and he's asking the important question: If Joe Biden doesn't have the cognitive function to run for re-election, then he certainly doesn't have the cognitive function to remain as Commander-In-Chief. How can any Dem pushing him to drop out of the presidential race, argue in good faith that he should stay on as POTUS? — JD Vance (@JDVance1) July 19, 2024 But the second horn of the dilemma is Kamala : We reported on Friday that Kamala Harris was going to have a conference call with big Democrat donors. The meeting was put together on short notice. However, at the time of the report, it was not clear what message she was going to deliver to them. . . . We now have details about the call. According to the New York Times, the call included roughly 300 donors, and ...

The other day, I mentioned James Kallstrom, the FBI manager who quickly became the face of the investigation into the July 17, 1996 explosion of TWA Flight 800. He represents a textbook execution of crisis management: at first, there were equal competing theories of the disaster, ranging from a terrorist bomb to a misfired US antiaircraft missile. Kallstrom was able to establish himself as a credible central figure who made information available no matter which way it led, and by making himself the best single source, he was able to establish the consensus that the explosion was the result of combustible vapor in a fuel tank, ignited by an electrical short circuit. As a result, other competing theories remain at the fringe. While TWA 800 was unquestionably a corporate crisis for TWA, which had already declared bankruptcy the year before, it was also a crisis, and probably a bigger one, for the FBI, whose credibility had been badly damaged by the Ruby Ridge standoff in 1992 and...

Fox News: Thomas Crooks’ parents were looking for him on Saturday in the hours leading up to the rally...Called law enforcement to indicate that he was missing...call happened on Saturday before Crooks later opened fire... pic.twitter.com/EblJ9am07L — Rantingly.com (@rantinglydotcom) July 17, 2024 Almost anything we might surmise, at least so far, about the Trump assassination attempt last Saturday has to be heavily hedged. The organs of state security are saying very little, and what they say is contradictory and often retracted days after it's said. But subject to that caveat, one data point stands out for me via the tweet above, the report that Crooks's parents were looking for him and had gone so far as to report him missing before the Butler rally Saturday afternoon. A few people responded in the thread below the post that this seems pretty unusual -- Thomas Matthew Crooks was 20 years old, and although he was a little strange, he wasn't the sort of at-risk person...

Tucker says this at about 8:00 in the video above, but he simply isn't the only one. To think this might even be an inside job is, frankly, against ordinary charity, against ordinary decorum in publc discourse, and against ordinary restraint -- but people are starting to come out and say it. The FBI investigation, which Joe says will be "thorough and swift", so far has been neither. But every day the loose ends go untied leads to more speculation, and the deep state is simply digging a hole for itself when it allows people like Secret Service Director Cheatle to set the tone : As the head of the agency, Cheatle said it's her responsibility to investigate what went wrong and make sure nothing like it can happen again. "The buck stops with me," she said. "I am the director of the Secret Service, and I need to make sure that we are performing a review and that we are giving resources to our personnel as necessary." Cheatle responded to repo...