In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Arizona Republican Rep Eli Crane said , My advice to the President is to bolster your private security around you not only to fill holes in the gaps that the Secret Service continues to leave open but also to watch the watchers. There is a very real possibility that there is a mole in the Secret Service team surrounding the President or at the highest levels of the Secret Service. So he needs somebody, like a group of individuals around him that are loyal to him. He's not the only elected official who's uncomfortable with the organs of state security, Florida Gov Ron DeSantis said on the Jesse Watters show Monday night : I don't think it's in the best interest of this country to say that agencies like the FBI and DOJ, which are trying to prosecute Trump in South Florida, they're on appeal at the 11th Circuit trying to reinstate an indictment that had been dismissed, that they're the best people to turn around and one, give us the truth about this...

Throughout yesterday, experienced law enforcement and intelligence observers raised perfectly reasonable questions about Ryan Routh, the people he must have worked with, and the extensive knowledge the organs of state security must already have had of him, his contacts, and his activities. For starters : A veteran FBI agent said Monday that he would be “shocked” if intelligence agencies did not already have would-be Trump assassin Ryan Wesley Routh on their radar for his travel and apparent efforts to recruit foreign fighters for Ukraine. “I asked about it in almost every case I had, especially in counterterrorism Division at the FBI when I was there, what did the other intelligence agencies know about this American citizen out on the battlefield and who was recruiting in Afghanistan?” Jeff Danik told the John Solomon Reports podcast Monday. "These are target countries, high criteria intelligence collection points for—are legitimate collection points—for our CIA, o...

The photo above is alleged wannabe assassin Ryan Routh on a 2023 trip to Washington to meet with diplomats and such. Note the understated outfits, the How-to-Dress-for-Success ties. The guy looks like he's just driven in from Bethesda, but he has a criminal record and works as a roofer in Hawaii. Somebody got him tricked out pretty well for this visit, huh? How'd that happen? That's just one of the questions I have about this whole story. Let's recall that just a few weeks ago , Donald Trump said he would release “all of the remaining documents pertaining to the assassination of John F Kennedy” if he were elected president in November, as part of a proposed new commission on presidential assassination attempts, including the one that targeted him. Well, of course, cross out the "one" that targeted him and, at least for now, insert "two". Meanwhile, the same FBI that is said to have promised a report on the investigation of the first attempt ...

I was thinking about another puzzle when I got up this morning: why do "the polls" say most people thought Kamala "won" the "debate", when the more respectable polls say Trump is inching ahead in electoral preference? The title of this post came to me in the shower: debate team is what the nerds do to get into Harvard. Look at Nate Silver's Wikipedia entr y, for instance: As a student at East Lansing High School, Silver won first place in the state of Michigan in the 49th annual John S. Knight Scholarship Contest for senior high school debaters in 1996. Silver actually went to Chicago; same differece. But this reminds me of a presentation on cognitive dissonance I heard from psychology profs as an Ivy sophomore myself: looking back, it was remarkably cynical. Their point was that experiments had shown that the more unplesant an experience was -- like, just for instance, hazing -- the more respondents were inclined to rate it as valuable. The ex...

Via the Mew York Post, The internet is lapping up a catchy new parody song poking fun at former President Donald Trump’s “they’re eating the cats” debate comment — with the music video raking in hundreds of thousands of views Friday. . . . A video of the tune had raked in more than 267,000 views on X Friday — with fans howling with laughter and calling it the purr-fect fall “banger.” It’s “too too, too good,” one listener gushed, while another called it “brilliant.” So all of a sudden, a 78-year-old teetotaling Republican becomes a Gen Z icon. Love him or hate him, they love him. But let's check in with Sean Trende of Real Clear Politics , who as I've been saying all along has brain waves amazingly well tuned to the conventional wisdom, as he acknowledges here: Let’s start out by stating that the emerging conventional wisdom surrounding Tuesday’s presidential debate is probably correct. The night started out promisingly enough for former President Donald Trump. He ...

I ended yesterday's post with a puzzle. According to the links, the Springfield, OH city elders somehow made a policy decision to encourage Haitian immigrants to move into town, because the local proletariat was unreliable, ungrateful, and unsuited to the low-pay jobs the employers had to offer. Bringing in a replacement working class was thought to be a win-win, the employers would get docile, grateful, and hard-working new employees, while the town would prosper. The links yesterday weren't completely clear on whether the Haitians were legal or illegal, but this story in the UK Daily Mail says , Springfield experienced a wave of legal Haitian migration in 2020 in a bid to revitalize the struggling local economy. Willing to do the blue-collar jobs locals were unenthusiastic about, the Haitians, who were already in the country legally, moved to the town. Within a few years, 20,000 immigrants arrived, swelling Springfield's population, which was only 58,000 in 20...

One of Trump's most controversial claims in Tuesday night's debate was that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, OH were eating local people's pets : "They're eating the dogs, the people that came in, they're eating the cats," Trump said during an answer to a question about immigration. "They're eating the pets of the people that live there, and this is what's happening in our country, and it's a shame." . . . David Muir, the ABC News anchor co-moderating the debate, immediately fact-checked Trump's claims, saying that the city manager in Springfield, Ohio, told the network there had been no credible reports of pets being harmed, injured or abused by people in the city's immigrant community. PolitiFact chimed in: But are the social media claims true about the immigrants eating their neighbors’ pets and dining on local waterfowl? City spokesperson Karen Graves, in a statement to PolitiFact, said no. "In response to...