In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

In this post a week ago , I suggested that municipalities like Springfield, OH, Aurora, CO, and Charleroi, PA have experienced particulary troublesome influxes of illegal or quasi-legal immigrants because local power players, abetted by politicians, have exploited government subsidies, routed via non-profits, to make money off them. It hasn't been hard for local investigative reporters to uncover these schemes, as I discussed at that link regarding the case in Aurora, CO. Now it turns out that the mayor of Springfield, OH is in on the same sort of boodle. Via the Buckeye Reporter , A Buckeye Reporter investigation has confirmed that Mayor Rob Rue of Springfield, Ohio, is renting out apartments in buildings that he owns to Haitian immigrants—a move that some local residents are calling a conflict of interest. . . . A few blocks away from Little and Rue Funeral Home, also owned by Rue, a 37-year-old man who introduced himself as “Works” lives in an apartment on an est...

Here's another puzzling data point, from Politico on Wednesday : Iranian hackers sent sensitive information stolen from the Trump campaign to President Joe Biden’s campaign earlier this summer, U.S. investigators said Wednesday. The emails were sent in June and July to individuals “associated with the Biden campaign” and “contained an excerpt taken from stolen, non-public material from former President Trump’s campaign,” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the FBI and CISA said in a statement. . . . It is unclear to what extent the then-Biden campaign read or made use of the information the Iranians sent. The three agencies said the emails were unsolicited and campaign staff did not reply to them. Although the account refers to Iranian "hackers", it doesn't say whether the hackers got the information from hacking the Trump campaign directly, or whether they obtained it indirectly, possibly from sources within the US government. We...

Yesterday I raised two possible hypotheses that might explain the puzzling constellations of events that led a freelance whack job off the plane from Hawaii to find just the right spot at the golf course fence to set up a shot at Trump when nobody was supposed to know he was on the golf course at that time. The one I tend to favor is my own, that some deep state cabal knew of Trump's golf plans because they'd bugged Mar-a-Lago during the August 2022 raid -- in fact, its main aim was simply to gain access to the place, especially the office and conference areas, to plant the bugs, not to retrieve documents. This tweet supports my theory: Can I just point out again, yes again, that in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case; a case against Trump where the official position of the DOJ asserts a "vital national security interest;" there is almost virtually guaranteed to be a Title-1 FISA authorized warrant.... The… https://t.co/MsdO6CZc0S pic.twitter.com/ipoZpTTf...

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...