In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

In Ferdinand Lundberg, The Rich and the Super-Rich (1969): Those few newspapers that make a practice of printing foreign news occasionally survey Latin American countries. The writers are invariably grieved to find a small oligarchy of big landowners in control, with the remainder of the population consisting of sycophantic hangers-on and landless, poverty-stricken peasants. But I have never seen it remarked that the basic description, with the alteration of a few nouns, applies just as well to the United States, where the position of the landowners is occupied by the financiers, industrialists and big rentiers and that of the peasants by the low-paid employees (all subject to dismissal for one reason or other just like the peasants). If anyone in the past few days seeks vindication of Ferdinand Lundberg's views, he need look no farther than the events surrounding the decisions by the once-totemic Los Angeles Times and Washington Post not to endorse a presidentiual ...

The Babylon Bee had a story a few days ago, Trump Campaign Raises Millions Overnight With New Donation Ask: 'How Much Would You Pay To Not Have To Listen To Kamala Talk The Next 4 Years?' I hope they would bundle that with an assurance that when Kamala leaves the public eye, she'll take Dougie with her. Earlier this month, he was minimizing the allegation that he'd slapped a date in the valet line at the Cannes film festival: Second gentleman Doug Emhoff dismissed scrutiny of his personal life during an interview on Friday, calling tabloid investigations into his past relationships and comments about Vice President Kamala Harris a “distraction.” “We don’t have time to be pissed off, we don’t have time to focus on it,” Emhoff said in excerpts of an interview that will air in full Monday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “It’s all a distraction. It’s designed to try to get us off our game.” Emhoff did not directly address allegations published by the Daily M...

There are a couple of bellwether items in this morning's news. Most intriguing: Los Angeles Times editorials editor quits when owner won’t endorse Harris : Los Angeles Times Editorials Editor Mariel Garza quit on Wednesday, weeks after the paper’s owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, announced it would not endorse any candidate this cycle. With Election Day two weeks away, Garza took issue with her employer shifting away from the tradition of endorsing presidential candidates. The paper has backed the Democratic candidate since 2008. The Los Angeles Times is the biggest newspaper in Vice President Kamala Harris’s home state of California and endorsed Harris when she ran for the Senate in 2016 and for the office of attorney general before that. On one hand, this is not your grandfather's LA Times : The news shook Southern California like an earthquake: Los Angeles Times , family owned for 118 years, was being sold to Chicago-based Tribune Co. . . . On March 11, there were three...

The big quote yesterday was from Mark Halperin : Former President Donald Trump is on track to win the 2024 presidential race based on the early voting numbers trickling in, according to a longtime political journalist. “If the early vote numbers stay the way they are, and that’s a big if, we’ll almost certainly know before Election Day who’s going to win,” Mark Halperin, editor-in-chief of the 2WAY video platform, said Tuesday. Halperin is an interesting case. He grew up in Bethesda as a member of the ruling class, although like me, he didn't go to Sidwell Friends (I went to B-CC; he went to Walt Whitman). He went on to Harvard and had a predictable career as a senior political analyst in corporate media, including ABC, NBC, MSNBC, and Showtime, but allegations of sexual harassment brought this to an end in 2017. As of the 2024 campaign, he seems to have worked hard to rehabilitate himself as the centrist honest broker among all the commentators, so he has a lot riding on...

PRESIDENT TRUMP: "I've now worked for 15 minutes more than Kamala" at McDonald's 🤣 pic.twitter.com/RMeivIPPd0 — Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) October 20, 2024 From Phil Boas at the Arizona Republic : This was supposed to be “Senile Sunday,” the day Harris and her surrogates made the case that Donald Trump is too old and mentally infirm to be president. They made the point repeatedly on the Sunday shows. Kamala Harris even launched the day with an ad and this tweet: “Donald Trump is exhausted, unstable, and unfit to be President of the United States.” Other surrogates and campaign people picked up the theme and piled on. Then the fry chef went to work in Bucks County, Pa. The cook who was too old, too tired and too senile to be president took the entire contents of the freezer bag labeled “Democratic Party” and emptied it into his metal basket. Then he deep fried it in hydrogenated vegetable fat. Boas hints at the bigger context: The whole thi...

A week ago, I noted that the Real Clear Politics popular-vote polling average had Kamala with a 1.8% lead . Just this past Friday, I noted that her lead was down to 1.3% . As new polls were released over the weekend, it continued to fall, until by this morning, it's down to 1.0%. On one hand, this is a lagging indicator, since the average includes old polls that haven't been updated. On the other, it includes polls that have proved highly inaccurate and biased toward Democrats in the past. But on top of that, a "national popular vote" average is Democrat-leaning, since it totals votes in high-population, Democrat-leaning states like New York and California, when the Electoral College is meant to limit big-state advantage in elections. So far, I've seen basically no cogent commentary on what this decline in Kamala's popular vote averages means. However, it comes in the wake of the vice presidential debate Octobrr 1, her Call Her Daddy interview October 6, ...

There was a pre-post mortem of the Harris campaign at Real Clear Politics yesterday that made all the usual references to 1972 and 1988 : This sort of thing has been seen before and with serious consequences. Here is the history: Like Harris, McGovern had an embarrassing vice presidential pick in Thomas Eagleton (he was eventually forced to ask Eagleton to withdraw after pledging to back him “1,000 percent”) and then got attacked over and over on his far-left record while his reckless changes on policy positions made him subject to devastating Nixon attack ad depicting the South Dakota senator as a political weathervane. So too, Dukakis had his share of recurring problems and self-inflicted wounds. . . that included the infamous and rather comic moment when in answer to criticisms of his national security bona fides he appeared riding around in a tank with an ill-fitting tank commander’s helmet. I've been mentioning McGovern and Dukakis all along here as well, but ...