In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

On October 18, I linked to a YouTube interview of Mark Halperin by Tucker Carlson, where Halperin predicts the outcome of the election: I think it will be the cause of the greatest mental health crisis in the history of the country. I think tens of millions of people will question their connection to the nation, their connection to other human beings, their connection to their vision for what the future for them and their children could be like, and I think that will require an enormous amount of access to mental health professionals. Reading between the lines of Halperin's Morning Meeting podcast since then, where (only for instance) he forbade Sean Spicer from criticizing his friend Ann Selzer, the "gold standard" pollster, for her wacky conclusion that Harris was ahead of Trump by 3 points in Iowa days before the election, it's pretty clear that Halperin was expecting the Trumpists would be the ones who'd have to line up at therapists' offic...

From Robert Spencer at PJ Media : As of this writing on Friday, Donald Trump’s popular vote total stood at 74,269,316. By the time you see this article and click on that link, however, that total is certain to be higher. Trump’s final popular vote total has now exceeded his official 2020 total of 74,225,926. Kamala Harris, meanwhile, has 68,800,347 popular votes, a steep decline from Old Joe Biden’s 2020 total of 81,286,454. He cites a piece by Victoria Taft, who asks, Did God Rapture Some 15 Million Democrat Voters? If Not, Where'd They Go? Before the election I wondered if this would happen. After universal mail-out ballots had been curbed in some places for the 2024 election, and despite same-day registration and voting and even outlawing voter ID in California, would America have the same numbers of voters as 2020? Would they show back up? At this point, it looks as if there could be a significant reduction in Democrat voters from 2020 to 2024. On Wedn...

Via hte New York Post : Mayor Eric Adams is ending his administration’s controversial program supplying migrants in city shelters with prepaid debit cards to pay for groceries. The pilot program distributed the preloaded Mastercards to asylum seekers at hotels-turned-shelters, with a family of four receiving about $350 a week to cover the cost of groceries and baby supplies. The city hired New Jersey-based tech startup Mobility Capital Finance in a $53 million, one-year “emergency” contract that drew backlash when the city failed to conduct a typical bidding process before picking the company. But with the one year up shortly, the Adams administration decided against renewing the contract, ABC7 reported. Accxording to this post on X, Adams's decision "reportedly" came after a phone call with Trump yesterday. NEW: Democrat New York City Mayor Eric Adams announces that NYC will no longer be issuing vouchers to illegal immigrants. Remarkable. Trump gets elected...

I've begun to see some productive insights into the election results, and I'll probably be bringing more of these up in coming days. But I continue to be influenced by Ferdinand Lundberg (1902-1995), best known for his 1969 book, The Rich and the Super-Rich . I think he was a proto-Trumpian populist whose view was that American politics, media, and popular culture, at least in the 20th century, were dominated by the behind-the-scenes interlocking interests of the post-Civil War industrial fortunes. So let's look at the election through a Lundbergian lens. The first thing to note is that the billionaires didn't operate behind the scenes in this election. Trump himself is one of them, after all. George Soros had Tim Walz to dinner at his condo; Mark Cuban was a Harris surrogate. Bobby Kennedy Jr joined the Trump campaign. Most notably, Elon Musk donated heavily to the Trump campaign and became a highly visible surrogate. Other, lower-profile Silicon Valley types were he...

I've never understood the point of Sean Trende, or in fact of Real Clear Politics. I've commented on his obtuseness many times here. A week ago, I saw this piece at RCP, Please Don’t Pay (Much) Attention to Early Voting Numbers. I had an instinct that, although it was conventional wisdom, it wasn't going to age well, and I bookmarked it for review after the election. Here's what he said: Every two years around this time, we finally get [solid numbers] in the form of early voting data. Like manna, these data seem heaven-sent, tempting those who analyze elections into making predictions about the future. And, every two years around this time, I find myself writing the same column with the same message: Don’t do that. It is not manna. It is more akin to a poisoned chalice offered to a thirsty man. . . . To see why this is a problem, it is useful to think of a party’s vote total as a part of an equation: The number of votes cast early times the party’s share of ...

I've been noting here that Mark Halperin, who was banished from cushy corporate media jobs after sexual harassment allegations in 2017, has been workling to rehabilitate his career as a putative honest and non-partisan commentator in this year's election cycle. The problem is that, as I did in part, he grew up in Bethesda. I don't know where he lives now, but I do know you can take Mark Halperin out of Bethesda, but you can't take Bethesda out of Mark Halperin. In yesterday's edition of his Morning Meeting show on 2WAY, embedded above, entitled "How to Lose an Election", he announces that Kamala is winning something called the info flow. At 7:08, he says, . . . From Madison Square Garden until yesterday, [Trump] has lost the info flow. . . . Sean [Spicer}, do you agree that he has lost the information flow in the past week and explain your counterargument. At 12:02, he demands that Sean Name a good moment Trump has had since Monday [October ...

I was a little surprised this morning to discover there had been some sort of non-event Friday where Hugh Hewitt, a talk show B-lister stormed off a Washington Post show , “First Look,” the Post’s live show hosted by Jonathan Capehart, alongside Ruth Marcus, an associate editor and columnist at the Post, during a discussion over former President Donald Trump [sic] legal efforts in battleground states. This happened Friday, but it didn't reach YouTube or the aggregators until this morning. It seems to me that this says something about Rush Limbaugh and the huge gap his departure has left in public discourse. Nobody has been able to replace him, least of all Hugh Hewitt, for all Hewitt seems to be trying. The whole episode has the air of something Hewitt cooked up to promote himself in the wake of Jeff Bezos's intervention at the Post: “We are news people, even though we have opinions, and we have to report the whole story if we bring up part of the story,” Hewit...