In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

I waas intrigued by this description of the trasnsition process at Mar-a-Lago, specifically the designation of Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence: I’m sorry folks, we are going to have to wait to understand the thinking behind this one. I have absolutely no idea. Mrs Gabbard has never led any organization of scale, nor held any position of intelligence review that I am aware of. Other than being a campaign surrogate (via RFK Jr) and very close friend of Tucker Carlson, who I’m told is one of a small group organizing the cabinet appointments; together with Donald Trump Jr, Vivek Ramaswamy, Elon Musk and Robert F Kennedy Jr. (currently living in Mar-a-Lago); I’m not sure what would be the plan for Tulsi Gabbard (maybe with guidance from Ric Grenell?). Like everyone else, I’m puzzled. Whoa, Bobby Jr is in residence at Mar-a-Lago? I did a web search for confirmation and came up with hints. I found this from Tuesday -- and thus it's probably already out of d...

The Wall Street Journal reported the first half of this development : The Trump transition team is considering a draft executive order that establishes a “warrior board” of retired senior military personnel with the power to review three- and four-star officers and to recommend removals of any deemed unfit for leadership. If Donald Trump approves the order, it could fast-track the removal of generals and admirals found to be “lacking in requisite leadership qualities,” according to a draft of the order reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. But it could also create a chilling effect on top military officers, given the president-elect’s past vow to fire “woke generals,” referring to officers seen as promoting diversity in the ranks at the expense of military readiness. As commander in chief, Trump can fire any officer at will, but an outside board whose members he appoints would bypass the Pentagon’s regular promotion system, signaling across the military that he intends to pur...

They had a staff of 12 to run a twitter feed? https://t.co/yttkQdCjl6 — Daniel Friedman (@DanFriedman81) November 8, 2024 On October 16, I put up an entry with links to post-mortems of Kamala's 2019 campaign for the Democrat presidential nomination. We may recall that she withdrew on December 3 of that year, before the Iowa caucuses and before any of the primaries. One link from 2015 went back even farther to review her pattern of spending, which looks like it's been consistent throughout her political career: California’s top Senate candidate Kamala Harris has been using her campaign account to fund stays in upscale hotels and first-class airfares during her nearly five-year tenure as state attorney general. A review by The Hill of California campaign finance records reveals that Harris’s expenditures follow a pattern: The Democratic candidate regularly charges thousands of dollars in luxury travel and hotels to her campaign. . . . While the Harris campaign’s ...

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...