In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

We saw yesterday that, although the conventional wisdom says Joe made a deal with Rep James Clyburn to choose an African-American woman in return for Clyburn's endorsement in the South Carolina primary, Clyburn's version of events was that before the primary, his only ask was that he commit to nominating a black woman to the Supreme Court. CBS News gave another Clyburn account in August 2020, after Joe announced Kamala as his pick: "I was part of the vetting. Then they were doing polling and I said to him, when all of that's over, you let your head and your heart take a look and you go with that" Clyburn told CBSN anchor Anne-Marie Green. "I spoke to him the day before he reached his conclusion and he said to me at the time, 'I am having a little war between my head and my heart. When that is reconciled, I will give you a call and let you know what my decision is.'" Clyburn, a close ally of one of Biden's VP candidates Representat...

I keep coming up with questions nobody else is asking -- for instance, although we hear leaks now and then about how insiders were getting worried about Joe's cognitive decline at least by early this year, why were the national and state Democrats working so hard to discourage serious primary campaigns for other candidates? For instance, Bobby Kennedy Jr originally planned to run as a Democrat in the primaries. Via PBS in October 2023 , Longtime environmental lawyer and anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Monday he will run for president as an independent and drop his Democratic primary bid, adding a wrinkle to a 2024 race heading toward a likely rematch between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. . . . Kennedy has spent weeks accusing the DNC of “rigging” the party’s primary against him and threatening that he might need to consider alternatives. In campaign emails and videos, he blasted the DNC’s decision not to host debates between Bid...

The public dialogue has been all about Trump's cabinet nominees, but the question that still won't go away for me, and nobody's talking about, is why the Democrat leadership never came up with a Plan B over Biden before the time to reoplace him was long past. The suggestions we had last summer were that at least by the start of the year, insiders were shocked at Joe's cognitive decline, but as far as I can tell, nobody did anything about it. Isn't that where the history of the 2024 campaign should start? But that means we should go back to 2020. From February of that year : Former Vice President Joe Biden's poor showing in the New Hampshire and Iowa primaries this week — and Bernie Sanders' strong performance in both — are terrifying the Democratic party's top managers and fundraisers. We got to taste that fear when Obama-era Secretary of State John Kerry was overheard on a phone call in a hotel lobby in Des Moines, Iowa, telling someone t...

Last night I was stuggling thbough one of those dreams where I start to suspect I'm dreaming, but the dream keeps going on so long that I decide maybe I had it wrong, maybe this is real life after all. When I finally did wake up, I realized with a start how many of the quasi-realist Edward Hopper's paintings, especially those with people in them, are actually dream images. Forget Salvador Dali, check out Edward Hopper. Then it occurred to me how many people seem to be reacting to Joe's pardoning his wayward son Hunter a little as though they're waking up from a dream . It's been a strange six months. First, Biden wasn’t “sharp as a tack.” He was sick and diminished. Next, Trump wasn’t a Nazi: He’s the president-elect of the United States with a majority mandate. Record numbers of blacks, Hispanics, and 65% of Native Americans supported him. Kamala Harris was a lousy candidate, wasted billions of dollars, and owes her #2 position to her ethnicity and gende...

I've been using Ferdinand Lumdberg's model of the finpolity that he outlined in The Rich and the Super-Rich (1968) as vehicle to understand this year's political developments. It turns out that Sundance, the blogger at Conservative Treehouse, has a parallel explanation that doesn't reference Lundberg or finpols , but it assumes a very similar theory of the wealthiest actors working to advance interlocking interests. He outlines what he thinks is the current state of the game in this post : In late summer 2023 not only myself, but several insightful analysts in the world of high finance, had come to the conclusion that Musk’s financial effort with the purchase of Twitter was unsustainable, unless something changed. Something did change. In early August of 2023, understanding the dynamic at stake, and also having a strategy for his own interests, Oracle’s Larry Ellison said, ‘he would not let Elon Musk fail with Twitter’. Billionaire Larry Ellison, a Tesla Bo...

Last June 17 , White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Monday dismissed speculation that President Biden froze while standing in the stage lights and had to be guided to an exit by former President Barack Obama at the end of an A-list Hollywood fundraiser on Saturday night. /p> “Let’s not forget President Obama, President Biden have a relationship. They are friends. They’re like family to each other, and I think that’s what you saw,” she told reporters during a press briefing in response to a question posed by The Daily Mail in reference to a viral clip shared by The Hollywood Reporter. “You saw the President put his hand … on the back of President Biden and they walked off the stage after taking questions … from Jimmy Kimmel. That is what you saw.” According to Reuters , Joe "drew cheers from the audience at a packed Peacock Theater in downtown Los Angeles, where Hollywood celebrities George Clooney and Julia Roberts were among the guests". It's star...

The New York Post reports , JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon has been communicating with Donald Trump in recent months through secret back channels, helping the president-elect hammer out a policy agenda before and since his decisive White House victory, The Post has learned. The 68-year-old Wall Street titan — who, like 78-year-old Trump, grew up in Queens in New York City — has acted as “a sounding board” for the incoming commander-in-chief’s economic manifesto, four sources close to Trump’s transition team said. But let's test what might be going on here. The Post refers to Dimon as "JPMorgan Chase CEO", but as we saw yesterday, Ferdinand Lundberg, who invented the term finpol , made the point that mere corporate officers, no matter how well-publicized, are just the hired help unless they hold an ownership stake in the same corporations. Is Jamie Dimon a finpol ? According to Wikipedia , James Dimon; born March 13, 1956) is an American businessman who has...