In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

I went to bed last night assuming the alt aggregators would provide a full update of the events surrounding the potential government shutdown, but of course they didn't. Only one or two mentioned that the Senate passed the new House Plan C version and sent it on to Biden for signature, which appears to be a formality, the main issue being getting Joe in shape to do much of anything. But where did things stand when I went to bed? As of noon yesterday, Leader Schumer was claiming he wasn't on board with anything : Outgoing Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) addressed the looming government shutdown on Friday and urged House Republicans to return to the initial deal negotiated by Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA). “If Republicans do not work with Democrats in a bipartisan way, very soon, the government will shut down at midnight. It’s time to go back to the original agreement we had just a few days ago. It’s time for that,” Schumer said, referring to the c...

It seems like I've been ruminating over the past year about an ongoing unspoken constitutional crisis, for instance, here , the day after the June 27 debate debacle, where I compared the apparent coverup of Biden's decline to the final months of FDR's presidency: Roosevelt could pass away at any time after the 1945 inaugural and have Truman succeed him, although had he passed away before that date, his successor would have been Henry Wallace. As it happened, the country got lucky. The problem right now is that if Joe Biden leaves the presidency for any reason before next January 20, his successor is Kamala Harris. So right now, it looks as if congressional leadership got together and cobbled up a business-as-usual continuing resolution to avoid a government shutdown. They assumed that the congressional uniparty could be stampeded into passing it at the last minute to avvoid said shutdown, Biden as lame duck president would sign it, and the boodle would proceed unin...

The video above shows that at least some much-needed humor is coming into the public conversation about the New Jersey drones. It makes one point, although not necessarily the most important one, that politicians are exploiting the panic, and in fact stirring up more of it, in order to get support for new intrusive legislation that has nothing to do with any perceived problem. At 0:42: Nobody knows where these things are from! I mean, it's all over the news! You know how all through Covid and all the lies about Trump, you were telling me the news is nothing but propaganda? Yeah. And now you're believing the news? More serious, and a little more to the point, is the video below from commentator and podcaster Bill Whittle. It starts with a reference I've already made, to the October 30, 1938 Orson Welles radio adaptation of H G Wells's War of the Worlds , that is "infamous for inciting a panic by convincing some members of the listening aud...

My view has been that Nancy Pelosi ran the Democrat Party, which means that she also ran the country during the Obama and Biden administrations. Whether she can keep it up after her fall and hip replacement in Europe is a question -- and Trump may have views on that as well. However, it sounds as though she's unwilling to acknowledge the passage of time. According to the New York Post , Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was donning “very high” heels when she broke her hip in a nasty fall on marble steps at a World War II battlefield site in Luxembourg last Friday — then ostensibly powered through the pain to pose for a group photo. . .. Pelosi is in her 19th term in the House of Representatives. Despite passing the leadership baton onto House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries over two years ago, she still has pronounced influence within the party. The San Francisco Democrat is widely speculated to have played a key role in fomenting the pressure campaign against President ...

The FBI is coming closer to saying it , but it's still talking around the point: The FBI on Monday delivered a warning to the public: don’t shoot guns or point lasers at mysterious drones in the sky. Pilots of manned aircraft are increasingly being hit in the eyes with lasers because people on the ground think they see a drone, according to the FBI’s field office in Newark, New Jersey. The FBI is also concerned that people might shoot a gun at a manned aircraft after mistaking it for a drone. Notice that the clumsily worded release mentions "manned aircraft", but it doesn't use a much clearer phrase, "commercial airliner", which is what the vast majority of these sightings are. Over the past few days, I've noted that the most-cited videos portray what Megyn Kelly breathlessly reported are going from dusk to around 11:00 at night, they say. Look at this. Another eyewitness told the New York Times the drones show up one aft...

Back when Megyn Kelly was being eased out at Fox with a consolation book deal, having failed at her assignment to bring Trump down, Sundance at Conservative Treehouse began calling her MeAgain. It looks like those days are back. At 1:20 in the video above, she embeds footage of a supposed New Jersey "drone", which is clearly a commercial jet. If nothing else, the roar of the engines gives it away. The Jerseyite comments, It looks likea a [redacted] triangle. They look like a traiangle. Er, that's because of the swept wings the jet's lights are mounted on. In a later sequence, another Jerseyite says, It looks like a spaceship, right? Like, that doesn't look like a drone, right? . . . It's like a small plane, it really is! It's like a small plane. These are all drones in the sky. Well, somebody better get on the case if all these drones are disguising themselves as planes! Megyn adds, All these are going from dusk to arou...

I'm not sure if the New Jersey drone frenzy is starting to die down or not. It looks as though sightings aren't oing viral, they're still focused mostly on New Jersey and neighboring states, even though airliners in landing patterns and helicopters are common all over the US. A quick web search brings up just a few sightings in exurbs well east of Los Angeles, but none in LA City or County. I think there may be a good reason for this. Our house is located on a low hillside overlooking Hollywood and Downtown, and in particular, if we look out the windows at night, we see helicopters, lots of them, all over the city. There are police, medical, traffic, news, and private helicopters, all the time. They are mostly far enough away that we don't hear them. Everyone in LA knows about helicopters and is used to them. Nobody is going to take them for drones, and it looks as though nobody is calling them in as drone sightings. The video I've linked at the top of this p...