In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Lindy Li is a puzzle. She's been highly visible in the press since the election, characterized as a Prominent Democratic National Committee powerhouse fundraiser who has turned on the party following Harris's November loss, spilling what purport to be insider secrets. I'm not sure about this at all. Matt Margolis echoes the received line at PJ Media : Democratic donor and operative Lindy Li hasn’t held back in her critiques of the party. For weeks, she’s been relentless, taking aim at Kamala Harris for squandering a billion dollars, criticizing her selection of Tim Walz, and calling out her embrace of radical positions. Li has even provided intriguing insider details about how Joe Biden was ultimately ousted, and what Pelosi and Obama really think of Kamala. Now, she’s dishing on Joe Biden’s mental decline. The reference to "what Pelosi and Obama really think of Kamala" carries a link to another Margolis story at PJ Media : In a candid interview w...

There's been a real effort to spin the outcome of the continuing resolution dispute as a loss for Trump and the Republicans. But as I noted yesterday, there's a big dog that diodn't bark, and it still hasn't: had Trump felt he lost, we would have seen bombastic posts against Speaker Johnson and other RINO Republicans, either from Trump himself or Elon Musk. Insead, we now have Trump simply moving on and threatening to retake the Panama Canal. Nevertheless, The Wall Street Journal calls it The Week the GOP’s High Hopes Collided With Reality : House Speaker Mike Johnson had spent weeks negotiating with Democrats, carefully cobbling together the compromises it would take to secure a majority vote in the narrowly divided chamber. It was a delicate construction, a house of cards, that had already begun to teeter when Elon Musk emerged Wednesday to stomp all over it. By Friday, the government was spiraling toward a shutdown after a series of failed and aborted votes...

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...