In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

The Washington Post, September 17, 2002 : When President Bush travels today to Andrew Jackson's hometown of Nashville, he may wish to stop by the Hermitage and lay a wreath at the grave of the Hero of New Orleans. More and more, Bush has been acting like the seventh president. Superficially, such a comparison is absurd. Jackson led a populist revolt against concentrated wealth in undoing the Bank of the United States; Bush is closely allied with corporate interests. I wouldn't say "absurd" so much as "obtuse". The writer, Dana Milbank, goes on, Jackson lost a disputed election in 1824 to the son of a former president; Bush, as son of a former president, won such a disputed election. Jackson was an uneducated war hero and father of the Democratic Party. Bush, of Andover, Yale, Harvard and the Texas National Guard, came to office in hopes of imitating McKinley, who defeated Jacksonian style populism in building the modern Republican Party a c...

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 ...