In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Last night I had what I can only call a medley or amalgam of every dumb recurring dream or nightmare I've ever had, probably familiar to many people, the one where I went to school in my bathrobe, the one where I can't find where my car is parked, the one where I need to use the bathroom but can't find one anywhere, the similar one where I need to find an elevator, the one where I signed up for a course, never bought the books and never showed up for class, but now it's almost time for finals -- and probably half a dozen others. In fact, I kept telling myself in the dream, "Oh, no, this isn't a dream!", and that meant I was going to have to tell my mother I had to drop out of school. When I woke up and realized it was in fact a dream, I was truly astonished. I went searching on the web for interpretations of what these things meant, and I learned that I was insecure, or that I was preparing for new experiences, or that I was reassimilating my personalit...

🚨 Van Jones DROPS A TRUTH BOMB: “Guys, can we cut it out? Donald Trump is not an idiot… Donald Trump is smarter than me, you, and all the critics… this dude is a phenomenal—he is the most powerful human on earth.” 🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/dUAKvYUMGm — TRUMP ARMY (@TRUMP_ARMY_) May 18, 2025 I think we're at the beginning of a remarkable reappraisal of Donald Trump, although there's been a fairly consistent minority opinion that Trump is a "genius" since his first term. I asked, the web, "Is Trunp smart?" It returned, among others, this link at Politico from 2020 : What we learned from Trump’s taxes does suggest he possesses an astonishing gift which could reasonably be called “genius” — if you accept that as a descriptive word rather than a term of praise. Genius, in this context, means something more than “very smart.” It means an ability to see connections and possibilities in circumstances that even people who are smart in conventional way...

In response to renewed complaints from Musk about the Big Beautiful Bill, Trump said yesterday , We might have to put DOGE on Elon. You know what DOGE is? The monster that might have to go back and eat Elon. Wouldn’t that be terrible? He gets a lot of subsidies. At the same link, The president’s ire comes after Musk expressed his frustration over the sweeping spending bill on social media ahead of Tuesday’s Senate vote. “The latest Senate draft bill will destroy millions of jobs in America and cause immense strategic harm to our country!” the 54-year-old wrote on X Saturday. “Utterly insane and destructive. It gives handouts to industries of the past while severely damaging industries of the future.” On Monday, the world’s richest man continued his criticism, saying lawmakers who had campaigned on cutting spending but backed the bill “should hang their heads in shame!” . . . Trump said Tuesday his former ally was upset over a Biden-era electric vehicle ...

Sam Tanenhous, who has written extensively on the conservative movement, has an essay out this morning on Trump at Vanity Fair, The Godfather Presidency: How Donald Trump’s Governing Style Mimics the Mob . The title promises, but it doesn't deliver. He talks extensively about Trump's formative years, but the fact is that the mob was on its way out starting with the Kefauver Committee in 1950-51 and continuing through the Apalachin Meeting of 1957, the assassination of Albert Anastasia the same year, and Bobby Kennedy's war on the Mafia from 1961-63. The closest association he can draw between the Mob and Trump is with John Gotti, the folk hero mobster, who operated out of Trump’s home borough, Queens, and whom the New York press—and this magazine—covered in the 1980s at the same time they were trailing Trump. Many remember Gotti as the well-dressed goon. Fewer recall the mass demonstrations held on his behalf when he was on trial or the politicians who spo...

I'm trying to get my head around this whole Thom Tillis retirement business. After Tillis annmounced that he couldn't support Trump's Big Beautiful Bill, putatively due to Medicaid cuts, Trump posted, Numerous people have come forward wanting to run in the Primary against ‘Senator Thom’ Tillis,” Trump wrote in another post. “I will be meeting with them over the coming weeks, looking for someone who will properly represent the Great People of North Carolina and, so importantly, the United States of America. Tillis immediately folded, saying near the end of a rambling statement , As many of my colleagues have noticed over the last year, and at times even joked about, I haven't exactly been excited about running for another term. That is true since the choice is between spending another six years navigating the political theatre and partisan gridlock in Washington or spending that time with the love of my life Susan, our two children, three beauti...

Hunter Biden is now being sued for unpaid legal fees by Winston & Strawn. https://t.co/FCb4qAnZB3 With his father out of power and influence peddling no longer an option, bills are coming due for Hunter ... — Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) June 27, 2025 The most recent news from the Bidens is that the white-shoe firm Winston & Strawn is suing Hunter to recover $50,000 in unpaid bills . For a firm like that, $50,000 is de minimis , so I'm a little puzzled, except that it probably shows the firm no longer sees any benefit at all to writing the money off as a lagniappe for the Bidens. This comes on the heels of Kevin Morris's family cutting him off after he "loaned" Hunter $6.5 million to cover legal fees . I think this is also directly related to Joe's last-minute pardons for his brothers and sister, their spouses, and not least, Hunter , saying "he wanted to prevent them from being targeted by 'baseless and politically motivated invest...

Via Real Clear Politics, a highly reliable organ of the conventional wisdom, I found a link to this piece at the WSJ by Tunku Varadarajan plugging Walter Russell Mead's weekly column there, Global View. Oddly, the Varadarajan piece isn't behind the WDJ paywall, but Global View is. In fact, Real Clear Politics often links to WSJ pieces that you must subscribe to read, an annoying practice that most aggregators don't follow. What that says to me is that the WSJ is worried that Walter Russell Mead by himself isn't pulling enough paying readers in, and actually, considering his career arc, I think I can see why. According to the piece, Mr Mead has come to the conclusion that Trump is a Jacksonian: Jacksonians believe the most important priority of the U.S. government in both foreign and domestic policy is the security and well-being of the American people. A Jacksonian holds that the U.S. “should not seek out foreign quarrels, but when the U.S. or ...