In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Michael Lebron, a legal analyst, sometime conspiracy theorist, and standup comic who posts as Lionel on his YouTube channel, had been off the Trump train for a few weeks, convinced Bondi and Bongino were covering something up. No longer, at the post embedded above: We are hitting a Twilight Zone level of disconnect that I never even thought was possible. . . . I mean, if you'd have told me that we'd be talking about pube doodles, I'd think you were out of your mind. What is this story? What is it? What does it have to do with anything? He wrote, if you believe it, Trump wrote, a birthday note, jotted something, typewritten, I guess, to Jeffrey Epstein, and it's this weird kind of a cryptic -- he's writing this down, and he does doodle by the way. You know, Trump does doodle. . . . We're actually breaking down the word "enigma", whether he's used it or not, I mean, it's the most ridiculous thing in the world, and they said...

Alt media has been slow on the uptake over The Wall Street Journal's report of a 2003 birthday letter from Trump to Epstein : The letter revealed by The Wall Street Journal was reportedly collected by disgraced British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell as part of a birthday album for Epstein years before the wealthy financier was first arrested in 2006 and subsequently had a falling-out with Trump. The letter bearing Trump’s name includes text framed by the outline of what appears to be a hand-drawn naked woman and ends with, “Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret,” according to the newspaper. The outlet described the contents of the letter but did not publish a photo showing it entirely. My first reaction is to wonder why the WSJ is messing around with stuff at this level. Trump has had allegations of a tryst with Stormy Daniels; he's been found liable for sexually abusing E Jean Carroll; he's spoken of grabbing women on the Acce...

On news that the rescissions package had passed the Senate early this morning, including elimination of federal money to public broadcasting, I decided to check how long the idea of "killing big bird" had been in the public imagination. It's been at least since the 1990s : “Every time Congress comes at public broadcasting, Big Bird is held up,” Sesame Street creator Joan Ganz Cooney told an interviewer in 1998, “as a crucifix is to a vampire.” Three years prior, when Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY) took the floor to argue against proposed cuts to public broadcasting funding, he brandished a small Big Bird doll. “Don’t kill Big Bird,” he extolled, “because public broadcasting works, public broadcasting is good for the American taxpayer, and good for the American people.” From the Tampa Bay Times in 1992 : Columnist George Will has had his fill of Sesame Street. "Does Big Bird need a subsidy?" he asks...

The sign in the photo above is a bit of 1990s nostalgia, it was prominent on San Diego area freeways back then as a warning that illegals might dash across traffic, but eventually the highway department seems to have decided the warnings were redundant, or maybe just a bad look, and it removed the signs. As I thought about those signs recently, I suddenly recognized that Californians have been adjusting to the conditions of mass migration ever since I've been out here, starting in the 1960s. But the other day I saw a news item that made me think things are changing: Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass signed an executive order Friday to bolster protocols and support immigrant neighborhoods, including offering cash assistance, in response to raids by the Trump administration targeting those living in the United States illegally. . . . In addition, Bass said a plan is being worked out to provide cash assistance to those affected by the enforcement opera...

Alan Dershowitz, after feeding confusion for several days with remarks like ". . . hand to God, I know. I know the names of people whose files are being suppressed in order to protect them, and that's wrong", has finally clarified what he means. In an interview with Chris Cuomo on NewsNation yesterday embedded above, he says at 0:12, No, there is no client list, there never has been a client list. A "client list" suggests that Jeffrey Epstein made a list of people to who0m he trafficked women. What there is is a redacted FBI affadavit from accusers -- there are several of them -- from accusers that accuse various people of having improper sex, and that has been redacted. The names of the people accused have beern blacked out. This is what I've been saying for a week. It's absurd to imagine that Epstein would create any document, that could be found via a search warrant or discovered in a civil suit, that confirmed the details ...

I continue to be puzzled at the reasoning behind the idea that there is an Epstein "list". Let's start with the first question, ehich might actually be more productive: we know that the FBI kept files on figures like Dr King. His FBI file itself was something like 17,000 pages: The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) began monitoring Martin Luther King, Jr., in December 1955, during his involvement with the Montgomery bus boycott, and engaged in covert operations against him throughout the 1960s. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was personally hostile toward King, believing that the civil rights leader was influenced by Communists. . . . Under the FBI’s domestic counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) King was subjected to various kinds of FBI surveillance that produced alleged evidence of extramarital affairs, though no evidence of Communist influence. As far as I can tell, although it's entirely credible that the FBI has maintained a...

For the past couple of days, I've been hearing clips, quotes, and soundbites of Tucker Carlson's remarks at the Turning Point USA 2025 Student Action Summit that's wrapping up today in Tampa. Oddly, I'm having a hard time finding YouTube segments carrying his specific remarks or any sort of written transcript, but I do see references to his complaints that, for instance, they've gotten men out of women's sports, but homeless people are still sleeping on sidewalks, so nothing really good has happened, or something like that. The best I've been able to come up with is a five-hour YouTube of the whole first night, which is embedded above. Tucker's presentation starts at 4:15. The first thing that struck me was his annoying high-pitched giggle. But then he got right into Epstein -- it's wrong to say it happened a long time ago, it shouldn't be a big deal. That wasn't what he voted for, and he almost never votes. His argument implies that he vote...