In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Perhaps the most intriguing text among the thousands of exchanges between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page was this one : [I]n a text from August 15, 2016, Strzok tells Page: “I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s office” – an apparent reference to Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe – “that there’s no way he gets elected – but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40 … . ” Page does not appear to have responded, according to records reviewed by CNN. The standard interpretation of Strzok's language is this : Lots of folks on the right are suggesting that “insurance policy” is some opaque and sinister Deep State code for black ops in the event of a Trump victory. . . . Give me a break. Read the text again. Strzok was reacting to the argument that there was no point getting worked up because Trump was bound to lose. Except that August 15, 2016 was just two weeks after Strzok...

An umderrated story in the whole history of the 2016 presidential campaign is the June 27, 2016 meeting betweeen Bill Clinton and Barack OIbama's then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch as their private jets both sat on the tarmac at the Phoenix airport. Phoenix-based KNXV reporter Christopher Sign broke the story of the tarmac meeting two days later, prompting a chain of events that would include an unprecedented news conference by then-FBI Director James Comey. Documents reveal Department of Justice staffers were given a ‘heads-up’ that KNXV had learned about the meeting, and assisted the Attorney General on how to address any potential questions from reporters. The repoprter, Christopher Sign, died of apparent suicide in 2021. In 2018, he published a book with additional details on the meetiog. According to the link above, the news that the meeeting had been discovered caused great consternation within the Justice Department: Lynch had arrived in Phoenix for a scheduled...

I was poking around the other day, and I discovered a remarkable item about Peter Strzok , the former high-level FBI official who is best known for his affair with Lisa Page, who at the time was an FBI attorney: A career employee with the FBI for 22 years before his firing in August 2018, Strzok had been a lead agent in the FBI's "Operation Ghost Stories" against Andrey Bezrukov and Yelena Vavilova, a Russian spy couple who were part of the Illegals Program, a network of Russian sleeper agents who were arrested in 2010. By July 2015, he was serving as the section chief of the Counterespionage Section, a subordinate section of the FBI's Counterintelligence Division. . . . Strzok rose to the rank of Deputy Assistant Director in the Counterintelligence Division and was the number two official within that division for investigations involving Russia. In that capacity, he led the FBI's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections,...

I've been looking at the Durham Report Classified Annex and various interpretations on the web, and nobody so far seems to have mentioned a passage on page 2. As of late spring 2016: According to [then-Democrat Natinal Committee Chair Debbie] Wasserman-Schulz, FBI, so, far, does not have persuasive evidence against Hillary Clinton because of timely deletion of relevant data from mail servers. Obama has no intention to darken the final part of his presidencey and "legacy" by the scandal surrounding the main contender from the DP. To solve the problem, the President puts pressure on FBI Director James Comey through Attorney General Lynch, however, so far without concrete results. Comey gravitates toward Republicans, and apparently, intends to prolong the investigation so that the scandal would keep going until the presidential election to jeapordize the chances of the DP to win the presidential race. These assessments were apparently made before the FBI in...

At NPR a week ago : Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna of California is condemning House Speaker Mike Johnson for sending members home early for a month-long recess to stop a bipartisan push to release records tied to Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier who died in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges. "He has stopped Congress and all of the business of this week because he doesn't want to have a vote," Khanna told NPR's Morning Edition on Wednesday. "He knows he would lose the vote." The resolution, introduced with Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, calls for the release of federal interview memos and evidence identifying "who all was involved in the sex trafficking that Epstein led," Khanna told NPR. It has gained traction in both parties, despite resistance from House GOP leadership. At Poynter : The week before last, I told a reporter who is pretty plugged into the Washington political...

One of the most consistent features of recent years has been Andrew McCarthy's underestimation of Trump. From The Huffington Post on August 1, 2023 : Conservative pundit and former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy is warning Republicans that nominating Donald Trump could backfire in a big way in 2024. “Trump doesn’t have a prayer of being elected president again,” McCarthy wrote in The National Review in a column posted online before the former president was hit with new indictments connected to the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021. . . . Despite that, polls show Trump running neck-and-neck with President Joe Biden. McCarthy said Democrats hope those polls lure GOP voters into nominating Trump. But he warned that Trump would face some difficult math next year, estimating that about a quarter of Republican voters won’t support him no matter what. With that sort of solid track record of being wrong, I'm surprised that anyone finds his takes reassuring, especially i...

If you want to understand why the universities have become stupid, you have to understand that the universities have literally become stupid. The average undergraduate IQ has fallen by nearly 20 points in 80 years--massive. This drop has happened at every level of education. pic.twitter.com/cCLjzvogTt — Kevin Bass PhD MS (@kevinnbass) July 27, 2025 I ran intio this post on X the other day, and all I could think of was David Brooks. In his 2000 Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There , he argued that James B Conant created a true meritocracy via the SATs, which the selective universities used to identify the most promising applicants, when previously they'd tended to favor the scions of the existing upper class. This allowed Jews like Brooks himself to rise in social status, which was altogether a good thing. By 2024, Btrooks had contradicted these views entirely in an Atlantic essay, How the Ivy league Broke America (this link is not behind a paywall). ...