In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Lately I'm amazed at how much even "independent" journalists waste my time. A good exasmple is the Morning Meeting show on YouTube and 2WAY featuring Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, and Dan Turrentine. Spicer in particular is represented as an expert on Trump -- "Can you take us into Trumpworld on this, Sean?" -- when he left the first Trump administration after only six months in July 2017, apparently because Trump lost patience with both Reince Priebus and his protege Spicer as "professional Repulicans". Just the other day, Halperin, Spicer, and Turrentine pontificated at length over where Trump and Putin might meet to resolve the Ukraine war -- maybe it would be Geneva. Maybe it would be Iceland or Greenland. Two days later, it turns out to be Alaska. In other words, they could blather on about Trumpworld or Putinworld, know absolutely nothing, and get away with it for days. Why shoud anyone waste time watching them? The various commentators enume...

We've entered the anniversary period for the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima (August 6, 1945) and Nagasaki (August 9, 1945), but there's been little of the usual handwringing this year, at least in what I've seen. Edward Feser, the neo-Thomist philosopher who sometimes posts on how, at least in his view, just war doctrine makes these attacks intrinsically evil, hasn't posted directly on the subject this year. I've done more thinking about this in recent months, and I think this might neveretheless be a good time to revisit the questions he raises. What may be the most succinct outline of his views, at least as far as I understand them, is at a post on his blog, Happy Consequentialism Day! on August 9, 2010. Although he provides a link to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philsophy's definition of consequentialism , he himself has little to say about it other than it is, as David Oderberg has put it, “downright false and dangerous, an evil doctrine that shou...

Just this past week, it looks like Trump has put another project on the front burner: he's going to reverse "home rule" for the District of Columbia. This was a major civil rights agenda item when I lived in Bethesda, just across the border in Maryland, with my family in the 1960s. The photo above speaks volumes: the only visible white figure marching with Dr King is Paul Moore Jr, Episcopal Suffragan Bishop of Washington, scion of one of the country's wealthiest families, later unmasked as a serial sexual predator. What on earth is going on here? Even at the time, Moore fit the type of the Northern philanthropist "helping" Southern blacks depicted in Ralph Ellison's 1947 Invisible Man . What was in it for that rich white guy? We've come to understand this only very slowly, but it looks like Trump has had insight into this, among many other things. President Donald Trump threatened Tuesday to have the federal government take control of Wa...

There's a segment of MAGA that thinks much of the Trump administration is just same old-same old, for instance at Conservative Treehouse : Unfortunately, we have a long and painful history with the Trump-era Main Justice system, intentionally leaking information to satiate the MAGA base and tamp-down demands for reform and accountability. For seven years various Trump officials have claimed to be working to bring accountability. None has been delivered. Also unfortunately, the pattern of bread and circuses is repeating. The Dept of Justice leaked a letter to The Federalist, in order to affirm their performance. . . . The DOJ providing this letter directly to The Federalist, indicates the purpose of Pam Bondi’s DOJ action is performative; not substantive. If the DOJ does not want to compromise their grand jury case, then why are they leaking their letters? Simply, think about it. . . . It’s likely the DOJ knows the challenge of the [Russiagate] case is a very high bar ...

There are several continuing questions about the text and e-mail messages between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page that were exchanged on FBI computers as they conducted a torrid affair. For starters, the texts, which were sent over a period between August 2015 abd sometime in mid-2017, weren't released until the affair became public on December 13, 2017 . In hindsight, this revelation, or series of revelations, appears to have been carefully managed. A series of text messages exchanged between top FBI employees referring to then-presidential candidate Donald Trump as an “idiot” and “d*uche,” while fearing his potential victory as “terrifying,” were released to lawmakers Tuesday evening on Capitol Hill amid increasing demands to see them, according to documents reviewed by CNN. Earlier this month, reports surfaced that special counsel Robert Mueller had removed Peter Strzok, one of the FBI’s top Russian counterintelligence experts, from his team after an internal investigatio...

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...