In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Yesterday's 2WAY Morning Meeting show is an example of the current media dilemma. Let's start out by recognizing that the three co-hosts are simply unlikely: Mark Halperin is in the middle of a long-march rehabilitation campaign to come back from 2017 sexual harassment allegations : According to a May 3, 2019 report in The Daily Beast, Halperin worked on repairing his reputation during the first quarter of 2019 with a goal of returning as a pundit on television and radio. According to the article, Halperin enlisted the help of Michael Smerconish, Mika Brzezinski, and Joe Scarborough on an under-the-radar yet calculated professional rehabilitation campaign. According to the link, more than a dozen women came forward alleging that for a 20-year period, Halperin had groped them and otherwise had unwanted bodily contact, and as a result, On October 30, 2017, both NBC and MSNBC terminated Halperin's contract with the networks. On January 3, 2018, Showtime r...

Last week, Project Veritas broke a two-part story ( here and here ) in which a Brazilian woman, Patrícia Lélis Bolin, alleges that "she was pulled into a visa fraud scheme to secure U.S. visas and green cards for wealthy clients". At the first link above, Lélis further claims former Attorney General William P. Barr knew of the fraud and used burner phones to communicate and conceal the scheme. . . . Lélis reported the visa fraud scheme to the FBI, which she claims triggered her prosecution while others involved remain uncharged. Indicted in January 2024, Lélis faces 19 charges, including wire fraud, unlawful monetary transactions, and aggravated identity theft. She is accused of defrauding immigrants by posing as a lawyer and soliciting payments for fraudulent E-2 and EB-5 visa services. Project Veritas reviewed hundreds of text messages, emails, and documents, confirming a September 2022 text from Attorney Clyde Vanel to Patrícia Lélis. In it, V...

This story has been out for months, but Mayor Bass is still working it : Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass on Wednesday blasted the Trump administration's immigration crackdown, saying the raids have put a huge dent in the city's economy. Bass said businesses have seen a drastic reduction in immigrant customers. She's concerned some immigrant families whose breadwinners have been rounded up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement may be on the brink of being left destitute. A piece at Red State gives more background: When federal immigration agents began raiding Home Depots and other businesses in the Los Angeles area recently, something strange happened: Foot traffic vanished overnight. Entire blocks shut down. Sales plummeted. And it wasn’t because customers were scared. It was because the workers were. Employees simply stopped showing up. Some owners shuttered their doors. Fear gripped the heart of L.A.’s commercial corridors. The real story? That ...

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 ...