In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

So the weekend's big news is that James Comey has outed hinself as a Swiftie , which is to say a fan of Taylor Swift. I just haven't been following this phenomenon, and I did some quick research to bring myself up to date. Accoreding to Wikipedia , Taylor Alison Swift (born December 13, 1989) is an American singer-songwriter. Her autobiographical songwriting and artistic reinventions have made her a cultural icon of the 21st century. She is the highest-grossing live music artist, the wealthiest female musician, and one of the best-selling music artists of all time. I watched a couple of her routines on YouTube, and on one hand, they seem like something recycled from the last century, maybe Joni Mitchell meets Madonna, but on the other, although she's 35, an age when the musical greats of my generation were already dead, her persona is more like an angry, disillusioned 14-year-old. This incongruity seems to be the key to why James Comey is a Swiftie, he's from an...

Looking back, the few times I was actually paid directly to do writing, it was government statistical reports and corporate policy manuals. But I got out of those jobs and into more interesting technical work as soon as I could. I saw a piece by John Kass at Real Clear Politic s this morning that showed me why I'm grateful to the Almighty for steering me away from his kind of work. Kass had a 41-year career as a writer for the Chicago Tribune and now freelances. I'd be ashamed to be him. In today's piece: It was Obama who orchestrated the FBI and CIA to create what is now understood as the “Russia Collusion Hoax” and used it in attempts to destroy his political rival President Donald Trump. He set them like attack dogs on the American presidency, to rip it apart after the American people had elected Trump as their president. This may be true, but we're a long, long way from seeing it proven, and to write this sort of stuff now is pure wishful thinking. But he...

Yesterday's post on the new revelations about Sally Yates's role in stopping the FBI investigation into a pay-to-play scheme involving the Clinton Family Foundation and then the effort to get Michael Flynn out of the White House relied mostly on a story at John Solomon's Just the News . I couldn't help thinking this added quite a bit of context to many individual pieces in the whole Russiagate story -- it made me think it all got started as early as 2015 in an effort to secure the nomination for Hillary. Sean Spicer interviewed Solomon yesterday evening on his own podcast (embedded above), separate from the Mark Halperin 2WAY show. Some of the context suggests it was done a day or two before the Just the News story was posted, but it does seem to give a wide-angle view of how Solomon is coming to see Russiagate, that is, that the pee dossier and the Flynn affair are just incidental pieces of a wider and longer-lived scheme. At 1:35, Solomon lays it out: I do have ...

Sally Yates so far has turned up just at the margins of the Russiagate saga. She's surfaced in this post largely as a stand-in for the departed Loretta Lynch during the last days of the Obama administration and the first days of Trump 45. According to Wikipedia , In 2015, she was appointed United States Deputy Attorney General by President Barack Obama. Following the inauguration of President Donald Trump and the departure of Attorney General Loretta Lynch on January 20, 2017, Yates served as acting United States Attorney General for 10 days. Trump dismissed Yates for insubordination on January 30, after she instructed the Justice Department not to make legal arguments defending Executive Order 13769, which temporarily banned the admission of refugees and barred travel from certain Muslim-majority countries (later to include North Korea and Venezuela) on the grounds that terrorists were using the U.S. refugee resettlement program to enter the country. . . . Yates st...

The other day, the FBI declassified another 266 pages of documents, and almost nobody seems to have noticed. BREAKING: @FDRLST has obtained the most recent 266-page tranche of declassified FBI documents. Because we believe in the right of the public to access and analyze these documents in their entirety, we are making the entire file available to everybody. Link in comments. pic.twitter.com/uSYjyuw0oF — Sean Davis (@seanmdav) August 13, 2025 I did my best to scroll through them, but with all the redactions, I couldn't get any sense of continuity. Having no choice, I waited for someone else to begin to make sense of everything, but I didn't begin to see much until this morning. Julie Kelly's take is probably the best -- it gives a good impression of the many interfacing pieces: Lots of the usual suspects—James Comey, Adam Schiff, and Peter Strzok to name a few—are popping up in newly-released documents related to the Russiagate hoax. But references to ...

Something occurred to me just this morning: the last summer of Trump's first term was marked by the George Floyd riots. Floyd was hyped for months as a paradigmatic hero-martyr, an implicit counterpoint to a racist Trump. Somehow this summer, the victim narrative has been turned upside-down: the most visible image is a law-abiding white guy, Edward Coristine, the former DOGE staffer who was badly beaten by a gang of black teens as he tried to defend his girlfriend from a carjacking. In the aftermath, Trump launched a new administration agenda to clean up the District of Columbia. As I noted laast week, this was an implicit reversal of a major civil rights agenda item from the 1960s and 70s, Home Rule for DC, and the current civil rights establishment understands it for what it is : South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn has insited that President Trump’s cleanup of Washington D.C. amounts to Jim Crow 2.0. . . . Meanwhile, the city’s Democratic Mayor Muriel Bowser wa...

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...