In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

On Monday, Israeli Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana called Trump a "giant of Jewish history". Now, I've been though a couple of Old Testament surveys and Fr Schmitz's Bible in a Year, and the only comparable non-Jew I can think of who would get that designation is Cyrus the Great, the Persian king who conquered Babylon and issued a decree permitting the Jewish people to return to Jerusalem and rebuild their temple, ending the Babylonian exile. In fact, Ohana said this: Mr. President, you stand before the people of Israel not as another American president, but as a giant of Jewish history — one for whom we must look back, two and a half millennia into the mists of time to find a parallel, in Cyrus the Great. In other words, I think it's a real mistake to underestimate Trump. And reading analyses of how Trump brought about the Hamas agreement, I keep thinking about the business school article I've mentioned here several times that makes the point that Trump...

For some time, I dismissed the female Archbishop of Canterbury and the near-simultaneous graffiti installation at Canterbury Cathedral as irrelevant -- the Church of England itself probably became irrelevant around the time C S Lewis died (November 22, 1963); the great uncle of the current Defender of the Faith and Supreme Governor of the Church abdicated over whether he should marry a divorced woman, a religious issue that never remotely disqualified his grandnephew, whose marital situation was identical. In fact, there was a time when designating a woman bishop of any sort would have been the province of medieval Lords of Misrule. If it's done now with even a faded aura of seriousness is an indication of how things have changed -- but this isn't the world proletarian revolution that loomed over the leisiured class for more than a century. Communist regimes dynamited churches. The 1911 Mexican revolution aimed to destroy the Catholic Church. The current revolution doesn...

Judge Immergut's temporary restraining order a week ago prohibiting Trump from deploying the National Guard to protect the ICE facility in Portland has disappeared from the news, probably because the issues are complex, but they mostly favor Trump. On Wednesday, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals placed an administrative hold on the case prior to hearing arguments on Thursday. Via the Oregon Capital Chronicle , U.S. District Court Judge Karin Immergut. . . granted the restraining order against Oregon Guard deployment on Saturday, saying the Trump administration had not made the case that a “rebellion” was taking place at the protests outside the ICE facility. A stay would prevent Immergut’s order from taking effect, but because of a second, broader restraining order she issued Sunday that has not yet been appealed, federal troops still couldn’t be deployed. Via Oregon Public Broadcasting , Federal law allows the president to deploy Guard members...

The headline of an Atlantic story on the Portland Antifa protests a week ago was Portland’s ‘War Zone’ Is Like Burning Man for the Terminally Online . The subhead is. "There’s more absurdity than menace on the city’s streets—at least for now." Most of it is behind a paywall, but this much is visible to a non-subscriber: In the days since Donald Trump directed his “Secretary of War” to marshal troops against “domestic terrorists” in Portland, Oregon, encouraging the use of “full force” in a city he likened to a “war zone,” I have been hanging around the demonstration that the president wants to crush. What I’ve found is an atmosphere that is more like a carnival than combat. By some accounts, this all started back in June, when a group of friends decided to pitch a tent outside an ICE facility in the city. “I was like, ‘Oh, hell yeah! Occupation against deportation! Let it begin, bitches!’” Andy Siebe, who has cropped, caramel-color hair and thin, rounded stumps for tee...

Through this link , The Restoration of America Foundation (ROAF) is a watchdog providing transparency of the nation’s military academies’ oversight boards. It issued a report on this past September's meeting of the US Naval Academy's Board of Visitors (equivalent to a civilian college or university's board of trustees), which included a presentation by Dean of Admissions Bruce Latta: Latta has been in the position for over 20 years, including when USNA was sued in 2023 for using race-based admissions practices. Latta told the BOV that race, ethnicity and sex were never considered in determining qualification for admissions. That assertion contradicts Latta’s court deposition and evidence in the Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) case against USNA. In SFFA Latta said, "If USNA was prohibited from considering race or ethnicity (across all minority groups) as one of many nondeterminative factors, I expect that USNA's class of admitted midshipmen woul...

According to KATU , After meeting with Portland Mayor Keith Wilson on Tuesday during a visit to Portland, U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said on Fox News that if the mayor did not meet some of her demands for more security at the ICE facility “we were going to send four times the amount of federal officers” to the city. Noem’s remarks to Fox's host Jesse Watters contrasted with a more muted statement from Wilson on Tuesday evening that did not mention any ultimatum issued by the secretary. “I continue to maintain that the tactics used by federal agents at the ICE facility are troubling and likely unconstitutional,” Wilson said. “In terms of recent rhetoric, we still do not know what ‘Full Force’ against Portland means, or how the administration plans to use our city as a military ‘training ground.’ Because of these deeply concerning situational unknowns, I intend to explore options to protect our community and our right to free expression.” ...

Via KOIN : Nick Sortor, who lives in Washington, DC, was slated to be arraigned on Monday afternoon on a second-degree disorderly conduct charge related to an incident outside of the ICE building on Thursday night. However, the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office said that while Portland police officers had probable cause to arrest Sortor, “after a careful review of the investigation, including reports and video, we do not believe the crime of disorderly conduct can be proven against Mr. Sortor beyond a reasonable doubt.” On one hand, for a DA to drop or reduce charges is not unusual, as true crime shows on TV are careful to point out. On the other, there were allegations that Sortor had instigated the attack : According to probable cause documents filed in the case of Angela Davis, [also arrested in the incident,] police relied in part on information from confidential reliable sources embedded in the crowd or CRS. According to one CRS, they witnessed a white man ...