In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

A point I've been making about Trump, especially in his second term, is that he isn't the implulsive, ego-driven guy the legacy media wants to make him, although I haven't seen even any alt media making a serious effort to portray him as an astute strategist. But clearly a bull-in-the-china-shop disrupter couldn't have worked out this past week's Gaza deal -- and let's recognize that he's also been eager to share credit for that with Secretary Rubio and his personal emissaries. This isn't a comic-book narcissist. But if there's method to the madness, what's his strategy for the shutdown? He seems over the past several weeks to have been concentrating on foreign policy; after the Gaza deal, he seems to have been renewing focus on Ukraine, while raising the level of harassment against Maduro in Venezuela. Over the same period, he's had little to say about the shutdown, other than consistently calling the Democrats "deranged" every ...

Yesterday it was reported , Billionaire Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker raked it in big in 2024, including more than $1 million while gambling in Las Vegas. A new tax filing released by Pritzker’s campaign on Wednesday, Oct. 14, shows the Democratic governor and his wife, MK, reporting about $10.7 million in adjusted gross income, according to the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times and NBC News. The filing also indicated that $1.4 million reportedly came from the Hyatt Hotels Corp. heir winning blackjack at a Las Vegas casino. . . . “I went on vacation with my wife, with some friends,” he said. “I was incredibly lucky. You have to be to end up ahead, frankly, going to a casino anywhere — it was in Las Vegas — and I like to play cards,” His campaign said the governor will be donating his winnings to charity. Several things jump out at me here. I'm not a tax expert; all I know about taxes is that my wife takes everything to an accountant before April 15 each year. But...

Late last month, information leaked that Mikie Sherrill, a US congresswoman and candidate for New Jersey governor, had been somehow caught up in the 1994 Naval Academy cheating scandal, which I've discussed here. Her original version as of September 25 was this: "There was a test at the school that was stolen," Sherrill said. "I did not realize it was stolen. I took the test... afterwards I knew what the rumor mill was... I didn't come forward with that information." No documents released or obtained by news outlets have shown that Sherrill was involved in the cheating, but because she did not report her classmates, she was not permitted to walk at graduation. However, on October 9, she appeared to modify this story, indicating that she had in fact spoken to inveatigators : “There were hundreds of people in my class that spoke to investigators. When I did, I told them what I knew,” she told reporters after her second debate when asked about ...

In Sunday's post, I began to think about the role of public space in a well-ordered society, and it brought me back to what I've recognized for several years: there's an ongoing battle over who controls it. Remarks in 2021 by former LA County Sheriff Alex Villanueva brought the issue into focus: “Public space belongs to the entire public, not to one individual. And that is the fundamental responsibility of government. That’s the fundamental failure of the Board of Supervisors, L.A. City Council and the mayor of L.A. — they have refused to regulate public space,” Villanueva said Monday. “And that is why the problem is growing exponentially year after year.” The particular problem was that the Venice boardwalk, a feature of a city beach area, had become a space for homeless encampments, which due to filth and antisocial behavior had driven out ordinary citizens who had expected to visit for recreation. In effect, the local authorities had abdicated their responsibil...

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...