In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Trump's media people, especially 2.0, are pretty darn good, while it's clear that only the B team is left at the Washington Post. I was wondering all Sunday why they dropped the big war crime story -- maybe the biggest scoop since Deep Throat -- on Black Friday, Nov 28, in the middle of a four-day weekend, when everybody would be bloated with Thanksgiving leftovers or off to the Black Friday sales. And then they just stood there while the White House got its ducks in a row the following Monday, which was yesterday. By then, even Real Clear Politics was having doubts : "What happened in this case depends on the sequence," [Carl]Cannon said [on the RCP podcast]. "These stories are not precise. Did Hegseth say 'kill them all' after the first drone strike had disabled this boat?" Tom Bevan suggested these reports are conveniently timed following the recent video from Congressional Democrats urging service members to disobey illegal ...

Robert Spencer asked over the weekend , "Hey, Why Was the DC National Guard Shooter Naked Except for a Pair of Socks?": The first photograph that circulated of Rahmanullah Lakanwal, who shot two National Guard members in Washington on Wednesday, murdering one of them, showed him lying on a gurney, naked except for a pair of socks. Initial reports took due notice of this odd fact, without making any attempt to explain it[.] I'll get back to this. But via the New York Post : A leading national refugee agency was warned multiple times that the Afghan terror suspect accused of murdering one National Guard member and critically injuring another was spiraling into mania and mental illness beginning in 2023, according to a bombshell email leak. Despite this, and an alleged failure to maintain his mandated contact with state social services, he still managed to win asylum in April of this year. Rahmanullah Lakanwal‘s behavior was so ...

I don't know if this is any sort of stunning insight, but ruminating on the latest "illegal orders" kerfuffle, it occurred to me yet again that Trump's whole political career can be understood as an extended Road Runner cartoon. In the 2016 election alone, a number of issues arose, including allegations of Russian collusion and hush money payments to Stormy Daniels, that would resurface in repeated attempts to bring him down in two impeachments and several criminal cases, but to no effect. The Access Hollywood tape was an October surprise that just about everyone was convinced would destroy his 2016 candidacy. Repeated attemnpts to tie him to the January 6 Capitol incursion have been just as ineffective. The Schumer Shutdown, ditto. Now it turns out that even before the shutdown, the idea of creating some sort of "illegal orders" scandal was a glimmer in certain eyes : A left-wing group is putting up billboards in high-crime cities where Pre...

Whether the "Seditious Six" casmpaign to convince military members to refuse "illegal" orders from Trump is actually a CIA operation is up in the air, but it's separate from the recent allegations that the shootings of two National Guard members in Washington last Wednesday are "Trump's fault". The most respectable version of this line can be found at Real Clear Politics in a piece from The Atlantic, A Terrible and Avoidable Tragedy in D.C. : The troops, deployed in an effort to reduce crime, are untrained in law enforcement; their days are spent cleaning up trash and walking the streets in uniform. Commanders, in a memo that was included in litigation challenging the high-visibility mission in D.C., argued that this could put them in danger. The Justice Department countered that the risk was merely “speculative.” It wasn’t. There are costs to performatively deploying members of the military—one of which is the risk of endangering ...

When I last looked at the January 6 pipe bomber two weeks ago , I noted that there were two competing stories coming out of one FBI. The best-publicized was that the individual in loose-fitting clothes, hoodie, and mask was a literally moonlighting female Capitol Police officer whom we'll call Ms C, who planted the bombs while wandering around Capitol Hill for an hour on the evening of January 5. The other story was that it wasn't Ms C, or maybe not even the figure wandering around in the videos at all. Instead, the bombs may have been planted shortly before they were discovered on January 6 by someone completely different. The main problem with this version is that on one hand, we have to discount the figure wandering around the previous evening, and on the other, we have to identify someone else planting the bombs the following morning. We must assume hundreds of man-hours have already been expended searching the relevant video footage for this without result. But be...

A headline in the normally pro-Trump New York Post: Michael Goodwin: Trump needs to hit the reset button if the GOP wants to win the 2026 midterms : As he barrels toward the end of his first year back in the White House, the president is beset by slumping poll numbers and a pileup of problems, some of which are self-inflicted. This is my first big puzzle, the "slumping poll numbers". These are the same polls that were wildly off just a few weeks ago, claiming the New Jersey governor's race was a tossup, and Republicans even had a chance in Virginia. But the outcome was dog bites man; blue states voted blue. Nobody's asking what happened to put expectations so far out of whack. But let's proceed: Even a gaggle of normally obedient Republicans in Congress are growing restless, and his call for gerrymandering House district lines in red states to pad the GOP advantage in the midterms is in danger of producing the opposite outcome. This comes af...

BREAKING: The Department of War is reportedly considering recalling Sen. Mark Kelly (D) to active duty for possible court-martial after he urged U.S. troops to defy orders from Trump and Hegseth. pic.twitter.com/W8q2a3iMlL — Breaking911 (@Breaking911) November 24, 2025 The received opinion, via the Sacramento Bee , goes like this: Truthful speech is protected by the First Amendment and should not be the basis for accusing people of sedition, let alone threatening the death penalty. This seems obvious, but on Thursday, Nov. 20, President Donald Trump responded to a video by six members of Congress by posting: “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” What did the members of Congress do to deserve this threat of capital punishment? They posted a 90-second video on social media that spoke to members of the military and intelligence communities about their oath to the Constitution. The part of the video that drew Trump’s ire was this remark: “This administration is pitt...