In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

I've got to say I'm disappointed that Graham Platner dropped out of the Maine Senate race, because having him stay on the ballot would have been just too delicious. But there's plenty of awkwardness and embarrassment yet to come. Just for starters is the Maine Democrat chair's message, embedded in Mark Halperin's 2WAY YouTube above: As you know, the Maine Democratic Party has been working around the clock to develop a process to replace our US Senate nominee that is open, inclusive, transparent, and fair. the integrity of this process is just as important as the outcome, and we are committed to ensuring that Democrats across our state can have confidence in both. Because, of course, last month's primary wasn't open, inclusive, transparent, and fair enough. She goes on, to cackles from one of Halperin's guests, We have repeatedly reiterated [sic] to Graham Platner's team that they have no role in determining our next Democratic ...

The big lesson for me in the evolving Platner saga is how easily mainstream leftists let themselves be conned. Scott Jennings claims he was in fact "vetted" : All of this whole thing is disgusting but to say that they hadn't vetted him, or that they didn't know about all this is totally false. They knew it and they signed up for it and I don't know why they're backing away from this scumbag today when they had already signed off on all that other crazy behavior. Strictly speaking, the specific Jenny Racicot allegations of sexual assault (and now sneaky behavior relative to contraception) became public only as of the past few days; they weren't general knowledge, for instance, before the Maine primary. What was actually going on was that, as I pointed out yesterday, Platner was merchandised by DSA talent spotters as though he had been vetted, and the Democrat machine and out-of-state donors took this on faith. He looked authentic, as only some...

We last looked at Graham Platner here a month ago. A link to the New York Post pointed out, The truth is he was discovered and coached by a pair of Ivy League-educated radical Democratic socialists, replicating a playbook they’ve used in Nebraska and Iowa. That revelation could be more damaging than the tattoo, sexting women other than his wife, blasting fellow veterans and admitting to masturbating in a port-a-potty, as it strikes at the heart of Platner’s alleged authenticity. . . . In summer 2025, Moraff and Fan were in Maine scouting for a new candidate. They had settled on union boss Chris Williams in Bath, but dropped him at the last minute due to “a skeleton in the closet that wasn’t true that we would’ve had to explain,” according to an interview they gave to Politico. What skeleton could possibly have been worse than a credible rape allegation? As of yesterday , A woman who dated Maine U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner says he forced her to have sex ...

I've noted before that I've recently discovered the UK Thatcherite toff Jacob Rees-Mogg, who gets things wrong in an entertainingly stuffy way. In the video above, he congratulates the US for having what he implies is a copy of the UK constitutional system. This is the sort of comfortable patter that Winston Churchill used to ingratiate himself with Roosevelt, and the sort of thing King Charles said to the US congress not long ago in a similar effort to get the US to continue to spend money on the UK's defense. Of the events in 1776, Rees-Mogg says, at 1:40: [T]he Americans said they were English gentlemen who just happened to live in another place, and they wanted the rights of Englishmen. They wanted taxation with representation. . . . Edmund Burke pointed out that there was a precedent for people living abroad being able to to send MPs. That is to say, up until the reign of Mary Tudor, Mary I, people living in Calais had sent members to Parliament, to the House ...

For some resson, the Wall Street Journal put up a link on Facebooki to a piece they ran last April, What Happens When Europeans Find Out How Poor They Are? . Coming back to it today, I find they've tucked it back behind a paywall. But the first paragraphs give up the gravamen: Do Europeans understand how poor they are? And what will happen when they find out? Those are the Continent’s big political-economy questions for the next few years—perhaps decades. The widening gap between American and European prosperity is among the most important facts of the global economy. The clearest manifestation is the chasm in per capita gross domestic product: $94,400 in the U.S., according to the International Monetary Fund, compared with $65,300 in Germany, $61,000 in the U.K. and $52,000 in France. I don't know what history books this fellow has been smoking -- I've gradually come to recognize I did well by not taking any undergraduate history courses -- but European and UK u...

Back in 2020, I posted about my first serious look at the Bourne franchise : The original Ludlum novels appeared between 1980 and 1990, while the film trilogy we watched appeared between 2002 and 2007, long before Donald Trump was anything but a playboy billionaire and reality TV star. Yet the image of the CIA and its fictional director, Martin Marshall, is the one we have now, the one with the actual CIA director John Brennan, who in the public mind is fully capable of Martin Marshall's misdeeds and fully eligible for Marshall's implied fate, federal indictment for serious whatever. Did Martin Marshall go to Yale? You betcha. A quick summary of the Bourne story as portrayed in the films is that David Webb, a former member of the US Army Delta Force, is recruited into a double-secret CIA program called Treadstone. This uses drugs, psychological manipulation, and elite-level special forces training to create super-assassins, who take out world political figures to furth...

I had a lengthy post here giving what was known at the time about the stabbing of Henry Nowak, an 18‑year‑old British university student, by Vickrum Digwa, a 23-year-old British Sikh, in Southampton, UK. At the time, although policy required that the circumstances of the stabbing, Digwa's arrest, and Nowak's treatment by local police be investigated by the Independent Office for Police Conduct, the IOPC was leaking to the UK Guardian that this would be perfunctory : The Guardian understands the IOPC has found no indication of any disciplinary or criminal offence by the officers involved after six months of inquiries, after it was referred to the watchdog in December. Hampshire police said of four officers involved, three remained on full duties and one has resigned. But as of yesterday, things seem to have changed : The two police officers who handcuffed Henry Nowak as he lay dying from stab wounds have been placed under investigation for gross misconduct ...