In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

I've been noting the peculiar incongruity of Real Clear Politics's opinion choices, especially its frequent platforming of far-left figures like Harold Myerson and Robert Reich, while they seldom publish conservatives much to the right of Victor Davis Hanson and Roger Kimball, who at this stage are just mainstream Republicans and boring ones at that. The other day, RCP ran this Myerson piece, The Democrats’ On-Again, Off-Again Class Politics . Myerson argues that the New Deal-Fair Deal politics of FDR and Truman were "class-based", but the later politics of Adlai Stevenson and John Kennedy were not. [W]hile working in John F. Kennedy’s White House, [Arthur] Schlesinger [Jr] comes away from a meeting with UAW President Walter Reuther and Sen. Hubert Humphrey, noting that both of them still spoke in “the New Deal’s distinctive rhetoric. Walter and Hubert could talk about ‘the people,’ about their ultimate wisdom, and the importance of doing things for them, in ...

Here's what puzzles me about Eric Swalwell. He's a major pretty boy, a very good-looking guy who should have no trouble with the ladies, but somehow, he's been repeatedly brought down by trouble with the ladies. The long-running saga of his affair with the Chinese spy Fang Fang began in 2014 while Swalwell had a seat on the House Intelligence Committee: The FBI assessment, which later became a full-fledged investigation, centered on allegations that Swalwell awarded internships at his offices in exchange for campaign contributions. The FBI identified Fang “Christine” Fang, a Chinese national, as the alleged facilitator of this exchange and alleged she employed conduits to route illegal donations. Swalwell also admitted that he had “physical relations with Fang” on multiple occasions, according to the FBI summary of his 2015 interview with agents. In a subsequent interview in 2016, Swalwell detailed one incident where Fang showed up at his door, after which Swalwell sa...

A Florida man found a legal loophole to block a Flock surveillance camera using a 12-foot-tall protest sign. 77-year-old Carl Gunn legally blocks a Flock license plate camera in St. Petersburg, Florida, by sitting on a public sidewalk and holding a 12-foot pool skimmer pole with… pic.twitter.com/x3iMcU37RZ — Historic Vids (@historyinmemes) August 19, 2026 If this guy ever finds out about cell phone tracking, he'll need to cover his umbrella with tinfoil. I'm amazed at the level of paranoia about automated license plate readers, especially Flock cameras, since all they do is trace the location of automobiles. Your cell phone can trace where you are, in a car or not, and GPS is only one way it does this. Nevertheless , A Wisconsin woman was pulled over at gunpoint twice in one week after Milwaukee Police Department staff failed to remove a vehicle alert from the Flock license plate camera system. TWICE it happened. Years ago, in the NCIC(National Crime Information Cen...

We last checked in on Kevin Morris more than two years ago, when I posted , But I can't resist posting on one footnote. Kevin Morris, Hunter's "sugar bro", attended at least the first day of Hunter's trial on Monday to support him, although as I posted here, after spending at least $6.5 million to pay Hunter's lawyers and fund his lifestyle, he's said to be out of money. I've been increasingly skeptical of the conventional Morris narrative -- he's a "Hollywood lawyer" who stopped practicing law 15 years ago, and he's a "novelist" who was never able to sell a blockbuster despite his wife being one of the most powerful agents in the industry. In other words, he's basically been just a dilettante living off his wife for more than a decade. And his wife is probably key to the most recent development in the story. In my post two weeks ago, I concluded, "It looks like Mrs Kevin has staged an intervention, and she...

It's mid-August, everyone's on vacation or wishes he was, nothing's new, so we get a Hunter Biden rerun, even in the Wall Street Journal . The piece is over 1000 words, has three bylines, and manages to convey absolutely no new information: Those who have spent time with him say the public is now meeting the Hunter Biden they have known for a long time: a sharp observer of politics and media who has had his own life dragged through the mud. . . . Former Biden White House aides said that Hunter was kept quiet in the White House because he was under federal investigation for much of his father’s time in the presidency. Former aides are now abuzz about what they considered to be a strong showing, and there is some regret they didn’t unleash him earlier, some said. . . . After Hunter Biden’s laptop was found and its contents leaked, his online history was made public, including nude photos of himself doing illicit drugs. The scandal prompted years of investigations and ...

One version of the transatlantic ruling class's response to the Arday scandal is this piece at The Atlantic . The author, Tyler Austin Harper, represents himself as capital-B Black, but looking at photos, it seems he could easily pass for white. Still, let's grant that he's a descendant, however distant, of African slaves -- he's nevertheless of a distinctly different class from Jason Arday, who was a member of an entirely new socially engineered class of UK immigrants from former British colonies created by the postwar Labour government. So about the only thing Harper has in common with Arday is that they share a certain amount of African DNA, but they're from two entirely different classes in two different countries. Nevertheless, Harper sees himself in precisely Arday's situation: I will confess that, until yesterday, I had watched the Arday saga unfold with some combination of amusement and distress. Amusement because of the undeniable comic ab...

As part of restarting my literary career, I just had a story published at Twist & Twain, Don't Worry, te Fix is In .