November 2, 2024 — Lloyd Billingsley
For a film released in 1968, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey stands up well on the technical side, with its beeping gadgetry and spaceships floating to the strains of Richard Strauss. The film also invites a comparison of recent events in America, including Tuesday’s election. On the Discovery One, headed for Jupiter, astronauts Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) and Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood) contend with the HAL9000 computer that controls
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November 2, 2024 — Lloyd Billingsley
Steve makes short work of the ridiculous “Latinx,” but also needing attention is the more common “Latino.” The term derives from the region of Latium in central Italy but it was never applied to the Italian-born Angelo Codevilla (The Ruling Class) or people such as Frank Sinatra, Madonna, Antonin Scalia and many others. “Latino” is applied to people with ancestry in the Iberian Peninsula of Europe, so they are more
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October 31, 2024 — Lloyd Billingsley
To someone like me who talks to people all over the world and still knows America is the shining city on a hill, calling America is a trash can for the world is so unpatriotic, it makes me furious. And I will always be an American before I am a Republican. That’s why, this week, I am voting for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. That was movie star and former
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October 29, 2024 — Lloyd Billingsley
San Francisco 49ers receiver Ricky Pearsall, shot in the chest during an armed robbery on August 31, played his second NFL game Sunday night versus the Dallas Cowboys. At this writing the shooter, allegedly a minor, remains unidentified. In California, a “youthful offender” is anyone under 26. This absurdity is now on display in George Gascon’s bid to free the Menendez brothers, who gunned down their parents in 1989. Gascon
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October 28, 2024 — Lloyd Billingsley
According to Hillary Clinton, on Sunday Donald Trump was “actually reenacting the Madison Square Garden rally in 1939,” held by the pro-Nazi German American Bund. According to Tim Walz, “Donald Trump’s got this big rally going at Madison Square Garden. There’s a direct parallel to a big rally that happened in the mid 1930s at Madison Square Garden.” For MSNBC, “with racist Madison Square Garden rally, Trump and his allies
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October 27, 2024 — Lloyd Billingsley
“I’m with Elon,” claimed California Gov. Gavin Newsom in the wake of Musk’s lawsuit against the California Coastal Commission, but the Coiffed One was quick to clarify. “Look, I’m not helping the legal case,” the governor explained. “You can’t bring up that explicit level of politics.” In his view, the Commission should have confined its debate to the merits of the permit but that’s as far as it goes. “These
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October 26, 2024 — Lloyd Billingsley
As Thomas Buckley of the California Globe reports, Los Angeles County DA George Gascon seeks a new deal for Lyle and Eric Menendez, sentenced to life in 1996 for the shotgun murder of their parents. Buckley sees it as a desperate political move by the unpopular Gascon, trailing Nathan Hochman by a wide margin, but the enabling dynamics are worthy of note. California Penal Code 3051 mandates that criminals under 26
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October 25, 2024 — Lloyd Billingsley
An elderly janitor called Ralph arrives for his shift, pushing a cleaning cart from room to room. After trading pleasantries with a couple of office mates, Ralph starts killing everyone who crosses his path. Once Ralph has carved a path of violence through the building, he ascends to the roof, tosses a few smoke pellets onto the ground below, and vanishes into the chaos. That’s from “Everything to know about
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October 24, 2024 — Lloyd Billingsley
On October 21, the congressional task force released Interim Staff Report: Investigating the Stunning Security Failures on July 13, 2024, in Butler, Pennsylvania. The detailed report charges the Secret Service with inadequate planning and concludes that “the tragic events of July 13 were preventable.” The task force shows no interest in shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks’ background and associations long before he nearly killed Donald Trump. The same is true of the
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October 23, 2024 — Lloyd Billingsley
“Burgerism is the new birtherism,” proclaims the Telegraph, a lame quip now making the rounds. Burgerism is Trump’s part-time gig at McDonald’s, as John notes, now drawing pushback from Democrats. On the other hand, “birtherism” might prompt people to wonder, like Martha (Elizabeth Taylor) in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, “what’s that from?” Back in 2008, a Hillary Clinton staffer circulated a rumor that rival candidate Sen. Barack Obama was
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October 23, 2024 — Lloyd Billingsley
“Trump is speaking like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini,” charges The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum, who throws in Mao Zedong and Pol Pot for good measure. As Sir Bedevire (Terry Jones) might say, who is this who is so wise in the ways of politics and history? Applebaum won a Pulitzer for Gulag: A History, published in 2003. The Yale alum is a smart lady, but as Nobel laureate Saul Bellow said,
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October 22, 2024 — Lloyd Billingsley
Election Day, November 5, marks 15 years since the massacre of American soldiers at Fort Hood. This event has meaning for the black men Obama is badgering to vote for Kamala Harris as a matter of duty. On November 5, 2009, self-proclaimed “soldier of Allah” Nidal Hasan murdered 13 Americans – 14 counting Pvt. Francheska Velez’s unborn child – and wounded more than 30 others. One of them was Sgt.
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October 21, 2024 — Lloyd Billingsley
“No power, no food, no medicine, no running water,” John notes. “So it always goes in a socialist paradise.” That’s Cuba, a model for American leftists from the start, despite a decidedly racist legacy. Cuba’s 800,000 African slaves were more than twice the number in the United States. Cuba did not abolish slavery until 1886 and there was no Cuban equivalent of the historically black colleges in the USA. By some estimates, only one
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October 20, 2024 — Lloyd Billingsley
The California Coastal Commission wants to block more SpaceX launches from Vandenberg Space Force Base because they dislike Elon Musk, who has responded by suing the Commission. Musk’s action recalls Nollan v. California Coastal Commission, handled by the Pacific Legal Foundation: In 1982, Marilyn and Patrick Nollan wanted to convert their one-story beach bungalow into a modest two-story home. The house had been the Nollans’ part-time beach house, but they loved the
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October 18, 2024 — Lloyd Billingsley
James Boasberg and Tanya Chutkan are worthy contenders for anybody’s list of worst judges in America. So is federal judge Emmet Sullivan, a 1991 appointee of George H.W. Bush to the District of Columbia Court of Appeals. In 1994, President Bill Clinton appointed Sullivan United States District Judge for the District of Columbia. In due course he would encounter Gen. Michael A. Flynn, President Trump’s pick for national security advisor.
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October 17, 2024 — Lloyd Billingsley
Elon Musk is suing California’s Coastal Commission (CCC), which recently voted to block more SpaceX launches from Vandenberg Space Force Base in Santa Barbara County. As commissioner Gretchen Newsom (no relation to Gavin) put it, “Elon Musk is hopping about the country, spewing and tweeting political falsehoods and attacking FEMA while claiming his desire to help the hurricane victims with free Starlink access to the internet,” and so forth. “You
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October 16, 2024 — Lloyd Billingsley
Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, Frontpage pick for worst judge in America, is a member of the DC District Court. The presiding judge of that circuit is James E. Boasberg, appointed in 2010 by the composite character president David Garrow described in Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama. In 2014, Chief Justice John Roberts appointed Boasberg to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and from January 2020 to May 2021 Boasberg
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