#Mike Howel

[riaaanna]

It was an all-star Convention this year 🥺 aside from John Harris these people were in attendance:

Crystal Taylor (self-explanatory... lol but Roger's roadie)

Terry Higgins (Freddie's driver/bodyguard)

Mike Moran (Freddie's pianist)

Lenny Zakatek (The Immortals - band with John Deacon!)

Eddie Howell (The Man from Manhattan)

Doug Bogie (Queen's early bassist)

Thank you Bas Asselbergs for sharing!

[shimmershark17]

I made a thing

[upsidedownbronco]

Fun little sh0p update!

From Dan & Phil to Loki to Stranger Things, check it out below 👇🏽

Remember these are PREORDER items and will take longer to ship out!

(more items coming soon!)

https://upsidedownbronco.etsy.com

[letthewhumpbegin]

Whumptober 2024, day 11

Prompt: convenience store

@whumptober

American Ultra (2015)

[2009era]

desperately need dnp to drop their honest challengers review like they did with saltburn in phil's bday stream

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Chris D'Angelo at HuffPost:

When it comes to the public’s ability to pry documents loose from federal agencies, Donald Trump’s supporters accept nothing less than full disclosure and have spent the past few years bombarding federal agencies with requests for records. But it seems overwhelmingly likely that posture will soon change ― right around noon on Jan. 20.

Take Trump-era Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, who is now a key member of the president-elect’s transition team and is widely expected to land another powerful administration post next year. In a May 2023 episode of the America First Policy Institute’s podcast, “The Tank,” Bernhardt bemoaned that left-wing organizations he’d “never heard of” had “inundated” federal agencies with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests during Trump’s first term, “to the point that it created a lot of activity in terms of slowing down the agenda.” “Frankly, I think they were very effective,” he said. “They’re highly funded by non-disclosed entities, and that’s fine. I was even surprised to find that much of their activity is tax-deductible.” “I’m not suggesting it’s illegal, but what I am suggesting is that it is incredibly one-sided,” he added. “That one-sided effort meant that their voice was often the only voice in the echo chamber surrounding policies related to the administration.” Bernhardt’s condemnation of perceived political adversaries using the 1967 law as intended to shine light on the inner functions of government is ironic. As a longtime lobbyist for oil, gas, mining and agricultural interests, Bernhardt entered the Trump administration with so many potential conflicts of interest that he had to carry around a card listing his former clients. Under his watch, the Department of the Interior repeatedly meddled with FOIA, going as far as to withhold information about Bernhardt ahead of his confirmation hearing to take over as secretary after the departure of scandal-plagued Ryan Zinke. And over the last couple of years, right-wing organizations, including the America First Policy Institute — many of them tax-exempt nonprofits and led by former Trump administration officials — have swamped the Interior Department and other federal agencies with thousands of records requests, many of them targeted at specific employees. (Bernhardt is chair of AFPI’s Center for American Freedom.)

Leading that sleuthing effort is the Heritage Foundation, an influential right-wing organization that spearheaded Project 2025, the extreme-right policy blueprint that GOP operatives compiled to guide Trump in a second term. Mike Howell, a former Trump administration official and current executive director of Heritage’s Oversight Project, told ProPublica last month that the foundation has filed more than 50,000 FOIA requests since 2022. Many of those requests target specific career civil servants and seek communications that mention a variety of “culture war” topics, including climate change action and diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. Others target internal discussions about Trump.

[...] One employee in the FOIA office of a government agency told ProPublica that the right-wing effort has jammed up the FOIA queue to the point that it has severely affected the agency’s ability to keep up with requests. And ethics watchdogs expect that the fishing expedition is part of Project 2025’s authoritarian vision of dismantling federal agencies and replacing tens of thousands of career staff — so-called rogue bureaucrats — with Trump loyalists willing to advance right-wing policies.

[...] The Trump administration has a record of doing exactly what Howell takes issue with. During Trump’s first year in office, federal agencies set a new record for censoring and withholding government documents requested through FOIA, The Associated Press reported at the time. Trump’s Interior Department changed its FOIA policy to allow for political appointees to review public information requests prior to their release and at one point proposed new regulations to grant the agency the ability to reject “burdensome” records requests and impose monthly limits for individual requesters. In a 2020 report, the Interior Department’s internal watchdog concluded that political appointees blocked the public release of documents related to Bernhardt ahead of his confirmation hearing in March 2019.

[...] Trump and his allies are pledging, yet again, to dismantle the “deep state” bureaucracy that they claim is conspiring against them. That is likely to include dismantling federal offices they deem not essential to an agency’s core function, including those working on climate change and environmental justice. What they conveniently forget is that the people in government they view as the enemy are, by and large, simply carrying out the Biden administration’s agenda.

Donald Trump’s first term was a censorious mess with FOIA requests. His 2nd term will be much worse.

[brevoorthistoryofcomics]

GH: GREEN LANTERN #162

Green Lantern had been my second-favorite super hero going back to my youth, when I found him occupying the back pages of THE FLASH. Once he got his own series again, I followed it regularly right from the jump. And I was particularly enamored of Marv Wolfman’s run on the character which had wrapped up not long before this. But still, all of this was not enough to prevent me from adding GREEN…

[comicarthistory]

Page from All Star Squadron #30. 1983. Art by Richard Howell and Mike Machlan.

[downthetubes]

Don't miss Minnie the Minx’s Mission of Maximum Mischief!

Watch out, Beanotown! Minnie the Minx is in charge now, in a new "Boomic" from BEANO publisher DC Thomson, available from all good bookshops online and physical, and WHSmith

Watch out, Beanotown! Minnie the Minx is in charge now, in a new “Boomic” from BEANO publisher DC Thomson, available from all good bookshops online and physical, and WHSmith. “Minnie’s Mission of Maximum Mischief“, an illustrated text-based tale, is a story about friends, family and overcoming one’s greatest fears, by learning to laugh at them.   Due to a case of mistaken identity, Minnie has…

[gleepolls]

Best Adult Character Bracket

view all best adult character bracket polls

[thesocklesswonder]

At the end of the article, the Heritage Foundation sent Rolling Stone a statement "clarifying" that they were not hacked. The information obtained was a two-year-old archive of The Daily Signal website (the foundation's "news" arm) that is owned by a contractor.

The statement reads, in part, "No Heritage systems were breached at any time, and all Heritage databases and websites remain secure, including Project 2025."

The lady doth protest too much, methinks

If they weren't hacked and the info SiegedSec got was useless, why did Mike Howell, executive director of the Heritage Foundation's Oversight Project, go off on an unhinged threat-fest against the hackers?

He really had a lot of hateful things to say, including a lot of commentary about furries. He also threatened to throw the hackers in jail and said he was working with the FBI to identify the hackers.

Very interesting, considering the information was so unimportant.

[eclipsejynx]

shoutout to those 3 gay furries who hacked NETO 3 times, disabled multiple Israel sites and organizations, threatened to leak information a fvcking nuclear powerplant laboratory because they wanted catgirls to exist, and the Heritage Association for Project 2025 (goes against abortion laws and LGBTQIA+ rights). you guys are amazing <33

still upset that they had to disband because of the FBI. if you guys want an explanation of what's going on, or wanna see the chat leaks of the furries and Mike Howell (head of Heritage Association), there's a video that has them. I don't really like that guy tbh. he claimed they were perverts and wants to get rid of LGBTQIA+ rights and abortion.

link to video explanation

[aurorathedragon45]

did yall hear about the gay furry hackers that hacked and leaked project 2025?? did yall see the chat log between one of the furry members and one of the guys that worked on said project 2025?? well here it is.

its funny, but also horrifyingly disgusting what this PROFESSIONAL GOVERNMENT AGENT said to this person. read at your own discretion.

and yes, this did happen, mike howell even admitted to it on his twitter page. absolutely disgusting.

[nando161mando]

Mike Howell from The Heritage Foundation is having a meltdown on X and posting Eminem lyrics.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Josh Kovensky at TPM:

Many MAGA influencers have an apocalyptic story to tell about the country, the political divide, and where we’re all headed, and they’re already using it to lay the groundwork for crossing what has long been a red line: deploying the military for domestic law enforcement purposes. In this MAGA fever dream, everyone has their part to play. They believe that they’ll be caught up in it; you might be, too. It goes something like this: If Donald Trump wins in November, people will protest. Riots will break out. The left, they theorize, will go all-out to stoke organized violence around the country, clearing the way for a newly inaugurated Trump administration to step in and make unprecedented, widespread use of the U.S. military to restore law and order.

This dark vision of the future draws on deeply pessimistic theorizing, on lectures about Marxist anti-government ideology seemingly ripped from the Cold War, on memories of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, and on claims that Democrats and the left will be unable to accept a Trump victory. It all comes against the backdrop of senior officials around Trump and Trump himself reportedly having been eager to invoke the Insurrection Act while he was in office, and mulling its actual use if he’s re-elected. In this situation, a second Trump administration would invoke the law to deploy the military to enforce immigration laws as part of a broader mission at the southern border — a proposal Trump has often spoken about publicly. But it would also make that invocation to do something far more extreme and at odds with American history: use the military against protestors.

[...] In the minds of Trump’s supporters, this planning is justified — in line with Trump’s promise of “retribution.” In their telling, he’s already borne those same slings and arrows that he envisions for his opponents: years of attempts by the “deep state” to thwart his administration, followed by supposedly unjust political prosecutions. He is punching back. It sets the stage, for Trump and those around him, to claim they are simply engaged in a tit for tat: using the machinery of the state to suppress his political opponents. And, in a stunning coincidence, those same opponents will happen to be violently rioting just as Trump takes office — at least in the fantasies of these hardcore supporters. Peter Feaver, a scholar of civil-military relations at Duke University, told TPM that the powers of the executive had “evolved” over the years, and that their responsible use had it come to “depend on electing a principled President.” Feaver served on the National Security Council in the George W. Bush and Clinton administrations. He added that the judiciary has long given the executive branch the power to use the Insurrection Act to override state law enforcement, in part out of deference to national security decision-making. Federal troops have been deployed domestically in dozens of situations; to quell the 1992 Los Angeles riots, to ensure desegregation efforts, to break up railroad strikes.

[...]

Higher stakes

For many right-wingers, the summer 2020 Black Lives Matter protests serve as a benchmark, often invoked when forecasting the kind of developments that they see as inevitable over the coming months, and requiring a tough response following a potential Trump victory. On the right, those protests are regarded as the high-water mark of recent left-wing violence.

As MAGA influencers tell it, the media and local, Democratic-controlled city governments ignored wanton lawlessness and violence, leaving shop owners and police squads to fend for themselves among violent mobs. The sense of grievance that’s emerged ignores the reality that many of the 2020 marches against police brutality were peaceful and managed to avoid burning down any police stations or looting stores. But the memory of that moment of activist mobilization remains powerful, among this set, and continues to inspire fear. Howell and others said that in their view, the November election would lead to a far greater level of chaos across the country than what was seen in summer 2020.

“Much more is at stake,” Douglas Wilson, a Moscow, Idaho pastor who has become influential in conservative circles, told TPM. “With the killing of George Floyd, it was simply an opportunity to vent, but no actual power was at stake. And with the presidential election, it would be actual power.”

Setting aside the crimped definition of “power” here, Wilson envisions left-wing self-preservation as further inflaming the imagined post-election violence. “If Trump wins, a lot of high powered, highly placed people are going to go to jail,” Wilson added. “They don’t want to go to jail.” Wilson has become increasingly influential among self-described Christian Nationalists, who see Trump as a vehicle to punch through an agenda that would try to reshape American society, bringing it closer to their hardline interpretation of Christianity. Wilson appeared last September at an event held on Capitol Hill called “Theology of American Statecraft.” He spoke immediately after a talk given by Russ Vought, a former Trump Office of Management and Budget director who has taken a leading role in developing policies for a second administration, including through Project 2025.

[...] A review of the paper that Vought referenced, authored by former DHS acting secretary Ken Cuccinelli and another staffer, shows that it answers an undisputed question: Does the Posse Comitatus Act, which blocks executive branch officials from deploying troops domestically, allow the president to use the military to defend the border? That part of the paper answers a question that’s long been settled: The Pentagon regularly deploys troops in support of protecting the U.S.-Mexico border, though not in a law enforcement capacity. But as the New York Times first reported, the document makes extensive legal arguments for using troops to arrest people as part of a domestic deployment.

[...] “This is actually the longest the United States has ever gone without an invocation of the Insurrection Act since the first version of the law was enacted in 1792,” Nunn, a fellow at the Brennan Center, told TPM. (The last time the Act was invoked was during the 1992 Los Angeles riots, when state and local law enforcement briefly lost control of sections of the city.) He noted that the Act is intended for situations in which civilian law enforcement cannot cope; thanks to heavy investment in state and federal law enforcement, Nunn said, those kinds of emergencies have become exceedingly rare.

Using the military against peaceful demonstrators would cut against a foundational element of American public life: the right to freely and peacefully make your views about the government known, absent government retribution. “To the extent that any candidate or person in the orbit of a candidate is suggesting a preemptive plan to invoke the Insurrection Act, that’s inappropriate,” Nunn said. “The purpose of this law is to respond to sudden emergencies. If you are planning it months in advance, that’s by definition anticipating an abuse of the law.” Neither of the two missions that the Trump team is envisioning — immigration enforcement or putting down protests — falls remotely within the ambit of why people join the military, Nunn added. “People who join the military don’t do so because they look to be deployed against their fellow Americans,” he said. Domestic law enforcement, among other things, is not seen within the military as its job. “It’s not what they want to be doing. They want to be focused outward, on defense.”

MAGA influencers are seeking to justify use of military force on domestic soil for law enforcement purposes if Trump wins to be used against anti-Trump protests.