#Peter Sagal

[ronnydeschepper]

Vijftien jaar geleden zag ik "Dirty dancing 2" ("Havana Nights")

Op 03/08/2009 zag ik “Dirty dancing 2” van Guy Ferland uit 2004, ook gekend onder de titel “Havana Nights”. Continue reading Vijftien jaar geleden zag ik “Dirty dancing 2” (“Havana Nights”)

[linusjf]

Peter Sagal: Running

“We runners talk about having fun but I don’t think anybody believes us. We talk about discipline and endurance, we take care, we exercise caution, we watch our diets and monitor our pace. We are ascetics who talk, unconvincingly, of the bracing enjoyment of self-abuse.” —Peter Sagal. Peter Sagal at the 2008 Texas Book Festival, Austin, Texas, United States. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

[tardisman14]

About to see Peter Sagal interview Tom Hanks

[bestofsophieturner]

News :

In Trust, Turner plays a Hollywood starlet who seeks refuge in a secluded Airbnb following a high-profile scandal, only to find herself at the mercy of hardened criminals on the hunt for a score.

Katey Sagal (Sons of Anarchy), Billy Campbell (Troll), and Rhys Coiro (Hustlers) have joined Sophie Turner in the psychological thriller Trust for Twisted Pictures and Republic Pictures.

Details as to their roles are under wraps. Other new additions set to round out the cast include Peter Mensah (Gladiator 2), Forrest Goodluck (The Revenant), and Gianni Paolo (Power).

Production started in Mexico this month.

[aswell84]

Peter Falk as Max in his three Christmas TV movies: "A Town without Christmas." "Finding John Christmas," and "When Angels Come to Town."

[michaelcoffeysthoughts]

Columbo: Season 2 (1972-73)

This is a very good season that keeps up the quality from its predecessor. The stories are consistently engaging and allow for some new perspectives on the Columbo character. After establishing the formula in season 1, this season gets to experiment with the stories and settings in ways that keep things exciting while retaining the series' core elements. The guest cast remains excellent, with a nice mix of classic Hollywood veterans and rising talent, while Falk's easy charisma is always a treat. The visuals keep the style of the first season and allows the murder plots and the humor to be more distinct from other mystery shows. This is a great season that works as a nice expansion of the series so far.

Episodes Ranked:

8.The Greenhouse Jungle

7.Dagger of the Mind

6.The Most Crucial Game

5.The Most Dangerous Match

4.Requiem for a Fallen Star

3.Double Shock

2.A Stitch in Crime

1.Étude in Black

[tammydarling]

Merry Christmas, Lovleys! 🎄🌟

[tanadrin]

I think it would be fun if from time to time there were apparitions of the hideous negative of celebrities that appeared and then just vanished without a trace. Like one day you turn on the TV and there’s a singer named Taylor Slow, whose music is all screeching noise and clanging discordant bells played at ear splitting volume, and then the TV flickers and the image vanishes and now it’s just a commercial for car insurance. Or you’re browsing TikTok and you see what looks at first like a Jamie Oliver clip, but his accent is a little off and his name is Olivier now for some reason, and he’s just hacking up chunks of unidentifiable flesh with a cleaver—did that one have a face?—and when you go to show someone the clip you can’t find it again. Or you’re listening to NPR and Peter Sagal introduces the guest in this week’s Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, except everyone is calling him Pete for some reason. Oh, and the guest keeps sobbing and begging to be let go, they swear they won’t tell anybody, please just don’t hurt them, but every time they say anything Pete just laughs like it’s the funniest joke he’s ever heard.

Just goofy lil things like that. To keep life interesting.

[broadcastarchive-umd]

Announcer Carl Kasell and host Peter Sagal of National Public Radio's Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me! in a publicity photo. The program continues, but Kasell retired in 2014.

Originally posted May 16, 2014.

[myfavoritepeterotoole]

Peter O'Toole and Barbara Carrera

Masada (TV Mini-Series)1981 directed by Boris Sagal

Peter O'Toole as General Cornelius Flavius Silva

Barbara Carrera as Sheva

[astrophysicist-guitar-god]

Not My Job: Queen's Brian May Gets Quizzed About Dairy Queen

OCTOBER 28, 2017 (12:44 PM ET) || HEARD ON  WAIT WAIT...DON'T TELL ME!

9-Minute Listen <- (as of 11/21/23, the audio link still works)

Download

Transcript

Michael Loccisano/Getty Images

Brian May left a promising career in science to try his hand at rock 'n' roll, and did OK enough, we guess, becoming a co-founder of the band Queen. (That makes him the only Ph.D. astrophysicist in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.) What's more, he's also deeply into 3D stereoscopic photography, and has just published a new book of pictures of his band.

Given his success with Queen, we made him answer three trivia questions about Dairy Queen, the ice cream and fast food franchise.

Queen's Brian May Rocks Out To Physics, Photography Secret Stereographs: Brian May Of Queen Reveals A Pastime

PETER SAGAL, HOST: 

And now the game where we reward a lifetime of achievement with a few moments of trivia. It's called Not My Job. Brian May left a promising career in science to try his hand at rock 'n' roll. And he did OK. He founded the band Queen with Freddie Mercury, John Deacon and Roger Taylor, making him, as far as we know, the only Ph.D. astrophysicist in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But he had another enthusiasm, 3-D stereoscopic photography. He's published a new book of pictures of his band so realistic you can practically smell the groupies.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: Brian May, welcome to WAIT WAIT... DON'T TELL ME.

(APPLAUSE)

BRIAN MAY: Thank you very much.

SAGAL: I spent a good part of yesterday evening with your book of these amazing stereoscopic photos and the great little viewer that comes with them...

MAY: Right.

SAGAL: ...Enjoying these 3-D pictures of your band and its history and Freddie Mercury and your other friends and musicians. And I have one thing to ask you. How is it that in all the years that you've been in the public eye, your hair has never changed?

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: Did any - nobody ever came to you and said, Brian, you know, now it's the 1990s. We need to cut your hair? Has any...

MAY: Yeah, they do it all the time.

(LAUGHTER)

MAY: I have a good answer for that. But it's probably not repeatable on your program.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: So there are so many things that are interesting about you. You were, as I said - you were pursuing your doctorate in science when the band started, right?

MAY: I was, yeah. In astronomy. In what they now call astrophysics, yeah. And I gave it up. And I thought I was actually doing astrophysics a favor by choosing the other option.

SAGAL: Really?

MAY: Yeah. And I also thought, you know, there's a window opening here. And if I don't kind of walk through - or a door opening, I should say. And I thought, if I don't walk through right now, that door will never open again. So I went off and, against all the odds, became a rock star for some reason.

SAGAL: Yeah. That seemed to have worked out pretty well for you.

MAY: It's OK. It's been OK so far. Yeah.

SAGAL: It really has. But...

PAULA POUNDSTONE: So wait, you're suggesting that you were not a good astrophysicist?

MAY: You know, I didn't think I was.

POUNDSTONE: What would make a bad astrophysicist?

MAY: Well...

POUNDSTONE: Like, you weren't looking in the right...

(LAUGHTER)

MAY: Well, what would make a bad astrophysicist would be, like, not being able to complete your Ph.D., which is what happened.

POUNDSTONE: Oh.

MAY: And I couldn't please my supervisor. So 30 years later, I found myself with another supervisor. And he liked what I did. So I kind of updated my vision of myself. But I got it after 30 years.

POUNDSTONE: Oh, wow.

(APPLAUSE)

SAGAL: Wait a minute. What I love is that you going in to get your Ph.D. not as young Brian May but as Brian May the guitarist of Queen.

MAY: Yeah.

SAGAL: I mean, did you - like, your oral exams - did you come in and say, I could answer your questions, or I could just do the riff from "We Will Rock You."

MAY: Well, you know, they were tough on me. I think they had to be because they couldn't be seen to kind of make it easy for me, you know? And, you know, I got a whole sheaf of stuff that I had to do in order to finish it off.

SAGAL: I bet that...

LUKE BURBANK: Did they try to work in any Queen stuff during the defense of your dissertation? Like, you may think you're the champion, Mr. May...

(LAUGHTER)

BURBANK: ...But this panel thinks otherwise. Do they do anything corny like that?

SAGAL: Now, this is the amazing thing about this book because in addition to your interest in astrophysics and obviously shredding on the guitar, you are a huge photography nerd. And you were...

MAY: Totally.

SAGAL: You were always into 3-D photography.

MAY: Yeah.

SAGAL: I'm just trying to imagine though that - it must have been like the mid-70s in the absolute apogee of, like, the rock 'n' roll lifestyle. And there's the cocaine. And there are the groupies. And there's the liquor. And you're, like, trying to get everybody to hold still so you can take a 3-D photograph.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: Guys, guys. Come on.

MAY: I'm not going to contradict you there.

(LAUGHTER)

MAY: Should we just move on?

SAGAL: All right. I will.

(LAUGHTER)

POUNDSTONE: Every high school student has the same story, I imagine, on the way to sports events.

SAGAL: Yeah.

POUNDSTONE: Like, when I played lacrosse in high school, we would bang our sticks on the roof of the bus.

MAY: Oh.

POUNDSTONE: How this driver tolerated it I'll never know. And we would scream at the top of our lungs the lyrics to, you know, "We Are The Champions."

MAY: Great.

POUNDSTONE: And it was so much fun.

SAGAL: Oh, yeah.

BURBANK: Did you guys ever win a match?

POUNDSTONE: No.

(LAUGHTER)

MAY: It did you no good whatsoever.

BURBANK: What would you sing on the drive back, "Another One Bites The Dust?"

(LAUGHTER, APPLAUSE)

BURBANK: Can I just ask what - like, in the creation of an amazing, iconic song like "Bohemian Rhapsody," did Freddie Mercury write those lyrics?

MAY: Absolutely.

BURBANK: And, like, what was it like when he says, OK, these are going to be the words to this song?

(LAUGHTER)

MAY: We had a kind of unwritten law. You know, generally, this song was kind of the province of the writer. And the writer would have the final say. So yeah, we didn't really discuss it. We didn't say, you know, why are you saying that, Freddie? It was just...

BURBANK: So no one looked at him when he started singing scaramouche?

POUNDSTONE: Right.

(LAUGHTER)

MAY: You know, we were enjoying ourselves.

SAGAL: Can you do the fandango?

MAY: I mean, this stuff is really fun to do in the studio.

POUNDSTONE: Oh, I bet.

MAY: And nobody had ever done it before, you know?

SAGAL: Oh, absolutely. I'd never heard anything like that in my life when that song came out.

MAY: Well, and you won't again.

SAGAL: I know. I know.

POUNDSTONE: So you guys just, you know, scaramouche, scarmouche, not even looking at one another?

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: I can imagine.

POUNDSTONE: It does sound like fun.

SAGAL: Last question - as an astrophysicist, because this is interesting how you both - do both - can you scientific explain how it is that fat bottomed girls make the world go round?

(LAUGHTER)

MAY: Yeah. I think that's still true. I was just lucky to find out early, you know?

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: Well, Brian May, we can talk to you all day. But we have business to do. We've asked you here to play a game we're calling...

BILL KURTIS: Have a peanut buster parfait.

SAGAL: You, of course, as we have been discussing, are one of the founders of Queen, one of the iconic rock bands of all time. So we thought we'd ask you three questions about Dairy Queen.

(LAUGHTER)

MAY: About what?

SAGAL: Dairy Queen. You might have come across it in your travels across America. It's a popular ice cream and fast food franchise.

MAY: This is the bit I've been looking forward to so much.

SAGAL: Oh, you are.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: Answer two questions about - by the way, I should say that absolute ignorance is always an advantage in this particular game.

MAY: Well, you've got it in this case.

(LAUGHTER)

ADAM BURKE: I'm just picturing the Queen tour bus pull up to a Dairy Queen.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: It'd be the greatest day of those people's lives.

BURKE: Freddie just marching in. Blizzards for the lot of us.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: All right (laughter).

MAY: Can I go home now?

SAGAL: This is already going very well.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: So the question, though, for Bill is who is legendary guitarist and astrophysicist Brian May playing for?

KURTIS: Ella Jones of Baltimore, Md.

SAGAL: All right.

POUNDSTONE: Here we go.

SAGAL: Just two right, and we win it all. None right - who cares? Here we go. Dairy Queen has given us so much by way of frozen treats, the Blizzard, the Dilly Bar, the Oreo Brownie Earthquake. But it's also responsible for what other wonderful thing? A, the defibrillator device; B - the band No Doubt, or C avocado toast?

(LAUGHTER)

MAY: I would say none of the above. But I have no idea. The defibrillator. I'm going for the defibrillator.

SAGAL: You could use a defibrillator at any Dairy Queen. But the answer is the band No Doubt...

POUNDSTONE: Really?

MAY: You're kidding me.

SAGAL: ...Because it turns out that Gwen Stefani and two of her band mates met and formed their band at a Dairy Queen in Anaheim, Calif., when they both - all worked there.

MAY: I'm on the edge of my seat.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: But we have other things. There's this Dairy Queen - one of them - in Morehead, Minn. And it's legendary because it still uses all the old recipes. And it was the place where their famous dilly bar treat was invented. Now, the owner there invented a number of other things that corporate never liked - so they didn't catch on nationally - including which of these? Which of these failed Dairy Queen treats? A, the flaming sundae; B, the meat shake...

POUNDSTONE: Ew.

SAGAL: ...Or C, the heck-of-a-job brownie?

(LAUGHTER)

MAY: I'm going to go for number one.

SAGAL: The flaming sundae. You're right.

(SOUNDBITE OF BELL)

POUNDSTONE: Wow.

SAGAL: He invented a flaming sundae, a sugar cube doused with liquor - set it on fire. Very attractive. So your last question. If you get this right you win, which I'm sure will go well with your CBE.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: Last question. Dairy Queen has a deep, dark secret - something they would rather that you - none of us - would know. What is it? A, their original name was Dairy Fairy; B, their ice cream isn't actually ice cream or C, the chain is wholly owned by the government of Iran?

(LAUGHTER)

BURBANK: He's operating at a slight disadvantage having never been to a Dairy Queen.

SAGAL: That's true.

MAY: I think B.

SAGAL: Yes. You're right.

(SOUNDBITE OF BELL)

SAGAL: It's true that their product - their frozen soft serve cannot be legally called ice cream because it doesn't have enough real cream in it.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: Bill, how did Brian May do on our quiz?

KURTIS: He is a champion.

POUNDSTONE: There we go.

(APPLAUSE)

KURTIS: Two out of three.

SAGAL: My friend, Brian May is an astrophysicist, guitar legend and one of the founders of the great rock bands of all time - that would be Queen. His new book, which is completely worth the hours you will spend staring at it - it's of stereoscopic photos he took. It's called "Queen In 3-D." It is out now. Brian May, what a joy to talk to you. Thank you so much for...

MAY: Thank you all.

SAGAL: Brian May.

(SOUNDBITE OF QUEEN SONG, "WE WILL ROCK YOU")

[favevoiceactorbracket]

Meet the Competing Voice Actors!

After the preliminaries and days of deliberating, here are you VOICE ACTORS COMPETING! One will take home the spot of Tumblr's Favorite Voice Actor!

A note before they are introduced! If you would like to support any of them send in an ask or make propaganda, any propaganda you make and post yourself should have me tagged! As well using the tags #favevabracket or #favevabracket2023!

And a quick reminder about the two rules that will be staying active!

No harrassment, hate, or vitriol will be tolerated. We are here to celebrate the work of voice actors not tear each other down

This is all for fun! Do not take it super seriously!

Good luck to all of our competitors!

Kirby Morrow

Rob Paulsen

Robbie Daymond

Tiana Camacho

Alex Hirsch

Khoi Dao

Megumi Ogata

Ray Chase

Sungwon Cho

tara strong

Yuri Lowenthal

Alejandro Saab

Billy Kametz

Billy West

bryce papenbrook

Cree Summer

Grey DeLisle-Griffin

Kevin Conroy

Phil Lamar

Zach Aguilar

Zeno Robinson

AJ Michalka

Alex Brightman

Allegra Clark

Ashley Johnson

Christopher R. Sabat

Daws Butler

Eartha Kitt

Erika Harlacher-Stone

Frank Welker

J. Michael Tatum

Jack De Sena

Jason Griffith

JK Simmons

John DiMaggio

June Foray

Kristen Schaal

Mark Hamill

Richard Horvitz

Steve Blum

Tom Kenny

Wendie Malick

Aaron Dismuke

Aaron Paul

Aimee Carrero

Alison Brie

Ami Koshimizu

Angela Bassett

Ashley Ball

ashly burch

Avi Roque

Ayumu Murase

Ben Schwartz, baby!

BETH MAY

bill farmer

Bill Scott

brandon rogers

Caitlin Glass

Casey Kasem

Cassandra Lee Morris

Cecil Baldwin

Christine Cavanaugh

Clark Duke

Colleen Clinkenbeard

Daman Mills

Dan Castellaneta

Dan Provenmire

Dani Chambers

Dante Basco

Dave Fennoy

David Tennant

Deedee Magno Hall

Deven Mack

Doris Grau

Doug Boyd

Dylan Marron

Elizabeth Maxwell

EG Daily

Elijah Wood

Ellen McLain

Eric Vale

Erin Fitzgerald

Josey Montana McCoy

Greg Chun

Gu Jiangshan

Guilherme Briggs (brazilian)

Haley Tju

Harry Shearer

Haruka tomatsu

Helen Gould

Hynden Walch

Jack McBrayer

Jackson Publick

Jaime Lynn Marchi

Jason Griffith

Jason Liebrecht

jason marsden

Jennifer Hale

Jerry Jewell

Jim Cummings

Jim Ward

John Burgmeier

John Swasey

Johnny Yong Bosch

Julie Kavner

Justin Cook

Kaiji Tang

Katey Sagal

Kdin Jenzen

Keith David

Ken Sansom

Kent William

Kevin Brighting

Kevin R Free

Kieran Reagan

Kimberly Brooks

Kimiko glenn

Kyle Igneczi

Kyle McCarley

Laura Bailey

Lauren Tom

Leah Clark

Liam O’Brien

Lorenzo Music

Lucien Dodge

Lucille Bliss

Lydia Mackay

Lydia Nicholas

Maddie Blaustein

Mae Questel

Mae Whitman

Maggie Robertson

Mara Wilson

Mark Oliver

Matthew Mercer

Matthew Zahnzinger

Maurice LaMarche

Max Mittelman

Mel Blanc

Melissa Hutchinson

Michael Adamthwaite

Micheal Sinterniklaas

Mike Judge

Monical rial

Natsuki Hanae

Nicole Tompkins

Olivia Olson

Olivia Wilde

P.M. Seymour

Parker Simmons

Patricia Ja Lee

Patrick Pedraza

Paul Castro Jr

Paul Frees

Penny Parker

Pete Gustin ( i think thats how it's spelled)

Peter Cullen

Phil Harris

Phil Hartman

Ricco Fajardo

Roger Craig Smith

Roz Ryan

Sandra Oh

Sarah Miller-Crews

Sayaka Ohara

Scatman Crothers

Scott Adsit

Scott Mcneil

Stanley Tucci

Stephanie Beatriz

Stephen Merchant

Steve Whitmore

Tabitha st Germain

Takaya Kuroda

Tom Kane

Tress McNeil

Veronica Taylor

Vincent Tong

Will Arnett

Yasuo Yamada

Zach Callison

Bobbie Moyinhan

Josh Brener

Andrew Francis

Brent Millar

Sebastian Todd

Kestin Howard

Lizzy Hofe

Andy Cowley

Todd Haberkorn

Yoshimasa Hosoya

Russi Taylor

[fresh-bag-of-ham]

unparalleled energy at a live taping of wait wait don't tell me. 2,000 public radio listeners absolutely frothing at the mouth to hear peter sagal say fuck

[mariacallous]

According to Tucker Carlson, the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was not an attempted putsch but instead “mostly peaceful chaos”: The “overwhelming majority” of rioters “were not insurrectionists,” he insisted. “They were sightseers.” The Fox News host’s revisionist take on Jan. 6, aired following the decision of Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy to share 41,000 hours of Capitol Police footage exclusively with Carlson’s team, has so far received widespread condemnation from the Capitol Police, the Justice Department, the White House, and Republican and Democratic members of Congress alike. Among the voices criticizing Carlson’s attempted rewriting of history have been staffers formerly on the Jan. 6 committee. 

“I served as a senior professional staff member on the January 6th Select Committee and helped write its final report,” wrote Tom Joscelyn in Politico. “I got a close look at some of the video evidence that Carlson obtained—and his manipulation of the audience was immediately obvious to me.” In a PBS interview, former senior investigative counsel James Sasso rejected Carlson’s claim that Jan. 6 was not an insurrection as “objectively not true.” Sasso went on, “There’s nothing to hide in the footage. There’s nothing to hide in the interviews that we had with defendants. We put out all of our transcripts. We have backed it up.” And Timothy Heaphy, the committee’s chief investigative counsel, told MSNBC, “This narrative that this was largely a peaceful protest with people waving flags and taking smiling selfies is just wrong.”

These responses to Carlson are only three of many public comments made by former Jan. 6 committee staffers in the months since the committee closed its doors on Jan. 3, 2023. Staffers have written guest essays in the New York Times and articles in Lawfare; they’ve appeared on podcasts; they’ve given television interviews; and one, Sasso, even made an appearance on the NPR quiz show “Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me!” (Asked by host Peter Sagal if “there’s anything that you know, but you couldn’t prove, but you’re going to tell me anyway,” Sasso responded, “If I told you that, I would be in a lot of trouble.”) 

The interviews and writing by former staffers are particularly notable because the Jan. 6 report was such an incomplete and fragmentary document. Now, a look at what these staffers have said publicly—and what they haven’t—reveals key points about what the report did and didn’t contain. And it suggests what issues, and controversies, will remain important for the country to address going forward.

The flood of interviews and writing by former Jan. 6 investigators is particularly striking when compared to the relative silence following other major investigations of Trump. The Mueller probe, for example, was famously a black box. Even in the years since the special counsel closed up shop, relatively few people involved have spoken publicly about their experiences. “Where Law Ends,” a bomb-throwing account by former Mueller prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, is a major exception—but even that was published in September 2020, a year and a half after the release of the Mueller report. Likewise, the two impeachment proceedings against Trump saw plenty of after-action commentary by the House managers prosecuting the impeachment and senators acting as the jury, but little from the staff working behind the scenes. 

Perhaps, though, there’s simply more for staffers to talk about in this instance. Rather than providing a comprehensive record of everything the committee uncovered, the Jan. 6 report frames the story of the insurrection narrowly around the figure of Donald Trump—a decision that, according to reporters, was driven chiefly by Vice Chair Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.). This approach has the advantage of telling a clear, direct story about Trump’s responsibility for the insurrection, but at the cost of leaving out—or even distorting—other parts of the story. The Washington Post, for example, has published a lengthy draft memo written by staffers investigating the role of social media in the insurrection, little of which made it into the final document.

That’s not to say that the report sought to cover up the committee’s other work—after all, as many staffers have emphasized, the committee has made available an extraordinary amount of raw investigative material for the public to sort through. But it does mean that former staffers have a lot to talk about. And their public comments provide a useful road map for a broader understanding of the committee’s work. 

Many staffers have acknowledged the report’s limited scope directly, with greater or lesser degrees of willingness to criticize the committee’s final decision-making on what to include in the final report. The report “could only tell part of the story,” Sasso wrote in the New York Times. Writing in Just Security and Tech Policy Press, Dean Jackson, Meghan Conroy, and Alex Newhouse—all staffers who worked on the committee’s social media probe—argued, “The report’s emphasis on Trump meant important context was left on the cutting room floor.” Still, Jackson told me in a Lawfare Podcast conversation that he understood the reasoning behind the committee’s choices:

I am not a decision maker in the ultimate findings of Congress. That role belongs to the elected representatives on the committee, and they had a decision early in their work together, they were going to work by consensus to the extent possible. And when you have a committee as diverse … Liz Cheney to [Democratic representative] Adam Schiff, the band of consensus might be rather narrow.

Notably, Schiff (D-Calif.) himself has suggested some dissatisfaction with the report’s focus on Trump, hinting at some of what might have been left out of the final document in the name of consensus. In a New York Times essay published after the report’s release, he wrote that “one line of effort to overturn the election is given scant attention” in the report: the role of Republican members of Congress in pushing to upend the vote. Schiff’s curious use of the passive voice—who gave scant attention to this issue?—reflects the delicate dance that those involved in the committee’s work have performed in order to gently indicate dissatisfaction with the report without pointing fingers at anyone in particular.

Members of the committee’s color-coded “red” and “purple” teams—the first investigating the planning of the Jan. 6 rallies and the “Stop the Steal” movement, and the second investigating extremism and social media—have been particularly open in sharing their thoughts. The portrait of Jan. 6 that emerges from their writing and public commentary is richer and more complicated than the published report’s insistence that “the central cause of January 6th was one man, former President Donald Trump, whom many others followed.” 

Jackson, Conroy, and Newhouse, all members of the purple team, argue that, “[w]hile Trump played an instrumental role in driving the attack, right-wing networks—comprised of everyone from mainstream talking heads to extremist armed groups—drove the mass spread of conspiracy theories and far-right content on social media.” In their view, major social media platforms played a crucial role in allowing this spread by failing to implement content moderation policies that would have required cracking down on the far right—often because executives feared political backlash from Republicans. Violent rhetoric also spread across smaller “alt-tech” platforms like Gab and Parler, which lacked the will or the means to limit such posts. This doesn’t mean that social media is a but-for cause of the insurrection, but it does indicate that the spread of extremist ideas across the internet, and the failure of social media companies to respond adequately, is a crucial part of the story of Jan. 6. 

Jacob Glick, who served as investigative counsel for the committee and conducted depositions of rioters and members of extremist groups, argued in Lawfare that the insurrection should be understood as the culmination of “a monthslong trend toward political violence … spurred on by pandemic-related health restrictions and, later, Black Lives Matter protests.” These previous events, together with Trump’s rhetoric about a stolen election, helped extremist groups recruit combatants to fight a “continuing war against leftist radicals and their collaborators,” which “reached a new phase” with the supposedly stolen 2020 election. In this sense, Glick wrote, Jan. 6 must be understood as part of “a larger, even more disturbing pattern”—a story about an “emboldened vigilante wing of the far-right that is held in thrall to bigotry and paranoia, which poses a threat to the rule of law that runs deeper than an old man’s dangerous vanity.”

Likewise, in the New York Times, Sasso wrote, “Other political, social, economic and technological forces beyond the former president had a hand, whether intentionally or not, in radicalizing thousands of people into thinking they needed to attack the seat of American democracy.” In his telling, key to Jan. 6 was a broader loss of faith in democratic institutions across American life, such that for both violent extremists and otherwise ordinary Americans present at the insurrection, “a stolen election was simply the logical conclusion of years of federal malfeasance.”

A key part of the Jan. 6 story left out of the committee’s report—or, in some instances, actively misrepresented by the committee’s presentation of events—involves the failures of law enforcement and intelligence agencies to anticipate and prevent the violence. This was the province of the committee’s “blue” team, which was largely absent from the final document—reportedly to the frustration of staffers who worked on this prong of the investigation. Heaphy, the committee’s chief investigative counsel, spoke to this omission in an interview with NBC. Trump “was the proximate cause” of Jan. 6, he told reporters, but “law enforcement had a very direct role in contributing to the security failures that led to the violence.” He explained, “There was a lot of advance intelligence about law enforcement, about carrying weapons, about the vulnerability of the Capitol. The intel in advance was pretty specific, and it was enough, in our view, for law enforcement to have done a better job.”

Yet Heaphy then walked back his comments after Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) seized on them to blame former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) for the violence, arguing that the committee had covered up information about law enforcement failures in order to protect Pelosi. Speaking to the New York Times, Heaphy said, 

Law enforcement had specific intelligence about potential violence directed at the joint session of Congress, and didn’t accurately assess and operationalize that. But some people have mischaracterized that as me saying that it’s law enforcement’s fault, that law enforcement could have prevented this or that the congressional leadership should have. That’s just wrong.

On Twitter, he wrote, “We need a reasoned discussion about how law enforcement gathers and assesses intelligence about domestic violent extremism in this country. That discussion should be unencumbered by politics or false characterizations of the committee’s findings.” But the dustup is itself a demonstration of how political differences among Jan. 6 committee members seem to have constrained what the committee was willing to say in its report in the service of seeking consensus about how best to tell the story. Members reportedly cut material about law enforcement and intelligence failures in order to focus more narrowly on Trump himself. A harsh statement to the Washington Post by a Cheney spokesman in November 2022, which argued that “[s]ome staff have submitted subpar material for the report that reflects long-held liberal biases about federal law enforcement,” hints at why some of the material on law enforcement might not have made the cut. 

Ironically, though, the spat over Heaphy’s NBC interview suggests that the committee’s decision-making may have undercut its own credibility by opening itself up to charges that members downplayed the true scope of responsibility for Jan. 6. Even before the committee published its final report, a group of Republican members of the House published their own report on security failures in the run-up to Jan. 6 and pointed the finger at Pelosi—an indication of how discussions of law enforcement failures had already become a locus of partisan disagreement. It’s more difficult to have the “reasoned discussion” about countering domestic violent extremism that Heaphy feels is necessary now that any such discussion will become mired in the auxiliary debate over why the committee did or didn’t include certain material in the final report. 

“When you make mistakes, ideally, you’ll learn from them,” Heaphy told NBC of failures by law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Along these lines, the Jan. 6 staffers who have spoken publicly have often emphasized that the work of responding to the insurrection is not yet done. This follows naturally from the (sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit) argument that the causes of Jan. 6 run wider and deeper than Trump himself: If greater societal forces are at play, then preventing another insurrection will require more than simply keeping the former president out of the Oval Office. 

Jackson, Conroy, and Newhouse—the purple team investigators—argue that “greater transparency in the realm of social media is essential” for public understanding of how private companies govern the digital public square. They call for “a host of pro-democracy and counter-extremism reforms both on and offline.” Writing with Mary B. McCord of Georgetown’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection, Glick made the case for an effort to counter far-right paramilitary groups, many of which were present on Jan. 6. Sasso argued for reforms that would help revitalize public faith in democracy, from campaign finance reforms to “tackling economic inequality and reinvesting in communities devastated by globalization and technological changes.”

This idea of work left unfinished also emerges in how former staffers talk about their own sense of responsibility in speaking out. “The final report from the committee told one piece of the story,” said Newhouse in a podcast interview. “I think our roles here, myself and my colleagues in the coming months, the coming years, is to try to help tell the rest of the story, to try to fill in the gaps.” His fellow staffers expressed similar views. In our Lawfare Podcast conversation, Jackson told me, “I do think there’s a responsibility to talk about it.” Often, staffers have positioned this process of speaking out as a collaborative effort, pointing to the trove of material released by the committee in addition to the final report. The committee, Sasso wrote, “released many of our documents publicly and archived the rest so that historians, political scientists, sociologists and many others can scrutinize our findings in ways we could not, examining the causes and consequences of Jan. 6 with a longer time horizon than we had.” 

(This argument can also be less collaborative and more accusatory. In a podcast discussion with Yahoo reporters Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman, former committee member Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) bristled when Isikoff pressed him on the committee’s failure to dig further into law enforcement and intelligence failures. “We laid out the facts the best that we could,” Raskin said. “Where is your profession? Have the journalists figured out who was the person who dropped the ball?”)

For all the work that remains to be done, the existence of the committee’s publicly accessible archive is, in a sense, a source of hope. It’s a commitment to the idea that the work can be done by engaged experts, journalists, and everyday people interested in digging through the documents. Kristin Amerling, who served as chief counsel and deputy staff director to the committee, commented at a Georgetown event that “the committee not only assiduously footnoted the various findings it made throughout the report, but it made every effort to provide the public the underlying information so that the public can draw their own conclusions and evaluate the basis of the committee’s findings.”

Likewise, there’s also an optimism to the idea that the existence and availability of these documents might help Americans understand the truth of what happened on Jan. 6, even amid lies like Carlson’s. “I’m really glad that all of our transcripts have been released,” Heaphy told the New York Times. “So if anyone thinks that we misled or shaded or hid facts, it’s all out there.” At a panel discussion following the news that Tucker Carlson would be broadcasting Jan. 6 footage, Sandeep Prasanna, a former investigative counsel for the committee, expressed a similar hope. This documentation, he said, ensures that, “regardless of whether someone is out there right now slicing and dicing surveillance footage to achieve whatever partisan or conspiratorial ends there may be, there is a factual record of what happened out there.”

[terrainofheartfelt]

Listening to Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me and one of the trivia games is about the inventor of pink lemonade and Peter Sagal LITERALLY just asked how this inventor first added the pink and of course all I can think is

That’s pussy babe!

[freddiekugel]

this is so true. you're listening to a weird, surreal podcast hosted by fictional Garrison Keillor (tho I always thought of Cecil as more a fictional Peter Sagal) and all of a sudden it's: oh this description of Carlos is a little gay.

with his beautiful haircut and "haven't we all been scientists at some point?" (oh, haven't we all thought about kissing someone of our same gender?)

and then: "he grinned, and I fell I love with him instantly." not played for a laugh, but dreamy.

it was 6 minutes into the first episode. we didn't know if Carlos would feel the same, but it was absolutely certain that Cecil was queer. and that this little desert town knew that and was cool with it.

Actually yknow what. WTNV should be considered revolutionary and significant gay media that played an important role in the growth of gay representation in media especially in podcasts. When people talk about important gay media in the early 2000s I want wtnv to be one of the ones people talk about. No if ands or buts about it.