#j.d williams

[wawamouse]

Oz Favorite Moment → 2x02 "Ancient Tribes"

[yankeeblue]

The orange couch in The Pit

[pierppasolini]

Galaxina (1980) // dir. William Sachs

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Eric Hananoki at MMFA:

While some Republicans have tried to distance their party from Laura Loomer, her show’s guest list indicates how closely linked the GOP is to the far-right extremist.  More than a dozen GOP nominees, elected officials, and Trump advisers have appeared on Loomer’s show, including Trump running mate JD Vance, senior Trump campaign officials Corey Lewandowski and Jason Miller, and members of Congress.  [...] Republicans have routinely supported Loomer by sponsoring her newsletter and appearing on her streaming show since it launched last year. Here is a list of those appearances:  

October 26, 2023: Jason Miller, Trump campaign senior adviser. 

November 3, 2023: Dave Williams, then-head of the Colorado Republican Party. 

November 7, 2023: Then-Rep. George Santos of New York. 

January 30, 2024: Sigal Chattah, national committeewoman for the Nevada Republican Party. 

October 17, 2023, February 13, 2024, July 23, 2024: Roger Stone, a longtime adviser to Trump. 

February 13, 2024: Sen. JD Vance of Ohio. 

March 19, 2024: Rep. Cory Mills of Florida. 

March 21, 2024: Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina. 

April 25, 2024, and June 4, 2024: Will Scharf, Trump attorney. 

April 30, 2024: Lynne Patton, Trump campaign senior adviser. 

May 21, 2024: Kari Lake, then-U.S. Senate candidate and now nominee in Arizona. 

May 23, 2024, and July 17, 2024: Corey Lewandowski, who helped with the Republican National Convention and then again joined the Trump campaign as a senior adviser in August. 

July 25, 2024: Bernie Moreno, U.S. Senate nominee in Ohio. 

Since the launch of Loomer Unleashed by Laura Loomer on Rumble last year, more than a dozen GOP electeds and Trump officials have appeared on her podcast.

[mannytoodope]

[mametupa]

[strelnik]

"Siamo i vecchi che avevamo giurato di non diventare mai."

Per "L'ultima cosa bella sulla faccia della terra" di Michael Bible sono stati tirati in ballo Salinger e Faulkner: io non so se sia così, ma leggerlo è stato "un pugno nello stomaco" - come ha scritto il NYT.

📖 8 recensioni via Machinapost

[jmunneytumbler]

How 'Hypnotic' Is It?!

How 'Hypnotic' Is It?!

I said-a hip, hop, hippy-hypnotic! (CREDIT: Ketchup Entertainment/Screenshot) Starring: Ben Affleck, Alice Braga, William Fichtner, J.D. Pardo, Hala Finley, Dayo Okeniyi, Jackie Earle Haley, Jeff Fahey Director: Robert Rodriguez Running Time: 94 Minutes Rating: R Release Date: May 12, 2023 (Theaters) Now that I’ve seen Hypnotic, have Robert Rodriguez and company convinced me that I would now like…

[lascitasdelashoras]

Edicion de clásicos

Literary Prints

[ljones41]

Ranking of "FIGHT NIGHT: THE MILLION DOLLAR HEIST" (2024) Episodes

Below is my ranking of the episodes from the PEACOCK limited series, "FIGHT NIGHT: THE MILLION DOLLAR HEIST"., the 2024 adaptation of Jeff Keating and Jim Roberts' podcast, "Fight Night". Created by Shaye Ogbonna, the eight-part miniseries starred Kevin Hart:

RANKING OF "FIGHT NIGHT: THE MILLION DOLLAR HEIST" (2024) EPISODES

1. (1.08) "Round Eight: Testify" - In this surprisingly tense finale, numbers bookie Gordon "Chicken Man" Williams and Atlanta Police Detective J.D. Hudson face off against the mastermind of the "Fight Night" robbery at the former's post-fight party in a daring hustle.

2. (1.03) "Round Three: Black Vegas" - The city of Atlanta celebrates Muhammad Ali's big comeback victory. Unfortunately, Chicken Man's fight night party turns into a nightmare, thanks to a group of robbers.

3. (1.07) "Round Seven: Jekyll Island" - Detective Hudson and Chicken Man track the surviving robbers to an abandoned resort on the Georgia coast, leading to a violent standoff. Chicken Man's mistress, Vivian "Sweets" Thomas forms a business alliance with powerful gangster Frank Moten, securing her future.

4. (1.01) "Round One: The Ballad of Chicken Man" - Atlanta prepares for Muhammad Ali's comeback fight and Chicken Man sets his eye on the prize by offering to host the post-fight party on behalf of the country's Black Mafia leaders arriving in town. Detective Hudson is ordered to lead the bodyguard detail for Ali.

5. (1.04) "Round Four: Real Policework" - Suspected of being the robbery's mastermind, a desperate Chicken Man sets out to prove his innocence. And the Black Mafia leaders seek revenge for the robbery.

6. (1.05) "Round Five: Ambition Ain't Free" - Now on the run, Chicken Man is forced to form an alliance with Detective Hudson. And the latter finds himself in the spotlight as the media, the law and the Black Mafia contemplate on the robbery.

7. (1.06) "Round Six: Community Men" - The manhunt for Chicken Man increases, making it difficult for him to clear his name. Detective Hudson continues to work outside of the law to prove Chicken's innocence.

8. (1.02) "Round Two: Fight Night" - The Muhammad Ali-Jerry Quarry boxing match commences, while Chicken Man hustles to impress Frank Moten. The robbers begin their heist at Chicken Man's house.

[oceanusborealis]

Breakwater - Movie Review

TL;DR – There are a lot of elements here that work; the cast is fantastic, and the setting lands. It is just the narrative glue that is meant to hold all that together starts peeling off far too early in the film. ⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 2.5 out of 5. Post-Credit Scene – There is no post-credit scene.Disclosure – I was sent a screener of this film. Breakwater Review – Today, we are looking at a film…

[haveyoureadthispoll]

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Helen Sullivan at The Guardian:

Oprah Winfrey spoke at a Democratic convention for the first time on Wednesday night, giving an enthusiastic endorsement to Kamala Harris while encouraging independents and undecided voters to turn out for the Democrats. In a forceful, vigorous speech that ranged from school integration to childless cat ladies, Winfrey sought to encourage voters to cast their ballot for “the best of America”.

Winfrey said she was a registered independent and called on other independents and undecideds to vote. “Values and character matter most of all. In leadership and in life. And more than anything, you know this is true, decency and respect are on the ballot in 2024. “I’ve actually travelled from the red wood forests … to the Gulf Stream waters,” Winfrey said, referring to the Woody Guthrie song This Land Is Your Land. She said she had seen sexism, inequality and division, and been on the receiving end of it, but she had also seen that more often than not, people will help you when you are in trouble. “They are the best of America, and despite what some would have you think, we are not so different from our neighbours. “When a house is on fire, we don’t ask whose house it is,” Winfrey said, adding that “if the place happens to belong to a childless cat lady, well, we try to get that cat out too”.

Winfrey’s comments were a reference to the Republican vice-presidential nominee, JD Vance, who has faced criticism for saying that the US is run by “childless cat ladies”. “Civilised debate is vital to democracy, and it is the best of America,” Winfrey said. [...]

“Soon, and very soon, we’re going to be teaching our daughters and sons about how this child of an Indian mother and a Jamaican father, two idealistic, energetic immigrants … grew up to become the 47th president of the United States,” Winfrey told the crowd. Asked afterwards about her decision to speak, Winfrey told CBS: “There couldn’t have been a life like mine, a career like mine, a success like mine, without a country like America. Only in America could there be a me. “And all of the freedoms that I have enjoyed, the successes that I have enjoyed, I feel that they’re on the line and at stake in this moment.” Winfrey endorsed Barack Obama in 2008, Hillary Clinton in 2016, and Joe Biden in 2020, but Wednesday was her first appearance at a Democratic convention.

Former talk show host Oprah Winfrey brought the heat at the DNC last night. She spoke to lots of Americans, especially viewers of her former syndicated show back in her heyday.

Winfrey has previously endorsed Democratic candidates for President, but this is her first time speaking at a DNC.

#DNC2024

See Also:

HuffPost: Oprah Delivers Memorable 'Childless Cat Lady' Zinger At DNC

Daily Kos: Oprah comes for JD Vance at the DNC, and the crowd loves it

[lily-orchard-archives]

March 12, 2017

[rederiswrites]

Full text of Heather Cox Richardson's latest essay:

February 1, 2025 (Saturday)

Throughout now-president Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign, it was clear that his support was coming from three very different factions whose only shared ideology was a determination to destroy the federal government. Now we are watching them do it.

The group that serves President Donald Trump is gutting the government both to get revenge against those who tried to hold him accountable before the law and to make sure he and his cronies will never again have to worry about legality.

Last night, officials in the Trump administration purged the Federal Bureau of Investigation of all six of its top executives and, according to NBC’s Ken Dilanian, more than 20 heads of FBI field offices, including those in Washington, D.C., and Miami, where officials pursued cases against now-president Trump. Acting deputy attorney general Emil Bove, who represented Trump in a number of his criminal cases, asked acting FBI director Brian J. Driscoll Jr. for a list of FBI agents who had worked on January 6 cases to “determine whether any additional personnel actions are necessary.”

Clarissa-Jan Lim of MSNBC reported that Trump denied knowing about the dismissals but said the firings were “a good thing” because “[t]hey were very corrupt people, very corrupt, and they hurt our country very badly with the weaponization.”

Officials also fired 25 to 30 federal prosecutors who had worked on cases involving the rioters who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and reassigned others. Bove ordered the firings. Career civil servants can’t be fired without cause, and these purges come on top of the apparently illegal firing of 18 inspectors general across federal agencies and a purge of the Department of Justice of those who had worked on cases involving Trump.

Phil Williams of NewsChannel 5 in Nashville, Tennessee, reported on Friday that federal prosecutors were withdrawn from a criminal investigation of Representative Andy Ogles (R-TN) for election fraud; Ogles recently filed a House resolution to enable Trump to run for a third term and another supporting Trump’s designs on Greenland. On Wednesday, federal prosecutors asked a judge to dismiss an election fraud case against former representative Jeffrey Fortenberry (R-NE). Trump called Fortenberry’s case an illustration of “the illegal Weaponization of our Justice System by the Radical Left Democrats.”

That impulse to protect Trump showed yesterday in what a local water manager said was an “extremely unprecedented” release of water from two dams in California apparently to provide evidence of his social media post that the U.S. military had gone into California and “TURNED ON THE WATER.” In fact, water was released from two reservoirs that hold water to supply farmland in the summer. They are about 500 miles (800 km) from Los Angeles, where the fires were earlier this year, and the water did not go to Southern California. “This is going to hurt farmers,” a water manager said, “This takes water out of the summer irrigation portfolio.” But Trump posted that if California officials had listened to him six years ago, there would have been no fires. Shashank Joshi of The Economist called it “real ‘mad king’ stuff.”

Trump’s loyalists overlap with the MAGA crew that embraces Project 2025, a plan that mirrors the one used by Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán to overthrow democracy in Hungary. Operating from the position that modern democracy destroys a country by treating everyone equally before the law and welcoming immigrants, it calls for discrimination against women and gender, racial, and religious minorities; rejection of immigrants; and the imposition of religious laws to restore a white Christian patriarchy.

Former Fox News Channel host Tucker Carlson has been a vocal proponent of Orbán’s ideology, and J.D. Vance this week hired Carlson’s son, 28-year-old Buckley, as his deputy press secretary. Although Trump claimed during the campaign he didn't know anything about Project 2025, Steve Contorno and Casey Tolan of CNN estimate that more than two thirds of Trump’s executive orders mirror Project 2025.

You can see the influence of this faction in the indiscriminate immigration sweeps the administration has launched, Trump’s announcement that he is opening a 30,000-bed migrant detention center at Guantanamo Bay, and officials’ revocation of protection for more than 600,000 Venezuelans legally in the U.S. and possibly also for Cubans, Haitians, and Nicaraguans. You can see it in the administration’s attempt to end the birthright citizenship written into the U.S. Constitution in 1868.

It shows in the new administration's persecution of transgender Americans, including Trump’s executive order purging trans service members from the military, another limiting access to gender-affirming care for transgender youth, and yet another ordering trans federal prisoners to be medically detransitioned and then moved to facilities that correspond to their sex at birth, an outcome that a trans woman suing the administration calls “humiliating, terrifying, and dangerous.”

The administration has ordered that federal employees must remove all pronouns from their email signatures and, as Jeremy Faust reported in Inside Medicine, that researchers for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention must scrub from their work any references to “[g]ender, transgender, pregnant person, pregnant people, LGBT, transsexual, non-binary, nonbinary, assigned male at birth, assigned female at birth, biologically male, biologically female.” Faust notes that the requirements are vague and that because “most manuscripts include demographic information about the populations or patients studied,” the order potentially affects “just about any major study…including studies on Covid-19, cancer, heart disease, or anything else.”

Those embracing this ideology are also isolationist. As soon as he took office, Trump imposed a freeze on foreign aid except for military aid to Israel and Egypt, abruptly cutting off about $60 billion in funding—less than 1% of the U.S. budget—to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which provides humanitarian assistance to fight starvation and provide basic medical care for the globe’s most vulnerable and desperate populations. The outcry, both from those appalled that the U.S. would renege on its promises to provide food for children in war-torn countries and from those who recognize that the U.S. withdrawal from these popular programs would create a vacuum China is eager to fill, made Trump’s new secretary of state, Marco Rubio, say that “humanitarian programs” would be exempted from the freeze, but that appears either untrue or so complicated to negotiate that programs are shutting down anyway.

Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) appears to be beside himself over this destruction. “Let me explain why the total destruction of USAID…matters so much,” he posted on social media. “China—where Musk makes his money—wants USAID destroyed. So does Russia. Trump and Musk are doing the bidding of Beijing and Moscow. Why?” “The U.S. is in full retreat from the world,” he wrote, and there is “[n]o good reason for it. The immediate consequences of this are cataclysmic. Malnourished babies who depend on U.S. aid will die. Anti-terrorism programs will shut down and our most deadly enemies will get stronger. Diseases that threaten the U.S. will go unabated and reach our shores faster. And China will fill the void. As developing countries will now ONLY be able to rely on China for help, they will cut more deals with Beijing to give them control of ports, critical mineral deposits, etc. U.S. power will shrink. U.S. jobs will be lost.” Murphy speculated that “billionaires like Musk who make $ in China” or “someone buying all that secret Trump meme coin” would benefit from deliberately sabotaging eighty years of U.S. goodwill on the international stage.

And that brings us to the third faction: that of the tech bros, led by billionaire Elon Musk, who according to year-end Federal Election Commission filings spent more than $290 million supporting Trump and the Republicans in 2024. Musk appears to consider colonizing space imperative for the survival of humanity, and part of that goal requires slashing government regulations, as well as receiving government contracts that help to fund his space program.

Before he took office, Trump named Musk and another billionaire, Vivek Ramaswamy, to an extra-governmental group called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), but Musk has assumed full control of the group, whose mission is to cut the federal budget by as much as $2 trillion.

Musk is interested in the government for future contracts, although a report from January 30, when Musk’s Tesla company filed its annual financial report, showed that the company, which is valued at more than $1 trillion and which made $2.3 billion in 2024, paid $0 in federal income tax. Today, Musk’s X social media company became a form of state media when the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said it would no longer email updates about this week’s two plane crashes—one in Washington, D.C., and one in Philadelphia—and that reporters would have to get their information through X.

Musk’s goal might well be the crux of the drastic cuts to federal aid, as well as the attempt last week from the Office of Management and Budget to “pause” federal funding and grants to make sure funding reflected Trump’s goals. After a public outcry over the loss of payments to local law enforcement, Meals on Wheels for shut-ins, supplemental nutrition programs, and so on, the OMB rescinded its first memo, but then White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt immediately contradicted the new memo, saying the cuts were still in effect.

The chaos surrounding the cuts could have been designed to make it difficult for opponents to sue over them. This method of changing government priorities through “impoundment” is illegal. Congress—which is the body that represents the American people—appropriates the money for programs, and the president takes an oath to execute the laws. After President Richard M. Nixon tried it, Congress passed a 1974 law making impoundment expressly illegal. But the on-again-off-again confusion appeared at first to stand a chance of stopping lawsuits. It didn’t work: a federal judge halted the funding freeze, suggesting it was a blatant violation of the Constitution.

But then, yesterday, Elon Musk forced the resignation of David A. Lebryk, the highest-ranking career official at the Treasury Department. Lebryk had been at Treasury since 1989 and had risen to become the person in charge of the U.S. government payment system that disburses about $6 trillion a year through Social Security benefits, Medicare, Medicaid, contracts, grants, salaries for federal government workers, tax refunds, and so on, essentially managing the nation’s checkbook.

According to Jeff Stein, Isaac Arnsdorf, and Jacqueline Alemany of the Washington Post, Musk’s team wanted access to the payment system. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) demanded answers from Trump’s new Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, warning that “these payment systems simply cannot fail, and any politically-motivated meddling in them risks severe damage to our country and the economy. I am deeply concerned that following the federal grant and loan freeze earlier this week, these officials associated with Musk may have intended to access these payment systems to illegally withhold payments to any number of programs. I can think of no good reason why political operators who have demonstrated a blatant disregard for the law would need access to these sensitive, mission-critical systems.”

Now, though, with Musk’s people at the computers that control the nation’s payment system, they can simply stop whatever payments they want to.

Wyden continued by reminding Bessent that the press has reported that Musk has previously been “denied a high-level clearance to access the government’s most sensitive secrets. I am concerned that Musk’s enormous business operation in China—a country whose intelligence agencies have stolen vast amounts of sensitive data about Americans, including U.S. government employee data by hacking U.S. government systems—endangers U.S. cybersecurity and creates conflicts of interest that make his access to these systems a national security risk.”

This afternoon, Wyden posted that he has been told that Bessent has given the Department of Government Efficiency full access to the system. “Social Security and Medicare benefits, grants, payments to government contractors, including those that compete directly with Musk's own companies. All of it.”

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo posted: “This is more or less like taking the gold from Fort Knox and putting it in Elons basement. Anyone who gets a check from soc sec or anything else[,] he can cut it off or see all y[ou]r personal and financial data.” Pundit Stuart Stevens called it “the most significant data leak in cyber history.”

All three of these factions are focused on destroying the federal government, which, after all, represents the American people through their elected representatives and spends their taxpayer money. Musk, who is an unelected adjunct to Trump, this evening gleefully referred to the civil servants in the government who work for the American people as “the opposing team.”

But something jumps out from the chaos of the past two weeks. Instructions are vague, circumstances are chaotic, and it’s unclear who is making decisions. That confusion makes it hard to enforce laws or sue, although observers note that what’s going on is “illegal and a breach of the constitutional order.”

Our federal government rests on the U.S. Constitution. The three different factions of Trump's MAGA Republicans agree that the government must be destroyed, and they are operating outside the constitutional order, not eager to win legal victories so much as determined to slash and burn down the government without them.

Today, senior Washington Post political reporter Aaron Blake noted that while it is traditional for cabinet nominees to pledge that they will refuse to honor illegal presidential orders, at least seven of Trump’s nominees have sidestepped that question. Attorney general nominee Pam Bondi, director of national intelligence nominee Tulsi Gabbard, now-confirmed defense secretary nominee Pete Hegseth, small business administrator nominee Kelly Loeffler, Veterans Affairs secretary nominee Douglas A. Collins, and commerce secretary nominee Howard Lutnick all avoided the question by saying that Trump would never ask them to do anything illegal. FBI director nominee Kash Patel just said he would “always obey the law.”