What in God’s name did he do to deserve this? He’s the most servile of Trump loving Senators in the government? I don’t get it. Trump pretty much calls him a liberal. What’s he talking about?
Graham isn’t happy. This may be a watershed moment for him. There is literally nothing he can do to make himself more of a Trump sycophant and it isn’t enough, They hate him anyway. He is nothing.
Update. Ok. I guess it must be Ukraine. I suppose he can try to become a Putin loving symp in a vain attempt to remain “relevant” but that’s all he’s got left.
Guy at Trump rally says Trump is working on exposing the Deep State, “and one of the creatures is here – Lindsey Graham.” pic.twitter.com/Sn0Rsa7Vmb
Woman at Trump rally is asked what Trump should do on day 1 if elected. She says he should put Biden in jail then round up people in the Deep State and “take them to the train station.” pic.twitter.com/5p0sIFL84e
We knew Trump had called Arizona Governor Doug Ducey (remember seeing that video of him getting a phone call with the “hail to the chief” ring tone while he was signing the electoral count paperwork?) We had not heard for sure until now whether Trump was doing what we thought he was doing:
In a phone call in late 2020,President Donald Trump tried to pressure Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) to overturn the state’spresidential election results, saying that if enough fraudulent votes could be found it would overcome Trump’s narrow loss in Arizona, according to three people familiar with the call.
Trump also repeatedly asked Vice President Mike Pence to call Ducey and prod him to find the evidence to substantiate Trump’s claims of fraud, according to two of these people. Pence called Ducey several times to discuss the election, they said, though he did not follow Trump’s directions to pressure the governor.
The extent of Trump’s efforts to cajole Ducey into helping him stay in power have not before been reported, even as other efforts by Trump’s lawyer and allies to pressure Arizona officials have been made public. Ducey told reporters in December 2020 that he and Trump had spoken, but he declined to disclose the contents of the call then or in the more than two years since. Although he disagreed with Trump about the outcome of the election, Ducey has sought to avoid a public battle with Trump.
Ducey described the “pressure” he was under after Trump’s loss to a prominent Republican donor over a meal in Arizona earlier this year, according to the donor, who like others interviewed for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. The account was confirmed by others aware of the call. Ducey told the donor he was surprised that special counsel Jack Smith’s team had not inquired about his phone calls with Trump and Pence as part of the Justice Department’s investigation into the former president’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, the donor said.
Ducey did not record the call, people familiar with the matter said.
Now out of public office, the former governor declined through a spokesman to answer specific questions about his interactions with Trump and his administration.
[…]
A spokesman for Trump declined to respond to questions about the call with Ducey and instead falsely declared in a statement that “the 2020 Presidential election was rigged and stolen.” The spokesman said Trump should be credited for “doing the right thing — working to make sure that all the fraud was investigated and dealt with.”
It is unclear if Ducey has been contacted by Smith’s office since meeting with the donor. Investigators in the special counsel’s office have asked witnesses about Trump’s calls with governors, including the one to Ducey, according to two people familiar with the matter. It is unclear if prosecutors plan to eventually bring charges or how the calls figure into their investigation. Prosecutors have also shown interest in Trump’s efforts to conscript Pence into helping him, according to witnesses and subpoenas previously reviewed by The Washington Post.
Trump phoned the governor’s cellphone on Nov. 30,2020, as Ducey was in the middle of signing documents certifying President Biden’s win in the state during a live-streamed video ceremony. Trump’s outreach was immediately clear to those watching. They heard “Hail to the Chief” play on the governor’s ringtone. Ducey pulled his phone from out of his suit jacket, muted the incoming call and put his phone aside. On Dec. 2,he told reporters he spoke to the president after the ceremony,buthe declined to fully detail the nature of the conversation. Ducey said the president had “an inquisitive mind”but did not ask the governor to withhold his signature certifying the election results.
But four people familiar with the call said Trump spoke specifically about his shortfall of more than 10,000 votes in Arizona and then espoused a range of false claims that would show he overwhelmingly won the election in the state and encouraged Ducey to study them. At the time, Trump’s attorneys and allies spread false claims to explain his loss, including that voters who had died and noncitizens had cast ballots.
After Trump’s call to Ducey, Trump directed Pence, a former governor who had known Ducey for years, to frequently check in with the governor for any progress on uncovering claims of voting improprieties, according to two people with knowledge of the effort.
Pence was expected to report back his findings and was peppered with conspiracy theories from Trump and his team,the person said. Pence did not pressure Ducey, but told him to please call if he found anything because Trump was looking for evidence, according to those familiar with the calls.
A representative for Pence declined to comment.
In each of the calls, Ducey reiterated that officials in the state had searched for alleged widespread illegal activity and followed up on every lead but had not discovered anything that would have changed the outcome of the election results, according to Ducey’s recounting to the donor.
After learning that Ducey was not being supportive of his claims, Trump grew angryand publicly attacked him.
It is unclear if Ducey and Trump had additional conversations. Publicly, the governor said the state’s election systems should be trusted, even as Trump and his allies sought to reverse his loss.
In Arizona, Trump and his attorney, Rudy Giuliani, called then Speaker of the House Rusty Bowers (R) on Nov. 22, 2020. They asked the speaker to convene the legislature to investigate their unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud, which included that votes had been cast en masse by undocumented immigrants and in the names of deceased people. Weeks later, on Dec. 31, 2020 the White House switchboard left a message for the chair of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, Clint Hickman, seeking to connect him with Trump. The supervisor, a Republican, did not return the call.
Trump and his allies made similar appeals to officials in Michigan and Georgia.On Jan. 2, 2021, Trump called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) and said he wanted to undo his loss there by finding additional votes. The next night, the White House switchboard left Hickman another voice mail seeking to connect him to Trump. Hickman did not call back.
Investigators with Smith’s office interviewed Raffensperger this week, and they interviewed Giuliani last week. “The appearance was entirely voluntary and conducted in a professional manner,” said Giuliani spokesman Ted Goodman.
More than half a dozen past and current officials in Arizona contacted by Trump or his allies after his defeat have either been interviewed by Smith’s team or have received grand jury subpoenas seeking records,according to four people familiar with the interviews.Those interviewed include Bowers, the former Arizona House speaker, and three current members of the governing board of Maricopa County, the largest voting jurisdiction in the state that affirmed that Biden won.
Spokespeople for Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs (D) and Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes (D), told The Post this week that their offices have not received correspondence from Smith’s team seeking records about the 2020 election. The Arizona Secretary of State’s office received a grand jury subpoena dated Nov. 22, 2022, that sought information about communications with Trump, his campaign and his representatives, according to an official familiar with the document but not authorized to publicly speak about it.
Six months since the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol completed its work, a far-right ecosystem of true believers has embraced “J6” as the animating force of their lives.
They attend the criminal trials of the more prominent rioters charged in the attack. They gather to pray and sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” on the outer perimeter of the District of Columbia jail, where some two dozen defendants are held. Last week, dozens showed up at an unofficial House hearing convened by a handful of Republican lawmakers to challenge “the fake narrative that an insurrection had occurred on Jan. 6,” as set forth by Jeffrey Clark, a witness at the hearing and a former Justice Department official who worked to undo the results of the 2020 election.
The 90-minute event was a through-the-looking-glass alternative to the damning case against former President Donald J. Trump presented last year by the Jan. 6 committee. In the version advanced by five House Republicans who attended the hearing — Matt Gaetz, Paul Gosar, Ralph Norman, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Troy Nehls — as well as conservative lawyers and Capitol riot defendants, Jan. 6 was an elaborate setup to entrap peaceful Trump supporters, followed by a continuing Biden administration campaign to imprison and torment innocent conservatives.
Writ large, their loudest-in-the-room tale of persecution rather than prosecution might be dismissed as fringe nonsense had it not migrated so swiftly to the heart of presidential politics. Mr. Trump has pledged to pardon some of the Jan. 6 defendants if he returns to the White House, and his chief challenger for the 2024 Republican nomination, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, has signaled he may do the same.
More than half, or 58 percent, of self-described conservatives say that Jan. 6 was an act of “legitimate political discourse” rather than a “violent insurrection,” according to a poll three months ago by The Economist/YouGov.
The counternarrative is in part animated by a series of particularly stiff sentences for the Jan. 6 defendants, including one of more than 12 years in prison handed down on Wednesday for a rioter who savagely assaulted a D.C. police officer, Michael Fanone.
The audience for the hearing in the Capitol Visitor Center included several of the most avid and successful promoters of the Jan. 6 counternarrative.
Among them were Micki Witthoeft, the mother of Ashli Babbitt, the Air Force veteran and QAnon adherent who was fatally shot by a Capitol police officer during the riot and is now heralded as a martyr by the far right; Nicole Reffitt, whose husband, Guy Reffitt, was sentenced to more than seven years in prison for his role in the riot and who now helps organize nightly vigils at the D.C. jail; Tayler Hansen, who has claimed to possess videotaped evidence of antifa elements instigating the violence at the Capitol, but who did not respond to a request from The New York Times to view the footage; and Tommy Tatum of Mississippi, who describes himself as an independent journalist and has inferred from various unidentified characters who appear in his own footage that sophisticated teams of plainclothes federal agents orchestrated the breach of the Capitol.
The Jan. 6 deniers range from true believers to flighty opportunists, with fevered arguments among them as to who is which. Mr. Tatum and William Shipley, a lawyer who has represented more than 30 Jan. 6 defendants, have for example accused each other on Twitter of cynical profiteering.
One generally admired within the group is Julie Kelly, a former Illinois Republican political consultant, cooking class teacher and pandemic lockdown critic who writes for the conservative website American Greatness. Ms. Kelly has asserted that the Biden administration is “on a destructive crusade to exact revenge against supporters of Donald Trump” and has accused Mr. Fanone, who was beaten unconscious by the rioters at the Capitol, of being a “crisis actor.” She was a frequent guest on Tucker Carlson’s prime-time show before Fox fired him in April.
Last month, aides to Speaker Kevin McCarthy gave Ms. Kelly and two other conservative writers, John Solomon of Just the News and Joseph M. Hanneman of The Epoch Times, permission to ferret through the Capitol’s voluminous Jan. 6 security footage, the only journalists other than Mr. Carlson to obtain such access.
In an interview the day before the House hearing, Ms. Kelly said she was scouring the video in hopes of learning the provenance of the infamous gallows that were seen on the Capitol grounds on Jan. 6. “Did Trump supporters go there and build that? I doubt it,” she said. Ms. Kelly also hopes to learn whether nefarious “agitators” were already inside the Capitol before the breach. She variously termed Jan. 6 “an inside job” and a “fed-surrection.”
Ms. Kelly recounted a meeting she and a fellow supporter of Jan. 6 defendants, Cynthia Hughes, had last September with Mr. Trump at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J. She said she told the former president that the defendants felt abandoned by him: “They’re saying to me: ‘We were there for him. Why isn’t he here for us?’” Ms. Hughes informed Mr. Trump that the federal judges he appointed were “among the worst” when it came to the treatment of the riot defendants.
Surprised, Mr. Trump replied, “Well, I got recommendations from the Federalist Society.” Ms. Kelly said he then asked, “What do you want me to do?” She replied that he could donate to Ms. Hughes’s organization, the Patriot Freedom Project, which offers financial support to the defendants. Mr. Trump’s Save America PAC subsequently gave $10,000 to the group.
Others in the ecosystem contend that Mr. Trump’s contribution to the cause is manifest by the slings and arrows he has himself suffered since that day. “I call him Jan. Sixth-er Number One,” said Joseph D. McBride, perhaps the most visible of the lawyers representing the defendants. “He’s under the gun. He’s being investigated and indicted.”
Mr. McBride’s clients include Richard Barnett, who posed for a photograph with his foot on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s desk, as well as Ryan Nichols, who exhorted fellow protesters to target elected officials, yelling, “Cut their heads off!”
Mr. McBride also represented two Stop the Steal rally organizers subpoenaed by the Jan. 6 committee, Ali Alexander and Alex Bruesewitz. It was Mr. Bruesewitz who introduced Mr. McBride to Donald Trump Jr., which led to several invitations to Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s club in Palm Beach, Fla.
“I’ve lost count at this point,” Mr. McBride said, adding that the club “is a good place to network.”
Mr. McBride was also a frequent guest on Mr. Carlson’s show, including the time he claimed that a mysterious man seen at the Capitol on Jan. 6 with his face obscured in red paint was “clearly a law enforcement officer.” Shown evidence later that week by a HuffPost reporter that the man was a well-known habitué of St. Louis Cardinals baseball games, Mr. McBride replied: “If I’m wrong, so be it, bro. I don’t care.”
He did acknowledge a certain dubiousness to the claim that the mostly white male conservatives who showed up at the Capitol on Jan. 6 had the judicial deck stacked against them.
“Pre-Jan. 6, anytime you heard the term ‘two-tier system of justice,’ it’s Blacks, it’s Latinos, it’s the infringed, it’s the poor, it’s the drug addicted, it’s the marginalized, it’s the L.G.B.T.Q. community,” he said. That coalition of victims, Mr. McBride insisted, now included the MAGA supporters he represented.
That is insane.
Keep in mind that these are the same people who believe that Kyle Rittenhouse was totally justified in gunning down 3 unarmed people at a political protest and routinely defend police and private citizens alike who shoot first and asks questions later.
I don’t know how to think about this anymore. I can’t help but feel that the right is simply brainwashed.
The Chinese spy balloon that was shot down over the Atlantic Ocean in early February was built, at least partly, using American off-the-shelf parts, a U.S. official has confirmed to ABC News.
The official could not say whether any of the American gear was sold illicitly to China but said determining whether any of it came from illegal trade was a topic of serious concern among officials since some items — like chips — are forbidden to sell to certain markets.
“We’re aware that it had intelligence collection capabilities, but it was our — and it has been our — assessment now that it did not collect while it was transiting the United States,” Ryder said during a briefing, adding, “As we said at the time, we also took steps to mitigate the potential collection efforts.”
That assessment allays concerns from some lawmakers early this year that the balloon was collecting information as it flew across much of the U.S. mainland in early February, including over sensitive military sites that house intercontinental ballistic missiles, before being downed by the military.
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in February the balloon was “one more method that they use to collect intelligence on us. We have to be cognizant of it and protect ourselves against it.”
China has maintained the balloon was merely a harmless, unmanned civilian vehicle.
Ryder was asked Thursday whether he believes those U.S. mitigation efforts were responsible for the balloon’s failure to gather any info.
“Certainly, the efforts that we made contributed,” he said.
I don’t know if we’ll ever learn the whole story about this. But the meltdown over it was instructive. We are a very silly country.
— DeSantis War Room 🐊 (@DeSantisWarRoom) June 30, 2023
Tim Miller:
Late Friday, the Ron DeSantis’s extremely online campaign team released a video to contrast the Florida governor’s stalwart bigotry with Donald Trump’s lighter touch and highlight the fact that their candidate stands out as the most hostile to LGBT Americans—in a field that, mind you, also includes Mike Pence.
The ad, which seems to have been originally produced by anonymous Twitter user ProudElephantUS, was repurposed by the “DeSantis War Room” with the following message: “To Wrap up ‘Pride Month,’ let’s hear from the politician who did more than any other to celebrate it…”
The video begins with a sizzle reel of Donald Trump promising to protect LGBT Americans, saying that he doesn’t care what bathroom Caitlyn Jenner uses, telling Barbara Walters that transgender women would be allowed to compete in the Miss Universe contest, and contrasting his views on gays favorably with how the group is viewed by Islamic terrorists.
From there the ad takes a hard turn, with a deep house beat and images that work very hard to depict Ron DeSantis as the country’s most-based, faggot-hating, alpha male. The “pro-”DeSantis portion of the ad compares him to fictional serial killer and cannibal Patrick Bateman, the (purportedly gay) Greek warrior Achilles, and the floating image of the “GigaChad,” a highly photoshopped muscle man.
The ad’s intended message is that, unlike Trump, DeSantis will not show any humanity to gays and will be significantly more effective at targeting LGBT Americans by advancing the most “extreme slate of anti-trans laws in modern history.”
But there is one line from this portion of the video that deserves particular notice.
Mike Figueredo of the Humanist Reportis quoted, saying DeSantis “just produced some of the harshest, most draconian laws that literally threaten trans existence” (emphasis added).
It’s important to recognize the context here. This is not one of those clip mashups where MAGA types make fun of hyperventilating lefties making overwrought claims about their opponents. It’s exactly the opposite. This clip is interspersed with shirtless muscled men who are ostensibly there to demonstrate DeSantis’s strength
1 The whole point of the ad is that DeSantis is tough enough to go there and actually target the LGBTs, unlike that cucked Trump who just wants to be loved.
Given that context, the inclusion of Figueredo’s line about how DeSantis’s policies “literally threaten trans existence” is deeply disturbing. That this line would make it into a product put out by one of the leading contenders for the presidency is a scandal. It ought create a total and complete repudiation from the campaign just to have any hope of surviving.
Say what you want about Mitt Romney’s 47 percent gaffe, it pales in comparison to suggesting that you want to pass laws that “literally threaten” the existence of a marginalized class of Americans like it’s a good thing.
In addition to this ad being childish, cruel, and reprehensible on the merits, it’s also political malpractice, even in a GOP primary. Especially for the person who is claiming to run as the “electability” candidate.
Are the voters in the Atlanta suburbs who have abandoned the GOP in droves excited to come back for someone who is running to Trump’s right on anti-gay bigotry? Do you think the McCain/Flake/Ducey voters who rejected creepy Blake Masters in Arizona are going to be interested in supporting someone who compares himself to Patrick Bateman and brags that trans people feel their very existence is threatened by his policies?
I promise you the answer is no.
Despite a disquieting turn in public opinion on trans issues, Americans are not looking for an edgelord Nazi who winks at the radicals hoping to eradicate trans people.
In a just world, DeSantis’s latest attempt to get to Trump’s nutball right would result in a backlash so severe that it eradicates from the GOP primary the notion that there is any purchase in signaling to America that your biggest problem with Trump was that he was just too kind and inclusive.
Alas, I doubt we live in such a world.
1 To be honest, there are so many shirtless men in the ad that if Proud Elephant were actually a gay lib or Log Cabin Trumper with a thing for muscular dudes trolling the DeSantis campaign and they just didn’t realize it because they have such a hard on for punishing trans people I wouldn’t be surprised. On a scale from homophobic to homoerotic this thing is off the charts.
Ric Grenell, famously gay Trumper (and totally unqualified ambassador and acting CIA director) called it homophobic. I don’t think any Republican cares about that at all.
Haven’t the DeSantis people learned yet that there is nothing — nothing — Trump can do that will shake the faith of his followers?
We don’t turn back our clocks for another four months. If American conservatives could have their way, they would turn back the last half-century. Back to when America was “great” in their eyes, in MAGA’s eyes. Back to when white dominance and The Lost Cause went unquestioned. Back to before the country agreed with the Civil Rights movement’s demands for equal voting rights and civil rights for minorities. Back to the world of the Cleavers and the Nelsons. Back to when women, too, knew their places.
Nostalgia not for lost innocence but for lost dominance is what made Donald Trump so attractive to the movement that grew up around him.
Speaking recently with Amanda Marcotte, David Neiwert (“The Age of Insurrection: The Radical Right’s Assault on American Democracy“) observed that fascism and neo-fascism have “actually been present in America since at least the early 1900s.” The increasing radicalization of the right has been there for years. Trump as their charismatic leader simply exploited it, gave it a mainstream platform, Neiwert says:
I don’t think they’re capable of winning, but I think a lot of people can get hurt and I think there will be a lot of people hurt by this, including them. One thing I’ve learned about right wing extremists over 30 years of covering them is that people who get involved in these movements destroy their lives. It’s one of the most toxic forces in America. It draws people into the abyss. It ruins their family relationships, ruins their relationships in the community. A lot of the time they wind up in prison.
All to preserve (or to restore) the power structures of the last century.
That is in part why MAGA Republicans display such affinity for Vladimir Putin’s Russia. He too wishes to retain the traditional power dynamics that pertained during the last century (and prior to that). That death grip on what was destroys lives there, Fareed Zakaria writes:
I’ve been stunned by one statistic ever since I read it: A 15-year-old Russian boy today has the same life expectancy as a 15-year-old boy in Haiti. Remember, Russia is one of the world’s richest countries in terms of natural resources. And it is an urbanized, industrialized society with levels of education and literacy comparable to, and perhaps even exceeding, other European countries.
This analysis comes from an August 2022 working paper by scholar Nicholas Eberstadt, who has long studied demography. He points out that for three decades now, Russia has been depopulating. With a brief respite from 2013 to 2015, deaths have outpaced births, but he notes that this trend is one that we see in many industrialized countries.
What stands out in Russia is its mortality rate. In 2019 — before covid and the invasion of Ukraine — the World Health Organization estimated a 15-year-old boy in Russia could expect to live another 53.7 years, which was the same as in Haiti and below the life expectancy for boys his age in Yemen, Mali and South Sudan. Swiss boys around the same age could expect to live more than 13 years longer.
By multiple measures, the Russian people lag behind the rest of the 21st century.
Russia has a longstanding inferiority complex that mimics that of American Southerners. They still pick at the scabs of their defeat in the Civil War and resent seeing monuments to their romanticized insurrection finally come down. MAGA Republicans “organize discontent” over their lost social dominance that accompanied modernization and the computer age. Their resentments make Vladimir Putin a kindred spirit.
Zakaria observes:
For Putin’s regime, the West now represents forces of social, economic and political modernization that could infect Russia. In his speech as he launched the invasion of Ukraine, Putin accused the United States of seeking to destroy Russia’s traditional values and impose new ones on it which directly lead “to degradation and degeneration, because they are contrary to human nature.” For Putin, modernizing Russia would create a more active civil society, greater demands for better health care, more opportunities for ordinary citizens and a less kleptocratic state. And so he advocates a traditional Russia, which celebrates religion, traditional morality, xenophobia and strict gender conformity.
What does this all add up to? I am not sure. But it’s fair to say that Russia’s biggest problem is not that it is losing the Ukraine war but rather that it is losing the 21st century.
“Well, he died. You can’t get any older than that.”
– Alan Arkin as “Yossarian” in Catch-22
One by one, the acting heavyweights of my lifetime are diminishing and going into the West. This happens, of course, to every generation at some point; and I’ve been advised by some even more ancient than I that “you get used to it”. I’m not quite there yet, because this one hurts.
Sure, Alan Arkin was 89, but he didn’t burn out…nor did he fade away (sorry to blow your theory, Neil). As recently as 2021, he was garnering accolades and acting nominations for his wonderful work alongside Michael Douglas in the fourth season of the Netflix dramedy The Kominsky Method (if you are unacquainted, do yourself a favor).
I’d venture to say Arkin invented “dramedy”, with his penchant for delivering performances that could be intense, deeply affecting, wry, understated, and riotously funny all at once. As all great actors do, he effortlessly embodied the whole of human expression – and (as the song goes) all he had to do was act naturally.
The Brooklyn native also produced and directed on occasion, and (in his spare time?) taught acting classes. He was also a musician and a songwriter. In the mid-50s he sang lead and played guitar in a folk music group called The Tarriers (his film debut was in an appearance by the band in the 1957 film Calypso Heat Wave, although Arkin was uncredited). Here’s a mind-blower: he co-wrote “The Banana Boat Song”, which was a monster hit for Harry Belafonte.
But his most lasting legacy will be his film work; so in tribute I thought I’d share a few quick thoughts regarding my top four favorite Arkin performances. You may note that only one of them is a leading role; but just having him on board kicked any production up a notch. Rest well, sir.
Hearts of the West – Jeff Bridges gives a winning performance in this 1975 charmer as a rube from Iowa, a wannabe pulp western writer with the unlikely name of “Lewis Tater” (the scene where he asks the barber to cut his hair to make him look “just like Zane Grey” is priceless.)
Tater gets fleeced by a mail-order scam promising enrollment in what turns out to be a bogus university “out west”. Serendipity lands him a job as a stuntman in 1930s Hollywood westerns.
The film features one of Andy Griffith’s best big screen performances, and Alan Arkin is a riot as a perpetually apoplectic director (he handily steals every scene he’s in). Excellent direction by Howard Zieff, tight screenplay by Rob Thompson. Also with Donald Pleasence, Blythe Danner, Richard B. Shull, and Herb Edelman.
Catch-22 – Yossarian: OK, let me see if I’ve got this straight. In order to be grounded, I’ve got to be crazy. And I must be crazy to keep flying. But if I ask to be grounded, that means I’m not crazy anymore, and I have to keep flying.
Dr. ‘Doc’ Daneeka: You got it, that’s Catch-22.
Yossarian: Whoo… That’s some catch, that Catch-22.
Dr. ‘Doc’ Daneeka: It’s the best there is.
Anyone who has read and appreciated the beautifully precise absurdity of Joseph Heller’s eponymous 1961 novel about the ugly and imprecise madness of war knows it is virtually “un-filmable”. And yet Mike Nichols knocked it out of the park with this 1970 film adaptation…and Buck Henry did a yeoman’s job of condensing the novel into a two-hour screenplay (although arguably some of the best exchanges in the film are those left virtually unchanged from the book).
Of course, it didn’t hurt to have such a great director and an outstanding cast: Alan Arkin, Martin Balsalm, Richard Benjamin, Art Gafunkel, Jack Gilford, Bob Newhart, Anthony Perkins, Paula Prentiss, Martin Sheen, Jon Voight, Orson Welles, Charles Grodin, Bob Balaban, et. al., with Henry playing the part of “Colonel Korn”. I think this 50+ year-old film has improved with age.
Little Murders – This dark, dark comedy from 1971 is one of my all-time favorite films. It was directed by Arkin and adapted by Jules Feiffer from his own self-described “post-assassination play” (referring to the then-relatively recent murders of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy). That said, it is not wholly political; but it is sociopolitical (I see it as the pre-cursor to Paddy Chayefsky’s Network).
Elliot Gould is at the peak of his Elliot Gould-ness as a nihilistic (and seemingly brain-dead) free-lance photographer who is essentially browbeaten into a love affair with an effervescent sunny side-up young woman (Marcia Rodd) who is bound and determined to snap him out of his torpor. The story follows the travails of this oil and water couple as they slog through a dystopian New York City chock full o’ nuts, urban blight, indifference and random shocking acts of senseless violence (you know…New York City in the 70s).
There are so many memorable vignettes, and nearly every cast member gets a Howard Beale-worthy monologue on how fucked-up American society is (and remember…this was 1971). Disturbingly, it remains relevant as ever. But it is very funny. No, seriously. The cast includes Vincent Gardenia, Elizabeth Wilson, Doris Roberts, Lou Jacobi (who has the best monologue) and Donald Sutherland. Arkin casts himself as an eccentric homicide investigator-and he’s a hoot.
The Seven-Per-Cent Solution – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s super sleuth Sherlock Holmes has weathered an infinite number of movie incarnations over the decades, but none as fascinating as Nicol Williamson’s tightly wound coke fiend in this wonderful 1977 Herbert Ross film.
Intrepid sidekick Dr. Watson (Robert Duvall), concerned over his friend’s addiction, decides to do an intervention, engineering a meeting between the great detective and Dr. Sigmund Freud (Alan Arkin). Naturally, there is a mystery afoot as well, but it’s secondary to the entertaining interplay between Williamson and Arkin.
Screenwriter Nicholas Meyer (who adapted from his own novel) would repeat the gimmick two years later in his directing debut Time After Time, when he placed similarly odd bedfellows together in one story by pitting H.G. Wells against Jack the Ripper.
More recommendations: Wait Until Dark, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Simon, The In-Laws, Glengarry Glen Ross, Edward Scissorhands, Little Miss Sunshine, Argo.
North Carolina’s Greensboro Science Center is delighted to announce the birth of two adorable red panda cubs, one male and one female, adding to the growing red panda family. The cubs were born on May 26 to Tai and Usha. This is the second red panda litter born at the GSC.
The cubs are currently staying in the GSC’s Shearer Animal Hospital surgery room, which has been converted into a nursery. They’ll make their debut on Thursday, June 15, 2023. The opening of the Shearer Animal Hospital to the public will be delayed until 9:15am on Thursday, 06.15.23. In addition to viewing the cubs through the surgery window, guests are invited to watch feedings. Although feeding times are subject to change with little to no notice, they are currently scheduled for 11:45am and 3:00pm.
