A judge in New York state on Friday sided with Project Veritas in continuing a ban on the New York Times from publishing certain documents pertaining to the organization.

The ruling by Judge Charles Wood of State Supreme Court in Westchester County amounts to a prior restraint on the Times, an uncommon restriction on any publication. It also requires the Times to return or destroy the disputed material in its possession. An earlier appeal by the New York Times in the case was unsuccessful.

Project Veritas, a conservative organization that seeks to uncover wrongdoing by mainstream media and liberal groups, is suing the Times for libel in connection with its reporting about the group’s founder, James O’Keefe. At issue in this instance are documents obtained by the Times that were prepared by attorney Benjamin Barr for Project Veritas in connection with the case. Wood ordered the NYT to turn over any physical documents it possesses in the case and to delete any electronic copies “and to remove such documents from the internet and any web sites or servers over which they have control.”

The Times responded with a statement by publisher A.G. Sulzberger: “In defiance of law settled in the Pentagon Papers case, this judge has barred The Times from publishing information about a prominent and influential organization that was obtained legally in the ordinary course of reporting.”

His statement referenced a landmark 1971 case, in which the Nixon administration sought to prevent the publication of reporting based on a mammoth classified report on the nation’s involvement in the Vietnam War dating back decades. The U.S. Supreme Court sided with the Times and the Washington Post in that situation...

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/12/24/project-veritas-new-york-times-526137

Ex-British spy, Erik Prince, and Project Veritas reportedly tried to entrap Trump's national security adviser
PETER WEBER
MAY 14, 2021

Erik Prince, founder of private security contractor Blackwater and brother of former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, recruited a former British spy in 2016 to professionalize the undercover operatives at Project Veritas, the conservative sting video shop run by James O'Keefe, The New York Times reports, citing documents and people involved in the subsequent operations to discredit perceived "deep state" enemies of former President Donald Trump inside the U.S. government.

The ex-undercover British spy, Richard Seddon, trained conservative operatives first at the Prince family ranch in Wyoming, then at a large, $10,000-a-month house near Georgetown University. Female undercover operatives tried to entrap FBI agents, sometimes using fake dating app profiles, and State Department employees, the Times reports. But "one of the most brazen operations of the campaign" was an attempt to take down H.R. McMaster, Trump's second national security adviser.

The plan was reportedly to send a female operative to Tosca, a restaurant McMaster frequented, to engage him in drinks and conversation and record him disparaging Trump or making other inappropriate remarks on camera. One of the people involved in the McMaster plot was Barbara Ledeen, a longtime Republican staffer on the Senate Judiciary Committee before retiring, she says, earlier this year. Presented with the details of the operation, Ledeen told the Times she was just a messenger, "not part of a plot."

Ledeen said "someone she trusted" contacted her to help with the McMaster operation. "Somebody who had his calendar conveyed to me that he goes to Tosca all the time," she said, and she passed the information on to a man she believed to be a Project Veritas operative with a fake name. The McMaster operation was aborted after he, unrelated to Project Veritas, resigned under pressure from Trump...

https://twitter.com/GreggSmith0351/status/1475246238723461128

https://twitter.com/Nordiqu/status/1474409707129679875

There is a wonderful scene in “Being the Ricardos” — Aaron Sorkin’s wrenching chronicle of the pioneering TV comedy series “I Love Lucy” — in which Lucy drags two of her co-stars to the studio at 2 a.m., during a thunderstorm, to re-block a comic moment in a dinner scene that hadn’t gone well in rehearsal. It wasn’t even her bit — it was between her two fellow actors — but she knew it wasn’t good enough, funny enough. And so we watch Lucy push them to rehearse it — position them, instruct them — and they comply, even though their expressions reveal that they think she’s gone mad.

But Lucille Ball knew where the funny was. She could envision it. She could hear it. And she knew what to add to it to make it better.

And making it better haunted her.

Sorkin knows the drive it takes to make things better, and he soon shows us just how much better — and how much funnier — Lucy makes the scene when it is finally filmed the next day. I dare you not to laugh at it.

Sorkin didn’t have the chance to talk with Lucy about what drove her that night, but that didn’t keep him from writing exactly what she must have felt.

”I am the biggest asset of CBS, the biggest asset of Phillip Morris and Westinghouse,” Lucy tells her impatient co-stars, “and I get paid a fortune to do exactly what I love doing…and

all I have to do to keep it is kill every week for 36 weeks in a row… Kill. So let’s do it again.”

It’s a breathtaking moment...

https://news.yahoo.com/marlo-thomas-reflects-working-lucille-160412594.html

Ives is often associated with the Christmas season. He did voice-over work as Sam the Snowman, narrator of the classic 1964 Christmas television special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Ives also worked on the special's soundtrack, including the songs "A Holly Jolly Christmas" and "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer", both of which continue to chart annually on the Billboard holiday charts into the 2020s...

Ives was identified in the 1950 pamphlet Red Channels and blacklisted as an entertainer with supposed Communist ties.[18] In 1952, he cooperated with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and agreed to testify, fearful of losing his source of income. Ives's statement to the HUAC ended his blacklisting, allowing him to continue acting in movies, but it also led to a bitter rift between Ives and many folk singers, including Pete Seeger, who accused Ives of naming names and betraying the cause of cultural and political freedom to save his own career. Seeger publicly ridiculed Ives for attempting to distance himself from many of the far left organizations he had supported.

In 1993, Ives, by then using a wheelchair, reunited with Seeger during a benefit concert in New York City, having reconciled years earlier. They sang "Blue Tail Fly" together..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burl_Ives

The Christian duo behind "I Still Believe" return with the incredible true story of a large and handsome man who was good at football

The incredible true story of a large and handsome man who was good at football and — thanks to his enduring faith in Jesus Christ — never gave up on his dream of playing it for enormous sums of money, Andrew and Jon Erwin’s “American Underdog” doesn’t quite sell the “against the odds” angle promised by its title. Which isn’t to say that Kurt Warner’s mythic rise from Cedar Falls supermarket clerk to the oldest Super Bowl-winning quarterback in NFL history was unworthy of being adapted into a mawkishly competent sports biopic, only that it’s kind of miraculous when anyone manages to become a famous athlete (as this movie’s opening narration spells out for us in statistical detail), and the Erwin brothers fail to contort Warner’s story into especially compelling evidence of all things possible...

Like so many of the faith-based biopics that have helped turn the genre into a flyover-state phenomenon, “American Underdog” is sustained by a vaguely fetishistic enthusiasm for its subject’s hardships (in this case: poverty, tornadoes, and a wife whose devotion to Jesus Christ is only surpassed by her devotion to bad wigs). For every 10 seconds of football action, we get 10 minutes of Levi staring into the camera like a deer in the headlights and wondering “why God would give me a dream that’s never gonna come true.” What kind of cruel deity would bless someone with the upper body of a small mountain range, only to curse them with the responsibilities of a human adult? Make it make sense!



Of course, the Erwin brothers — wildly dynamic filmmakers whose recent Walmart products range from faith-based music biopics like “I Still Believe” to faith-based football biopics like “Woodlawn” and this one — have become the leading auteurs of megachurch cinema because their movies could be confused for secular fare if you squint. Telling stories that emphasize general hardships over religious persecution and keep the God talk at a low whisper until the third act, the Erwins tend to eschew the Newsmax crowd in favor of Trojan horsing their way onto the godless screens of America’s multiplexes, and “American Underdog” is the duo’s most agnostic bid for mainstream success thus far...

Is “American Underdog” a good movie? Not even a little bit, but that’s kind of like saying “The Power of the Dog” is a bad microwave toaster. Traditional metrics of quality hardly seem relevant when it comes to a biopic that’s less interested in satisfying any narrative conflict than it is in paying off its protagonist’s spiritual investment...

https://www.indiewire.com/2021/12/american-underdog-review-1234686634/

..Donald Trump may have failed to overthrow the 2020 election by sending a mob to storm the Capitol on January 6, but his coup is not over. Indeed, all signs show that his plans to steal the 2024 election are coming together nicely. Honest election officials are being purged across the country, replaced with Trump stooges who will invalidate election results Republicans don't like. Insurrectionist types are taking over state legislatures, armed with plans to throw electoral college votes to Trump, regardless of how the people in their state vote. And it's widely believed that, if Republicans control the House in 2024 — which all signs suggest they will — they will simply refuse to certify any election Biden wins.

This is happening all out in the open. And yet somehow the majority of Democratic voters don't seem to notice or care that Republicans are literally plotting a fascist takeover of the country. As Zach Beauchamp of Vox wrote earlier this month, "Neither Democrats nor the general public are doing much of anything to stop [Republicans]." He cited a troubling October poll that shows only 35% of Democratic voters even recognize that democracy is under serious threat.

Why Democratic voters are so blind to a threat that's playing out right in public isn't a surprise: The behavior of their leaders signals that there's no reason to worry. Oh sure, Democrats like to talk about how democracy is in danger. But rather than focus their energies on saving democracy, they spent the past 11 months trying to negotiate a social spending bill that was never going to get past Manchin's bad faith objections.

This isn't to say that the items in Build Back Better — child care, better drug prices, climate change provisions — aren't important. They are, in fact, critical. But Democrats failed to understand what Republicans know in their bones: This isn't an episode of "West Wing." The guy who gives the best speech doesn't win. Ideas don't matter. All that matters is power. The greatest agenda in the world — without the power to make it happen — is worth less than your March 2020 stockpile of toilet paper.

The prioritizing of Build Back Better over voting rights couldn't be a better symbol of how Democrats' understanding of power is totally backward. Their hope was that passing bold economic legislation and improving people's lives would prove to Americans that government works, leading Americans to feel more protective of their democracy. But what they've discovered is that, without a working democracy, bold economic legislation is just a fantasy...

https://www.alternet.org/2021/12/republicans-power/