(Excerpt: We Build the Wall ...assembled an advisory board of right-wing luminaries - including Erik Prince the founder of private military company Blackwater, now known as Academi)
The Persistent Influence of Trump’s “Shadow Adviser” Erik Prince
Jeremy Scahill, Matthew Cole
14 - 17 minutes
Jeremy Scahill:
Just by way of context, Erik Prince, of course, comes from a really
powerful family in the state of Michigan. His sister, Betsy DeVos, is
married to Dick DeVos, the heir to the Amway Corp. fortune, which is a
multilevel marketing scheme. And those two families merged together and
were the premier bank rollers of the radical religious right, as well as
the Republican revolution that swept Newt Gingrich and the Contract
With America to power in the early and mid-1990s.
Fast-forward past the Blackwater years, and Erik Prince running a
mercenary company, to the end of Obama and the 2016 campaign kicking
into gear. Erik Prince originally was in the Ted Cruz camp and then
started to transition over to Donald Trump. This latest batch of documents
that we have been able to read through because of Jason Leopold and
BuzzFeed contains some pretty extensive notes and documents from
interviews with Steve Bannon about Erik Prince’s role in the Trump
campaign, and then ultimately during the transition period.
And what’s interesting, I think, to note is that Erik Prince’s
connection to Trump world is multifaceted. You have the fact that Erik
Prince and his family were close to Vice President Mike Pence when he
was a member of Congress, and Prince and his mother had raised money for
him. They were bundling money and raising money for Donald Trump when
they eventually switched over from Ted Cruz to Donald Trump.
And then it gets us to where we are in these documents, where you
have Erik Prince via his relationship with Steve Bannon, and the two of
them, by Bannon’s admission, had known each other for eight or nine
years when the Trump campaign had kicked into gear.
Erik Prince, of course, had been on
Steve Bannon’s radio show on Breitbart many times, where he was already
openly pitching a return to the glory years of the Phoenix program —
the assassination program in Vietnam — and talking about how the U.S.
needed to get back into the covert operations game in a very serious way
10 hours ago · Stephen K. Bannon, a former Trump strategist, was convicted of contempt of Congress this summer and pardoned by Trump in 2020 while facing a ...
Hooray! ...“One of the great things about that character,” Ms. Baranski said of
Diane, “is that she was never portrayed as a victim. I don’t like
playing victims. I’d be terrible as the long-suffering wife.” She said
that’s also why she liked playing Maryann Thorpe, who “had her
three-martini lunches and then planned creative revenge on her
ex-husband.”
I ask Ms. Baranski about her Tiffany’s window of
laughs. She has about 12 different ones, all sparkling — ranging from
sultry to sarcastic to can-you-believe-Donald-Trump-might-run-again?
22 hours ago · Christine Baranski Brings Throwback Flair to Her Ripped-From-the-Headlines Stardom. The actress is back for the final season of “The Good Fight "
Christine Baranski Brings Throwback Flair to Her Ripped-From-the-Headlines Stardom
Maureen Dowd
17 - 21 minutes
Credit...Camila Falquez for The New York Times
The actress is back for the final season of “The Good Fight.”
Christine BaranskiCredit...Camila Falquez for The New York Times
It’s
pretty meta that I’m sitting with an actress who’s the epitome of Upper
East Side sophistication in a hotel that’s the epitome of Upper East
Side sophistication.
But then, some Wednesdays are better than others.
Christine
Baranski showed up for lunch at the Mark looking like a million bucks,
wearing a belted black Michael Kors pantsuit and blue-tinted Robert Marc
sunglasses, every hair of her highlighted bob in place, her makeup
perfect. In fact, she looked exactly like the prototypical New York
society woman drawn on the hotel’s coasters, except without the designer
dog tucked under her arm.
At 70, Ms. Baranski is busier than
ever. She has wrapped up the sixth and final season of Robert and
Michelle King’s “The Good Fight,” a spinoff of “The Good Wife.” The show
has continued the adventures of the liberal Chicago lawyer Diane
Lockhart, now working at a prestigious, predominantly Black law firm.
But “The Good Fight” has a more madcap feel — as if everyone’s about to
break out in song — blending fantasy and current events with fun guest
stars playing real luminaries or thinly veiled ones. Diane becomes a
conspiring leader of the Resistance against Donald J. Trump.
The
beginning of the end starts streaming this Thursday on Paramount+. She
is also filming the second season of Julian Fellowes’s frock opera “The
Gilded Age.” And on her breaks from TV, she has been studying T.E.
Lawrence and Oscar Wilde at Oxford University.
Image
Credit...Paramount+
Now her biggest ambition, she jokes, is to play the Fool to Meryl Streep’s Lear.
She
could do it. She has theater chops and went to Juilliard in a golden
era that produced Robin Williams, Patti LuPone, Kevin Kline and Mandy
Patinkin.
“I wasn’t movie-star beautiful,” she said, “which is probably why I didn’t aspire to be a film actress.”
But
she became a TV star in her 40s and wowed fans with her comedy skills
in movies like “The Birdcage,” “Bowfinger” and “Mamma Mia!” (not to
mention Broadway’s farcical “Boeing-Boeing”).
Ms.
Baranski is a throwback to those 1940s actresses like Rosalind Russell
and Eve Arden who could be campy and glamorous, cutting and moving,
wicked and loyal, all at the same time. In other words, the perfect best
friend.
‘She Has a Little Elaine Stritch in Her’
“I
live on the Upper East Side, but I don’t usually look like this,” she
said apologetically, explaining that she had just come from “fluffing
and glossing” for The Times’s photo shoot.
I don’t believe her, of course. Her co-stars have already told me that she is enviably meticulous.
“We’d
be flying to the Emmys, and I’d look over and she’d be there, lipstick
perfect, those long legs, crowned with that gorgeous mop of hair,
reading The New York Times,” said Julianna Margulies, who starred with
Ms. Baranski in “The Good Wife.”
Cynthia Nixon plays Ms.
Baranski’s younger, meeker sister in “The Gilded Age,” and nearly 39
years ago, she played her teenage daughter in the original Broadway
production of Tom Stoppard’s “The Real Thing,” directed by Mike Nichols.
(Ms. Baranski won a Tony for that role.)
“She’s a little girl
from Buffalo, but she always seems like she dropped in from Paris,” Ms.
Nixon said. “She’s such a citizen of the world. She never stops
cultivating her garden, whether she’s reading, researching, working on
her instrument — that amazing body.”
Image
Credit...HBO
Meryl
Streep, who appeared with Ms. Baranski in two “Mamma Mia!” movies,
chimed in about her 5-foot-10 friend: “Her posture is like a queen.”
Ms. Baranski said merely, “I do Pilates and I’m moderate in my habits. I have good genes.”
As
someone who’s perennially messy, I’m fascinated by women who never
leave the house looking less than perfect, as if they just pulled
everything they’re wearing from a tissue-laden box. (My sister is like
that.)
I leaned over to examine Ms. Baranski more carefully and
figure out how she does it. But I knocked over the pitcher of
half-and-half for her coffee, which spilled all over her side of the
table and dripped toward her black suit. Without missing a beat, she
covered the mess with a napkin and kept talking about Tom Stoppard.
She
is also the type who would never miss a performance or show up not
knowing her lines. Once, before she opened at the Kennedy Center in
Washington in the title role of the musical “Mame,” she slipped and fell
on a New York sidewalk and broke her right kneecap. (She jokingly
renamed the show “Maimed.”) But by opening night two months later, she still managed to dance and sweep up and down the grand staircase.
Not
to say that the actress is as starchy as Agnes van Rhijn, her character
in “The Gilded Age,” a fearsome figure who, not unlike Maggie Smith’s
Dowager Countess in “Downton Abbey,” can level you with one put-down or
averted gaze. That’s a type that Julian Fellowes, the creator of both
shows, calls “sardonic old survivors,” matriarchs trying to hold up the
slipping standards of society.
Unlike Aunt Agnes, Ms. Baranski has
been known to have nude swimming parties in the moonlight at her lake
house in Connecticut with fellow actors like Mark Rylance and Cherry
Jones.
“There is indeed lovely bacchanalian behavior,
but nothing untoward,” she said. “I think Cherry in particular just
doesn’t care if she swims naked in the day or the night.”
“Christine
exudes class and grace, but she can throw back a martini, eat a hot dog
and talk sports with the best of them,” Ms. Margulies said.
Ms.
Baranski is an opera aficionado and a devout Buffalo Bills fan, with a
T-shirt that says “Buffalo, a drinking town with a football problem.”
And as for her martinis, she said, she likes Grey Goose with a twist —
and vermouth just as “an afterthought.” She stops at one and a half,
unable to keep up with her character in the 1990s sitcom “Cybill,”
Maryann Thorpe, who was fabulously dressed, politically incorrect and
never without her favorite accessory: a martini.
A typical conversation between Cybill and Maryann:
Cybill: “You know what is amazing, Maryann?”
Maryann: “They make vodka from wheat!”
Image
Credit...CBS
Although
the two women had great on-air chemistry, Cybill Shepherd — on whom the
show was based — addressed off-air tensions in her memoir, writing that
she found Ms. Baranski standoffish. People connected to the show told
me that the fact that Ms. Baranski won an Emmy for her role and Ms.
Shepherd did not contributed to the tensions, and Ms. Shepherd wrote,
“the grain of truth in this controversy was that of course I was
envious. Who doesn’t want to win an Emmy?”
Tom Werner, one of the
show’s producers, brushed off the criticism of Ms. Baranski. “She wasn’t
snobby,” he told me. “She was brilliant.”
Ms. Baranski
said, “Can you believe that still comes up? People still want to know.”
She declined to discuss Ms. Shepherd further.
Maryann was so popular that Ms. Baranski shied away from tippling roles afterward, for fear of getting typecast.
“When I’m asked to pose for pictures,” she said, “I never pose with a drink in my hand.”
Michael
Kahn, who taught Ms. Baranski acting at Juilliard, gave her high
praise, saying, “She plays somebody who’s tipsy better than anyone I
know.” It’s easier for women to be funny acting drunk than men, Ms.
Baranski said.
“She has a little Elaine Stritch in her,” said Ms.
Streep, whose oldest daughter, Mamie Gummer, worked with Ms. Baranski in
“The Good Fight” and whose youngest daughter, Louisa Jacobson, plays
the ingénue in “The Gilded Age.” (Ms. Streep had to break the news to
Ms. Baranski that Ms. Jacobson is “terrified” of her when she’s in
character as Aunt Agnes.)
Ms. Margulies recalled that once, when
she and Ms. Baranski were walking to see a Costume Institute exhibition
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, they were accosted by a gang of
autograph seekers.
Ms. Baranski drew herself up to her full
height, surveyed the group, told the ringleader with asperity, “Oh, no,
darling, don’t be silly,” and kept walking.
Image
Credit...Camila Falquez for The New York Times
Image
Credit...Camila Falquez for The New York Times
‘Twelfth Night’ and Witchy Baths
Ms.
Baranski’s grandparents were immigrants who had been stage actors in
their native Poland. She grew up in a blue-collar Polish American
neighborhood in a suburb of Buffalo. Her father, who died when she was
8, edited a Polish-language newspaper, and her mother had a job ordering
parts for air-conditioning factories.
Ms. Baranski went to a
Catholic girls’ school, and we swapped stories about scary nuns. In high
school, she adopted a grander way of speaking, akin to Madonna’s odd
English accent.
“I think I decided I didn’t want to sound like a
Buffalo girl,” she recalled, “and people would ask me, ‘Are you
English?’ I’d say, ‘No, I’m just affected.’”
She had trouble with
the sibilant “S” and was rejected from Juilliard when she first
auditioned. After she capped her two front teeth — “I had a gap like
Lauren Hutton’s, but not as beautiful” — and took speech lessons, the
drama school let her audition again, with a page full of S’s. She did a
speech of Viola’s from “Twelfth Night,” but mispronounced Viola.
“It’s Vy-ola,” a judge on the faculty boomed. “Vee-ola is the instrument. Wrong department.”
Ms. Baranski joked that she was admitted “by the skin of my teeth.”
Then,
maybe just to show them, she won acclaim starring in a cascade of “S”
productions: Shakespeare, Stoppard, Sondheim, Neil Simon, Cybill
Shepherd and “The Simpsons.”
She was married for 30
years to the actor Matthew Cowles, until his death in 2014. He had a
long recurring role on “All My Children” as Billy Clyde Tuggle.
“He
was a white-trash pimp and he wrote his own material,” Ms. Baranski
said. “They took him off the air for a while because Jerry Falwell and
the Moral Majority were cleaning up television and he had to go.”
Image
Credit...Universal Pictures
She once did a guest appearance
with him. “Ten days after having my firstborn, we agreed to be on a
plotline where I was Billy Clyde’s white-trash girlfriend living in a
trailer park,” she said. “He and I kidnapped one of the leading
characters. Please promise me you won’t look it up. It’s so bad that
it’s kind of great.”
She gave her husband credit for handling it well when she gained more star wattage.
“It
was so hard,” she said, her voice wavering. “I was on the red carpet at
an Emmy event and we were standing together and a photographer shouted
out: ‘Get out of the way. You’re standing in her light.’ And he did.
“He was such a bighearted man. He was really happy for me and proud of me.”
They
had two daughters: Isabel, who has a law degree and is a writer, and
Lily, an actress who just produced her own film, a surreal short about a
woman who loses her teeth, one by one.
Her friends
rave about Ms. Baranski’s dedication as a mother, noting she flew back
on a red eye from Los Angeles to Connecticut every weekend when she was
filming “Cybill.” And they are amazed at the flair she puts into being a
grandmother to three boys.
Ms. King, the “Good Fight” co-creator,
marveled at how Ms. Baranski would not simply bathe her grandchildren:
“She bathes them outdoors and pretends to be a witch and throws a
cauldron of water on them and cackles.”
“I’m a terrifying,
wonderful witch,” the actress said brightly. “My mission is to keep them
away from screens because when we raised our girls in Connecticut,
there was no TV in the house. I know children can have happy childhoods
without being mesmerized and stupefied by screens.” (Maybe she’s drawing
from her own admitted overdosing on MSNBC in the Trump era.)
Ms.
King said that Ms. Baranski was also nurturing to the crew. “If somebody
needs help, she is just going to quietly give it,” she said, adding
that when one crew member was injured and couldn’t work for months, Ms.
Baranski was one of the people who gave him money “so he could continue
to have food on the table.”
‘Thank God for Pilates and Talcum Powder’
When
“The Good Fight” began, the Kings assumed that Hillary Clinton would be
president. In the middle of filming the pilot, they had to retool. The
show began with an opening shot of Diane Lockhart, in a black dress and
pearls, with her mouth hanging open, watching Mr. Trump’s inauguration.
Now Diane is contending with the jaw-dropping idea that he may be
announcing another run for president (if he’s not in jail).
“Six
years later, can you believe that this guy is still in our brains,
taking up all this real estate?” Ms. Baranski said, biting into a
cookie. She blames the news media in large part. “Everything he said was
covered, every outrageous thing,” she said. “It gave him so much
traction.”
The show wades into thorny racial issues,
depicting a power struggle between Diane and Black partners who do not
want her at the top of the firm because of her race.
The Kings
were so impressed with Ms. Baranski’s ability to be sexy throughout her
60s that, for the final season, they put her character in a romantic
triangle with two men, Diane’s Republican husband (played by Gary Cole)
and a doctor (played by John Slattery) who gives her microdoses of a
hallucinogen to help her deal with the stress of voting rights being
threatened and Roe being overturned).
Ms. Baranski said she gushed
to Ms. King: “My God, I’ve just had the most wonderful day at work. I
was in bed between Gary Cole and John Slattery.”
Image
Credit...Paramount+
In
one scene in Season 4, Diane got dolled up in a black vinyl dominatrix
catsuit for her husband, Kurt, a taciturn conservative who works for the
Trump administration and the N.R.A., and who goes big-game hunting with
the Trump sons and gets shot, Dick Cheney-style.
“Thank
God for Pilates and talcum powder,” Ms. Baranski said dryly. “It took
four dressers and a lot of talc to get me in and out. This outfit
deserves more than one orgasm.”
Though Kurt’s political
ideology causes Diane agita, she is determined to reach across the
chasm. When he is dubious about the dominatrix outfit, she switches to
“an N.R.A. Barbie” look, adding a cowboy hat and a rifle.
“It’s a
way of keeping things lively in the bedroom,” Ms. Baranski explains,
“since they dare not talk politics in the dining room.”
Mo Rocca,
who has guest starred on “The Good Fight,” told me: “You don’t think,
‘This is sexy for an older couple.’ You just think it’s sexy. She’s
getting better as she gets older, which I think is really cool.”
The first phone maker to add satellite texting to its devices is... Huawei
Allison Johnson@allisonjo1
4 - 5 minutes
Huawei has announced the Mate 50 series, a day ahead of Apple’s September event and with a feature that the iPhone 14 is expected to offer:
the ability to send texts via satellite communication. The Mate 50 and
Mate 50 Pro will be able to send short texts and utilize navigation
thanks to China’s global BeiDou satellite network, allowing for
communication in areas without cellular signal.
1 day ago · The new Mate 50 series from Huawei delivers the first smartphones able to link with China's BeiDou global satellite navigation system.
IMAGE CREDIT ABOVE+Richard
Yu Chengdong, chief executive of Huawei Technologies Co’s consumer
business group, introduces the company’s new flagship smartphones, the
Mate 50 series, at a product launch on September 6, 2022. Photo: Weibo
7 hours ago · Huawei launched the flagship Mate 50 in China without 5G internet connectivity after U.S. sanctions cut off the Chinese tech company from ...
Smart Service Widgets, Convenient SuperHub, Enhanced Privacy and Security
Your Glamorous Mate
Symmetry Aesthetics, Refined Clous de Paris Pattern, Durable Kunlun Glass1, 6-Metre Water Resistance2
A New Era of Mobile Photography
Ultra Aperture XMAGE Camera, F1.4 Ultra-large Aperture, Adjustable Physical Aperture of 10 sizes, Super Night Mode, Professional Portrait, Super Macro
Performs Like a Champ
4700 mAh Battery3, SuperHold, SuperRender4, SuperStorage
Personal, Productive, and Private
Smart Service Widgets, Convenient SuperHub, Enhanced Privacy and Security
Clear as Crystal
Come for the tech, but stay for the view! The 120 Hz5 curved screen and individually calibrated colours make each frame a sight to see. And 1440 Hz PWM dimming6, which reduces flicker, gives your eyes the breather they deserve.
It Has Your Back... and Front!
Powerful Kunlun Glass keeps the screen out of
harm's way, as demonstrated by the first-ever five-star glass drop
resistance certification from Switzerland's SGS. The overall drop
resistance is boosted 10 times7.
Water Challenge? Accepted
HUAWEI Mate 50 Pro is built to handle whatever
life sprays its way, with IP68-rated splash, water, and dust resistance,
and an incredible 6 metres of water resistance2 on the Orange version.
Mark Zuckerberg training MMA is about as weird as you'd think it be | Boing Boing
Devin Nealy
5 - 6 minutes
"Self-defense is an essential skill that every human should have. Even if
it's minimal, the ability to intelligently navigate physical combat can
provide one with a massive psychological boon. Instead of walking
around with a heightened sense of insecurity, a self-defense
practitioner feels infinitely more secure in dangerous situations. Plus,
any student of a martial discipline learns an unspoken truth about
reality: understanding how to inflict physical harm typically makes you
less combative. Having a background in any marital discipline forces you
to assess every person with a sense of humility. You discover that
virtually anyone could have pugilistic skills and immediately gauge the
physical costs of a potential skirmish. . ."
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