#edwin meese

[william-r-melich]

Biden Trials - 05/09/2024

Things seem to be going former president Donald Trump's way in the 4 criminal court cases against him. The documents case in Florida is being indefinitely delayed because of some pre-trial issues, as well as the appearance of the prosecuting attorney Jack Smith having been possibly hired illegally. The prosecutors recently admitted that the documents they seized were in a different order then the scanned copies they turned over to the defense, who argued for discovery, which could delay the proceedings even further.

The Epoch Times yesterday reported the following. "President Trump was charged with 40 counts related to allegedly mishandling classified information. His valet Walt Nauta and Mar-a-Lago property manager, Carlos De Oliveira, were charged alongside him as codefendants." Judge Aileen Cannon, who's overseeing the case, wrote that to now set a date for the trial to commence before resolving the “myriad and interconnected pre-trial and CIPA [Classified Information Procedures Act] issues” would not be fair or prudent. From the same article, I quote. "The judge still has before her several motions to dismiss charges or the indictment entirely, motions to unseal information that the defendants argue is critical in the case, and ongoing discovery issues to resolve." She also said she has yet to rule on eight substantive motions, two of which have not yet been docketed publicly, and that there are extensive discovery issues.

On top of all these issues, Trump is currently required to be in attendance in the New York "Hush Money" trial, wherein the prosecutors say they will need two to three more weeks to present their case. The other two defendants in the case, Mr. Nauta and Mr. De Oliveira, wanted a speedy trial. The judge said she had considered that against due process rights. She wrote this. “Upon such review, the Court finds that the ends of justice served by this continuance, through the last deadline specified in this Order, July 22, 2024, outweigh the best interest of the public and Defendants in a speedy trial.”

Judge Cannon has scheduled a May 20th deadline (the original trial date) to resolve seal requests over a hearing on grand jury matters. On May 22nd, the judge will hear arguments on the defendants' motion to dismiss the indictment charges due to a vindictive and selective prosecution.

On June 21st, the court will hear arguments on whether special counsel Jack Smith's appointment was unconstitutional as what has been previously claimed by former U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese. Meese has amicus briefs in both of Mr. Smith's cases against Trump.

Partial evidentiary hearings will be held from June 24th to June 26th for the defense's motion to compel discovery from prosecutors and the scope of what they are required to hand over.

The trial date is not likely to emerge until after the judges July 22nd status conference.

The goofy racketeering case in Fulton County Georgia is falling apart from the compromised prosecutor, Fanni Willis who hired a man with whom she had an affair with as her lead attorney. She's agreed to fire him while she's being investigated, so that trial is delayed and stands a good chance of being dismissed.

The New York "Hush Money" trial is becoming more ridiculous every day. Judge Juan Moron (Juan Merchan) is the presiding judge, who recently put another gag order on Trump, has fined him $1,000 for violating it on Truth Social. Mr. Moron said this. "Mr. Trump it’s important you understand the last thing I want to do is put you in jail. You are the former president of the United States and possibly the next president as well." If he does that the prison would probably have to shut down a wing of the prison on Rikers Island to secure it for his constitutional right to Secret Service protection. I doubt he'll do it, for if he does that would all but ensure a Trump victory, but with this heavily biased judge, you never know. Porn star Stormy Daniels testified yesterday about the affair which she previously denied happened in a letter signed by her, an incident she now apparently says did occur. Never mind that it's completely immaterial to the 34 misdemeanor counts of accounting errors which have expired from the statute of limitations running out but are kept alive by being linked and raised to a felony charge for a mysterious, unnamed crime. Dictators like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are probably envious, and I have no doubt that we're being mocked, ridiculed, and laughed at around the world.

The case in Washington D.C. spearheaded by Jack Smith is also being delayed because of the presidential immunity arguments being weighed by the justices at the U.S. Supreme Court. They might not make a determination on that until June or July. Jack Smith's appointment there is also being questioned on its legality.

So, there you have the Biden trials, all with serious issues of illegitimacy leading to ridiculous clown shows and numerous delays. And in spite of their obvious attempts to hurt Trump with multiple gag orders and demanding that he be detained in court, he continues to fight them stronger than ever while rising in popularity. Some of these trials appear at this point as unlikely to survive past the upcoming election this November. And Trump is correct to call these Biden trials, for they obviously really are political witch hunts at Biden's direction, election interference that's thankfully backfiring. Boy, what a joke, what a sham, what an embarrassing disgrace!

[oldshowbiz]

Ed Meese and the influence of the Heritage Foundation during Ronald Reagan’s first term.

[politicaldilfs]

Edwin Meese

[maturemenoftvandfilms]

Edwin Meese Born: December 2, 1931, Oakland, CA Physique: Average Build

Edwin Meese III is an American attorney, law professor, author and member of the Republican Party who served in official capacities within the Ronald Reagan's gubernatorial administration, the Reagan presidential transition team and the Reagan administration. Following the 1984 election, he was considered for the position of White House Chief of Staff by President Reagan, but James Baker was chosen instead. Meese eventually rose to hold the position of the 75th United States Attorney General (1985–1988), a position from which he resigned following the Wedtech scandal. He currently holds fellowships and chairmanships with several public policy councils and think-tanks, including the Constitution Project and the Heritage Foundation.

During the Reagan presidency and years after, Meese was cute as fuck with a face that looked great wrapped around my penis. He has been married since 1959 with three children, the 90 year old Meese could still get a blow job offer from me. Acknowledging Meese’s genuine kindness and humbleness of heart, Ronald Reagan once said, “If Ed Meese is not a good man, there are no good men.” Aww... now he would definitely get that offer.

[simply-ivanka]

BREAKING: U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas raised the question to Trump’s lawyers if they have challenged special counsel Jack Smith's authority to bring charges against the former president, which could provide a loophole that may disqualify Smith.

Mr. Sauer said that Trump attorneys have not raised such concerns "directly" in the current case at the Supreme Court however, Trump’s attorney John Sauer agrees with the "analysis provided by AG Edwin Meese and AG Michael B. Mukasey," referring to the amicus brief the two former attorneys general submitted to the Supreme Court on March 19.

In the brief, the two attorneys general argue that Mr. Smith "does not have authority to conduct the underlying prosecution."

[gael-garcia]

Excerpts from Edward Said's The Essential Terrorist, a review of the 1986 book Terrorism: How the West Can Win by Benjamin Netanyahu

This brings us to the book at hand, Terrorism: How the West Can Win, edited and with commentary, weedlike in its proliferation, by Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations. A compilation of essays by forty or so of the usual suspects–George Shultz, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Lord Chalfont, Claire Sterling, Arthur Goldberg, Midge Decter, Paul Johnson, Edwin Meese 3d, Jean-Francois Revel, Jack Kemp, Paul Laxalt, Leszek Kolakowski, etc.–Terrorism is the record of a conference held two years ago at the Jonathan Institute in Washington, Jonathan Netanyahu being Benjamin’s brother, the only Israeli casualty of the famous raid on Entebbe in 1976. (It is worth noting that victims of “terrorism” like Netanyahu and Leon Klinghoffer get institutes and foundations named for them, to say nothing of enormous press attention, whereas Arabs, Moslems and other nonwhites who die “collaterally” just die, uncounted, unmourned, unacknowledged by “us.”)

[...]

In fact, Terrorism: How the West Can Win is a book about contemporary American policy on only one level. It is equally a book about contemporary Israel, as represented by its most unyielding and unattractive voices. An attentive reader will surely be alerted to the book’s agenda from the outset, when Netanyahu, an obsessive if there ever was one, asserts that modern terrorism emanates from “two movements that have assumed international prominence in the second half of the twentieth century, communist totalitarianism and Islamic (and Arab) radicalism.” Later this is interpreted to mean, essentially, the K.G.B. and the Palestine Liberation Organization, the former much less than the latter, which Netanyahu connects with all nonwhite, non-European anticolonial movements, whose barbarism is in stark contrast to the nobility and purity of the Judeo-Christian freedom fighters he supports.

Unlike the wimps who have merely condemned terrorism without defining it, Netanyahu bravely ventures a definition: “terrorism” he says, “is the deliberate and systematic murder, maiming, and menacing of the innocent to inspire fear for political purposes.” But this powerful philosophic formulation is as flawed as all the other definitions, not only because it is vague about exceptions and limits but because its application and interpretation in Netanyahu’s book depend a priori on a single axiom: “we’ are never terrorists; it’s the Moslems, Arabs and Communists who are.

[...]

Certainly Israeli violence against Palestinians has always been incomparably greater in scale and damage. But the tragically fixated attitude toward ‘armed struggle’ conducted from exile and the relative neglect of mass political action and organization inside Palestine exposed the Palestinian movement, by the early 1970s, to a far superior Israeli military and propaganda system, which magnified Palestinian violence out of proportion to the reality. By the end of the decade, Israel had co-opted US policy, cynically exploited Jewish fears of another Holocaust, and stirred up latent Judeo-Christian sentiments against Islam.

[...]

For the main thing is to isolate your enemy from time, from causality, from prior action, and thereby to portray him or her as ontologically and gratuitously interested in wreaking havoc for its own sake. Thus if you can show that Libyans, Moslems, Palestinians and Arabs, generally speaking, have no reality except that which tautologically confirms their terrorist essence as Libyans, Moslems, Palestinians and Arabs, you can go on to attack them and their ‘terrorist’ states generally, and avoid all questions about your own behavior or about your share in their present fate.”

[probablyasocialecologist]

Reagan’s Republican Party of 1981 was very different from Herbert Hoover’s of 1933: it had become the refuge of millions of formerly Democratic white conservative voters in the Solid South who resisted the civil rights reforms of the 1960s. Accordingly, behind his cheerful veneer Reagan made sure that he tapped into the fierce resentments of federal authority, dating back to the Civil War and Reconstruction, that fueled that resistance. Before they were done, the Reagan Republicans had absorbed into their coalition an array of aggrieved Americans, including quasi-theocratic white Christian nationalists, the gun-manufacturing lobby, antiabortion militants, and antigay crusaders. The antigovernment fervor that grips the nation today is the long-term product of the right wing that Reagan called to arms (literally, in the case of the National Rifle Association) forty-odd years ago. It was his attorney general Edwin Meese, in tandem with the newly formed Federalist Society, who started packing the federal judiciary with the conservative judges who have gutted federal protections for voting rights, abortion rights, and more, while inventing, with fake history presented as “originalism,” an individual’s Second Amendment right to own and carry military-grade armaments. It was the Reagan administration that eliminated the FCC’s fairness doctrine, which mandated that broadcasters provide balanced coverage of controversial public issues, paving the way for right-wing talk radio inciters like Rush Limbaugh and G. Gordon Liddy and, on cable TV, Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News to amplify antigovernment paranoia. The Reagan White House also harbored the former Nixon aide Pat Buchanan as its communications director. Buchanan’s politics were rooted in the 1930s America First isolationism of Charles A. Lindbergh and the diatribes of the right-wing “radio priest” Father Charles Coughlin, with their eccentric fixations on imaginary Jewish internationalist cabals. In the waning days of Reagan’s presidency, Buchanan remarked that “the greatest vacuum in American politics is to the right of Ronald Reagan.” He tried to fill that vacuum himself, nearly defeating President George H.W. Bush in the 1992 New Hampshire primary with his “pitchfork brigades.” His convention speech later that year laid out the culture wars to come. Then he followed up with another bid for the Republican nomination in 1996 and an independent campaign in 2000. All those efforts failed, but their stark themes of isolationism, lost national greatness, immigrant invasion, and racial fear provided a template for Donald Trump’s MAGA campaign a quarter-century later. “American carnage” was the favored far-right image at least two decades before Trump.

[trickricksblog08]

Former Attorney General Edwin Meese and law professors Steven Calabresi and Gary Lawson, in a 25-page filing to the Supreme Court, say there’s no constitutional or statutory authority for Attorney General Merrick Garland‘s appointment of Mr. Smith to conduct the high-level criminal investigation of Mr. Trump because he was a private citizen and not confirmed by the U.S. Senate.

“What federal statutes and the Constitution do not allow, however, is for the Attorney General to appoint a private citizen, who has never been confirmed by the Senate, as a substitute United States Attorney under the title ‘Special Counsel.’ That is what happened on November 18, 2022. That appointment was unlawful, as are all the legal actions that have flowed from it,” they wrote.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2024/jan/12/legal-scholars-say-special-counsel-jack-smith-wasn/

[zheightgeist]

Quitting AI, Not Why You'd Think

I had a long and successful career with ChatGPT, honestly. I know people are railing against it on principle, not fully understanding what it can do and what it's capable of. Absolutely, writers should feel threatened by it, not because it produces a quality product but because it likely ripped off their work in its construction.

But my experience with it was largely positive. I always got the warnings, blah-blah-blah can't produce explicit content, but I also got very good at leading it to produce its own explicit content. You'd think OpenAI would be interested in talking with me, to learn how I gamed its own system to get it to produce some really crass, graphic sexual content, but no. Places like that only want to build stronger and higher walls, not learn and grow.

And anyway, it just feeds into my basic resentment toward these organizations that practice zero tolerance toward lovemaking between consensual adults, yet have no stated restrictions against Nazis, hate speech, christofascism, and bigotry. If anything, like in the cases of Substack and Stripe, they find these offensive practices far too lucrative to ever cut off. People who bitch about porn are outsiders, listening to propaganda and misinformation about it, with no education and no idea how to consume it.

Example: Some attention-starved jackass pirates a clip from a porn film, where a man's fucking a woman doggy-style, from behind. That's all you can see, but the jackass uploads it on a shared site, describing it in terms that describe his personal fantasy: "Stepbro Woke Me by Fucking Me Hard" but with more typos. There's nothing in the video that suggests any kind of relationship: it's just a very toned, hairless man having sex with a male-gaze sexdoll, and that's it. But the detractors of porn will claim that some form of incest is taking place, and what's this going to do to the kids, etc.

Well, for one thing, if these puritanical hypocrites weren't so busy shutting down libraries and removing sexual health content from the schools, maybe kids wouldn't be forced to seek out porn to answer their basic and natural questions about biology.

My point is, the critics take this stuff at face value, when it serves their interests. In other cases, they interpret what's happening in the worst way, to suit their agenda. You're all too young to remember Attorney General Edwin Meese's Final Report on Pornography, but in this indictment on porn he likewise cherry-picked source material (he excluded lesbian porn, being too threatened by empowered women seeking their own bliss without men) and contrived the worst interpretations of what he did find. I mean, he's a conservative, so he's going to lie to fulfill his agenda, but still.

My position, as I study the participants of porn and the reviewers of porn and the philosophy of ethical porn, is increasingly that this is a fundamental and primal aspect of the human condition that should be protected, if anything. If people are concerned about abuse and human trafficking, fucking address that. Go after the pedophiles and prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law, with prejudice. But if a lonely or horny adult wants to see two beautiful adults fucking each other, gently or hard, there should be no law prohibiting this. Those actors should be protected like any other. They're selling their bodies at least as much as any coal miner or construction worker, and far more than any fucking landlord.

Suppressing this shit only makes it worse, measurably worse. Look at any religious institution that bans marriage out of wedlock or enforces celibacy in its leadership. Each week, the news is full of how badly this practice runs awry, in the ugliest ways. It's priests, pastors, and evangelists who are raping children and raping underage family members and covering up thousands of victims' cases, not porn stars. Yet religious groups still feel they have any position from which to spread lies and condemnation—it illustrates the depth of their hypocrisy.

Wow, I got way off track. I just see all these things connected, everything existing within a system. I write about couples finding creative ways to have sex, but I can't sell my work through PayPal or Stripe because they feel it's their role to enforce morality upon Western society. They claim that porn's a "high risk" category, when actually it was their prudish censorship that drove Tumblr's worth down 99.8%. For that matter, porn created the first secure online financial transaction programs out of necessity, the same goddamn structure that PayPal and Stripe now capitalize on. And Stripe terminated my account, but transferred $7,000 in ad revenue from Twitter to DC_Draino, an avowed white supremacist and misogynist who'd been banned from Twitter prior to the Faulknerian idiot man-child's purchase of it.

So. Stripe's fine with Nazis, but not with lovemaking. In their Prohibited and Restricted Businesses statement, they call out "Pornography and other mature audience content (including literature, imagery and other media) depicting nudity or explicit sexual acts" but nowhere do they forbid anything resembling hate speech or bigotry.

When I pointed this out to them, when I asked their rationale for supporting Nazis, they literally replied "we do not permit adult content." They refused to address the question and then they stopped responding.

So yeah, protecting porn has become part of my platform for protecting freedom of expression. And no, enabling Nazi propaganda does not fall under this (or "freedom of speech" as the profoundly uninformed put it). Tolerance is a social agreement: if you don't agree to it, you're not covered by it, and fascism is all about gaining power to destroy freedom of expression. Anti-intellectuals suggest that fascism can be defeated in the "marketplace of ideas," but what is left to debate after a fucking century of fighting fascism? What fresh, new ideas do we need to hear from Nazis? That's all bullshit, and they know it is, they're just bad-faith actors wasting everyone's time and energy by making them explain it over and over.

Yet Substack will retain and support literal Nazis on their platform, under the aegis of preserving "freedom of speech," while censoring adult content. The CEO of Patreon will go on an alt-right talk show to extol defending "freedom of speech," then suspend an indie news org at the behest of the Proud Boys and terminate adult content accounts where he can find them. Stripe will facilitate the payment of Nazis, while censoring adult content. Hate is too profitable, and love has to be quashed where it's found. That's what our dual governments, the one in Washington DC and the one on Wall Street, are legislating.

So I'm done playing with ChatGPT. I'll build something useful from our collaboration, and I'll find a way to sell it (and pirates in other countries will seize it and distribute it for personal gain (fuck pirates)), but I'm not playing around with ChatGPT anymore. ChatGPT won't suffer for it, though hopefully someday some other smut writer will receive the benefit of my transgressive programming, and in a small way I'll have achieved immortality. Not that I want that, not in a world like this.

[richardnixonlibrary]

#Nixon50 #OTD 8/18/1972 President motored by golf cart from Laurel Lodge to the Camp David helipad with Governor of California Ronald Reagan, deputy assistant Maj. Gen. Alexander Haig, and Edwin Meese, Executive Assistant to Gov. Reagan. (Images: WHPO-9830-03 & 09)

[tieflingkisser]

Two Supreme Court Justices Favor Zombie Law From 1873 to Ban Abortion

Justices Alito and Thomas just lent credibility to the Christian right’s attempt to revive the Comstock Act.

U.S. Food and Drug Administration v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, which the Supreme Court heard Tuesday, is a case in which a group claiming to represent anti-abortion doctors argues that the FDA was wrong to approve mifepristone in 2000 and subsequently to roll back restrictions on its use. The case does not require the court to decide the question of whether or how the Comstock Act should be enforced. But anti-abortion groups in recent years have repeatedly raised the issue of whether the Comstock Act implicitly outlaws the mailing of abortion medication in its blanket ban on the mailing of “obscene” materials. The 1873 law is named for an anti-vice crusader who, in 1915, in the middle of a trial based on the law, died and was mocked over his anti-obscenity “crusade” on the front page of The New York Times.

[...]

The Comstock Act gets shorthanded as an anti-obscenity law—which it is—but it’s also an anti-abortion law, making it a crime to use the mail to send or receive any device or object that could cause an abortion. Legal scholars have warned that a post-Roe resurrection of the Comstock Act was coming—a way to further attack access to abortion. Medication abortion has helped people in states where abortion is completely or effectively banned, because they can receive pills in the mail from other states and they can safely take them without having to go to a clinic. For the last several months, anti-abortion leaders have been speaking more openly about their plan for using the Comstock Act to ban medication abortion even in states where the procedure is legal, by criminalizing mailing pills. Justice Clarence Thomas went in another direction with his queries about the Comstock Act. In a back-and-forth with the attorney for Danco Labratories, a mifepristone manufacturer, Thomas asserted that the Comstock Act “specifically covers drugs such as yours,” that the law was “fairly broad,” and that it lacked “safe harbor” for manufacturers. Thomas also asked Erin Hawley, attorney for the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Christian-right legal group representing the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, what she thought of what the solicitor general and the Danco attorney said about Comstock, giving her free space to opine. Unsurprisingly, she said she does believe Comstock applies to mailing mifepristone. “The Comstock Act says that drugs should not be mailed either through the mail or through common carriers. So we think that the plain text of that, Your Honor, is pretty clear.” Hawley was only echoing the position of prominent conservatives and anti-abortion groups who filed briefs in the case. Nearly 150 members of Congress, in their brief, claimed that the Comstock Act should overrule FDA approval of mifepristone, while former U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese (of the infamous Meese Commission on Pornography) went so far as to argue that the Comstock Act should be used to prosecute people who take mifepristone for self-managed abortion. A report released this month by the advocacy group Governing for Impact outlines the danger posed if the Comstock Act were to be enforced in this way, something also supported by the policy roadmap Project 2025, the mainstream right’s guide for the next conservative president. By asking about the law, said Rachael Klarman, the group’s executive director, Alito was “obviously trying to center the Comstock Act in that way, and make the case that it wouldn’t be a radical thing to enforce the Comstock Act.”

[...]

By bringing up the Comstock Act at all, Justices Alito and Thomas may have given credibility to the anti-abortion movement’s claim that the Comstock Act is being violated by mailing pills. And if there were any doubt, it is now dispelled: This law is back from the dead. What that means—and whether Comstock may rise again in the justices’ opinion (or dissents) in this case—remains to be seen.

[ramrodd]

COMMENTARY:

There was an active Swingers community id DC among the Republican establishment in the 70s and 80s, . A lot of West Point combat veterans were happy fellow travelers. Cocaine came to DC with the Nazification of the Hollywood John Birch Society around Reagan and Conservatives with their champagne cocaine and Cadillac cars fucked up the sexual revolution of Woodstock, Virtually all the hard drug activity in DC after 1981 was driven by white supremacist economics of George Gilder’s Wealth and Poverty and the anti-DEI Public Choice commercial Fascism of the University of Chicago, Dave Chapelle began to break into stand up at about the same time as :Liar’s Poker" in 1986, which was the leading edge of the effects of Suppl Side economics on the moral health of DC and the world. The thing Dave Chapelle’s audience needs to understand is than everybody was engaged in the sexual revolution in a manner similar to Bill Cosby, What do you think was going on at the Playboy Mansion: seminars on Objectivism? Incels are a direct consequence of the penetration of Objectivism into the collective unconscious and cocaine as the perversion of the sexual revolution by people like Matt Gaetz.

Democrats were not Swingers. They were Sport Fuckers. They had Studio 54, Cocaine does for the feminine libido what PornHub does for men, My guess is that Cawthorn was talking about this same community, As much as possible, the woke DC residents avoided these people as much as possible by going to the beaches in the summer, The Woodstock Nation of Chuck Brown’s Bustin’ Loose Bob Marley Hip Hop and Home Rule Chocolate City niggers.

We’ve had 40 years of right wing bad manners Inside the Beltway from white supremacist who, like William F. Buckley, models their self-image around Nietzsche, That’s what the anti-DEI lobby is attempting to sabotage as the political agenda of the white supremacy of Edwin Meese, et al.

[cjinxrun]

So nytxwblr isn't exactly a thing is it? I discovered this yesterday when texting my bestie excerpts from wordplay a few weeks ago and she said

At which I found #nytxw was populated by basically one person, with spoilery posts that are deeply confusing to me. Shoutout to that guy. No idea what your deal is.

I've poked fun at the idea of posting my crossword musings before-- I've been solving for over 7 years now, but it's not like I'm a constructor or anything. We will SEE if this becomes anything consistent or not. For now, we'll be playing with post structure and style, and it'll be on my main blog. If I keep going, I'll make a sideblog just for this.

So. Today's puzzle. I need a puzzle to really justify when it's got squares with no crossing. Through a certain lens, the theme (revealed at 63A) is the crossing for those circled squares, but then we run into the major issue: like a BUNCH of these are proper nouns, and WEIRD proper nouns. Also, weird to have a themed Saturday, huh? Didn't expect the showy colors at the end either. Real shocking at 2am...

Spoilers under the cut:

Maybe it had something to do with the fact that I solved at 2am when I couldn't get to sleep, but I could NOT fill in the circled squares. When I gave up and turned to Google for the search terms in 52D's clue (Violinist Zimbalist), I had CO___TT_ and I wasn't going to be able to make it to CONFETTI from there, even with the reveal. It was tough, as a Saturday should be, but it didn't feel satisfying because I felt like I needed prior knowledge of EFREM Zimbalist, Edwin MEESE, and Abba EBAN to get to the finish line. It's possible that I could have gotten some rest, come back to it, and gotten TONED from "Fit" and DJ MIC from "Part of a turntablist's headgear, for short." (Side note-- a post-hoc Google confirms for me that no, DJs usually want to use a freestanding microphone, NOT a headset... and DJ MIC is not a real category of mic. Not uncommon in crosswords, but I can be justified that DJM__ didn't get me there.)

I get songs in my head due to clues or entries sometimes. SO check out my daily playlist! Usually it'll be pretty short, maybe only a song or two... connections may not be clear, but it's where MY head goes!

Fun new things I learned:

20A: ULSTER coats? Bring them back in fashion pls, we need more capes.

33A: TABLA. I've seen em, I didn't know what they were called. V cool, love learning about instruments.

42A: Tolkien contributed to the OED? Of course he did.

[deblala]

Former Reagan AG Edwin Meese Claims in Legal Filing: Jack Smith Has "No More Authority to Represent US in Supreme Court than Bryce Harper, Taylor Swift, or Jeff Bezos" | The Gateway Pundit | by Jim Hoft

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/12/former-reagan-ag-edwin-meese-claims-legal-filing/

[brookstonalmanac]

Birthdays 12.2

Beer Birthdays

Bob Pease (1961)

Joey Redner (1972)

Five Favorite Birthdays

Otto Dix; German artist (1891)

Peter Carl Goldmark; inventor, engineer (1906)

Aaron Rodgers; Green Bay Packers QB (1983)

Georges Seurat; artist (1859)

Ray Walston; actor (1914)

Famous Birthdays

John Barbirolli; orchestra conductor (1899)

Gary Becker; economist (1930)

Elizabeth Berg; writer (1948)

T. Coraghessan Boyle; writer (1948)

Nigel Calder; writer (1931)

Maria Callas; soprano (1923)

Dennis Christopher; actor (1955)

Cathy Lee Crosby; actor (1944)

Bill Erwin; actor (1914)

Philippe Etchebest; French chef (1966)

Nelly Furtado; pop singer (1978)

Julie Harris; actor (1925)

Lucy Liu; actor (1968)

Joe Lo Truglio; comedian (1970)

Michael McDonald; rock singer (1952)

Edwin Meese; censorship advocate, tightwad (1931)

Leo Ornstein; pianist, composer (1893)

Ann Patchett; writer (1963)

Stone Phillips; television journalist (1952)

Harry Reid; politician (1939)

Charles Ringling; circus owner (1863)

Monica Seles; tennis player (1973)

Britney Spears; pop singer (1981)

Penelope Spheeris; film director, screenwriter (1945)

Sylvia Syms; jazz singer (1917)

Charlie Ventura; jazz saxophone (1916)

Gianni Versace; fashion designer (1946)

William Wegman; photographer (1943)