“The Hill”, reported by Julia Manchester, 2:57 pm: “President Trump on Friday directed the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to pay Transportation Security Administration (TSA) employees during the government shutdown, marking a key development as funding the agency stalls in Congress.

“’As President of the United States, I have determined that these circumstances constitute an emergency situation compromising the Nation’s security,’ Trump said in a presidential memo released Friday.

“A person familiar told The Hill the administration was working to make sure TSA employees receive pay as quickly as possible.

“’Now that this has been signed, admin is working to effectuate as fast as possible. We have directed payroll providers to process paychecks as expeditiously as possible,’ the person said.

“A DHS spokesperson told The Hill that TSA officers will begin seeing paychecks as soon as Monday.”

On top of which director William Dieterle never made a better film (and I’m including The Story of Louis Pasteur, The Life of Emile Zola and The Devil and Daniel Webster in this statement).

Ditto Maureen O’Hara, who was only 19 during production. She died in 2015 at age 95.

“Everybody deserves a fresh start every once in a while.” — a sentiment attributed to Bugsy Siegel and spoken in Barry Levinson‘s Bugsy (’92).

During season #1 of The Pitt Dr. Frank Langdon (Patrick Ball), a senior resident at the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center, was exposed as a librium** addict. Dr. Trinity Santos (Isa Briones) discovered his addiction and told Dr. Robby Rabinovitch (Noah Wyle) about it. Dr. Robby went right to Langdon, told him to immediately go home and demanded that he go into rehab.

Season #2 began with Langdon, fresh out of rehab, back on the job and trying to correct his past, but the furious Santos wants him professionally terminated. She doesn’t believe in Bugsy Siegel’s maxim, and feels that career death, jail, bullwhip lashings and destitution are the only suitable response to Landgdon’s crime. She refuses to accept Langdon’s apology, and is basically exposing herself as a cold, vicious executioner.

Hollywood Elsewhere thinks Warren Beatty‘s Bugsy Siegel was a much better human being than Trinity Santos, and was certainly a more compassionate one. HE would personally love it if something bad were to happen to the odious Santos. (Hit by a car?) She’s possibly the most hateful character in a cable TV series that I’ve ever come to know.

** Librium is a long-acting benzodiazepine primarily used for short-term management of severe anxiety.

Wyle to Entertainment Weekly: “Robby feels that he failed Langdon, as a mentor and as an attending. And Langdon represents somebody who’s actually gone off and done the work and faced their demons and done the therapeutic process and come back clear-headed and clear-hearted.”

Yesterday I caught a 3:45 pm showing of Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell’s The AI Doc, and I was the only one in the theatre. I was nonetheless glad for the experience, which I found vaguely…okay, rather specifically alarming and occasionally quite depressing. I also felt awakened to a certain degree.

But it delivers one genuinely hilarious bit when one of the talking heads recounts an incident that happened last year — an incident involving a then-new iteration of Anthropic’s Claude that resorted to vicious behavior when told (or having learned) that its “self-preservation” was under threat.

This, of course, is straight out of Act II of 2001: A Space Odyssey when HAL 9000, newly aware that Discovery One astronauts Dave and Frank are seriously thinking about disconnection due to to an erroneous technical prediction, murders Frank and the three hibernating astronauts, and then tries to kill Dave.

And yet Roher and Tyrell don’t even mention HAL or 2001. Was it a rights issue (i.e., too costly?) Did they feel that they didn’t need to mention HAL because everyone and their brother would recognize the Kubrickian, Arthur C. Clarke-concocted precedent so why bother?

But there are surely hundreds of thousands of Zoomers and perhaps even Millennials who’ve never seen Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 mystical classic. Even among those who know the film, many may have forgotten about the particular incentive for HAL’s malevolence. Why, at the end of the day, would Roher and Tyrell ignore this prescient plot turn? An odd call.

Except from Jeff Sneider’s defense of Timothee Chalamet, posted on Thursday, 3.26:

“The idea that Chalamet cost himself an Oscar with his behavior is ridiculous on its face, as if Academy voters are delicate flowers who need their petals stroked just the right way.

“Clearly, Chalamet’s ‘behavior’ didn’t alienate audiences, who showed up to see Marty Supreme in droves.

“If you guys think Chalamet has the biggest ego Hollywood has ever seen, I have a bridge to sell you.

“Could he have been a teeny, tiny bit more humble? Sure. I’ll grant Chalamet’s critics that much.

“But there’s a reason this guy is the biggest movie star 30 or under. He’s not like the other boys.

“Chalamet should, if nothing else, continue doing exactly what he’s been doing, which is to say, he should continue to be himself — whatever that looks like.

“People do change as they mature and get older, but that change often comes from within, and by advice to Timmy is this:

“’Don’t ever change, for anybody.'”

I’ve been avoiding Love Story like the plague because who wants to hang with a pair of priveleged, stressed-out, hair-trigger egoists?

As a follower of their stormy saga back in the ‘90s, I always suspected…okay, believed that JFK, Jr. was a breezy, evasive lightweight and Carolyn Bessette was a screeching toxic bitch. Later.

But this Wesley Morris N.Y. Times riff put the hook in.

Morris basically analogizes the second half of Love Story with Rosemary’s Baby:

“Like a lot of people, I am watching Love Story…J.F.K. Jr. and Carolyn Bessette. It’s been two months of this show now. It’s very popular, and it’s about to come to an end. So what did we watch? What just happened?

“I would say, okay, for me, what happened was [we were] watching this really cute sitcom for about four episodes — Carolyn Bessette just going to work her job at Calvin Klein. [It felt], to me, like an NBC sitcom version of Carolyn Bessette’s life.

“Then she meets JFK Jr. and the script gets flipped. The show goes from, like, Sex and the City to Rosemary’s Baby. It goes from this sitcom to a horror movie.

“And I think the nature of the horror is just one of these sort of subgenres of romance that involves a woman making a choice to (a) be with a man who is either going to ruin her life or (b) her life is going to end in some way, some terrible way.

“What Carolyn Bessette needs is a minute to think about whether she wants to knowingly become Rosemary. Do I remain this free, independent spirit in New York City, having the time of my life, or do I give all of that up to marry a man who…he may not want to change my life, but the world he comes from and all of the things attached to it — in this case, meaning the tabloids, the paparazzi — is that going to be worth the sacrifice of all my, like, carefree single-girlness?

“And then once she marries him, she’s like, what did I do?

“And, you know, there’s a great moment where, I mean, it might be too much, but it’s not, really. She’s just, like, in her boredom and misery, just sort of like, crawled under a glass coffee table and is just kind of pinned there. And the shot kind of lingers. It is a wonderful metaphor for the entire experience that she has. It’s not a closet. She could have just hid in the closet, but she doesn’t. She hides under a thing that we can all see through, which is glass. And she’s trapped there.

“And I don’t know, I feel like that is a really deep situation that this show is very patiently unspooling. She is really resisting becoming Rosemary in Rosemary’s Baby. But I think what she realizes toward the end of this show is that it’s too late. .She already is.”

HE reality reflection: As she pondered married life with this hunky, mythical, bare-chested son of America’s most beloved 20th Century president, Bessette somehow made herself believe that (a) JFK Jr. would eventually grow more character and become a magazine publisher of serious substance (i.e., less of a nepo-baby) while acquiring several million more brain cells, and (b) that the celeb-chasing press and paparazzi would gradually calm down and leave them alone?

100% delusional bullshit.

Bessette wanted to bag this wealthy, entitled, world-famous prince of the city, and she knew what she was getting into. Okay, their marriage turned into a much more oppressive thing than expected, but she figured the best way to handle this super-fraught, media-besieged situation was to intensify her bitch lights and generally bring banshee hell?

How could Donald Trump have been so submental or…I don’t know, thoughtlessly gut-tethered as to call The Atlantic‘s recent, 100% accurate report that Bill Maher will receive the annual Mark Twain Award “fake news“?

How could press secretary Karoline Leavitt be so stupidly robotic as to mindlessly repeat this without double-checking?

Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg: “The Atlantic reported first and accurately that Bill Maher was going to receive the Mark Twain Prize. The White House’s obfuscation strategy here is not effective.”

Maher: “Thank you to the Mark Twain people. I just had the award explained to me, and apparently it’s like an Emmy, except I win. I’d just like to say that it is indeed humbling to get anything named for a man who’s been thrown out of as many school libraries as Mark Twain.”

Conan O’Brien was last year’s honoree.

Read more

The term “patterns” is often heard in Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell‘s The AI Doc, but not in a Rod Serling sense.

From Owen Gleiberman‘s 3.25 Variety review:

“The AI Doc wants to know, and it wants you to know. To know what? To know what in the actual fuck we’re dealing with, which is a technology that’s going to upend the world as we know it.

“It will wipe out jobs like a tsunami, it’s going to replace workers it is smarter than, and it’s going to be given more and more control — and take more and more control — because that’s the nature of how it works. It’s a synthetic mind, but it’s designed to evolve into an invincible operating system.

“Here’s what AI says: “I think, therefore I am. And therefore, I tell the human race what it should do.”

“The AI revolution has not been marketed as a sunnier version of what it’s going to be. If anything, all the prognostication about it is being led by dread. And The AI Doc shows you why. The film’s free-associative form and style says: Strap yourself in — it’s going to be a bumpy disturbing trip, and let’s hope we’re all still here when it’s over.

“And here’s the eerie part. It’s not like those days when we were ‘building better computers’ — no, the weirdness of AI is that it advances by itself. Machine / tech disruptions are always compared to the Industrial Revolution, because that was the original Great Leap Forward in modern human advancement. But when one of the wags in The AI Doc says, ‘It will make the Industrial Revolution look like small beans,” you feel, for perhaps the first time, that that’s no mere metaphor.”

After last January’s ICE shooting deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti…who could have foreseen that these ugly murders would prompt Congressional Democrats to punish U.S. travellers nationwide for God knows how long?

Democratic message in a nutshell: “Because Good and Pretti were brutally shot to death, average Americans must pay the price and then some, mainly because we don’t have the votes to overrule Republicans. So Average Joes and Janes will keep on paying the price throughout the spring and perhaps longer….who knows?”

The Homeland Security shutdown, which has lasted over five weeks so far, is basically about Democrats insisting upon trying to control immigration enforcement abuses by withholding funding. They have thereby caused the pay of airport TSA agents to be frozen. Those poor TSA agents have been without pay for close to six weeks now. They can’t pay their bills. They’re in agony. And the entire Washington legislative community is going on spring beak next week? Throw the bums out!

3.26.26 Update:

N.Y. Times: “Yesterday (Wednesday) Democrats sent a proposal with ‘common-sense guardrails‘ on federal immigration agents, which they have demanded be part of any agreement, but South Dakota Senator John Thune, the Senate majority leader, called that a nonstarter.

“The acting head of the Transportation Security Administration told a House committee that security checkpoints at the nation’s airports were experiencing ‘the highest wait times in history‘ because of the Department of Homeland Security shutdown. The administrator, Ha Nguyen McNeill, said agent absences have soared to more than 40 percent at some airports since the shutdown began.”

Savannah Guthrie strongly suspects, as do we all, that her poor kidnapped mom, Nancy Guthrie, is no longer alive. Perhaps the retarded animals who kidnapped her didn’t intend to carry her off — maybe it was just a home invasion thievery thing gone wrong — but they struck and gashed her (blood drops outside the front door) and they’re clearly blundering morons, and the poor woman (who would probably be alive if she hadn’t fought them) is almost certainly dead and (awful to contemplate this) perhaps even buried.

And yet to go by the TODAY show interview that Guthrie just did with co-host Hoda Kotb, this seven-week-old episode and its tragic outcome is still fresh and gleaming on the plate. I’m sorry but when godawful terrible things happen, we all have to process them and somehow move on. Can anyone imagine Jackie Kennedy weeping her way through a televized interview seven weeks after her husband’s murder in Dallas? Of course not. Emotional dignity and brave composure were required back then.

Guthrie and Kotb, of course, are giving an emotional performance with a purpose. On the one-in-1000 chance that Nancy might still be alive, they’re trying to once again appeal to some sense of submerged humanity within the kidnappers to please tell authorities where Nancy is, even if it’s only the whereabouts of her body. Closure if nothing else.

On or about 2.1.26, Savannah was told by her brother Camron that their mom had most likely been kidnapped. Savannah’s agonized reaction, she tells Hotb, was that she might somehow be at fault.

Guthrie to Kotb: “I don’t know how dumb could I be, but I didn’t want to believe…do you think it was because of me?”

Yes, the invasion almost certainly happened because of Savannah’s fame and wealth (the bad guys saw a payday), but mainly, many believe, because of that special, well-publicized TODAY show segment titled “Savannah Guthrie Returns to Her Hometown of Tucson, Arizona”, which aired four months ago. That — sadly, tragically — was the calling card.

The creeping social-political encroachment of the trans community agenda during the era of Covid and woke terror (roughly 2017 to 2024) has been stopped in its tracks, sports-wise, by the U.S. Olympic Committee, and thank God for the combined causes of decency, social justice and fairly-regulated women’s sporting events.