Yeah. That's why I so wish someone would make a limited series about LBJ, his time in the Senate and his rise to power (say using the Caro books as a guide), because while an ambitious SOB who straddled the lines between the liberals and conservatives, and sucked up to the racist Southern bloc, there was also a deep…

Yeah, watching season 1 of House of Cards shortly after watching Season 3 of The Wire really made the political scheming and policies seem really flat and phony.

Yup. In reality, Frank's continuous scheming to sabotage a newly elected Democratic President would end in November 2014 with him going down by 30 points to a conservative Republican challenger a la 1994 and 2010, then shuffling off to a big payday on K Street.

The idea that a President could get down to single digit approval ratings has to be #3. Even at their worst, Nixon, Bush and Carter stayed in the high 20s. There's just a partisan floor there.

Except for that godawful negative ad that shows up. As cheap looking and crappy as real political ads are, how come no show or movie (The West Wing was bad at this too) ever seems to be able to come up with one that looks like a real thing?

I like them too, but mention that on the DS9 boards, and they'll eat us alive!

Perhaps because everyone on this show is playing Checkers for Slow Children?

….and, of course, yet another example of a "No, wait, that would actually destroy this person's political career" moment that just gets ignored on this show. It would take roughly 30 seconds for Republicans to make her the face of "The Democrats' 'real' War on Women."

Yes. If Frank were actually interesting as a character, it would be fun to just keep him as Vice President for a while, watching him work an office whose power entirely resides in influencing people with actual power. But the show just wants to keep hitting check points on that game board and is the lesser for it.

One of the greater problems with House of Cards is that Iago needs better Othellos.

Yea, except there's a lot of ways Tony could have a legitimate setback besides dying. Spacey seems to have as much trouble getting what he wants as Captain Janeway does teching the tech to get out of a spacial anomaly. And like Janeway, his decisions are never, ever, wrong.

I will say it handled investigative journalism better this time, with someone other than Kate Mara being a walking symbol of blogging millenials and dying newspapers, even if the entire campaign finance scheme was beyond stupid.

Yes. Malcolm Tucker is a magnificent bastard, but he's a fun magnificent bastard who more or less makes sense!

I'd say the presence of MSNBC's nearly entire lineup says something about both their journalistic ethics, and their ratings, and neither of them are flattering.

It's hard to have chills when your lead is such a cartoon super-villain that nobody's a threat to him ever. When you know he's always going to win, there's no tension and no stakes. When theres's no stakes, his evil doesn't feel all that frightening or transgressive.

The funny thing is that, as Biden pointed out a few weeks ago, the power of the Vice Presidency is all influence and relationships, not constitutional. So there's a really interesting show that could have just been made out of an Underwood Vice Presidency, scheming and battling other people for influence with the…

It's very telling how much the show buys in to Frank's hype that the show doesn't realize that destroying the Presidency in order to save it is a fool's play. All Underwood has to look forward to is the Ford Administration: A crushing midterm, two years where the Congress reasserts control over the executive branch if…

Yeah, that 88 team had David Robinson, Dan Majerle, and Danny Manning in terms of experienced senior college players that were great, successful, pros (and Manning was amazing before his knees betrayed him with the Clippers). But everyone agrees John Thompson miscoached that team, picked his own guy in Charles Smith…

I don't see how the Lithuanian defeat specifically is a huge upset: The US had already lost by 19 to a Puerto Rico team that went only 3-2 in the group stages at that point, had only barely beaten Lithuania in 2000 (85-83 in the Semis), had won the Bronze in three straight games, and it was a historically weak US…

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