I always appreciate a show willing to burn through plot.

Hmm. I would really like a "Doc brings in a killer fungus" twist.

It wasn't like a high-speed escape where viewers gloss over The Obvious Thing To Try in the heat of the action—he was just standing there, often in slow motion, in easy range for our heroes. A head shot to him and his guys would seem to solve their problems. A fatal shot anywhere on their center mass, really.

This is what I find so alarming this year. I knew there was a streak of authoritarianism in the US, but the delighted embrace of outright, literal fascism still takes me by surprise. Like there is no irony when his supporters rejoice in how like Mao, Mussolini, or Saddam he will crush all opposition.

He would totally not have dragged us into wars (record scratch) hey if the Iranians make GESTURES then we're bombing Iran.

I keep thinking of Johnson acknowledging that civil rights would cost Dems the south for a generation. Wouldn't they rather take the hit of making the most toxic part of the party go off and run on the White America ticket, so they would stop bleeding moderates and stinking to high heaven in the eyes of young people…

On a serious note: Both parties should adopt a rule that you must release 10 years of taxes. When you file to run on their ballot, probably; after the first couple of primaries at the very latest. If you cannot make 10 years of taxes appear boring, you are far too inept to ask the rest of us to legally tie ourselves…

"The rest of us are firmly lashing ourselves to the anvil that is Trump, and we expect you to climb in this basket with us…"

I honestly thought they were going to spend 2009 doing that, showing up in 2012 without dragging along the angry racist unhinged limb they have to keep explaining. Surely sometime?

Katrina would have hit, but the head of FEMA would have probably been someone vaguely familiar with emergency response. It could have been downgraded from "shitshow full of radioactive sharks" to "shitshow."

The whole thread goes off into some weird "where did all these people come from?" territory, with a broad, all-genders-and-orientation approach to "If I WANT something, and ask politely, who are they to tell me no?" And more rational people arguing that if people do not work in or adjacent to field A, it is weird to…

Second-hand, but someone at TS had a good analogy:

As framing: I would never want to accuse the Democrats of competence, so I'm sure this is happenstance rather than an elaborate plan. (Though concentrating on fundraising in August, campaigning post Labor Day, probably is a deliberate plan.)

According to various fact-checking sites, the birther nonsense started with some die-hard Clinton supporters, but not with the campaign. Nor was it propagated by the campaign. (Which makes sense, as it is stupid. Sometimes campaigns do say "yeah, going there would backfire horribly all over us" and sensibly move on to…

Interesting observation from someone who had a lot of sympathy with the far left, while being seasoned enough to want to accomplish more than sitting on the sidelines being pure: A lot of people have One Special Cause that is their big issue. And because of this, they tend to be careful not to step on anyone else's…

It's interesting: I was listening to some Carl Hiassan nonfiction pieces on a long drive, written 10-15 years back, and he hits Bush 2 repeatedly on his utter failure on the environment. That he never met a big business proposal he wasn't eager to steamroll environmental protections to enact. Iraq is treated as the…

Rather than hit him on unfair (they might want to be billionaires and pay no taxes, because smart deals), hit him on "he's not a billionaire, he just plays one on TV via an elaborate shell game with Russian money." Which undercuts the entire rationale for how he'd do such an awesome job as president, because he claims…

One can argue that the reason for maternity leave is just to recover from childbirth, not to care for a newborn. (I don't agree with it, but it's at least a logically consistent viewpoint.) But she should have understood that was the argument that she was making. Instead it seems like there is no depth on this…

Raising this now might be a way to pivot to that "half" estimate of the basket of deplorables. Because guess whose supporters, more than half think the president was born in Kenya, in the absence of any evidence to that?

One probably has to give a quasi-pass here, because if your height is 6'3" when you get out of bed in the morning, it's probably 6'2" by afternoon. (I'm too short to be affected by this, but my husband is this height.)