This. Carmela tried to “atone” for her complicity by making a big show out of “helping out at the church” and befriending her shitty sleazebag parish priest but she had no qualms at all about happily accepting Tony’s “blood money” as she saw fit. And not only that, but she frequently flaunted “her” wealth in front of…

Absolutely correct, she was brilliant in the role. Carmela was not some delicate flower being stomped into the ground by her wicked husband, she was fully complicit and enabled him at every corner. Some of my favorite scenes in the show involved Carmela and Artie’s wife Charmaine, an honest woman who despised the…

And she took him back as soon as it became apparent that she’d end up with nothing in a divorce. She agreed to take him back in exchange for Tony buying her a spec house to build and flip, with those profits going straight into her pocket. Carmela grew up in a mob family, she knew exactly who Tony was when she married…

No way re: Carmela. She was flat-out told she was complicit and flat-out told the only way to even try to make it right was to take the children and leave Tony and his life of crime behind. But she was so steeped in her brand of cognitive dissonance that she rationalized it all to herself as always and continued…

I once wrote an essay called “Reconsidering Patty Chase” upon my adult-aged rewatching of My So Called Life. I despised Patty as a teen and thought Graham was the coolest dad, but by the time I turned thirty, Patty became the character I most identified with. I have to give her props for holding it down with such…

The Cat in the Hat used to give me SO much anxiety as a kid. I did NOT understand the appeal of the Cat at all and empathized far too much with the Fish..

I had this same reaction as a kid. Honestly had an aversion to reading it to my kid as an adult because I just remembered it and the cat being upsetting and unsettling more than I really remembered the plot itself.

No this is a really good take.

Total agreement on Skylar White but you lost me with Carmela Soprano. She’s not Tony levels of immoral obviously but the show was pretty great at showing varying degrees of culpability in its non-Mob characters. Carmela had the opportunity to do the right thing on numerous occasions and chose not too. The most blunt…

The Fish in The Cat in the Hat should be at the top of this list. I know, in the cartoon it is voiced by a guy but the book does not assign that fish a gender and I would argue it is the ultimate Lame Bitch.

We are set up to hate the fish, when all it does is point out that we don’t know that cat and he should not be…

The mom from My So Called Life. She is running the family business even though it’s maybe not her calling. Letting her lame-assed husband flail around trying to figure out what he wants to be when he grows up even though he’s already fucking grown up and has two kids that will need some financial support as they…

Carmela was complicit in the whole thing, don’t compare Skyler to her. Carmela knew what Tony was when she met him, when she started dating him, when she married him, when she had kids with him. She knew where the money and the house and the cars and all of that came from. She was right there for everything, and when…

Sally Field in Mrs Doubtfire.

A quick internet search tells me that not only does United carry way more animals than other airlines, but that United checks dogs and cats and also rabbits and household birds, which most other airlines refuse. They also will transport brachycephalic dog breeds, which most other airlines refuse. So I’m sure that has…

“I prefer a litmus-test” - well, enjoy losing. As the Will Mcavoy character said, “If liberals are so fucking smart how come they lose so goddamned always?” THIS is why. Politics IS local, run a candidate that understands the local voter and you may win. You cannot rely on (a) a purity pledge from Democratic…

He is, in other words, the kind of middling Democrat the party’s base is begging it to move away from.

This! Elect actual liberals in places they can win, and elect more moderate democrats in places where actual liberals cannot win.

This. I think getting the more conservative areas used to the idea that center-left (or just center) Democrats can be effective leaders in their areas means that, down the road, we could shift more geography blue.

I’m all for a move for more progressive candidates in the Dems - but we also have to at least pay lip…

Conservative Democrats getting elected in conservative districts where previously there were ultra-conservative (or just radical) Republicans is still a win. Voting with you sometimes is better than voting with you never.

I don’t even remember that those things happened in the book because I disliked reading it so much I either didn’t finish, at age 7, or just blocked it out.