Johnny Grant?

At best I’d say Reagan’s Cold War legacy is a mixed bag. It’s true that Reagan played a significant role in the endgame of the Cold War, but I’m still going back and forth in my mind as to how much of the posturing and expense was necessary. Reagan deliberately stoked Cold War tensions by doing things like…

It took me awhile to get this, but here’s your star, dammit.

I’m so sorry to hear about that. Sometimes it’s difficult to broach the subject with the one who has it, it was that way with my maternal grandmother too.

Yes, I’ll never understand the animus against Obama. Here was a guy with a fairly thin resume in politics, not much of a paper trail, no trailing controversy, absolutely middle-of-the-road business-friendly message, and somehow the right came to regard him as Satan incarnate.

That is very true. You had Obama doing things like praising Reagan from the podium: “...[Reagan] was elected by people who were ready to hear his message...”— really head-clutching stuff if you pause to consider that. Except for social issues like civil rights (which Reagan couldn’t’ve cared less about), Obama and…

It was kind of a broad cultural joke; people assumed Reagan was losing it in his first year, as he was the oldest person elected president (69 at that point). That contributed to it. At some point, Reagan was pretty good on policy—meaning that Reagan understo0d what was going on, even though his view of the world…

i tell my Brit Lit students about the 1967 decriminalization (it’s the other end of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885) and they can’t believe it. I then tell them about the police rounding up people like the future Sir John Gielgud in the 1950s (spurring them to rethink the whole…

I think it’s the latter. I don’t think the ending is as pat as some of the rest of the narrative is; the movie is more interesting in that these two tendencies (conventional love story/character study of Ned Kynaston) are constantly pulling against each other. I don’t find the love story between them all that…

The film Kate refers to the open with Billy Crudup and Claire Danes is Stage Beauty (2004), and I think it’s underrated also. Though it’s quirky, incomplete, and blindingly anachronistic (the film suggests that the introduction of female actors instantly turned everyone onto “naturalistic” acting), I refer my students…

Trump and his minions do not know what they are saying, they can’t . It’s as if they’re putting on a kabuki-theatre version of what someone being the president is supposed to do, but it’s utterly backwards and surprise, they’re not getting anything accomplished. At least Red Skull and Dr. Doom have goals.

Absolutely, dead on. Great work.

I didn’t know about this—thanks for the link, now following. Looks hilarious and so, so apt. This is the kind of thing the internet is for, dammit.

Oh, wow. I never would’ve noticed that Scaramucci’s a dead ringer for the Red Skull: the prominent brow and jaw, the beady eyes, Jesus.

Yes. But again, as with everyone in this administration, I can’t fathom what the hell incentive they have to bow to Trump. What the fuck Scaramucci’s game is, I don’t know. He’s got plenty of money, I assume, and hardly needs the aggravation.

Sometime, it has to. My 401K looks nice right now, but it cannot last, and, well, easy come, easy go.

There will be a 10% market correction in the fall, at this point I’m counting on it. Maybe it’ll be a result of not getting tax reform done. At least at some point before November 2018 there will be, and it’ll be delicious watching them flail.

Somebody, at least, shit, I dunno, I bet maybe 10 or so Republican senators, have a conscience. His base will erode further, and it will then be advantageous for them to eject him. I’m not crazy about the idea of President Pence, but I just don’t see how this will continue. Trump can’t offer Congresspeople any…

Yes, that is the most likely scenario. At this point, loyalty is the most important thing the Republicans have, and their ideology is utterly vacant. I just can’t imagine what the Republican party will splinter into, or if some want to survive as the Republican party that Reagan re-invigorated, or what.

Yeah, I might be foolish in assuming that human decency might kick in somewhere, at that. The part I’m having trouble believing here is why the fuck is anybody loyal to this guy, who is so obviously incompetent, ignorant, incurious, shallow, avaricious, stingy, and a shitty dresser to top it all. And he’s someone…