DramatistDreamer

Oh, my list of grievances for how SNL marginalized their Black talent is long but that would be for another thread. Suffice it to say, judging from how he did characterizations for the multiple characters in many of his movie, Murphy likely added a lot more to characters like Gumby and Mr. Robinson, etc. than was originally on the page.

Yeah, I get that sense too. SNL's writing of black characters has been overly broad for about 25 years and running now. It'll be interesting to see if A Black Lady Sketch Show finds a comedic persona for Kamala. They're the only sketch show that I can see with the ability to do this.

Low bar is where we're at, in so many respects these days. They didn't even try where Obama was concerned. They threw up their hands and claimed nothing about him was funny. Meanwhile Key & Peele took their time and concocted Obama's Anger Translator sketches, which were ground in Obama's character and were actually funny and prescient. SNL suffers from lack in their writer's room, I'm at the point where I doubt their writers even take the subway, they seem so far removed from reality.

I suspect that if these courts remain as slow as they are, we're going to see a lot more of this stat.

I agree but at 15, if she stays healthy and focused (that Capriati reference was not the best one ), there is a lot of upside in her game. Of course, I expect that people will also adjust their strategy when they play her now that she's no longer a virtual unknown but I don't expect her game to stay in place either. Either way, it should be interesting and today is a milestone achievement for her.

Congratulations to Coco on her first WTA Tour win. What a remarkable season!!

Some Kamala Harris supporters griped that she wasn't represented in this sketch but given the fact that Harris' performance during the Equality forum was of such a high standard, I guess there was nothing SNL could find to poke fun at. I think it's a lot more problematic that they have fifty types of white guys, yet not enough of black, Latino or Asian players to cover a diverse group of candidates (and voters). SNL is going to struggle because this group of candidates is the most diverse in the history of American presidential politics.

I guess SNL doesn't have a large enough pool of black guys to find one to play Don Lemon. They did find Lin to portray Castro since they had no actor last time and got criticized for not including him in a previous sketch. Sorry but that sketch was a mess. Billy Porter couldn't even rescue it.

Tennis Channel will be showing the final in Linz. I guess TC got tired of TT berating them over lack of coverage of Coco Gauff's matches and decided to actually try to work something out.

Not just health insurance but any type of social service or subsistence benefit, including WIC, foodstamps, Medicaid, etc. The private health insurance was an add-on. It was basically stipulating that any immigrant who was in the process of applying for, or in the process of application for a green card could find their status jeopardized if they tried to apply for any type of social service. There were woman who were foregoing WIC for their babies or CHIP (Children's Health Insurance) because they had a husband who was waiting for his green card and they feared it would jeopardize that, even though the child is a U.S. citizen by birth. It's really very cruel. The private health insurance rule that you are talking about, I think was an EO that Trump was trying to do (I'm not sure if it was a part of the Public Charge Rule or a separate EO) was designed to prevent immigrants from even being allowed in unless they could prove that they could pay for their own private health insurance with no government help. They are somewhat connected yet distinctly different from one another.

There's one thing we won't have to wonder about, TC likely won't be showing it, since they don't have the rights., lol. TC's hate for women's tennis has reached such ridiculous lows that they'd likely rather show a Challenger in a back alley in Cleveland than show a WTA final. ...and this is coming from someone who enjoys watching a good Challenger match but come on!

Coco Gauff is the only tennis player from the U.S. to make a final this weekend and the Tennis Channel has been missing it. TC is borderline useless, glad I no longer subscribe.

ICYMI-Trump took several "L"s this week.

I'm beginning to think that the Ukraine talking points being sent to Democrats is not a mistake but someone inside trying to bust these GOP con artist. Also, I know I can't be the only one who made the connection between the clandestine meeting between Rupert Murdoch and A.G. Barr with Shep Smith's departure.

This is what Trump has done to most of the U.S.' existing treaties and agreements, only in this instance signs of the damage has been almost immediate. I mentioned this up-thread the other day. This will do lasting damage to the U.S. in negotiating treaties and accords going forward. ICYMI-

And I said this was going to happen from the get-go. Clearly, she was never going to bow to Trump.

Since 2017, the number of Cuban deportations has increased ten-fold. So far, I haven't heard a peep from Marco Rubio. Oh well.

Kiki Bertens has had some losses this year for sure, but this is Coco Gauff's first win against a Top 10 opponent, so that is a memorable win for her.

The Internet morphed into the disastrous wreck we have today because of corporations like AT&T, Comcast, Verizon (once known as Ma Bell-Bell Atlantic) and the other consolidated cable and telecommunications company getting into the industry and closing out the smaller, independent Internet Service Providers (ISPs). As a student, I started using what was known as the World Wide Web when it first started to become known to the general public, around 1994 but 1996, I was taking computer science courses on html (when, in order to build your own website, you had to learn how to write code, none of this template stuff that everybody does today. The Internet, while only accessible to a small population, was a completely commerce-free environment, that was about connecting with people (an outgrowth of the flourishing of electronic mail a.k.a. "e-mail"). By around 1997-98, small, independent start-ups sprang up to offer Internet service for little cost. By 1999-00, big telecommunications companies (AT&T, chief among them) decided that they were not content to see indie/small startups thriving--they wanted in. The communications behemoths began to squeeze the smaller, indie ISPs (which tried but couldn't compete as companies like AT&T had a lock on the wires and infrastructure that ISPs used) out of the industry. Unfortunately, ISPs couldn't pay the cost of paying companies like AT&T for the use of their wires, as they didn't have the capital but these indie ISPs did try to hang in there--some raised their monthly fees, others like Netzero, went from free to a form of "metering" their service, whereas it had previously been unlimited. Eventually, most of the corporate titans swallowed the smaller, indie ISPs (anyone remember AT&T buying out EarthLink?). By 2005, The telecommunications behemoths had a virtual lock on the industry. The Bush administration, headed by a "CEO in the White House" did nothing to stop the tide of these corporations forming a virtual monopoly on the industry, setting the monthly fees as they had done with the cable, claiming that they were raising industry standards and creating/shoring up better use of technological infrastructure and spurring innovation to ensure worldclass Internet, therefore they needed to keep fees at a certain level to cover costs. Nonsense! Across the Atlantic, in places like the U.K., Germany and the E.U., competition between ISPs flourished, which kept companies competing for business and kept prices down. And in Asia, Internet technology was at least a full decade ahead of the U.S. (e.g. they had video phones on mobile many years before the U.S. did) as they began to build their fiber optic technology (cables wired under the sea floor) post WWII. The U.S. telecommunication corporations' contribution to the Internet was not innovation or technology, it was the introduction of commerce and money, which opened the door for fraud, scams and other forms of criminality (As early as 2002, I reported an incident of "phishing" to my bank when my bank had no idea what "phishing" even was!) all in the name of financial greed. So that is where we are today and IMO, the big telecommunications firms are the reason why we are in the state we are in. Even the founders of the World Wide Web/Internet suggested that we needed to "start over" and build an alternate web, one just for connection, communication and education, where information is shared freely and commerce is banned.

Apparently William Barr had a secret (not-so-secret now) meeting with Rupert Murdoch last night, under cover of darkness. Didn't Trump's former personal lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen travel to Vienna during Trump's campaign a couple years ago?

^^ Two words--Flight risk. The corruption of Trump and his Trump-adjacent GOP cronies appears to be endless. Like a bottomless swamp pit. My friends had tried to get me to join Facebook half a dozen times over a decade ago. I'm glad I resisted. It always seemed like it would be a drain on my privacy and I never knew why but I had a feeling.

Anybody know what time this show will be slotted in?

Why does Kei look so adorable here?