Vee

I am still far from convinced this is anything but a pipe dream of the cast's.

I just saw the introduction of "Hudson King" in mid-July '91. Is it me or is Stephanie Hobart literally locked away in the set that will quickly become a lot of the remodeled Llanfair (or maybe Marty's house/La Boulaie, or the carriage house)? Meanwhile Kerry Nichols is instantly written out in a day. This is how GH should still be handling a mass exodus! Chris McKenna really was amazing from the jump. Nathan Fillion was great and seminal but McKenna will always be my preferred Joey. He, Jessica Tuck and even Joey Thrower are a great and very funny sibling trio in this stupid caper about hunting down where Stephanie has been taken by Uncle Carlo. (In which a henchwoman is dumb enough to buy 13/14 year old Joey as a pest exterminator.) The actors and long relationships really put a lot of the show over, including with Tina and Viki talking about how far they've come. This all just reminds me why I'll always probably keep Karen Witter first as Tina in my heart, even if Andrea was amazing and wonderful. I wonder when they decided to keep Tonja Walker vs. canning her after Loon Lake. She can still be so scary yet also so hilariously campy. Threatening Cassie with a chunk of apple at the end of a knife while ranting about apples having peptids. There is some truly bizarre dialogue here as well as some ridiculously circular material with Bo and Cassie as they strain to get Alex's pregnancy lie out of their mouths. Then there's Carlo and his streetwise henchwoman bantering about how acorns don't grow on vines and "botany wasn't my strong subject." What?! These weird-ass dialogue soliloquies just go on and on. There's some decent humor and interplay in these eps but over half this dialogue makes me feel like there's a gas leak in my home. I really hope Gottlieb fired a lot of these people. It feels like a writer's strike situation! Didn't Lee Ann come on within a day or two of Gabrielle being sent off to the hoosegow in April or May of '91? (The episode with Gabrielle's exit, sadly, is apparently not available.) By July Max is already banging this young girl and trying to entice her with... a gigantic stuffed horse. Okay.

Cyrus is boring as hell to me. I think sometimes Laura has an inner life in recent years. Other times she, like many characters, Is at the whim of plot. And I still have never totally bought the relationship with Kevin, which was FV grafting a cheap (recurring) C-player onto her because she insisted upon a new love interest and he couldn't be bothered to make a new contractual investment in a veteran whose power he already clearly resented. It's worked out because Genie and JL get along, because they've generated a lot of story with Kevin and Ryan and because they have a real fanbase, but it still feels artificial and pat to me. I would love to see the coming-out scenes with Aiden that PM's team apparently wrote and/or shot for her in the spring that supposedly got cut.

I don't think she's irrelevant as she's been so central for a number of years now (one of the few things this regime got right and only because FV's numerous attempts to marginalize her or drop her to recurring were pushed back by the audience), but I do think she's barely been visible this year for whatever reason. Some of it may be Genie's vacation time or family, part of it is the creative strife. And when she was there they had her in the worst possible story (the Heather mess). It makes me glad the kids are back.

I'm happy for him and I don't really have an issue with Martin as a recurring player, but this just feels like more of FV, CVE, etc. restoring everything to their vaguely passable factory settings for the show. Isn't Cyrus back again for no reason?

I might've gone with GTS for Gates a la SuBe or PSSNS but I guess it's not really many more letters. GAT is not an option based on recent slang lol.

I loved Chris Pennock on Dark Shadows but I always wondered why they never brought Tom O'Rourke back. Such a great actor in so many things, not just GL.

I'm speaking more to the tiresome, ancient sentiment on social media that everything Trump does is 4-D chess and will always succeed. It doesn't succeed, it hasn't been succeeding for some years now electorally. Marc Caputo, who is a slimeball, is out there laundering the Trump campaign line that cat-eating in Ohio is a great win for them because these smears vaguely go back to immigration. But that's just a line. It's cope from a campaign staff deep in the grips of delusion. "They're eating the cats" has done nothing to grow their base or cut into Harris. So what's left? 38% (and slowly fading) of whackjobs.

Real or staged, it's gonna have even less impact than the first one which blew away in a week and moved no voters - which I don't think any of us would've believed would happen the first time. He's just that unpopular. That's the surreal universe we live in (and the kind of pariah Trump is to anyone outside his 38% core base) where not one but two assassination attempts on a central presidential candidate and ex-president do nothing to his polls. This guy apparently was trying to push a unity ticket of (wait for it) Nikki Haley/Tulsi and Vivek Ramaswamy. He's just a weird crank.

But viewers are getting to know her, and she's opened up leads as a result of that as well as the debate. All of her polling on trust, personality, security, etc. have gone up over the last month and particularly in the last week. This is verifiable. And he hasn't crowded her out of the conversation. And this latest attempt is going to do even less for him than the first one did. Meanwhile, Laura Loomer and his Springfield smears aren't effective outside of his base - they've done nothing but turn more people outside of his shrinking base off. So why believe weak spin that everything he does is a success before it even happens, when it's proven to fail over and over? When was the last time Donald Trump won an election cycle, for himself or his party in a general or a midterm? Eight years ago.

Honestly, like what was posted above, most of these disasters are not deliberate. They are not about shifting focus. They are simply self-made disasters and impulsive fúck-ups which ultimately hurt him. Attacking the biggest pop star on the planet with hundreds of thousands if not millions of young fans (and suburban family fans, mothers, fathers, etc.) who she can mobilize to vote is not a brilliant plan or ploy - you can see GOP pundits all over social media dooming about it and saying that he has screwed himself with this. Inciting a race pogrom in Ohio when his opponent is opening up a lead and this kind of specific behavior turns off moderates and undecideds and causes him to bleed more of the support he has been bleeding for eight years is not a brilliant plan. And a potential new assassination attempt won't be a brilliant opening either. After the last attempt complete with fist-pump photo op and a yell of "fight!" faded within a week and did nothing for him, no second attempt will do anything either. It's not even going to knock Vance's blunder today out of the news for long. Look at the half-life the last assassination bit had and cut it in half, if that. As long as Trump, Vance and their people can't stop talking about Haitians, that story will continue to play even if there is a minimal interruption (which I doubt). The only way Trump knows how to operate is to flood the zone and never stop talking, hoping the last thing he did will fade away. But that hasn't worked In any election cycles since at least 2020, if not since 2018. And again, most of what he has done and is doing is just him riffing and lashing out - no one told him 'let's go after Taylor Swift.' That's the last thing they want. This is him just going wild. There is no master plan. There is no brilliant ploy. There is no media jiujitsu anymore. Nothing has helped his poll numbers. Nothing has changed the national conversation about him becoming the loser of this race. Nothing has changed the fact that he bombed the debate and Harris has opened up more leads as a result. He just looks like a blithering fool stepping on one rake after another. It is no longer a series of incidents that are fading; in an election cycle they all merely become cumulative, building on themselves into a mountain of shít that drags him deeper. That is his new reality. People need to accept that Trump is not some trailer trash Sun Tzu. It doesn't fit and it doesn't work.

Jonathan Martin's bad mood over the election continues to spiral as he grumbles about Trump's latest blunder and sounds exactly like an exasperated 'stick to policy' Republican pundit, then takes shots at the Harris team's well-received Swift lyric joke:

A longer thread of Vance's train wreck interview with Bash: And a damning, non-paywalled NYT investigation into John Roberts' influence on recent SCOTUS decisions.

If you liked that, you'll love this. Meanwhile:

This is only state polling for Iowa, but is a striking change from how Trump was doing there in June against Biden. (And it's a pre-debate poll.)

But it doesn't move new votes. And it alienates the middle (and yes, some of his peeling base) further. That's his problem, and that's why Harris is opening up since the debate.

Felicia has been pretty present over the last year IMO.

The outlier here (Atlas) also was pushing Herschel Walker beating Warnock a few years ago, I believe. It's also a conservative think tank. Judging by the above, it hasn't.

Trump and Vance's people are apparently livid about this piece and targeting Bouie.