Vee

And now, a good time.

Guest starring the corpse of Adam Carolla:

A positive piece about Abrams, but I'd like to know more about the skullduggery hinted at here.

They may try, but press smell a loser eventually. We don't hear much about Tim Pawlenty or even Rubio anymore, and even Paul Ryan is mostly hailed by them in the manner of a Jedi Force Ghost on the sidelines at this point. McCarthy is not as skilled as even that squad. He'll fade. As for what media want for a Republican narrative, this cycle is another proof that increasingly doesn't matter. Dave Wasserman is skilled at what he does but needs to leave his ego out of it. Some of these guys want to cover for their bad predictions and getting caught up in the Republican-cheering Washington vibes, and that's what leads to this stuff. Others (probably Silver) are irredeemable.

Becoming Speaker of a tiny margin in the House will expose McCarthy and leave him a shell of what little he is. His career will be functionally over after. It's also shattered the dreams of the many access journalists who ran fawning puff pieces about McCarthy as the new "social animal" of the Capitol, hoping to get in good with him in what they believed would be a giant new Republican House.

This is pretty remarkable:

A legend. RIP.

Eh, it doesn't get me down that much. We've had an incredible midterm and if they take the majority they can't function at these margins.

Dems getting 218 remains unlikely, but worth reporting on the gains and losses nonetheless:

Get ready: Not surprising, but whatever:

Wonderful to see her looking so well. I hope the long-lived rumors of a more serious illness are just that and she can return again.

Show of the year for me. HBO-caliber work from the legendary Tony Gilroy (longtime scribe of the original Bourne films and writer-director of the excellent Michael Clayton, among others) and probably the best Star Wars product period since 1983, let alone in the recent overexposed Disney doldrums choked by fan service and Easter eggs. Gilroy was responsible for reshooting and rewriting a great deal of the deeply troubled Rogue One after filming was mostly complete, and made a silk purse from a sow's ear. R1 is far from perfect, but the excellent things in it are all him. Now he's taken a supporting player from that film who I thought had little to say and made him into a linchpin in this prequel, set five years before the original Star Wars. You would not know this show is SW unless someone told you. Its arcs are strictly played out in 2-3 episode blocks of semi-contained stories contributing to a larger plotline. Its ground-level immersion in the working class lives of its little people on backwater worlds, in the grinding bureaucracy of the Empire, in the Kafka-esque prison system and in the high-toned world of Coruscant and the Senate is second to none. It's of a piece with both UK kitchen sink dramas of the '70s and '80s and the original Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. And Stellan Skarsgård (among many others, like Diego Luna, Denise Gough, Kyle Soller, Andy Serkis, Faye Marsay from Doctor Who and Fiona Shaw) is giving the performance of a career, again. I should also single out the incredible Genevieve O'Reilly, signed to a bit role as the young Mon Mothma in Revenge of the Sith in the 2000s (Mon Mothma is Senator to Chandrila and future leader of the Rebel Alliance, glimpsed as an older woman in Return of the Jedi) who has now risen to become a major star in this show years later, as Mothma struggles to navigate the constant surveillance on Coruscant, her helpless position in the Senate, and working to fund the nascent Rebel cells.

Yeah, no. It's racist, and it's happening because they don't want to show Nicholas Chavez and either Trina intimate. There hasn't been a single onscreen kiss and as far as I can tell, there won't be until they have absolutely no other choice. If they decided to turn the show into the Spencer/Trina Lovefest 2023 I'd happily eat crow. I'm not seeing it. I think they will do the bare minimum and try to wait the fans out. That doesn't make anyone "Chicken Little" to state the obvious about this piece of shít soap.

Long, important thread: