Vee

Biden might well have won, I don't know. There is a piece in the Times, I think, about him saying he wished he had spent more time in the Rust Belt for Hillary, that he blames himself. Joe Biden's a great man. But the fact is - IMO, anyway - that Hillary Clinton, despite the ingrained hatred and prejudice against her in the press and segments of the public going back 25 years, was insanely qualified and deserved to be President on every level. She will be a martyr for women for generations to come now, and you can bet that someday, if we survive this, and a woman does become President, she will name-check Hillary Clinton and I will cry my eyes out. And part of me does ask myself whether we really deserved better, when that squishy, apathetic, uncurious and/or racially anxious middle America couldn't look at these two choices - between an incredibly competent and professional woman and a childlike narcissist who can't stop tweeting (even today, Trump voters are decrying his tweets while trying to convince themselves he didn't mean the things they didn't like but did mean the things they did) - and still had to pick the man just because the woman is - by definition and stereotype and caricature going back almost thirty years - a bitch for saying she didn't want to bake cookies. What would we have proven if we'd run Biden? That we can still elect the right white guy?

Not going to happen, IMO. Time and age are against that generation. I do believe this is a last gasp of a dying old America, provided we fight against it and stay alive.

Catherine Hickland (OLTL, Loving/The City, etc) talks about her relationships with her mother-in-law Debbie Reynolds and sister-in-law Carrie Fisher.

I mean, in fairness you guys have been predicting poor cute old Jay will get it for like years now and he hasn't. So I'll wait and see, but yeah, it's all just so grim.

Well, we didn't spit in his face, but I definitely feel like the country should be ashamed and embarrassed, as I am. I know the Obamas wouldn't want you to feel that way, though.

I haven't been able to watch Obama much since November. Not in real time, anyway. It's too hard. He did so much for people like me, and more for everyone than people often realize or respect. That segment of Kimmel with idiots on the street not knowing that Obamacare and the ACA are one and the same drove me mad.

Very possible. But at the same time, the story he and the network have both gone with is "I wanted to take too much time and they wanted it out soon", which is what I also heard from a friend. He is a notorious perfectionist during production and post on style, music, editing, etc. Now they have even more time, the new showrunners haven't really spoken once, and all recent Discovery questions keep being routed by the press to Bryan Fuller, the man who left in October. I just find it very curious, especially since CBS was initially desperate to keep anyone from knowing he'd quit outright until he confirmed it a month later. The funny part is the rationale suggesting they want to keep people from being confused while Sonequa Martin-Green is still on TWD. Yeah, right.

Wouldn't they have set up some of those potential casualties a bit more? They've barely been seen of late. And yeah, while on the one hand it's a good idea for a stunt, the thing is what I said a few weeks back - even when it is often very well-acted, produced and often written (IMO) the show gets so grindingly dark or cynical about hope and things become monotonous. The Mitchell sisters die a horrible, immediately legendary death; Danny Dyer calls his deeply depressed son a failure while raising a banner for East End masculinity; Michelle is outed as Mary Kay LeTourneau; a horrible auto accident mows down a ton of people. This is all in the last month or less. Does it really need to be that dark? Even Guza's GH would be like 'whoa, pull back.'

Maybe they're caving and letting Fuller come back. The timeline was their big issue with him - he wanted more.

Also my hometown or close to it. My mother is marching there as well.

Buy the Kindle of the oral history too - Reflections. It's great. The Secret History is great and threads a lot of real history in with the fiction. It also has its share of continuity lapses on some of the supporting cast's backstory (Ed, Nadine, etc). Supposedly these gaffes were intentional to illustrate the problems of subjective history, but who knows. Other characters, like Andrew or Josie Packard, get their backstories heavily fleshed out.

That Bruce Springsteen cover band has pulled out, too. Who does that leave? Toby Keith, a reality show runner-up and other cover bands?

I have him on Ignore so I don't have to see his posts when you all constantly take the bait. He wins every time you acknowledge him, no matter how good you think it will make you feel. He's beating you every time. Ignore him.

Jonny is only in here because the thread is active. He is a troll and easy to put on ignore. Do not respond to him.

LOL OK

Idle thought: I think they're hedging their bets/playing the long game on the whole Matt/D.J./Steve triangle, judging by the end of Season 2 which leaves it somewhat ambiguous. Jeff Franklin says here that he likes John Brotherton and CCB together, and I do too - I think the whole Matt thing took off bigger than the spoiler he was probably originally intended as because they liked JB and he had great chemistry with Bure. But I don't think they're done with that quadrangle. I think they're going to end up with Steve and D.J. in the long run. Steve was much more tolerable in S2 now that he isn't a gross stalker, and he and D.J. were a lot more fun than before. But I'm still Team Matt, so I hope I'm wrong. He is still a regular.

Here is the NYT piece with the interviews with female Trump voters, incidentally. I do believe the economic issue is a real one, but I think it's so bound up and intertwined with white existential fear over a changing multicultural society - something that is psychologically paired with immigration and the loss of manufacturing - that it's dishonest to separate them entirely, at least when it comes to the Trump voter. Obama saved our economy, he didn't tank it. But a lot of confused middle American whites conflate his rise with the changing sociocultural tides. They're not realizing the cratering began with Bush, and Obama inherited the hangover.

Was it here that that NYT piece about white women who voted for Trump got posted? Interviewing a bunch of them? Besides the longstanding grudge against Hillary being 'untrustworthy', which was very prevalent, it all basically boiled down to existential anxiety about a changing world - feeling displaced economically was a big talking point, but to me that is just a convenient cloak, I think it all still goes back to white privilege and the delusion (whether overt or subliminal) that everything only went to hell with the black guy in charge, and that putting a traditional white, male, business-oriented face back in place will right the paradigm. The overriding throughline was we'll get the factories that sustained our families back, we'll get the businesses back! No, we won't. Things have changed. When those people see Trump tank things even worse, there will be a backlash among the confused, depressed middle-class whites. The question is just what kind of spiral it will be. I wish I could feel more sympathy, because someone in the DNC will have to as a profession.

The reviews have been pretty damn good, so I'll be burning through this shortly.

I saw this tweet and thought of you, Carl:

Wow - maybe my prediction of a terminal illness instead wasn't so bad after all. This is a terrible idea.

And D.J. made friends with Lachlan Buchanan's gay guy at that Irish wedding! Not to mention that the constant homoerotic stuff with her, Kimmy, Stephanie and the guys - and the freewheeling love triangle she has with both Matt and Steve, or DJ drinking and/or clubbing - is way beyond what Kirk Cameron would approve of.