Skin

I wonder if we will see other retired Republicans like Paul Ryan returning to politics now that Trump looks to be losing the election and is out of office?

Completely agree. Which honestly is why I am a bit scared for Kamala replacing him. America has shown it's true colors and a map for her in 2024 is scary to me. These voters lost their mind under Obama, and I still think they've been broken by the idea that a Black President was as good as he was. They never healed which is why they sent Trump in.

I wouldn't laugh, Trumpism is far from over in this country. The fact that this election is this close says volumes considering Trump basically killed 200,000 people, destroyed the economy, increased unemployment and wiped out gains for decades. People will vote for him, because he will cut taxes, fill courts with right-wing judges, and hurt Liberals. It's crazy to think that had he not mishandled COVID-19 he would have been re-elected.

A lot of people are saying Nevada is "callable", and should be called now - the problem is the previous call with Arizona which still seems a bit close. With the AP and Fox already calling Arizona for Biden, it creates the narrative that Biden already won, when it looks like the vote for Arizona is still out. It's a bit of a mess. If they call Nevada for Biden, that most likely means he won Arizona as well. Wouldn't surprise me if most news outlets wait until Arizona is finished counting before releasing the wins of both states.

It sounds like you think this is going to be a really close race?

FiveThirtyEight shared their interactive election forecast generator here. It's helpful to understand what that fault lines are for a Trump win: he needs Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas to win - if he loses any of those states he has a less than 1% chance of winning the election.

Insane they got three Supreme Court seats with this President.

Agree with all of the sentiments shared in the past three posts. They aren't really surprised (or at least they shouldn't be), they are just feigning shock so they don't rile up his supporters. They want to be seen as impartial in their responses, so they can be seen as "moderate" or "middle of the road". They are in essence enabling his narrative and in effect normalizing his awfulness.

I always felt these debates were a bad idea. It's impossible to debate Trump, it's like playing chess with a pigeon, in the end it's going to knock all the pieces off the board, defecate all over the board and claim it won in the end. The public also is not moved by debates or civilized conversation anymore. Trump has consistently been supported by 40-45% of the electorate for the past 4 years. Nothing is going to change that, least of all debates. If anything the debates and the Supreme Court nominee have only increased his support. He was previously in the low 41's and now he is trending up again to 43-44%.

I've always felt that Christina was always trend following her contemporaries, so I am not surprised that she is overlooked. She always got there with a sound that wasn't especially her own or was often too late in capitalizing her material to fully embody, actualize and trademark the sound as hers. In her debut she copied Britney, in her sophomore effort she copied P!nk's Misunderstood and Alicia Key's Songs In a Minor, for her third album she copied Amy Winehouse, and with her fourth album she was creating material very reminiscent of Gaga. The rest of her material has been pretty generic, and not of particular note as the public forgot about her outside of her features which played to other artists strengths. She's an artist who has always in some shape or form been musically bereft, and inconsistent.

It's significant in context of the times I think. I don't necessarily find Christina Aguilera to be especially impressive in any chart capacity, but the chart climate they are speaking about is a bit nuanced. Christina (or more accurately her label) deserve kudos for exploiting it for those feats and achievements. Christina getting back to back number one's with Genie, Come On Over and What A Girl Wants is somewhat similar to Ariana Grande getting her strings of number ones in this climate. What the original tweet fails to understand are the chart methods that Christina used to employ to achieve her results was a very different strategy than Jive's Britney, Backstreet Boys and N'sync used, as BetterForgotten notes above. Jive's strategy was to limit the singles success so more people would buy the album. If they couldn't buy the single, pre Napster they had to buy the full album to access/own/listen to the material outside of radio. As such people shouldn't be looking at Billboard's Hot 100 to measure the success of those particular artists. They should be looking at their album sales, Billboard 200 chart and comparing those sales to Christina's to see how successful they were in their commercial efforts. Christina's strategy was to flood the single market to get more #1's similar to Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, Destiny's Child and Micheal Jackson. Basically this. Britney's singles never got physically released unless they were radio/airplay flops and Jive wanted to save face with a high Hot 100 peak. Jive knew that Britney could always get a sales hit so they timed releases to get her to chart higher if it benefited them. Britney only released 3 singles physically: Baby One More Time (her debut single), From The Bottom Of My Broken Heart (airplay was low) and Stronger (Airplay was low). After 2000 sales declined so significantly there was no reason to even release singles as the Hot 100 was basically just an Airplay chart until digital downloads were measured in 2005.

It would not surprise me if that does happen in season 3 and is apart of Alex's arc. Trevor St. John seems to be a CW favorite he was on Vampire Dairies, Containment and now Roswell. I wouldn't be surprised to see him pop up somewhere else soon.

Well. That happened. This show is really a pale version of what it once was.

Sophie seems tickled pink with this season from her interviews.

I think everyone knew that she could do it, it's just the way in which it was done, which was so surprising. D&D pretty much gave her no cover, and forced her to become the villain of the series. They could have had Cersei refuse to surrender - that would have more or less been in character, and that would have made her actions a bit more morally grey, but it's clear they wanted to make her the Mad Queen 2.0, and they needed her to be unjustifiable in this. There's no where else for the character to go at this point. They boxed her into a corner and have now thrown her away. They pretty much ruined the chance for plausible deniability for her, and can't salvage anything left of her character. It's tragic, and crazy unfortunate, being how hugely popular Daenerys is for the show. Sad to see that this is how GRRM sees the character.

That's not what the original series was about. Especially not in the later seasons.

Tess herself, wasn't the problem so much as the way she was utilized as a plot contrivance to bring the show in a different direction. I think had the show gone about bringing her on differently, there wouldn't have been much of a controversy around her addition to the group. She was added to bring strife to the group, and she broke up the set that was mostly formed by the time she got there. Had she been added to the group sooner (and differently) - I think she would have been more accepted. The fact that she came nearly right at the end of the first season made fans look at Tess as an interloper. There's also a larger metaphor that they don't like the way the show deviated and got worse over time around the time she became apart of the main cast. The larger problem was that the WB didn't know what they wanted Roswell to be, they didn't know if they wanted it to be a romantic teen melodrama like Dawson's Creek/Felicity, or if they wanted it to be a huge arc carrying sci-fi action series like Buffy/Smallville and the network interference caused a lot of issues in the second season. I think the series writers even lamp-shaded this in an episode where they had two of the characters argue which movie was better "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" or "The Matrix". It didn't help that the writers didn't know what they wanted either. If you take a look at Season Two of Roswell, it's all over the place. They went from a secondary alien invasion from a rival species, to Time Travel to Evil Twin Aliens to Alien Possession Parasites to Alien Teen Pregnancy to Alien War on a Remote Planet. A hodgepodge of ideas, none of which had real legs. A lot of people give season three grief, but it was clear that the show was going off the rails as soon as season two. Season three just inherited a lot of bad debt. The writers tried everything they could but the show couldn't stick with anything, and by the end they couldn't bail themselves out of bad story-telling. It's telling that most fans now either ignore those plot points completely or forget they even existed. The Sci-Fi portion of the show never found the right direction, and never took off. I don't know if it's because they couldn't or they didn't want to.

It was really the chemistry of the actors that made Roswell work as a character study, rather than as a show. I don't know many people who watch Roswell who were in love with the plotting and storylines but rather the actors, couples and pairings which made the show work. It had a dedicated fanbase directly because of those actors/character ships. Liz/Max (Dreamers), Maria/Micheal (Candies), and even Isabel/Alex (Stargazers) really were what kept the series afloat. When they started messing with those characters and the relationships, friendships and connections within the series the show pretty much tanked, as a lot of fans felt betrayed in seasons two and three.

I remember reading about the working conditions in places like China, India and the like from a friend who traveled there, and the conditions sound horrible. The work for pennies on the dollar and have virtually no holiday pay outside of the new year. If there is ever a talk about a strike, they threaten to move the plant to somewhere else where pay will be cheaper. You can't fight against that kind of greed, because it's a race to the bottom. They have no laws to protect their workers. Opinions on the Affordable Care Act are just so odd. You have a large amount of American's who receive healthcare from their employer, and you also have millions of Americans who don't want to pay for health insurance and are angry because they don't want to sign up for insurance. But these are the same people who will be in the poor house if they didn't have insurance or if they wind up with a pre-existing condition when they want care.

Those jobs are forever gone.

Single payer is when the government pays for all of your health insurance and healthcare associated costs. Like many European countries already do. The drawback to this and the only one I could think of is that most people won't be able to have luxurious hospital visits where each individual patient receives their own suite, with gourmet food, premium cable channels, and won't be able to order any medical service they want ala carte. But this is mostly for the blue cities in New York, California, who have that kind of money and embrace that kind of technological innovation in their hospitals. That is not a concern in say a place like Kansas - where the average hospital is 100 miles or so away from some residents. There is something to be said about it's ability to ration out medical services -- for instance the 15 year old soccer player who bumped her head and is saying it hurts won't be able to get a CT scan, and twelve other tests to make sure their isn't a problem with her, and neither will a 65 year old who is 200 lbs over weight and complains of angina won't be able to receive a new heart valve -- but those are the kind of unrealistic expenses that American's shouldn't have had in the first place. It's more regulation - but it's from a place that is a bit more moderated and knows it has finite resources amongst it's population.

I'm actually willing to play ball with some of the mid-west voters who feel that they are being displaced by the economy. But only very marginally, the great recession may have been a huge wake up call for them that they weren't as "solid" as they believe themselves to be. The reality of the situation is that wages have been stagnant since the 80's, and as such due to inflation the dollar doesn't stretch as it once did and everything is rising and their salaries are not -- this is all true, but it's been true since forever. I think what blew out a candle or made the light go off was the recession that was more or less a lot like the Great Depression. I think for a lot of them these past few years have been a major wake up call that whatever they have can be gone in a split second, and they are right. On average people are only 3 or 4 steps away from homelessness and that's a hard pill to swallow when you feel that you were artificially "safe" for decades before. However this demographic is not the manufactured working class worker that Donald is pitching too. This specific subset of people are those who are currently employed pulling upwards of 50k+ jobs and are somewhat educated and in the age bracket of 50 or older. These are the demographics who have more or less been "safe" from the worst effects of the recession and who don't have faith that their children will have a better life then they had it. These are the folks who are hosting their kids after they paid for their college or are currently paying college tuition. This is a problem, but it's also inherently capitalistic - this isn't going to get better with Regan lite policies. When you live in a capitalistic society you end up with winners or losers always, and this is the nature of our country. These are the same people who are profoundly afraid of socialism but then hem and haw about the ill effects of capitalism and not being able to build wealth, and being 3 or 4 bad moves away from losing everything and having nothing for their children. These concerns are valid but they keep voting for more of the same and they are a big portion of the electorate -- precisely 70% of it. I have no sympathy for the working class whites who refuse to acknowledge the end of manufacturing and do not want to change fields. This same thing happened in the black community and no one blinked an eye at it, but now because it's happening to poorly educated whites everyone is supposed to care. At least they don't have to put up with the added stigma of believing that they are just lazy, violent, people who wanted to live on the welfare state and nothing about them or their problems was ever worthwhile. Largely these problems aren't anything new, it's just - just like with social security these problems are so reactionary that they are coming up late in big ways. What makes me a bit upset is that if we had strong leadership we probably could be talking about ways to make this better - but due to the electoral college these problems will never get solved. Obama wasn't able to break the Reagan footfold in the belief of trickled down economics - but maybe Trump will be able to get them to realize that none of this stuff is going to work. Republicans have been set on an agenda that will harm their constituents the most, and I can only hope for the backlash of what will happen when they realize all of their aid is cut off and they can't eat or pay bills in addition to slashed wages. I'm worried about what form this backlash will be as well the Bundy's just got away with holding government property at gun point just last year. That kind of extremism with guns is horrifying. His approval ratings are a disaster and they keep getting lower and lower. He has already lost Democrats and Moderates, the only thing keeping his score from completely collapsing is Republicans which favor him nearly 90%. Democrats and Moderates have rated him so low that his score has fallen down to something like 44% which was down from 51-52% (when he won the election) and down again from 48% (Republican candidate). If Republicans collapse on him he won't have anything to buoy his score. So far they are the only ones who have faith in him. I can only imagine what the floor will be. I'm predicting record lows by 2018.

Twelve states to keep an eye on: Arizona Colorado Florida Maine Michigan Minnesota Nevada New Hampshire North Carolina Pennsylvania Virginia Wisconsin These were all won with a percentage margin of 5% - these states can flip either way. Democrats need to start mobilizing now to make significant gains over the next 2-4 years. 147 electoral votes right here.

There's also the problem that healthcare is a market that just keeps exploding in regards to cost. It's a for profit industry that doesn't really care at all about it's consumers, patients or sick people. They just want to make money. I don't necessarily think the problem is just taxation, it's that the healthcare industry doesn't want healthcare to be affordable, or work for everyone. That's why the costs keep escalating. A lot of people belief that the ACA is the reason for their increased health costs and bills, but it's really just the messenger or something that has been escalating at a great rate for years now. I was reading an article, and I agree with it, it basically said that the floor for Republican voters is going to be around 20-30% with Latino voters, which makes sense. Not everyone is going to have Republicans with a fervor. It's just not in the cards. The solidly liberal camp is only but maybe 15-20% of Americans, and then we start delving further into the spectrum of left leaning, moderate, and right leaning. If these latino voters stay in this 20% I don't think that's much of an issue. The Hispanic/Latino population is diverse, and you have some that have internalized hatred for their race, and others who are angry with undocumented immigrants because they feel they got over when they didn't. That kind of infighting can't really be helped. You also have segments of the population who can "pass" for white or who have accumulated a sense of economic status like Cubans who left Castro - and they feel they belong to that demographic more then those who recognize their diversity and true heritage. Colorism is alive in all races. Some feel they can "pass" for white, and they would rather indulge that belief. As white-Hispanics grow in the population this may happen. But there is more growth outside of the latinx/Hispanic demographic.

This is the kind of stuff that scares me, it brings me Cold War and WWII vibes. The escalation and verge of war out break and appeasement is terrifying to me. This isn't 1960 anymore.