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kinetic-elaboration · 3 years ago

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September 17: 3x07 Day of the Dove

I am incredibly discombobulated today—usual weekend nocturnal shenanigans I guess! Anyway it’s somehow midnight. Gonna try to write up these note on the Classic episode The Day of the Dove in as efficient a manner as possible.

Hmm, a planet with wavy pink Fraggle plants. I like it already.

But where is Spock? Very suspicious.

I really appreciate Kirk giving a little speech to set up the overall question/issue for us. (I know he does this all the time with the Captain’s logs but this is out loud and so… more obviously expository.)

Oh no, it’s our old friends…the Klingons.

I will admit that this ONE TIME, the Klingon is being reasonable. Like, it is reasonable to think that Kirk and the Enterprise attacked his ship, given that his hip WAS attacked, and who else would it be?

Three years of peace between the Klingons and the Federation? That is inclusive of the show so all this tension must technically be “peace” and also implies there was something more like a direct war going on, like, right before Kirk got the captaincy.

Zoolander voice: What is this, a colony of the INVISIBLE?

“We have no devil. But we understand the habits of yours.”

No takers? No takers on the torture? No volunteers to be mercilessly tortured by the Klingons?

Star Trek Beyond could have had Kirk and Chekov bond over being brothers! I mean, to other people.

They’ll kill 100 hostages at the first sign of treachery. He does know there are only 400-some people on the ship right? Maybe you should pace yourself, Kang.

Kirk’s so badass he needs MULTIPLE guns trained on him just to use the phone.

Oh-ho secret message to Spock. Which version of the iPhone will be capable of doing THAT?

The Klingons are “suspended in transit” is an awfully nice way of saying they’re just dematerialized atoms in space. Philosophy major and/or Bones nightmare fuel.

How did Kang not see this coming, by the way? Like, he just says “I’m taking your ship now, me and my 6 men versus your 400-some men, and I’ll do this by simply declaring it to be so. Now let’s beam up to your ship, where I’ll be greatly outnumbered, and there are armed security guards all around me.” Guess he’s been reading The Secret!

WIFE AND SCIENCE OFFICER

Aka the most important part of this whole episode.

Kirk’s face is very ?????? You can have both????

It’s legitimately not even important for her to be the science officer tbqh. Like that is so gratuitous. That’s just in there to drive me insane.

"We're prisoners, somehow, after I demanded to come on the ship, assuming they'd just give it to me without any kind of fight. How DID this happen?”

Federation death camps lol—someone’s been watching Fox News.

I do kind of wonder… is this an actual rumor that goes around the Klingon homeworld or is it something that the alien entity put in her head specifically to make her angrier right now? I mean it really could be either.

I also appreciate this episode for being pretty much the only one to actually attempt to give the Klingons a reason for being as they are. The Romulans… maybe aren’t well-described, but they do have a sort of regalness to them, appropriate for being related to Vulcans, and you can kind of imagine that they are the way they are because they’re Vulcans without the intense self-control. Plus they’re literally only in 2 TOS eps and in the second, the Federation are the aggressors. But the Klingons show up a half-dozen times only to be depicted each time as just like Cartoonishly Bad, aggressive, violent, and selfish for basically no reason. And I mean, some people really are!! But TOS has so much nuance in other places, that it always seemed a little disappointing to me that the Klingons are really just like ‘well we’re just bad and we hate everyone and we really like killing I guess.” At least in this ep there’s a little more added to that: that there is poverty on their world, that they feel aggrieved, that they feel unprotected, that taking and conquering is how they look after themselves…

I think that’s later in the episode though.

He’s detaining them in the LOUNGE lol. With their favorite dishes available to them to eat. Absolutely barbarous conditions.

I can’t believe Chekov is hanging in the elevator with the cool kids. Like, one of these things really isn’t like the others.

Kang is officially sure of himself for someone currently imprisoned in the lounge, that most fearsome of Federation death camps.

Hmm, could the glittery light alien have taken over??

You know what, that's a lot of tasks for Johnson to do all by himself: search the whole ship, fix the engines, and free 400 people.

Sulu would love this: everyone gets a sword!!

“Bridge. I gotta show this to Sulu immediately.”

Klingons have maintained a dueling tradition. That’s interesting. Finally some characterization going on.

Spock is really living up to his logical nature today. Everyone else has gone off the emotional deep end and he’s like “have you considered this completely rational explanation that accounts for the actual, observed facts??”

Whoops Chekov is actually an only child. Scratch that previous Beyond headcanon. (Interesting that his dead brother does really resemble Sam though—killed on a research colony??)

Love that Sulu knows that about him though.

Oh, that’s a pretty schematic picture of the Enterprise. I want that on a t-shirt.

Lol the pan out to the armory, now filled with… swords!!

Do ALL of these men have a fetish for swords? Sulu and fencing, Spock displaying swords in his quarters, and Kirk in his San Francisco apartment, and Scotty salivating over this Scottish blade.

“Klingon units.”

Finally Sulu gets his sword! It’s what he deserves.

Love that the shiny light alien also has a fetish for swords.

Oh no, it’s our old adversary, an alien life force.

What is the alien’s purpose? Um, I’m pretty sure its purpose is to start shit.

“An appropriate choice of terms, Captain.” I don’t even remember what this is referring to but I think it’s pretty clear that Spock is enjoying himself during a crisis again.

Bones, being so dramatic. Were there atrocities? He’s talking about the Klingons as if they were literally hacking off limbs—it’s a few stab wounds here and there, chill.

Oooh, time to behave like military men—strong words. (But I thought it wasn’t the military?? @ S**** P****) (This might not even be my best argument, given the context of this episode, but I’m sticking with it.)

This is like a giant game of capture the flag.

AU that’s just about the Enterprise crew playing capture the flag with the Klingons.

Sulu in the background standing guard with his sword

Damn, turning on Spock with the slurs now!!

Spock was absolutely ready to kill him. Like he would 100% have taken him out with a blow to the head. And he’d been doing such a good job of not feeling the alien’s effects so far! Admittedly, that was a strong provocation though.

Honestly, I really like this scene. It’s uncomfortable and tense and you can really see how the alien is bringing out the worst possible influences of their respective races. And I liked how Spock was definitely full on pre-Reform Vulcan for a minute there. It was a more effective portrayal of what that might have looked like than All Our Yesterdays tbqh.

A result of… stress?

Kirk got himself out of it first. He’s so strong. He knows himself so well, he cannot be outsmarted by any alien.

“We’ve been taught to think in terms other than war.”

“The alien brings out the worst of us—patriotic drumbeating…even race hatred.”

He’s so sad; he can’t imagine thinking like that about Spock :(

Sulu in a Jeffries tube! A man of many talents. It’s okay bb, take credit for turning on the lights.

The alien must have been getting bored. The Klingons must have been doing too well, and the playing field needs to be leveled for maximum shit-stirring.

“Let’s find that alien.” That’s how I ALWAYS feel.

Oh, Kang, you’re so close—“What power supports our battle but thwarts our victory.” So, so close to getting it.

ALIEN DETECTED.

Spock takes his sword, of course.

“Jim.” Obligatory Jim moments hit differently when they’re not so obligatory.

“Jim—stop hitting my protégé. And put that sword down.”

Kirk looks so sad, picking Chekov up to carry him bridal style.

Also in addition to ‘race hatred’ I think we need to add ‘rape-y tendances’ to the bad stuff that the alien is inspiring here.

“A brief surge of racial bigotry. Most distasteful.” Spock winning for understatement of the year.

They're assuming the alien is trying to test out their relative powers but I think it just wants entertainment. I mean, doesn’t it look like a naughty little thing?

Mara’s outfit is… little shorts? Interesting. Usually not my style but she makes it work.

Spock doesn’t even look at Johnson as he falls lol. Another one bites the dust.

“It exists on the hate of others.”

What does this remind me of? Oh, the Vast of Night and the whole “aliens made us do every bad thing ever” conspiracy theory. At least this one makes more sense, in part because it is not quite so overwhelmingly broad!

All hostile attitudes must be eliminated, he says, and there's Mara right behind Kirk giving him a death stare lol.

Kang is so obviously posing. Google Earth, always taking pictures.

Only a few minutes before drifting forever in space becomes inevitable? Good thing Kirk works well under pressure.

“Well… do whatever you can, Scotty. You know the drill.” Doesn’t even bother giving real directions anymore. We’ve been in this scenario before.

“So we drift in space, with only hatred and bloodshed aboard.”

And the 392 people below just get to…live in Enterprise prison, I guess.

Star date: Armageddon. So dramatic!

I’m not even making that up; that’s an actual quote. Can you imagine being an Admiral listening to this?

“Stop the war now.” An actual line, really aired on television.

Spock wants to threaten the wife lol. That's the old pre-Reform Vulcan seeping through. Surak who?

Damn, Kang is cold. “Eh, she gets the concept of being killed in battle.” They’re gonna need marriage counseling after this.

“There is another way. Mutual trust and help.” Yes that’s my hero!!

“No one can guarantee the actions of another.” Can’t remember the context of this entirely anymore, but great line.

The entity is loving this—multi-person choreographed sword fight!!

"Those who hate and fight must stop themselves. otherwise it is not stopped.” Another baller line. Spock has a lot of deep thoughts today. And so does Kirk. And Kang.

Kirk tries to reason with the alien. Nice try.

“Shoo. Shoo, alien. Off the ship, go away.”

Omg that last moment—Kang slapping Kirk’s back way too hard, Spock’s completely ridiculous wide-eyed expression when he does, like some sort of combo of amusement and confusion, and then Sulu just passing on by in the background….

Then the alien just yeets itself into space. And that’s the end!

Always feels weird when there’s no wrap up on the bridge.

Also, what are they going to do with the Klingons? They have no ship. They really did come out of this a lot worse than Kirk and co. No ship, huge casualties—and no one to blame even, but the alien.

I feel like the alien messed up a little in killing so many Klingons. Like, it could have accomplished its purpose, angering the Klingons and turning them on Kirk, by attacking the ship a little less violently—you know they’d react to 5 deaths pretty much the same as 400, and then there would be many more people to fight forever and produce that sweet sweet anger!

Maybe the alien’s powers aren’t strong enough to influence 800 people though. Also it wants equal forces and 800 people wouldn’t fit on the Enterprise, one assumes. So it still makes sense.

That was, of course, an excellent episode. 100% agree with is classic status, even though the main things I remembered going in were the wife + science officer bit, and everyone laughing at the end in a really forced, fake way, in order to make the alien go away.

I thought the Klingons were a lot better/more interesting today than usual. First, I think Kang is a better character, or a better actor maybe, than the others; he has a certain way about him that is… more watchable, more sympathetic. And he’s always saying these really dramatic things that make it seem likely he writes patriotic Klingon war poetry in his off time. Also, including his wife made them seem more… not human obviously, but normal. Not just cardboard cut-out villains. And of course the actual lightly specific motivations I earlier mentioned helped too.

Also, the plotting was very good: it built up slowly but surely over time, so at first the alien’s influence wasn’t that obvious, and then it became more so, and then it became horrifically obvious and extreme. And then you had to re-evaluate earlier moments: was that the alien changing facts in their heads, or a real part of the animosity between humans and Klingons? And it wasn’t always clear, which I appreciated. The tension when the people were at their worst wasn’t overdone, like in that moment with Scotty, Spock, and Kirk—or even in Chekov’s assault on Mara, tbh. The various strategies of the different sides were very entertaining too; there was never a dull moment, and they fit in a lot of straight-up actions and twists into 50 minutes.

The possible threat was truly terrifying, also: stuck in a space ship, forever, unable to die, feeling the worst possible emotions all the time, besieged, angered, despairing, fighting a war that can’t be won, being injured and suffering only to recover and fight again, and it never stops… A perfect nightmare mixture of insanity and violence and pain. And the alien, in encouraging hatred and anger, doesn’t discriminate between sides: they turn on each other just as much as on the Klingons, breeding paranoia and infighting. For eternity.

The episode also felt much more strongly anti-war than I remember tbh. Like it was not subtle. Kirk literally says “stop the war” in so many words. He has a part in his speech where he talks about the possibility of other aliens out there, encouraging other wars. And while I do think “maybe the aliens are making us do it” is a cop out explanation, or would be if it were real, the scenario gave the show a lot of room to say, like, pretty ballsy things: to include “patriotic drum beating” along with “race hatred” in a list of corrupting feelings they were experiencing; to show how the same instincts that lead to warring also lead to sexual assault and the aforementioned ‘race hatred;” to reveal the true horror of an endless war by making the participants unkillable and sticking them in a singular space ship in the middle of nowhere; to imply that the combatants of war gain nothing from it, but outside or third-party entities will pull strings of their own design to profit from the conflict as long as possible; even to make an impassioned plea to camera to stop the endlessness of the conflict. Like I can’t even totally unpack this but it is a lot!

Finally, it was also a great Kirk episode, which of course is my most important factor. He’s smart; he’s strong; he’s so sure of himself and his values that he cannot be manipulated to mindless hatred, he represents the values of the Federation, and the show itself; he treats even his enemies with basic respect and humanity; and ultimately, he saves the day.

Okay I was not efficient in writing this up at all! It is very late!!

#the year 2021 #2021: star trek #2021: fandom thoughts #star trek tos

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duhragonball · 3 years ago

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Luffa Story Arc Breakdown

“Ah shit, he’s talking about his OC again! I told you not to wear that shirt!”

“Hey, sun’s out, guns out, my dude.”

I should have #159 up shortly, and this weekend I gotta get 160 figured out. July is my next writing month, and I’ll be trying to add 30000 more words to this damn story. But I still have to figure out what to do with the loose bits that I haven’t posted from the previous writing months. It’s the same rigamorale I dealt with in 2019 and 2020, but on a much smaller scale. So I gotta nip that in the bud before it gets worse.

Every year, I think I’m going to do proper chapter summaries on AO3, and I never go through with it because it’s just a big hassle. By “hassle”, I mean I have to re-read the entire fic and catch all the spelling errors and plot holes that I missed the last time around.

Honestly, reading my own work is kind of fun sometimes, provided enough time has passed that I can get some distance from it. Someone will like an old post of mine, and I’ll check it out to remember what it was, and Tumblr Mobile will recommend other posts of mine, including my own fic, and I’ll check it out and go “Hey, this guy’s pretty good.”

I need to tell myself that more often, because these recent chapters I’ve been posting just feel like noise. I’ll read ‘em and they look right and I see nothing else that needs to be changed, but I just can’t stand looking at them, and I know that’s just Editing Fatigue because I had a blast writing all this Frieza stuff. Back in January, I found a YouTube video that was just a supercut of the Frieza fight before Goku showed up, and I’d put that on and work out how to cram a time traveler into it. Then I found another supercut of Frieza vs. Base Goku and did the same thing in April. That may be what makes it so boring for me to read. It’s not just that I wrote it, but I adapted scenes from another work that I already saw, and recently. Hell, a few weeks ago I re- watched the Frieza Saga again, because I was hunting for Track M814 uses. So it feels dull even though I know it’s hot stuff, so maybe I should re-read my older material for an ego boost.

But I’m not gonna do that right now, because I’ve got a lot to do today. Instead I’ll be trying to sort the chapters into “arcs”. I’m hoping this will get me a step closer to whatever it is that I need to do.

Luffa #1-10: The origin story, to keep it simple. I did a prologue in #1 to introduce the character, and I think I gave her a gold breastplate, like a Roman Soldier would wear, because I had this goofy idea about constantly switching her outfits that didn’t last. Then we flash back to Luffa’s time on Dorlu Prime, her failed defense of that world from an invasion force, and her unlikely escape from captivity. Also, the title character turns into the titular Super Saiyan, thereby fufilling the titular legend.

Luffa #11-16: Bigreen Arc. Luffa can’t control her new form, so she ends up on a planet that specializes in medical science to figure out what’s wrong with her. This one is designed to explain some of the disconnects in Saiyan lore. Luffa’s not the first Super Saiyan, but she’s not even sort of familiar with the transformation, even though she’s heard tales of all the old heroes. So this arc tries to fill in that gap.

Luffa #17-23: Overnight Sensation. Luffa has to figure out what to do with herself now that she has this Super Saiyan power. She tries to go back to mercenary work, only to find it as boring as it is profitable. So she starts asking herself what she really wants (revenge), and how she plans to get it (founding an interstellar Federation).

Luffa #24-28: Luffa’s increasing popularity frightens her old enemies and attracts the attention of new ones. As Kandai flees in search of refuge from Luffa’s wrath, an old acquaintance shows up to reconnect with Luffa in an unexpected way.

Luffa #29-37: None So Blind. As Kandai becomes entangled in the political upheaval on Planet Goldwall, Luffa is drawn away from her new Federation project by seductive new power, one that promises an escape from her old problems, but at the price of her very identity. Meanwhile, the Federation is invaded by a powerful enemy from across the stars. Can Luffa return in time to deal with this new threat. Will she even want to?

Luffa #38-49: Liberation of Extraliga. Luffa launches a counterstrike on the occupied world of Extraliga, then takes the fight to the invaders. Her offensive leads her to Kandai, but she also has to contend with the Shockmaster. Can she defeat them both, or will she have to choose?

Luffa #50-60: Training Arc. Well, not just training, but I wanted a lull between the first Shockmaster arc and the second, and this is it. I did a lot of fun stuff here. Luffa drinks a whole bottle of waffle batter, Zatte gets into a Stand Battle, the characters from an old Dungeons and Dragons ad make a cameo appearance, the Shockmaster gets an origin story, and oh, Luffa might have gotten a little married somewhere in this mess.

Luffa #61-69: Second Extraliga War. The Shockmaster invades the Federation again, begging the question of why he should want it so badly. This time, he conducts his business in person, but Luffa is read for him. Or is she?

Luffa #70-76: The Luffa Way Arc. Long story short, I needed an arc to explain why Luffa never taught any other Saiyans how to transform the way she can. For one thing, most Saiyans are too afraid or resentful of her to want to learn. In this story, Luffa meets a small band of Saiyans who accept her teachings, but it still doesn’t work out.

Luffa #77-96: Pozet Arc. The King of Planet Saiya finally reaches out to Luffa for reconciliation, and Zatte convinces her to accept the invitation. But it turns out the King wants more than just friendship. Rehval has a problem, one that concerns the entire Saiyan population, and he is convinced that only Luffa can help him solve it.

Luffa #97-100: I’ll be real with you chief, this is just a collection of one-offs I wrote before moving on to the next arc. First, Rehval’s wayward daughter, Princess Seltiss, has her own plans for the future of the Saiyan people, and she and her boyfriend take the first step in making them a reality. Next, Zatte dictates a letter to her marriage counselor. Then Luffa tries to figure out whatevr happened to Drang Dedruhn. Finally, on the world of Archeo, Phyper Notro plots to deconstruct the legend of Luffa, only to discover the truth is much more dangerous than the rumors.

Luffa #101-108: Trismegistus Arc. While Luffa persecutes the Saiyans for any leads to track down King Rehval, a group of Saiyans searches for a mysterious alchemist rumored to possess a secret potion that will give them incredible power.

Luffa #109-117: Jindan War, Part 1. The Jindan Cult launches an attack on the Federation, and Luffa cannot take the fight to the enemy, since she doesn’t know where their secret base is. Unable to defend multiple Federation planets at the same time, Luffa reluctantly accepts an alliance with Princess Seltiss, leader of the Saiyan Free Company. Seltiss fears that the mysterious Trismegistus may unravel her father’s work to unite the Saiyan species, but her only hope of defeating the cult is to win Luffa’s trust.

Luffa #118-130: Jindan War Part 2. The war continues, with neither side able to gain a clear advantage. Luffa and her allies manage to repel the invaders, but are worn down in the process. The Federation grows weary of Luffa’s inability to end the conflict, and the only one who seems pleased is Trismegistus, despite the high casualties and lack of tactical gains. Eventually, his followers begin to question his motives, but do they have the courage to take action when they discover the answers?

Luffa #131-141: Jindan War Part 3. Luffa learns the location of Trismegistus’ headquarters, and assembles a fleet powerful enough to crush him in a single attack. Can Trismegistus survive her offensive? And can the universe survive the outcome of this battle?

Luffa #142-146: Xenoversal. In the distant future, a wish is made for a powerful warrior to defend time itself. And so, Luffa is recruited to join the Time Patrol, led by the Supreme Kai of Time, and the mysterious swordsman Trunks. But where is she exactly, and when? Can she ever return home? Is there even a home to return to?

Luffa #147-156: Ginyu Force Arc. Luffa now knows how far in the future she’s traveled, and her Time Patrol work seems to be the only thing left that can give her life any purpose. But can she even accomplish the dangerous missions that lie ahead? Trunks has his doubts...

Luffa #157-161: Frieza Arc. Uh, yeah, she fights Frieza in this one. It probably speaks for itself. I’m trying to remember a particular moment that happens in the Frieza conflict that would be of great importance to Luffa, but I’m drawing a blank. Sorry.

#luffastuff

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oliverzafar · 5 years ago

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CHANGE WILL COME FROM THE CHILDREN

Oliver Zafar officially announced his bid for the presidency in February of 2019, doing so as a left-leaning Independent candidate. His core values are based on progressivism and looking towards the future, ensuring a better America for both its present and future citizens.

Read more below about where he stands on the core issues facing Americans today!

CLIMATE CHANGE. Incredibly vocal about doing everything possible to stop climate change and vouches that the Green Movement can boost economic growth and create millions of new careers for those in the fossil fuel industry worried about losing their jobs. Launch a 10 to 15-year plan to transition to 100% clean energy and net-zero greenhouse gas pollution. Remove subsidies and tax breaks for the fossil-fuel industry and implement a Carbon Tax. Ban fracking and all fossil fuel exports. Require plastic bags in stores only be given out at a price. His own campaign is incredibly clean, offsetting all carbon emissions produced from travel activities and events by investing in renewable energy and carbon reduction projects.

GENDER AND RACE ISSUES. Mandate a universal paid parental leave policy for either or both parents. Fight the gender and race-based pay gap by requiring businesses to report salaries, promotions, and dismissals as broken down by gender and race to the public. Codify Roe v. Wade to continue ensuring safe and legal abortions. Conduct regular random, unannounced investigations into police officers to ensure no race or gender bias takes place. Work to decrease the disproportionate amount of women of color affected by infant mortality.

LGBTQ+ ISSUES. Describes the murder of black trans women in America as a “national crisis”. Include members of the LGBTQ+ community in the Equal Housing Act. Remove all legal loopholes that allow individuals to lose their jobs due to their sexuality in twenty-two states. Ban conversation therapy. Repeal the FDA’s policy that disallows gay men from donating blood.

HEALTHCARE: Work towards “Healthcare for All” by: a) sponsoring a buy-in program for Medicaid so that not only low-income individuals have the option to use public healthcare, and b) expanding Medicare by allowing people ages 50 to 64 to still buy into it. Have the government manufacture cheap generic drugs if prescription drug costs rise too high to stop excessive pharmaceutical price-gouging. Allow Americans to purchase medications from other countries as a way to lower consumer costs. Push to pass the Affordable Medications Act in the Senate to allow the federal government to negotiate drug prices with insurance companies under Medicare.

FOREIGN RELATIONS. Build a public and private international coalition against China’s intellectual property theft and compete against China in Asia with a TPP-style trade deal. Limit drone strikes, if not discontinue them completely. No military intervention in Venezuela’s current political climate.

ECONOMICS. Cut taxes on small businesses and farmers, raise them on corporations. Incorporate a VAT Tax to pay for many of his proposals, which he loves to emphasize is a tax already used by every developed country besides the US. Encourage more union-positive thinking throughout corporate America (he’s very proud of the fact that his own staff is unionized!). Stronger anti-trust regulations to break up monopolies and encourage companies to invest profits in their employees and communities.

IMMIGRATION. Repeal criminal penalties for people crossing the border. Reexamine the current immigration process and try to expedite/ease the process so that families are not forced to enter illegally. Conduct a comprehensive review of current ICE procedures and implement serious retraining based on federally approved security protocols. If this is still unsuccessful, abolish ICE and redistribute its responsibilities to other agencies. Increase foreign aid to Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, and other countries in crisis to thus reduce the flow of asylum seekers to the U.S.

STUDENT DEBT. Expand access to college by providing interest-free federal loans. Allow employers to make tax-free contributions to pay off their employees’ student debt and help those in work-study programs graduate without owing anything.

EDUCATION. Introduce a free universal pre-K program to ensure all children have the same successful start. Introduce initiatives to increase the US’ advancement in science, technology, and mathematics when compared to other much more advanced developed countries. Research the amount of homework and schoolwork given at public schools and whether or not it’s the most productive to produce actual results.

DEFENSE. Lower military spending by ending regime-change wars and reducing the acquisition of nuclear weapons.

GUN REFORM. Enact the Disarmament Act with some modifications. Invest into research and development of “smart gun” technology and other technological preventative measures.

PACS: Reform campaign finance laws so that representatives don’t answer to donors, they answer to voters. Force every company that wants government contracts to disclose every campaign donation. Outlaw superPACs and overturn Citizens United.

— Please specify their target voter audience [age, ethnicity, region, income, etc]

Young, young, young! Oliver’s support is distributed between 18 to 44 years old, with very few older generations outside of his home state of Massachusetts willing to even hear him out. The quintessential Oliver voter is a grad student – high in education level but low in income. He’s also attracted a lot of support from people who are fed up with the two-party system that seems to permeate American politics and would instead prefer a more Independent candidate who doesn’t need to preen to Democratic powerhouses to make a decision. He polls very favorably among members of the LGBTQ+ community and people of color, especially Asians, Middle-Easterners, and Indians who want to see their region represented through either him or his fiancé. Both sides of the coast are the areas that his support is most concentrated in, especially Northeastern intellectual elites, while his spouts of passionate progressivism are lost on most of Middle America.

— What do their supporters love and believe in when it comes to their persona and campaign? AKA. What’s people’s reasoning for voting for your character?

The first thing Oliver’s supporters will cite as the reason that they vote for him is his passion. He speaks and campaigns with a kind of fire that most politicians lost before they even became elected. They love his youth after having grown up with generation of old white dirtbags ruling the country, and believe that as the first Millennial presidential candidate he understands the problems plaguing America’s most indebted, most stressed, and most socially conscious generation better than anyone else running. Progressives also appreciate how incredibly vocal he is about his experience as a gay man and a person of color who experienced an incredible amount of discrimination following 911.

— What does the opposition hate when it comes to their persona and campaign? AKA. What points are brought up when trying to convince others your character isn’t a good choice for the seat?

Take a seat y’all, this is gonna take a while: His youth is usually the first criticism people bring up, because it’s the one that’s least controversial as opposed to his sexuality or race (but we’ll get to that too). Even though he’s got over a decade of experience in politics, people hesitate to endorse someone who’s just a few years above the legal age to even run for president. His opposition will also bring up the hypocritical nature of his marriage, since Oliver’s this stalwart progressive while his fiancé writes for Republicans. Democrats and moderate Republicans usually stop there in terms of his personal life, but of course conservatives will reference his homosexuality as something “the country isn’t ready for” or bring up his Arabic roots as “something a post-911 USA shouldn’t trust”.

Aside from just personal issues, Oliver’s also received a lot of backlash for running as an Independent. Though he’s doing it for the sake of proving that a divisive two-party system is only going to ultimately hurt America (he’s got Madison 10 like… framed twice in his office), people are harsh to point out that he’s only going to take votes away from Berkeley and essentially hinder a Democratic victory. Oliver also doesn’t know how to just give no comment when asked questions by reporters (much to the exhaustion of his staff), which while seen as “endearingly passionate” by some is seen as “an inability to keep his goddamn mouth shut” by others. He’s also incredibly uncompromising on his key issues (climate change, healthcare, gun control, and student loans most prominently), which doesn’t resonate well with moderates who aren’t 100% committed to his radicalities. And as much as Oliver claims to fight for the people, he suffers from a chronic syndrome of Northeastern Elitism as a result of being an intellectually-raised, Harvard-educated, I’ve-read-The-Republic-in-its-original-Greek kind of guy that doesn’t hold Middle America at too high of a regard.

#cbcbcchallenge #last AND least..... trash king extraordinaire!#im sorry about the logo y'all photoshop just inserted those squares in the back and i've accepted defeat #i'll redeem myself with like a fun lil meme or smthg for pt 2 of this challenge

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patriotsnet · 3 years ago

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What Republicans Are Running Against President Trump

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/what-republicans-are-running-against-president-trump/

What Republicans Are Running Against President Trump

The 2024 Republican Presidential Candidate Wild Cards

The first Democratic debate back in 2019 had 20 — TWENTY! — candidates, so don’t be surprised if the Republican field is just as large or larger. We could have some more governors or representatives run, or even other nontraditional candidates, like a Trump family member, a Fox News host or a celebrity, like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, who’s said he’s “seriously considering” a run. Stranger things have happened.

If Trump Were To Run In 2024 New Poll Shows He Would Dominate The Race

Olivia Brown

Perhaps the positive results of this new poll will finally lead Donald Trump to throw his hat into the ring for the 2024 presidential election.

The former president has previously said that he is looking at the possibility “very seriously” but “it’s a little too soon” to announce his campaign.

The May 2021 poll shows that Donald Trump would come out on top as the winner if he were to run in the 2024 presidential election against Vice President Kamala Harris.

When polling likely voters for the general election, national survey research company McLaughlin & Associates discovered that more than three-quarters of Republicans would vote for Trump. In fact, an astounding 83 percent of likely Republican voters would cast their ballots for Trump in the general election.

Trump has nearly unanimous support in the Republican Party and seems to be favored above all other potential Republican candidates.

When compared to former Vice President Mike Pence, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, Trump took the majority lead at 57 percent.

Meanwhile, Pence trailed behind at 10 percent, at eight percent and Haley at five percent.

With Republican voters seemingly in the bag, where does Trump stand with the rest of the nation?

Given the fact that 64 percent of voters polled believed Vice President Kamala Harris would assume the nation’s highest office before the end of President Joe Biden’s official term, Trump seems to be in solid standing.

Wheres Kamala Last Person In Room Harris Silent 6 Days Amid Afghan Pullout Chaos

Democrats are increasingly fearful Vice President Kamala Harris’ missteps will open the door for Republicans to regain the White House, a new report said Friday.

Dems, including senior White House officials, fear that Harris will lose to any Republican she faces — including former President Donald Trump— if President Biden does not seek reelection in 2024, Axios reported.

At 56, Harris is more than two decades Biden’s junior — and has been considered the heir apparent to the 46th president since he selected her to be his running mate last year.

While Harris will still be the presumptive nominee if Biden becomes the first president since Lyndon Johnson to not seek a second full term, Axios reports that a series of blunders have left officials and operatives concerned.

Right now, one operative told Axios, the feeling among Democrats isn’t “‘Oh, no, our heir apparent is f—ing up, what are we gonna do?’ It’s more that people think, ‘Oh, she’s f—ing up, maybe she shouldn’t be the heir apparent.’”

Harris has repeatedly been criticized for her handling of the illegal immigration crisis along the US-Mexico border, a problem Biden dumped in her lap in March by tasking her to deal with the “root causes” of the issue.

According to Axios, several White House officials have also described Harris’ office as a “sh—tshow,” poorly managed, and staffed with people who don’t know the vice president well.

Us Election 2020: The Other 1214 Candidates Running For President

The US has had presidents for more than 230 years, but only the first – George Washington – has ever been elected as an independent candidate.

The twin peaks of US politics, the Republican and Democratic parties, dominate media coverage and campaign donations so completely that the chances of an outsider winning are virtually nil.

What kind of person looks at those near-insurmountable odds and thinks – I’m running anyway?

Quite a range as it turns out: As of 9 October, some 1,216 candidates have filed with the Federal Election Commission to run for president.

The BBC asked three of them – a concert pianist and motivational speaker, a Native American IT technician, and a crypto billionaire – what they stand for, and why they deserve the votes of Americans.

Sen Marco Rubio Of Florida

Like Cruz, Rubio would enter the 2024 presidential race with heightened name ID and experience from his 2016 run. One of Rubio’s biggest challenges, though, could be his fellow Floridians. If DeSantis and fellow Sen. Rick Scott run, there could be just one ticket out of Florida, a Republican strategist said.

Rubio, 49, is married to Jeanette Dousdebes and they have four children. He graduated from the University of Florida and University of Miami School of Law and was speaker of the Florida House of Representatives before running for U.S. Senate in 2010.

Republican Leadership Thus Far Mum On 2024 Preferences

RNC officials have vowed to remain neutral in the future presidential race. They say their focus right now is on the 2022 elections – a major item on the retreat agenda – as the party tries to regain control of the U.S. House and Senate.

House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., and other election officials are attending the retreat. Scott, a Florida senator and potential presidential candidate, heads up the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

The weekend series of meetings includes panels and speeches on such topics as improving Republican voter turnout, expanding GOP coalitions, and building a campaign case against Biden, his administration and the Democratic-led Congress.

To Democrats, this weekend’s activities in Palm Beach look a lot like sucking up to Trump. Democratic National Committee spokesman Ammar Moussa likened the would-be presidential candidates to contestants on Trump’s old television show, “The Apprentice.”

“While Republicans are hobnobbing with their special interest donors, President Biden and Democrats are delivering for everyday Americans, putting vaccines in arms, money in pockets, and bringing normalcy back,” he said.

Eight Republican 2024 Candidates Speak In Texas Next Week But Not Trump

Steve Holland

WASHINGTON, April 30 – A Republican Party event in Texas next week will hear from eight potential candidates for the party’s presidential nomination in 2024, without former President Donald Trump, a source involved in the planning said on Friday.

The May 7 event at a hotel in Austin is being co-hosted by U.S. Senator John Cornyn and Texas Governor Greg Abbott, to thank donors who helped fund a voter registration drive and get-out-the-vote efforts in the state.

High-profile Republican politicians who are considering whether to seek the party’s nomination in 2024 are expected to speak to the crowd of about 200 donors.

They include former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and U.S. senators Marco Rubio, Tim Scott and Rick Scott, the source said.

The event comes as Republicans wrestle with whether to try to move past Trump in the next election cycle or fall in line behind him. Trump told Fox Business Network’s Maria Bartiromo on Thursday that he was “100%” considering another run after losing in 2020 to Democrat Joe Biden.

Trump was not invited to Texas, the source said. Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley was invited but was unable to attend, the source said.

Many Republican insiders doubt Trump will follow through on his musings about running for president in 2024, leaving a void that other party leaders will seek to fill.

Who Are The Republicans Challenging Trump For 2020 Nomination

Only one candidate is now vying to defeat Trump for Republican nomination in the 2020 presidential race.

While the pool of Democrats vying for the party’s presidential nomination was among the largest and most diverse in the history of the United States, President Donald Trump faced a much smaller cadre of challengers for the Republican ticket in 2020.

After two Republicans dropped out, only one opponent remains in the race against Trump. That’s in contrast to the three remaining contenders in the Democratic field, which once had more than two dozen candidates.

In a statement in April, the Republican National Convention said the Republican Party is firmly behind Trump and “any effort to challenge the president’s nomination is bound to go absolutely nowhere”, prompting criticism that Republican leaders are making it impossible for another candidate to succeed.

Here is a look at the now sole Republican challenging Trump.

More Gop Challengers Line Up Against Trump More States Cancel Their Primaries

Alex Seitz-Wald

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump now has three GOP primary challengers, but they won’t be given a chance to compete in at least four states after Republicans there decided to scrap their presidential nominating contests in favor of supporting Trump.

The Republican parties of Nevada and South Carolina, both crucial early nominating states, voted this weekend not to hold contests, as did Kansas and Arizona.

“With no legitimate primary challenger and President Trump’s record of results, the decision was made to save South Carolina taxpayers over $1.2 million and forgo an unnecessary primary,” South Carolina GOP Chairman Drew McKissick said in a statement. “President Trump and his administration have delivered for South Carolinians, and we look forward to ensuring that Republican candidates up and down the ballot are elected in 2020.”

All The Republicans Who Wont Support Trump

Numerous top G.O.P. officials have said publicly or privately that they will not be backing the president’s re-election. Some have even endorsed Joe Biden. Here’s a look at where they all stand.

Follow our latest coverage of the Biden vs. Trump 2020 election here.

As November draws nearer, some current and former Republican officials have begun to break ranks with the rest of their party, saying in public and private conversations that they will not support President Trump in his re-election. A number have even said that they will be voting for his Democratic opponent, Joseph R. Biden Jr.

As Mr. Trump’s political standing has slipped, fueled by his failures in handling the coronavirus pandemic and by the economic recession, some Republicans have found it easier to publicly renounce their backing.

Here is a running list of those who have said they will support Mr. Biden in the fall, those who simply won’t support Mr. Trump, and those who have hinted they may not back the president.

Trump Remains The Center Of Attention

So much of the Republican Party’s future revolves around Trump and whether he will run again in 2024 – and whether his campaigning for conservative allies in 2022 congressional and state elections will split the party.

The former president is even hosting one of the events at this weekend’s retreat, a Saturday night dinner at his Mar-a-Lago estate. Other retreat activities will take place at the Four Seasons resort hotel, about four miles south of Mar-a-Lago.

More:Exclusive: Defeated and impeached, Trump still commands the loyalty of the GOP’s voters

Trump, who remains popular with Republican voters despite his election loss to President Joe Biden and the chaos that surrounded it, has repeatedly said it is too early to decide whether he will run again in 2024.

But Trump plans to get involved in the the 2022 races, targeting Republicans who supported impeaching him over the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol or otherwise opposed his efforts to overturn the election.

Trump’s endorsements of favored candidates in Republican primaries threaten to split the Republican Party. His 2022 activity also means it could be years before he announces what he will do in 2024, effectively freezing the Republican presidential race.

Still, some Republicans are doing the kinds of things future presidential candidates do, regardless of whether Trump has announced.

Former President Donald Trump

Trump told Fox News host Sean Hannity that he made up his mind about whether he’ll run for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination again, but he didn’t say what the answer is, keeping the 2024 field open, for now.

The former president held his first post-White House rally in Ohio on June 26 — the first since his inflammatory Jan. 6 “Save America” rally that preceded the failed insurrection attempt at the U.S. Capitol by his supporters. Trump called it the “first rally of the 2022 election,” but no cable news network carried it live, not even Fox News.

The rally came in the middle of a busy few days in June for Trump. Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani had his law license suspended in the state of New York over his false and misleading claims about the 2020 election, and a week ago, The Trump Organization and its Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg were indicted on tax fraud charges and accused as part of a two-year investigation that began when Trump was still in office. Weisselberg and lawyers for the Trump Organization both pleaded not guilty.

The former president has reportedly told others that he won’t have to wait until 2024 to return to the White House. The New York Times and other news outlets have reported that Trump expects to be reinstated as president by August.

Trump’s power in the Republican Party is growing. Here’s how we know

Sen Tom Cotton Of Arkansas

Cotton needs to work on his pushups. The 44-year-old senator did 22 pushups onstage at a Republican fundraiser in Iowa alongside Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and he barely had any depth. Grassley’s weren’t any better, but he gets a pass for being 87 years old, and he runs four days a week. The contest was for a good cause: to raise awareness of the average 22 veterans a day who take their life.

Cotton’s remarks at the fundraiser were an early preview of what could become a campaign stump speech. He attacked Biden, critical race theory and China, according to in Des Moines. He also offered his full throated endorsement of the Iowa caucus, which is something candidates who want to win the Iowa caucus do.

“Why should there be any change to the Republicans’ first in the nation status just because the Democrats can’t run a caucus?” Cotton said, referencing Democrats’ delayed caucus results in 2020. “Iowa has had this status now going back decades and that develops more than just a custom or habit, it develops a tradition of civic engagement unlike you see almost anywhere else in the country.”

Led By Giuliani Trump Campaign Effort To Stop Certification Falters In Pennsylvania

Although Wisconsin does not have automatic recounts, state law allows a losing candidate behind by 1% to file a sworn petition, along with a filing fee. The state will only pay for a recount if the margin of victory is .25% or less.

The Wisconsin Elections Commission it had received a $3 million wire transfer from the campaign to cover the estimated cost of the recounts.

“No petition has been received yet, but the Trump campaign has told WEC staff one will be filed today,” the tweet said.

Wisconsin Elections Commissioner Dean Knudson also about the cash transfer Wednesday morning.

Wisconsin law allows candidate behind under 1% to request recount, either full statewide or selected wards, with payment of estimated costs upfront. Formal petition&paymt due 5pm today. Est full cost $8M. Trump paid $3M overnight. 1/2

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Election workers count absentee ballots earlier this month in Detroit, the county seat of Wayne County, Mich.

Officials in Michigan’s most populous county reversed course and certified its election results Tuesday evening, just a few hours after a surprising party-line deadlock suddenly cast the certification of more than 800,000 votes in doubt. Wayne County voted overwhelmingly for President-elect Joe Biden.

It stood for just about three hours under withering criticism, as residents made their complaints clear during a public comment period and local and national leaders lambasted the two members’ decision online.

No Evidence Election Was Compromised Cybersecurity Agency Says

The dust-up in Wayne County unfolded amid a nationwide effort by Trump and many of his GOP allies to push back on the results of the election. The outgoing president has claimed widespread voting fraud, without evidence, in the several of the states that he lost, including Michigan.

On Wednesday, the president reiterated his claim that a “giant scam” robbed him of a victory in the state. “I win Michigan!” .

He and his allies, however, have repeatedly failed to produce evidence supporting their allegations of election fraud.

That failure has spelled trouble in court for his campaign to get the election results overturned. In Michigan, an appeals court on Monday unanimously ruled against a Republican bid to invalidate the vote in Wayne County. The decision backed a lower-court ruling that found the allegations to be simply “not credible.”

And the legal setbacks for Trump haven’t been confined to Michigan’s borders, either. As NPR’s Pam Fessler explains, similar efforts challenging the vote in Pennsylvania, Georgia and Wisconsin have failed to gain traction.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger speaks during a news conference Wednesday in Atlanta.

Georgia’s secretary of state said Tuesday that some fellow Republicans have tried to pressure him into disqualifying legal ballots that may not have favored President Trump.

“Failed candidate Doug Collins is a liar— but what’s new?”Raffensperger wrote in a Facebook post.

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Maryland Gov Larry Hogan

Hogan, 64, is a two-term governor and cancer survivor who underwent chemotherapy while in office. He was declared cancer-free in 2015. A moderate, Hogan told The Washington Post that he saw the 2024 Republican primary as a competition between “10 or 12 or more people fighting in the same lane to carry on the mantle of Donald Trump” and another lane “straight up the middle” that would be much less crowded. Though he said it was too early to say whether he saw himself in that lane, Hogan wrote in his 2020 memoir “Still Standing” that members of Trump’s cabinet approached him about challenging Trump in the GOP 2020 primary.

Why Donald Trump Is Republicans’ Worst Nightmare In 2024

Analysis by Chris Cillizza, CNN Editor-at-large

Earlier this week, amid a rambling attack on the validity of the 2020 election, former President Donald Trump said this: “Interesting that today a poll came out indicating I’m far in the lead for the Republican Presidential Primary and the General Election in 2024.”

this on Trump’s future political ambitions from Politico“Trump is confiding in allies that he intends to run again in 2024 with one contingency: that he still has a good bill of health, according to two sources close to the former president. That means Trump is going to hang over the Republican Party despite its attempts to rebrand during his exile and its blockade of a Trump-centric investigation into January’s insurrection.”new Quinnipiac University national pollhis growing legal and financial entanglementsAs CNN reported on Wednesday night“Manhattan prosecutors pursuing a criminal case against former President Donald Trump, his company and its executives have told at least one witness to prepare for grand jury testimony, according to a person familiar with the matter — a signal that the lengthy investigation is moving into an advanced stage.”

Some Republicans Could Buckle Under Trump’s Attacks

Sen. Jerry Moran of Kansas was one of 20 senators from both parties who pledged to support the infrastructure bill, but the Trump-backed candidate is up for reelection next year, and some Trump-allied groups are running ads against his early endorsement. Moran voted against it twice last month, though his vote won’t be pivotal to the bill’s success.

Republicans are already eyeing the next stage of the infrastructure fight: The $3.5 trillion Democratic spending bill. That package will have to go through reconciliation, a legislative pathway for bills to be approved with 51 votes in the Senate instead of the usual 60. It is very unlikely to attract a single Republican vote.

McConnell is already trying to turn up the heat by threatening to withhold GOP support for suspending or raising the debt limit in the fall. That would force Democrats to do it on their own. Congressional inaction or gridlock could mean a devastating default.

“Let me make something perfectly clear: if they don’t need or want our input, they won’t get our help,” McConnell said Thursday. “They won’t get our help with the debt limit increase that these reckless plans will require.”

Republican Party Presidential Primaries

Republican National Convention

First place by first-instance vote

Donald Trump

Presidential primaries and caucuses of the Republican Party took place in many U.S. states, the District of Columbia, and five U.S. territories from February 3 to August 11, 2020, to elect most of the 2,550 delegates to send to the Republican National Convention. Delegates to the national convention in other states were elected by the respective state party organizations. The delegates to the national convention voted on the first ballot to select Donald Trump as the Republican Party’s presidential nominee for president of the United States in the 2020 election, and selected Mike Pence as the vice-presidential nominee.

President Donald Trump informally launched his bid for reelection on February 18, 2017. He launched his reelection campaign earlier in his presidency than any of his predecessors did. He was followed by former governor of MassachusettsBill Weld, who announced his on April 15, 2019, and former Illinois congressmanJoe Walsh, who declared his candidacy on August 25, 2019. Former governor of South Carolina and U.S. representativeMark Sanford launched a primary challenge on September 8, 2019. In addition, businessman Rocky De La Fuente entered the race on May 16, 2019, but was not widely recognized as a major candidate.

Biden Flips Coveted Georgia The Last State To Be Called By The Ap

The full hand recount of the state’s 5 million presidential votes resulted in a narrowing of Biden’s lead over President Trump in Georgia, but not nearly enough to change the result. He started out with a 14,000 vote lead, and now leads by just over 12,000 votes.

The recount, formally known as a risk-limiting audit, is intended to verify the contest’s winner. As Georgia Public Broadcasting’s Stephen Fowler , four counties uncovered a few thousand previously uncounted votes, which subsequently cut into Biden’s margin of victory.

Douglas, Walton, Fayette and Floyd counties all experienced issues with missing or unscanned votes related to human error — but the numbers weren’t significant enough to change the outcome of the election.

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There is no mandatory recount law in Georgia, but state law does allow for a recount if the margin is less than .5%. It currently stands at .2%.

Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger announced the hand audit last week, citing the close margin of the race.

The four counties with new vote totals must recertify their results. Statewide election results must be certified by Friday. The Trump campaign then has until Tuesday to request an additional recount, which would be by machine rather than by hand.

Trump has repeatedly questioned the integrity of Georgia’s vote counting, it both a “joke” and a process that led to “fraudulent votes” being found.

Who Is Trump Reaching

If the former president proves to be a kingmaker in the 2022 midterms, his allies say he may seek reelection in 2024.

“The Republican Party is just a name,” Steve Bannon told me last week. I had called him to ask about the influence he believes his old boss still carries inside the GOP. “The bulk of it is a populist, nationalist party led by Donald Trump.” As for the rest of it? “The Republican Party, pre-2016, are the modern Whigs,” he added, referring to the national party that collapsed in the mid-19th century over divided views on slavery.

Bannon might not be the most reliable barometer of the political moment, but some of Trump’s fiercest Republican critics share his belief that the former president maintains a strong grip on his party. “He sparked this , and now others are going ahead and taking the baton of batshittery,” Representative Adam Kinzinger, a Republican from Illinois and a staunch Trump critic, told me last week.

After losing badly in 2020, the GOP wants candidates who can win in 2022. But the party’s biggest star seems less concerned with fellow Republicans’ electability than with their fealty. Trump aims to punish incumbents who voted for his impeachment and reward those who support the culture war he’s stoked. Republicans want to talk about Joe Biden’s liberal leanings and how inflation is making life more expensive for most Americans. Trump wants to talk about himself and his personal woes.

What will voters want to hear?

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weekendwarriorblog · 4 years ago

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The Rest of the Weekend Warrior’s 2020 Top 25… and His Terrible 12 Movies!

If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll notice that my Top 10 has already appeared over at Below the Line, and you can either go there and read those first or start with the movies that fell just outside my top 10, including a few movies you might not have heard about.

Back at the very beginning of 2020, I made a private resolution that I would watch more screeners. This is because I had become quite legendary for publicists sending me screeners and me just not getting the time to watch them with all the running around I was doing to screenings. I will never make a resolution like that ever again. (In fact, if my 2021 resolution was to have more sex, I only really need to do it once.)

This year, I wrote (no joke) slightly under 300 reviews, which may be more than I wrote in the three years prior. Part of this was having extra time from not travelling around the city trying to get to screenings, but also, once I decided to transition my weekly box office column into a review column, I decided that I was gonna watch and review as many movies as I possibly could this year. I’m sure there are others who do this all the time, but man, I don’t know how you do it. There were days where I got so burnt out at staring at my laptop for 15 hours every day that I just had to stop.

Still, when you’re watching 300 movies in a single year, any movie that can get into my annual Top 25 (or even get an Honorable Mention) should feel somewhat honored.

Anyway, onto the second 15 movies in my Top 25 (click on the title for a link to each of my reviews!):

11. Herself (Amazon Prime Video) – One of my more recent viewings is this film directed by Phyllida Lloyd (Mamma Mia!) and starring British actress Clare Dunne (who also co-wrote the script) as a mother of two young girls who got out of an abusive marriage with a man who still shares custody with her daughters. She wants to give her girls a place to live so she decides to build her own house on a plot of land given to her as a gift. It’s such a simple premise but Lloyd and Dunne have made a wonderful not-too-heavy drama that still slams you with its raw emotions.

12. Jungleland (IFC Films) – I really enjoyed Max Winkler’s earlier movie Ceremony, but this underground boxing drama about two brothers (Jack O’Connell, Charlie Hunnam) was also a solid crime-drama that follows them on a road trip to deliver a mob boss’ mistress (Jessica Barden) back to him on their way to a big match. Winker really outdid himself in terms of the storytelling and somehow managed to avoid most of the normal boxing movie cliches while allowing this to stand up to some of the greats.

13. Palm Springs (NEON/Hulu) – One of the first of this year’s Sundance movies that really connected with me, Max Barbakow’s sci-fi comedy starred Andy Samberg as a guy stuck at a horrible wedding who ends up in a Groundhog’s Day situation with the wonderful Christin Milioti was so much fun. Adding to the madness was JK Simmons as a guy who seems to be out to get Samberg’s character for reasons we don’t learn until much later. Such a brilliant and hilarious movie with so much great re-watch value.

14. Soul (Disney•Pixar) – The latest from the animation studio that seemingly can’t do wrong – but that depends on who you ask – follows jazz pianist Joe (voiced by Jamie Foxx) who dies and ends up “The Great Beyond” desperate to get back to earth having just gotten his big break. Helping him (sort of) is a soul voiced by Tina Fey, and things don’t go quite as Joe helped. Co-written and co-directed by Kemp Powers, the film goes in a different direction from Docter’s last animated film, Inside Out, but still retaining some of the same metaphysical fabric that made that Oscar-winning animated film connect with adults just as much as with kids.

15. Mangrove (Amazon Prime Video) – The debate on whether Steve McQueen’s latest “Small Axe Anthology” should be deemed a TV series or five separate movies continues to rage as Amazon decides to save the movie for the Emmies. At two hours long, Mangrove is the closest of the series to being a great stand-alone film, and frankly, I thought it was better than McQueen’s Oscar-winning film, 12 Years a Slave. This told the true story of restaurant owner, Frank Crichlow (Shaun Parkes), and how he’s persecuted by the racist local police in the late ‘60s, but when he teams with a local Black Panther activist (Black Panther’s Letitia Wright), a protest march turns into a tense court trial for a number of people involved in it.

16. I Will Make You Mine (Gravitas Ventures) – Actor Lynn Chen’s directorial debut was actually the third movie in a trilogy of indie films centered around musician/songwriter Goh Nakamura, who appeared in all three films. I watched this the first time thought it was just okay. When I realized it was part of a series of films, and I went back and watched the other two movies, I was completely blown away by what Chen did within this finale. With movies, you generally only have a limited time to explore its characters, but like Richard Linklater’s “Before” movies, this movie helped to really create depth in the characters by revisiting them. I was kind of shocked that I hadn’t seen the other movies – few critics have – and though only 18 other critics reviewed this one, the film is still 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, which should tell you how good it is.

17. Sylvie’s Love (Amazon Prime Video) – Tessa Thompson and Nnamdi Asomugha starred in Eugene Ashe’s 50s-60s-set romantic drama about an early television producer and a jazz musician, following their relationship after a summer fling that ends with him leaving for Paris. Separated for years, she remarries and raise the child from her former lover, but then they reconnect and… well, you’ll have to watch it for yourself. It’s on Prime Video right now, so if you’re a subscriber, you have no reason not to. (And Erik Davis of Fandango had a great idea… watch this as a double feature with McQueen’s Lovers Rock from “Small Axe Anthology”!)

18. The Traitor (Sony Pictures Classics) – Last year’s Italian section for the Oscar International Film was a fantastic The Godfather-like crime-thriller, this one starring Pierfrancesco Favino as Tomassso Buscetta, a Palermo-based Casa Nostra family member responsible for the heroin trade in the ‘80s who flees to Brazil. It’s an amazing story showing that filmmaker Marco Bellochio did his research to create a movie that didn’t really get the critical love or attention it deserved.

19. Weathering With You (GKids) – And here is Japan’s selection for the Oscar International Film, a rare Anime film, this one by Your Name director Makoto Shinkai, this one more about a fantasy-romance about a young man who meets a young woman who can control the rain, which they turn into a lucrative business. I didn’t love it quite as much as Your Name, which was a truly inventive turn on the “body-switching” movie, but this also had some of the same characterizations that make Shinkai’s work so terrific, so it was impossible not to enjoy how it translated into his latest feature.

20. Lingua Franca (ARRAY Releasing/Netflix) – Trans filmmaker Isabel Sandoval’s film was released in the same weekend as another movie with a trans lead, Flavio Alves’ The Garden Left Behind. While they were both good, Sandoval wrote, directed and starred in her movie which was about her character Olivia having a romance with a guy surrounded by transphobic bros. Olivia is also trying to get her green card, and the immigrant aspect of the film really added a lot to what seemed like a deeply personal film.

21. The Outpost (Screen Media Films) – I’ve been a fan of Rod Lurie’s work for almost as long as I’ve been writing reviews. In fact, one of my very FIRST movie reviews was for his movie The Last Castle in 2001. I’ve also been fortunate to call him friend. I’ve watched Rod transition into quite a skilled television director, but I been waiting over ten years for him to make a movie as good as his amazing political thriller, Nothing but the Truth. Working from Jake Tapper’s non-fiction novel, Lurie created a full-on and unapologetic war movie as good as Peter Berg’s Lone Survivor, Blackhawk Down or any other modern war film… but also a film as personal as any others released this year.

22. The Trial of the Chicago 7 (Netflix) – Aaron Sorkin’s second film as a director stepped things up, WAY up, as he decided to take on one of the more noted events that signified the famed “Summer of Love” of 1969, as a number of peaceful protesters were tried by the federal government for “inciting a riot.” The amazing cast included Eddie Redmayne, Sacha Baron Cohen, Yahya Abdul-Mateen 2, Michal Keaton, Mark Rylance, Frank Langella, Jeremy Strong and many more. It was an abundance of acting riches and when you have such a fine wordsmith in screenwriter/playwright Sorkin, it’s hard to go wrong. The thing is that by the time I saw this, I had already seen Steve McQueen’s Mangrove, which in my opinion is a far superior version of a similar story from the same time period.

23. Words on Bathroom Walls (LD Entertainment/Roadside Attractions) – A movie I didn’t expect much from but totally fell in love with was this romantic drama starring Charlie Plummer as Adam Petrozelli, a young man sent to a Catholic School where he hopes to keep his schizophrenia a secret from his new classmates. The film co-starred Taylor Russell from Waves as Adam’s friend and love interest, who also gets worried about Adam’s erratic behavior whenever he goes off his meds. Adam’s condition was shown by the personalities he interacts with, played by Anna Sophia Robb, Devon Bostick and Lobo Sebastian, but the movie also stars the great Molly Parker as Adam’s mother and Walton Goggins as her live-in boyfriend. All of this adds up to a great coming-of-age film from Thor Freudenthal that also became one of the first couple movies since March to test out theatrical waters months after the pandemic shutdown.

24. Sputnik (IFC Midnight) – An amazing Russian sci-fi thriller from Egor Abramenko (remember that name!) that’s likely to be compared to Alien but adds so much more depth by taking place in communist Russia during the ‘80s. It stars Pyotr Fyodorov as a cosmonaut who brought something back with him from space and Oksana Akinshina as the psychologist who has to figure what is happening. It starts quite, reminding you of the original Russian film Solaris, but by the end, it gets pretty insane. More than anything, it finds a way of doing something original within an overused sci-fi trope.

25. Parallel (Vertical Entertainment) - Similarly, I had pretty low expectations for Isaac Ezban’s sci-fi/horror film about a group of Silicon Valley friends who discover a mirror that allows them to travel to and from alternate versions of their own dimension, which they use for criminal activities. Soon, some of them have gotten out of control with the power and money that this access gives them, but like Palm Springs, it’s a great take on another overused sci-fi trope that’s done so beautifully. (Warning: There have been a LOT of movies with this title in the last five years. Make sure you choose the right one!)

Honorary Mentions: The Prom (Netflix), Kindred (IFC Midnight), On the Rocks (A24/Apple TV+), Yellow Rose(Sony), Misbehaviour (Shout! Factory), Premature (IFC Films), Spontaneous (Paramount), The Climb (Sony Pictures Classics)

Oh, and as a reminder, here’s my top 10, this time with links to my reviews where applicable:

10. One Night in Miami.. (Amazon Prime Video) 9. Pieces of a Woman (Netflix) 8. Sound of Metal (Amazon Prime Video) 7. Mulan (Disney+) 6. Synchronic (Well GO USA) (Tied with Disney+’s Hamilton) 5. Nomadland (Searchlight Studios) 4. News of the World (Universal) 3. Minari (A24) 2. Corpus Christi 1. Promising Young Woman (Focus Features)

And some MORE DOCS I liked that didn’t make my Top 12 over at Below the Line:

13. Robin’s Wish (Vertical) 14. PJ Harvey: A Dog Called Money 15. 76 Days (MTV Documentaries) 16. Rebuilding Paradise (NatGeo) 17. The Fight (Magnolia) 18. Collective (Magnolia) 19. Stuntwomen: The Untold Hollywood Story (Shout! Studios) 20. We Are Freestyle Love Supreme (Hulu) 21. My Name is Pedro (Sweet 180) 22. Crock of Gold: A Night with Shane MacGowan (Magnolia) 23. You Cannot Kill David Arquette (Super) 24. Feels Good Man 25. Suzi Q (Utopia Distribution)

The Terrible 12 of 2020!:

And it’s the moment you’ve been waiting for -- and the reason I guess most people are reading this -- so I apologize for making all five of you read through all the great movies and docs of 2020 before getting to the juicy stuff. Let’s get to it!

12. Superintelligence (HBO Max) – There was a time when I loved Melissa McCarthy – years before Bridesmaids – but her success after that film and her decision to keep making movies with husband/director Ben Falcone has only led to a few halfway decent comedies. (I didn��t think The Boss was that bad, but that’s cause it co-starred Kristen Bell.) So imagine if you’re one of the first big studio comedies to be dumped to Warner Media’s new streaming service, HBO Max, and that was almost SIX MONTHS BEFORE COVID HIT! How bad could a movie be to have that little support and confidence from the studio? Well, I found out that very thing, as I sat through this horrible movie that had McCarthy play another one of her usual “everywomen,” this one who encounters an Artificial Intelligence, voiced by James Corben, who has achieved sentience. Trying to learn what it is to be human, the AI starts giving McCarthy’s character everything she wants, including a relationship an old workmate, played by Bobby Canavale. The movie wasn’t very funny but it also branched into a rom-com plot that just didn’t suit either McCarthy or Canavale, so yes, quite an epic fail.

Rotten Tomatoes Quote: “'Superintelligence' is not a term I'd use for whoever greenlit this piece of crap.”

11. Hubie Halloween (Netflix) – I don’t think that Hubie Halloween was anywhere near Adam Sandler’s worst movies ever, and probably not even his worst for Netflix – although there have been some VERY bad ones. The problem is that any opportunity Sandler was given in this movie to show he can deliver something other than “more of the same” had him instead resorting to the physical humor that appealed to his fanbase. And yet, it wasn’t even the worst movie to come out that week it debuted on the streamer. (See below.)

Rotten Tomatoes Quote: “A perfectly fine Netflix movie, not something I’d ever want to have to sit in a movie theater watching with others.”

10. Max Cloud – This sci-fi-action-comedy didn’t have a terrible premise – I mean, I enjoyed it in all three Jumanji movies -- but it was marred by being such a monumentally badly made movie that stars one of the one actors in the business, namely Scott Adkins. Set in 1990, Adkins plays the title character in a video game, in which a teen girl finds herself transported as a character. If you wondered what a Jumanji movie would look like in the hands of a completely incompetent cast and crew, well, here you go.

Rotten Tomatoes Quote: “Pretty awful, a bad faux video game movie that should have had its plug pulled.”

9. The Stand-In (Saban Films) – Not to be outdone by her frequent co-star Adam Sandler, Drew Barrymore threw out all of the love she’s garnered from previous movies and her new talk show by playing dual roles of a raunchy comedy star best known for her pratfalls (so kind of a cross between Sandler and Melissa McCarthy?). Barrymore also played her nearly identical stand-in who didn’t get as much acclaim but gets to stand in for her famous lookalike when the latter goes on a bender and ends up hiding in her mansion for five years. Not sure why Barrymore thought this would be a good way to put her back on the movie screen, but yikes… one of her character’s big gimmicks is falling face first into a pile of horse shit – not funny and just plain gross.

Rotten Tomatoes Quote: “Guarantees Barrymore a double-dose Razzie nomination.”

8. The War with Grandpa (101 Studios) – For whatever reason, I decided not to review this Weinstein Co. cast-off family comedy starring Robert De Niro and Uma Thurman. Maybe that’s because I hated the movie so much I could barely get through it, and with a Friday review embargo, I just decided not to waste any more time thinking about it. So why didn’t it end up lower, you ask? I have no effin’ idea.

Rotten Tomatoes Quote: N/A

7. Pearl – There have been some bad young adult romances over the past few years, and while I don’t think Bobby Roth’s is actually based on any existing book, it might as well have been, because it was very, very bad. It stars Larsen Thompson as a 15-year-old piano prodigy who is sent to live with her unemployed film director uncle, played by Anthony LaPaglia, who was so super-creepy in that role. I don’t remember much else, since I deliberately scrubbed my memory of this movie’s existence. Little did I realize that I’d be watching an even WORSE version of this movie a few months later.

Rotten Tomatoes Quote: “LaPaglia is way too good an actor, who deserves better than this.”

6. Black Water: Abyss – Another movie I watched late in the week and just didn’t have time or bother to review. Honestly, I remember very little about this. I think it involves crocodiles? Who knows, who cares? Not me or anyone else I expect. Everything about this movie was pretty bad.

Rotten Tomatoes Quote: N/A

5. The Turning (Universal) – Probably the biggest studio movie to wind up on this list, and possibly the only reason I didn’t review this was because I interviewed the director, Floria Sigismondi (The Runaways), who is generally a pretty awesome artist. But I love the original source material on which this is based and seeing how much better Netflix’s The Horror of Bly Manor was a few months later just made me a little sore that a movie starring the great Mackenzie Davis with Finn Wolfhard and Brooklyn Prince could end up with one of the lamest endings of a horror movie in recent memory.

Rotten Tomatoes Quote: N/A

4. Butt Boy (Epic Pictures) – Tyler Cornack’s comedy-slash-thriller was my worst movie of the year for many, many months until the three movies below it reared their ugly heads. Still, this one is pretty ugly as it stars Conack himself as Chip Gutchel, a man who becomes obsessed after a proctology exam so that things just keep vanishing up his own asshole. Yeah, I think my RT quote is fairly apt.

Rotten Tomatoes Quote: “I wouldn't recommend this to my worst enemy.”

3. Buddy Games (Saban Films/Paramount) – The fact that Josh Duhamel’s directorial debut came out the same week as Superintelligence yet ended up lower on this list is fairly telling. It involves Duhamel and a group of his friends taking part in ridiculous competitions for money, and shows what happens when these friends reunite five years later to throw another Buddy Game. It was just very low-brow and disgusting and a not particularly funny take on the Jackass movies. There was scene that almost made me stop watching.

Rotten Tomatoes Quote: “To call Buddy Games moronic, idiotic or even asinine, would be an insult to morons, idiots or asses, who are also likely the movie's target audience.“

2. Sno Babies (Better Noise Films) – This poorly-conceived “Afterschool Special” that follows a high school senior named Kristen (Katie Kelly) and her ever-growing drug addiction was almost like a young adult version of Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream if just about everything about the movie was bad from the writing to the acting to just really horrible images that no one would want to watch or be put through. If the film just followed Kelly’s character, maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad, but it’s a narrative that follows a bunch of characters including a couple wanting to have a baby… and when Kristen becomes pregnant due to her being on drugs, well, you can probably guess where it’s going. The only movie this year that had me literally yelling at my laptop like a lunatic.

Rotten Tomatoes Quote: “The people who made this movie should never be allowed to make another movie again.”

1. Dead Reckoning (Shout! Studios) – Scott Adkins makes his second appearance in the Terrible 12 with a movie in which he plays an Albanian terrorist. In fact, when I first heard about this movie and the fact it was directed by Andrzej Bartkowiak, the cinematographer/director behind Romeo is Bleeding and lots of trashy action flickers from the Aughts, it made me expect something in that vein. Instead, this is another young adult drama set in Nantucket with K.J. Apa from Riverdale playing Adkins’ brother who falls for a local teen lush, played by India Eisley, who proceeds to chug alcohol in every scene. Oh, her parents were killed in a terrorist act… coincidence? I think not. Eventually, we learn that Adkins’ character is planning a terrorist act by blowing up a boat on the 4th of July, and that’s maybe an hour or more into the movie. And yeah, there’s a number of action scenes awkwardly shoehorned into the story as well… Adkins’ fight with a nurse trying to help him was particularly hilarious. But the fact that the movie is being sold as “a thriller inspired by the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013” just makes the whole thing even more awkward and insulting. This one ends up in the “What on earth were they thinking, whoever financed this movie?” box.

Rotten Tomatoes Quote: “The only way to have any fun watching this disaster is to play a drinking game where you take a drink every time Eisley's character takes a drink.”

That’s it for this year…. Happy New Year and on to 2021!

#TheWeekendWarrior #EDsTerrible10 #EDsTop25 #Movies #Reviews

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billyagogo · 4 years ago

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Democrats take one last swing at state legislatures before 2021 redistricting

New Post has been published on https://newsprofixpro.com/moxie/2020/10/31/democrats-take-one-last-swing-at-state-legislatures-before-2021-redistricting/

Democrats take one last swing at state legislatures before 2021 redistricting

Most of the attention — and money — in the 2020 election cycle is focused on the presidential race and control of the Senate, but some of the most consequential elections are happening in small state legislative races across the country.

Regardless of which party controls the White House and Congress, or how the new 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court rules on abortion rights, LGBTQ protections or voting access, state legislatures will pass or reject some of the laws that most directly shape people’s lives. In nearly 40 states, they will play a key role next year in drawing the new congressional and general assembly maps that will establish the balance of power for the next decade.

After suffering devastating losses at the state level before the 2011 redistricting, Democrats are hoping to have a seat at the table this time.

That will require electing candidates like Ricky Hurtado, a 31-year-old former teacher running in a diverse and growing suburban North Carolina House district. Hurtado is outraising Republican incumbent Stephen Ross, who won in 2018 by just under 300 votes out of 30,000 cast. The Burlington seat, between Greensboro and Durham, became more favorable for Democrats after a 2019 court decision forced Republicans to redraw some districts.

Hurtado, whose parents fled El Salvador’s civil war in 1980, grew up in rural North Carolina and has made education a central focus of his campaign and reached out to Black voters and the growing Latino population in the district. Before social distancing, when he campaigned in the precincts new to the district, Hurtado found some residents were surprised to see him.

“We were realizing very quickly that there are folks there that hadn’t heard from a candidate in over eight years,” he said. “And were shocked when they found us walking their neighborhoods, because they were previously in a district that was very, very, very red.”

Democrats in North Carolina need to gain control of at least one chamber to have a say in drawing the lines for legislative districts and the congressional map — the state is expected to gain a new U.S. House seat due to population growth. They need to net six seats in the House and five in the Senate.

“Republicans have long understood that the roots of power lie in the states and state legislatures in particular, as it comes to redistricting, but also voting rights,” said Vicky Hausman, co-founder and chief executive of Forward Majority, a super political action committee spending millions on North Carolina and other states in an attempt to catch up to GOP efforts.

The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee is focused on flipping chambers in North Carolina, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Michigan, Texas and Minnesota and hopes to break GOP supermajorities in Kansas. As part of its “Flip Everything” push, the committee said it needed to win 48 seats to take control of 10 chambers across the country; it hit its $50-million fundraising target days before the election.

Republicans are focused on 14 states. In addition to defending their majorities in places like Texas, they are attempting to break and prevent Democratic supermajorities in the New York House and Senate, respectively. The committee has consistently outraised Democrats this year, and raised $23 million in the third quarter.

The nonpartisan Cook Political Report has rated the Republican-controlled Arizona, Minnesota and North Carolina senates and the houses in Iowa, Michigan and Pennsylvania as toss-ups. The University of Virginia’s Center for Politics has given Democrats a slight edge in the Arizona chambers and rates the Texas House a toss-up.

“Even if Biden loses Texas, the Democrats could flip the chamber,” said Chaz Nuttycombe, the director of CNalysis who drafted the forecast for the Center for Politics. Democrats have gained ground in the Texas suburbs under President Trump, he said.

Since the 2016 election, the DLCC has won 450 seats in districts Trump won and flipped 10 chambers, most notably the Virginia House and Senate in 2019. Even in the states they can’t win, Democrats say each win on a map drawn by Republicans is meaningful. “Every seat the GOP loses on gerrymandered seats is an embarrassment to them,” DLCC President Jessica Post said in a call with reporters on Tuesday. “We don’t need to win every chamber to significantly diminish the Republican power in the states.”

After losing up and down the ballot in 2008, Republicans realized 2010 could be a reset year — after the 2010 census and midterm election, whichever party controlled state legislatures would have enormous sway in drawing the state and federal election maps for the next decade. The Republican State Leadership Committee invested $30 million in key races across the country as part of the Redistricting Majority Project, or REDMAP, led by Chris Jankowski. The DLCC spent about $10 million. “We kept waiting for them to respond,” Jankowski said.

Republicans went from controlling 36 legislative chambers to 55 after the 2010 election. The next year, new Republican majorities in several states — including Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and North Carolina — drew maps that helped cement Republican power.

In North Carolina, the RSLC spent $1.2 million in 2010 to help the GOP win control of both chambers for the first time since the Civil War. In 2012, the party gained a supermajority in both chambers that remained intact until the 2018 election.

“Pent-up frustration does not begin to describe how Republicans in North Carolina felt when they finally took the majority,” said Chris Cooper, the head of the political science department at Western Carolina University.

Under Republican control, North Carolina declined to expand Medicaid under Obamacare and passed — and later repealed — the “bathroom bill” that targeted the transgender community and led to the state being boycotted by business groups. It passed a massive voting bill that would have cut early voting by a week, restricted which forms of ID were allowed and ended same-day voter registration. The law was struck down by a federal appeals panel that called it “the most restrictive voting law North Carolina has seen since the era of Jim Crow.”

In 2013, the Moral Monday movement, led by the Rev. William J. Barber II, began holding protests outside the state Capitol to oppose a slew of Republican-backed changes, including the voting bill and cuts to education and unemployment.

“It was less about a specific bill, but the frustration that was bubbling up in our community,” Hurtado said. “North Carolina — it’s a battleground state this year in 2020, for a reason, right? It is pretty purple. It is 50-50. But our politics have not reflected that over the last 10 years.”

Nationally, there has also been a movement among Democrats to win back legislative seats, and several groups have formed to specifically target down-ballot races or made them a focus ahead of this election.

In 2016, President Obama and Eric Holder, his former attorney general, formed the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, which has raised more than $52 million and focused on backing candidates and challenging Republican-drawn maps in states like North Carolina and Pennsylvania, which redrew its congressional maps in 2018. Obama has endorsed more than 100 state legislature candidates, including Hurtado. Swing Left, a grass-roots group founded in 2017, named North Carolina as one of its “super states,” where it’s organizing to help Democrats win the presidential race, as well as the Senate and state legislative races.

Forward Majority has spent more than $32 million to boost state House and Senate candidates in Arizona, Florida, Texas and North Carolina.

Hausman, of Forward Majority, said that even though Democratic candidates are enjoying fundraising success in some states, there has still been a “market failure” on the Democratic side when it comes to certain key chambers, particularly in Florida, where Democratic candidates are being outspent by Republicans in competitive races.

“We’re all gonna look back in two years’ time, four years’ time, when we’re unable to win Congress because of gerrymandering and wish we had done more, unless we actually can step up and … compete for power now,” she said.

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vinayv224 · 5 years ago

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Trump is ignoring his top health advisers over 2020 election fears

Trump speaks at the White House on Monday. | Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images

The US is halfway through Trump’s “15 days to slow the spread,” and he’s already pushing to end it — even with coronavirus cases on the rise.

On day seven of the White House’s “15 days to slow the spread” initiative, President Donald Trump started talking about sending Americans back to work — an idea at odds with advice from his top health advisers.

In a tweet on Sunday, the president said in all capital letters: “AT THE END OF THE 15 DAY PERIOD, WE WILL MAKE A DECISION AS TO WHICH WAY WE WANT TO GO!”

On Monday he retweeted similar opinions as news began to leak that behind the scenes Trump was sharing this view with his advisers, and one of his aides appeared on Fox News to say the same thing.

WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF. AT THE END OF THE 15 DAY PERIOD, WE WILL MAKE A DECISION AS TO WHICH WAY WE WANT TO GO!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 23, 2020

Trump’s eagerness to end social distancing was also a major topic of his marathon news conference on Monday evening. He said he plans to reopen certain parts of the economy “not long after” the 15-day initiative ends, even if his medical and public health advisers don’t agree with him.

“The doctors, if it was up to the doctors, they’d say ‘let’s shut down the entire world,’” Trump said at one point, adding at another that the shutdown “causes other problems, and maybe it causes much bigger problems than the problem we’re talking about now.”

.@kaitlancollins: Did any of the doctors on your team endorse easing the federal guidelines? TRUMP: "Not endorsed." pic.twitter.com/azN4bVbg2Z

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 23, 2020

The point of the 15-day initiative was to encourage social distancing to “slow the curve” of the virus and save lives. But as of Monday, there was no sign that the pandemic was slowing. In fact, outbreaks in America are even outpacing some of the worst-hit countries in the world.

Worse, most experts, like Dr. Anthony Fauci, Trump’s most-prominent expert on his coronavirus task force, warn that the pandemic will get worse before it gets better. Experts fear that talk of encouraging people to get back to their normal routines quickly could hamper efforts to slow the pandemic — or even encourage its spread.

Trump, however, indicated on Monday that he thinks people have already learned the necessary lessons — even though he was speaking on the day after single-day coronavirus-related deaths in the country broke 100 for the first time ever.

"We learned so much discipline" -- Trump is talking like the coronavirus pandemic is in the rear view mirror, when in fact America just broke 100 deaths in a single day for the first time. pic.twitter.com/pnmFzN1QxW

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 23, 2020

There is a minority opinion — one expressed in particular by economists associated with Trump — that resuming some economic activity after a 15-day period is a worthwhile risk to take. But even the most-aggressive argument emerging from that camp doesn’t compare to Trump’s willingness to send people back to work en masse. It’s clear that with the Dow plummeting and unemployment claims spiking, Trump fears an economic disaster ahead of the 2020 election could doom his prospects. (Trump even posted a retweet suggesting his idea is directly tied to the election.)

Trump’s sudden swing from calling for a 15-day day crackdown, to doubting the science it’s based on less than half-way through, is emblematic of his reckless approach to combating the coronavirus. All signs point to the crisis getting worse — and the man in charge is putting his own political interests before the lives of Americans.

Trump is getting frustrated with the advice of public health experts

On Monday, the president followed up on his previous night’s tweet by retweeting a number of accounts with sketchy handles like @steph93065 that urged him to get people back to work — not only for the sake of the economy, but for his reelection hopes as well.

“15 days. Then we isolate the high risk groups and the rest of us get back to work before it’s all over for everyone!! #Landslide2020,” wrote @FedupMil in a post that was retweeted by the president.

On Monday morning came a slew of news reports that Trump is “itching to scale back social distancing after 15-day period,” as CNN put it. The New York Times reported that “at the White House, in recent days, there has been a growing sentiment that medical experts were allowed to set policy that has hurt the economy, and there has been a push to find ways to let people start returning to work.”

Then came a Fox News appearance from top White House economics adviser Larry Kudlow in which Kudlow echoed points Trump made on Twitter.

“The president is right: The cure can’t be worse than the disease, and we’re gonna have to make some difficult trade-offs,” Kudlow said. “I spoke with the president about this very subject late last evening.”

KUDLOW teases that Trump will try to send people back to work next week: "We can't shut in the economy... POTUS is right: The cure can't be worse than the disease, & we're gonna have to make some difficult trade-offs... I spoke w/ POTUS about this very subject late last evening." pic.twitter.com/OV02aLFGxh

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 23, 2020

It’s understandable that the White House is eager to reestablish a sense of normalcy. Experts are now saying that the ongoing curtailment of economic life could produce unemployment levels worse than the Great Depression and an unprecedented shrinkage of GDP.

Trump would obviously have a hard time making a case for his reelection amid that sort of economic carnage. But to the extent he cares about American lives more than his own political future, the responsible thing to do is wait and see — at least until there’s some semblance of improvement, not as cases mount.

The number of US coronavirus cases continues to rise

The whole point of the 15-day program is to prevent the health care system from being overwhelmed by “flattening the curve” of coronavirus cases. But as the following chart indicates, the number of confirmed cases in the US continues to grow at an exponential rate.

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There’s no indication that the number of cases will plateau or start coming down before next week. On the contrary, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Sunday that “it’s only getting worse, and in fact April and May are going to be a lot worse.”

It’s true that many of the US cases are concentrated in especially hard-hit regions like New York City, the San Francisco bay area, and Washington state. One might view that as contributing to an argument for the resumption of normal social and economic life in relatively better-off states like West Virginia or the Dakotas.

But the experience of Hong Kong, where the coronavirus seemed to be under control until a relaxation of social distancing resulted in a second outbreak and even more stringent measures, demonstrates the risk involved in prematurely encouraging people to go back to gyms, bars, and other places where the virus can spread. And the idea there’s much to be gained by reopening businesses in places like Grand Forks, North Dakota while San Francisco remains under lockdown and hospitals are at the verge of overflowing in New York is dubious at best.

Furthermore, while US coronavirus testing capacity has increased in recent days, the country still lags far behind others in terms of tests performed relative to the population — meaning we still don’t have a clear picture of how widely the virus has already spread.

Resuscitating the economy requires getting the virus under control

In the end, the choice Trump seems to think he faces between continuing strict social distancing measures meant at getting the coronavirus under control or ending them in hopes of stopping the economic collapse is a false one.

The latter can’t happen without the former, and the former can’t happen until the number of cases levels off, while more vigorous testing gives experts the tools they need to develop a better picture of how widely the virus has already spread.

Which is to say, even if you care about economic activity as the only value here, it's really not clear that anything like "business as usual" is even a possibility in the midst of a roaring pandemic, even if you let everything stay open.

— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) March 23, 2020

Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiology professor at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health and director of Harvard’s Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, told the Washington Post that “every well-informed infectious epidemiologist I know of” thinks that the best way forward in the short term is more restriction, not less.

“We haven’t yet even seen signs that the growth [in coronavirus cases] is slowing, much less reversing. Now is the time to tighten restrictions on contacts that could transmit the virus, not loosen them,” Lipsitch said. “If we let up now we can be virtually certain that health care will be overwhelmed in many if not all parts of the country. This is the view of every well-informed infectious epidemiologist I know of.”

State governors have more authority than Trump to keep people at home, but what Trump says matters. For instance, the national standardization of social distancing measures throughout the country (with some notable exceptions, like beaches in Florida) came shortly after Trump stopped downplaying the gravity of the situation just over a week ago and embraced the “15 days” program.

At the very least, the president should wait until the outbreak is under control before trying to give people hope, because the trajectory of the numbers indicate there’s no good basis for doing so beyond short-term political self-interest. In fact, the quickest route back to some sense of normalcy is to stop the spread of the virus by continuing to encourage people to stay home, even if we have to do so for more than 15 days.

The news moves fast. To stay updated, follow Aaron Rupar on Twitter, and read more of Vox’s policy and politics coverage.

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kinetic-elaboration · 4 years ago

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November 13: 1x23 A Taste of Armageddon

Feeling pretty tired now, and it’s been a rough day, but I did rally to watch, and enjoy, an episode of Star Trek.

A diplomatic mission today. The Enterprise comes with friendly intentions!

I don’t entirely get this Ambassador or the back story here. They want to set up diplomatic relations with this solar system, because Federation members somehow get killed there a lot. But the Eminians don’t ever leave their solar system, so if the Federation is having problems with them it must be because the Federation is messing around in their space. So perhaps you could just no go there?

Mmm love Kirk being A Captain. “I’m thinking about this ship, my crew.” He’s not a fan of Ambassadors or people usurping his power.

And Spock seems very interested in all of this.

Aw yeah another cool 50s sci fi background! There are more of these than I remembered.

All of the interior hallways, as well as the exterior painting, are all nice and bright and multi-colored for those new color TVs.

It’s hard to pinpoint why, but I feel like this is an effectively Alien culture. Like maybe it’s the weird hats or the colorful hallways or the initial mysterious nature of them, but they just feel very not human, in a way ST alien guest stars don’t always manage imo.

Those annoying colonists lol. Sent them to a new planet and now they’re attacking us.

“If this is an attack... where’s the attack?”

Everyone in Star Trek does a lot of scanning and surveillance.

“Our civilization lives--the people die--but our culture goes on.” Literally America’s COG plans.

“I do not approve. I understand.” I love Spock so much.

The target has been “classified destroyed.” Kirk is confused and rightfully so.

Hmm, is Spock meditating?

Oh, there’s McCoy! Guess he didn’t get the memo yet that he and everyone else is dead.

Scotty know when Kirk’s voice isn’t Kirk’s voice. I love Scotty also and appreciate that he’s getting a bigger role at this point in the series.

I guess Spock is still a “Vulcanian.” Ngl... kind of wish they’d stuck with that. It has a certain ring. I feel like this is the first mention of their telepathic abilities--aside from the mind meld specifically. And they’re “limited” abilities. But not so limited that he can’t control that dude’s mind without touching him--and through a door. Mom suggested the ability is stronger with touch, which makes sense, especially as they do have psychic bonds with each other. But still. That looked pretty powerful to me.

Kirk is so apologetic about possibly being forced to kill.

“I’ll cover you.” It’s probably because of STXI that that affects me so much lol.

I can’t believe “there’s a multi-legged creature on your shoulder” worked! I remember seeing this ep for the first time and just completely losing it at that.

No one’s even gonna talk about the Prime Directive today, I guess.

So it’s already escalating as Anan said: real weapons used to destroy their weird suicide machines, now real weapons to attack the Enterprise.

Scotty’s not impressed by their fire power though.

If only Spock were here to be reminded of his father.

“The best diplomat I know is a fully activated phaser bank.” But they’re not military lmao.

Kirk is so turning up the charm again with Mea. But she’s not very susceptible to it and he’s getting kind of impatient, so it’s like Aggressive Charm.

I feel like this ambassador isn’t very smart. He’s too trusting, doesn’t seem to have great instincts. As opposed to Scotty, who is also Brave and Good, taking a stand.

“The haggis has hit the fan.” Please tell me that is not a real Scottish saying.

I know Kirk and Anan are supposed to be, like, tense and dangerous and threatening in this scene, but it’s reading almost flirty. “Would you...like a drink?” Kirk’s little finger crook thing.

You can tell he already has a plan at this point, which is kind of unusual in terms of Star Trek structure imo. Like usually you’re more with Kirk as he develops a plan, and here you’re watching him hint at the plan. “I don’t need my ship to destroy your whole planet” and so on.

“A man like that would have preferred to die fighting.”

How’d the diplomats get down to the planet? I thought the shields were still up.

They’re really giving Fox the Cliff’s Notes version of their society, huh? “Nice to meet you, you’re off to die now, sorry, really.”

Spock’s like “Oh, no, an Ambassador being killed?? How terrible...”

“Keep her from leaving. Sit on her if you have to.” Unexpectedly hilarious like wtf kind of order is that. And then the Yeoman like trying to look all fierce and Mea’s like “Yeah, okay,” eye roll.

“I’m practicing a peculiar variety of diplomacy.” Spock is such a bad ass. And he’s having a good time being action hero.This is why Vulcans think he’s weird.

Now he needs to find the Captain!

Kirk and Spock both using schoolyard tactics to win fights: tripping someone, the old spider trick. And they’re effective!

Quite possible even better than the spider scene is this ‘Spock comes to rescue his boyfriend and Kirk already has two guns trained on the room’ scene. “I thought you needed help.” / “Oh, I need the help.”

“We’re not going to kill today.” Honestly this one speech is deeper than all 7 seasons of the 100. Also more optimistic and nicer.

Kirk versus the computer again lol. This time, with firearms!

“A feeling is not much to go on.” IT IS IF IT’S A SIMPLE FEELING AMIRITE FELLAS?

“You almost make me believe in luck.” / “You almost make me believe in miracles.”

Honestly where the fuck is EITHER of those things coming from? Like no one was talking about luck and they definitely weren’t talking about miracles!! No one mentioned any miracles, Jim!!

He always gets so flirty after the danger is over, though. Every single time. “Ah, yes, all is well, now time to say something romantic or suggestive. As a treat.”

And then they play that weird comical music over Spock’s confused face as if that made it less queer.

So anyway this isn’t the official Vietnam War Episode but it’s kinda giving me Vietnam vibes. (According to the amazon trivia, I’m right: the computer tallies of the war dead was inspired by Vietnam causalities being shown on tv at night.) From an American perspective, it’s far away, it’s largely invisible, but it’s also long, it seems to exist for its own sake.

Also interesting that no one ever mentions why the two sides are fighting--probably because after 500 years, they don’t know. They just continue on in this mechanized, unceasing way.

That was a really good episode, and even though the actual danger of computer isn’t really what they predicted, I think it holds up regardless, in a different way.

I mean first of all technology has done a fair bit to sanitize war--the use of drones, for example, that allow the aggressors not to see their damage.

But also, and this is like only a half-thought really, but... One thing I think about a lot that the show didn't predict is that the internet allows us to see so much more than any other group of people in history. everything is very close, and there are pictures and videos and so on, from all over the world, available to you at any given time. I think this is very hard to deal with psychologically. So thinking about that in relation to this...it's a different balance but for the Eminians, war was both very real and close--it's constant, and people die all the time in huge numbers--but also very far away, because it's happening essentially hypothetically. So the dichotomy doesn’t line up in the same way but it still exists, imo.

And wow, that “we’re not going to kill today” speech. That was an interesting little wrinkle: that part of why the Eminians continued warring was because they felt like it was just inherently who they were. Their nature. Same philosophy espoused by all the grimdark showrunners of today. “I’m smart and brave and deep because I’m showing a mirror to humanity!! A MIRROR!”

And then here's Kirk, a Classic Hero, coming in and saying, "Yeah, wow, deep, you've determined that your species has a violent history. That's cool and all but have you considered that every single day you can consciously choose to make different, better choices?"

This was a good Kirk ep, a good Spock ep, and a good Scotty ep. It bums me out that he’s seen as comic relief now I guess... as my mom said, Scotty liked a joke but he was never comic relief.

I think it would be interesting to hear more of Spock’s thoughts in this ep, though. He’s the son of an ambassador and his people also had a warlike history that they dealt with in a way different to how humans do. But the method of problem solving of the Enterprise Captain and crew today was very martial, much more about brute force, and strategy as well, than peaceful talking--an overall plan I doubt many Vulcans would like. It would be interesting to hear how he thought of it all to himself.

Anyway, it’s getting late! Next up is a very decidedly good Spock ep, This Side of Paradise. Might be watching it on Wednesday so..not too long to wait!

#the year 2020 #2020: star trek #2020: fandom thoughts #star trek tos

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aceofwands · 7 years ago

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Ria hateblogs Discovery Episode 5: “Choose Your Pain” (do I even need to retitle this one?) (not liveblogged to @kendradaynes for a change)

Okay here we go!

right ... fancy blurr-o vision of an empty ship, and oh look, it’s Michael facing herself - dream sequence?

yep. dream sequence

Michael talking to the Doctor about how they’re torturing the Tardis, oops I mean Tardigrade

What a veeeeery spiky starbase

Lorca talking to Admirals, who want to use the technology - wait, Starfleet didn’t already have the specs for the spore drive???

OH GOOD they’re HUNTING the Tardigrades! THAT seems like something Starfleet would do

Lorca is all “we’re the only ones who can do this” uuuuugh it’s just so unbelievable

what interesting friends Tilly? there are no other characters on this show

STRESSED Tilly?! WTF she has MORALS, not stress

UGH I did NOT need to see that Lorca - so they can fix his eyes but he doesn’t trust doctors? good lord

is it just me or is the admiral hella wooden? it’s probably just the dialogue

“why give everyone another reason to judge you?” for the drama. obviously

“are you uncomfortable with the power I’ve been given Admiral?” she might not be, but I am, cause it makes no damn sense - Sisko didn’t have this much power and DS9 was literally on the front line of the Dominion War

“i’m your friend” wait really?

my ship, my way - ah yes, that old Starfleet motto

LOL

Lorca just got picked up by a Klingon ship, where exactly is the Discovery in all this? where is the ship in relation to the space station???

skipping the intro cause I cbf today, it’s boring anyway

how does Discovery in orbit of a planet look LESS realistic than the old shows? TOS’s Enterprise on a string was more realistic ffs!

LOL it’s POSSIBLE the Klingons have figured out the spore drive exists - YOU THINK? what did they THINK would happen if they kept using it?

“do you have proof that we are harming it?” I mean, its screams of pain???

why would Saru continue to trust her and allow her to operate, given his own reservations

LOL I love how the list of Starfleet’s ‘decorated captains’ is LIMITED TO THE FEW CAPTAINS WE KNOW ABOUT, come ON show as IF there haven’t been people over the DECADE since Enterprise we don’t know about!!

also Georgiou is the ONLY WOMAN ON THE LIST

Saru getting the computer to tell him how to be a better captain ... uuuugh because Michael makes him doubt himself? you wouldn’t want to ever question your own decisions, would you Saru??

oh good. Mudd.

ahahahaha at least we get a bit of amusement finally .... even his exposition is boring though

wow, these Klingons really can’t talk

oh wow

this is what every Star Trek shows need, Klingons brutally beating up a prisoner to remind us they’re bad guys

from what they’ve established of Lorca so far, I find it hard to believe he HAS reservations about not letting other Starfleet officers or people be injured instead of him, that’s how shady his morals are

wait, the Doctor isn’t the CMO? where are the actual senior officers on this show?!!! we don’t see the Chief Engineer, the CMO, everyone we do see on the Bridge are just role-less bridge officers there to give orders to

“you are the cause of this situation Burnham” ummmmm that is blatantly untrue?

shoulda got those eyes fixed Lorca

lol “or a liar” Lorca is SUCH AN ASSHOLE

OH GOOD implied sexual assault!

“of course you did, the moment you decided to boldly go where no one had gone before” uuuugh this dialogue

“sick and tired of getting caught in the crossfire”, but I thought we hadn’t seen the Klingons in 100 years ??? what other war or ‘crossfire’ have Federation citizens been in, exactly?????

so glad they only have 3 crewmembers on this extremely important research project! an expert, a cadet, and a criminal! THAT’S believeable

they’re still calling it Ripper ... great ...

soooo it’s a Jaegar? they need to Drift? human controlled mushroom spore drive, the “science” of this is fucking ridiculous

“no cadet, it is fucking cool” w o w, what Star Trek dialogue

finally a Klingon speaking English

they just look so fucking stupid with their spiky armour and giant heads, like how is it that huge glam rock hair and creaky rubber armour still looks more real than these Klingons???

lol, no one’s told Saru about the plan to fix the Spore Drive

lol, Saru trusted Burnham to listen to him - why would he? how stupid can he be? she literally never listens to any orders. ever

“I gave you an order, do you understand?” > her long winded answer = no

“your actions show me what you are” lol yeah

but also way to ignore the ethical issue of torturing the Tardigrade ENTIRELY what the actual fuck

why are they all so terrible

“we both know you lost that [your decency] with your last command” oh good, Lorca backstory

“apparently, the honorable Captain was too good to go down with his ship” - OH but he blew up the ship so the crew wouldn’t be tortured on Qo’noS

WHAT a Starfleet officer folks! someone for us all to admire and be inspired by, not.

ugh back to Saru. I hate him SO MUCH, he is just driven by his fucking hatred and distrust of Michael

why don’t they pull a Lorca and transmit its cries of pain across the ship

OH GOOD they’ve killed it!

WHO COULD POSSIBLY HAVE PREDICTED THIS?

oh no, it’s not dead, it’s just dehydrated itself

“rehydrate it and bring it back” FUCK OFFFFF SARU

YOU’RE AN ASSHOLE

“I will not be party to murder” wow, so glad at least one crewmember has morals - but ofc it’s the doctor

awwww, the Starfleet officer volunteering to be beaten instead of Mudd - the only one who has morals - the only Starfleet officer so far who deserves the title

LORCA IS SUCH A COWARD

oh lol wait they’re trying to break out, these Klingons are even unbelievable as warriors, on top of everything else, they got beaten up way too easily

lol Lorca leaving Mudd to Klingon prison - he’s an asshole and that is NOT Starfleet Captain behaviour (but then nothing Lorca does is)

don’t leave him behind Lorca! you won’t be back for him!

WHAT EVEN IS THIS SHOW

NOOOOOOO Lorca this is your fault! don’t let the only likeable Starfleet officer be murdered by the Klingon who’s been assaulting him!

oh it’s okay though cause he found the docking bay in like 30 seconds and came back for him - good thing the ship was tiny apparently

what even are these Klingon fighter ships? they’re little fans! they look fucking stupid

Saru worked out Lorca was being chased, just in time for a dramatic beam out

“we are able to jump commander” in the shiftiest voice, guarantee they did the experiment on Burnham

ohhhh lol nope, Stamets did it to himself

at least he had morals!

oh the dramatic wake up scene

AHAHAHA his laughter is the best

at least he can finally talk to mushrooms or whatever?

oh good, Saru has come to talk to Michael

wow, I’m so amazed at this dialogue, the way everyone just explicitly lays out their feelings and motivations. how realistic.

it just rings so fucking false, like there is NOTHING genuine behind it, any of it

Michael giving Saru Georgiou’s telescope

finally a Starfleet order - save the Tardigrade’s life!

sooo they don’t know if it’s safe to let it go but they’re just gonna chuck the spores in and send it off????? ummmmmm

really?

REALLY?

oh good, it woke up in space and zapped away.

hey we’re finally seeing Stamets and Culber as a couple ... brushing their teeth

“you were in danger” awwww <3

also he’s like, tapped into the fungi network now, dream come true

“I also knew you’d leave me if I let anything else endanger that creature”

what they didn’t even get to kiss in their lovey dovey scene

UMMMMMM creepy mirror Stamets, that’s a bit of a worry

well.

episode done.

I really want to like this show for what it is. Really, I do.

We had the moral drama of the Tardigrade, but how am I supposed to like Saru when he literally throws his morals completely out the window??? “I was just following orders” is never a reason to harm another being and really, the show brushed over the whole ethical issue completely by just having the characters make individual choices to serve the plot, rather than actually discuss the issue like they would in any other Star Trek series

and Lorca’s entire backstory just makes him even more shady and immoral ffs

and I am just really really not on board with how the characters do complete 180s for the sake of the plot and drama - Saru doesn’t trust Michael, but then he does, flip. flop. flip. flop.

and oh boy am I really, really, really not on board for ‘characters explain their motivations and feelings in a paragraph of exposition’ with 0 emotion behind any of it. it makes it feel so contrived.

I still just don’t feel like I care about any of the characters at all, none of them feel the smallest bit real, there’s something so unnatural and unrealistic about their dialogue and their actions. I think the only reason I found the episode slightly more bearable than others is because they finally had enough plot to keep things moving along without me getting bored.

also, the weirdest part is how small the show feels. the Discovery feels empty, the starbase scene we didn’t know or care about any of the other Admirals, even the Klingon prison ship didn’t feel like it had anything other than that one cell (and corridor, and torture chamber) - they’re so tightly focused on the few characters we know that it just feels like everyone else is cardboard cutouts in the background. it doesn’t FEEL like there’s a war going on. all this money on set design and special effects and whatever and the show somehow feels tiny?

#hateblogging #anti Discovery #STD #ep 5

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keywestlou · 5 years ago

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MORNING STEW #32

Lost several days last week because of platform problems. Thrilled to be back!

So many thoughts left unwritten. I have picked out those that still have interest and share them with you today in a Morning Stew presentation.

Per the usual, there is no order in which they appear. I write as the topics appear in my notes.

Syracuse/Duke last night. Syracuse lost 97-88. A good first half. Syracuse began sliding in the second half.

Syracuse played well in January. Won 6, lost 1.

Syracuse lost last night for 2 reasons. They were unable to control their offensive backboards. Also, Duke’s in your face defense prevented Syracuse’s 3 point game.

Occasionally, I have written re myths surrounding George Washington. Like…..He did not chop down the cherry tree, he did not meet with Betsy Ross in 1776 re creating an American flag.

Another myth involves Washington’s teeth. Poor. Down to nothing at some point in his life.

Story has it Washington’s teeth were made of wood. False! His false teeth consisted of 3 sources: The teeth of slaves, filed down teeth from animals, and those fashioned from ivory.

Mark Twain was not always an author. The Civil War got him into writing.

Mark Twain his writing name. His real name Samuel Longhorne Clemens. In the years immediately prior to the Civil War, Clements was a qualified pilot on the Mississippi River.

Commercial traffic on the Mississippi ceased when the Civil War began in 1861. Clements went to Nevada and California hoping to strike gold and silver. No luck.

He turned to writing. Took the professional name Mark Twain. Wrote much about the Mississippi River. Became recognized as one of America’s greatest authors.

Tino as an extra. A homeless person. Tino says he is selected to play a homeless person often.

On this day in 1931, Pauline Hemingway was out fishing with husband Ernest. She caught a 7′ 1″ sailfish. The sailfish set a season record.

Bolton did not get to testify. Trump and the Republican Senators successfully barred the truth from the trial.

A trial is not a trial without witnesses and document exhibits. I know. I tried cases for 46 years.

A trial without witnesses and exhibits amounts to a cover-up and sham. Should not even be called a “trial.” In this instance, the Senate “trial” defrauded the American people.

The truth will out in due course. Before the November election. Hopefully it will affect the judgment of voters at that time.

Get rid of Trump!

Today a big one in American history. Groundhog Day!

The world’s most famous weather predictor.

The first groundhog event occurred on February 2, 1887. The groundhog’s name Punxsutawney Phil. Today’s groundhog still so named.

The crowds gathered this morning immense.

Punxsutawney Phil emerged at 7:28 am. A light snow falling. He did not see his shadow. Means an early spring.

Many things are broken in the U.S. The federal government one. Especially the Presidency and Republican Senate.

Another is the criminal justice system.

A 36 year old Pennsylvania woman with advanced cancer a perfect example.

The lady stole $109.63 in groceries from a supermarket. She wheeled the cart out without paying.

She was arrested. It came out prior to and during the proceedings that she had about 1 month to live. Advanced uterine cancer and cervical cancer. She required immediate surgery to remove her uterus and tissue around it. A last ditch effort. Her doctor told her, “If you don’t get this done, you will die. It is eating you up inside.”

She was sentenced Monday. That same day she had an appointment with her doctor to make final arrangements for the surgery.

The judge sentenced her to at least 10 months in jail.

The woman had a record of petty thievery and drug addiction.

Should not have been an issue under the circumstances.

The supermarket says it had nothing to do with it. The authorities are responsible. Pennsylvania’s Lt. Governor has gotten involved. Said he was going to the supermarket and pay the bill himself. The supermarket said again out of their hands.

The United States of America. Doesn’t sound like it. Or, maybe it does. We seem to be in a steady decline in all respects.

Appears Trump will be acquitted of Impeachment on Wednesday. So be it. I hope American voters will remember all the deviousness involved in the proceeding and vote Trump and whatever Republican Senators they can out of office in November. Throw out the Republican Congresspersons also.

We need a clean slate!

The Trump tragedy we are experiencing did not begin with Trump’s election. It goes back to 2010 when the U.S. Supreme Court decided Citizens United v. FEC Rulings. The decision determined a corporation was a “person” and could contribute funds in an election.

Major corporations are contributing mega-bucks.

Money can and does buy elections. It is happening. Trump a benefactor. The 100 plus federal judges McConnell has successfully appointed to the bench another example.

It is the money that controls. Not Trump or McConnell. They are merely the beneficiaries and tools of the rich.

Pete Buttigieg’s husband Chasten Buttigieg was in Key West Wednesday evening for a fundraiser.

Stock Island was once famous for its dog track. One was built in 1953. Took all of 6 weeks to build. Opened with a crowd of 4,000.

How times have changed. Can’t build anything of significance today in 6 weeks. The soon to start repair work to the Cow Key Bridge an example.

The Key West Citizen continues to publish May Johnson’s diary. From 1896.

May a 19 year old school teacher.

I mentioned last week my suspicion that May’s Mom did not like Miguel. Miguel appears to be May’s boy friend.

The newspaper’s Citizens’ Section printed a comment in yesterday’s paper: “Inquiring minds want to know when May and Miguel hook up. Can’t wait.”

China is the worst hit by the coronavirus epidemic. The Florida Keys are also affected. though not by the virus itself. Rather by the huge number of spiny lobster shipments Chinese brokers have cancelled.

China loves spiny lobsters from the Florida Keys. Import them big time.

The Chinese New Year celebration last week was cancelled. Crippled Keys’ sales.

Last year at this time, spiny lobsters were selling for $20 a pound. Three weeks ago, down to $10 a pound. Now, $6 a pound.

Primarily because of China cancelling orders.

You do not have to get the bug itself to suffer.

Today, Super Bowl. Tonight at 6:30. Most of America will be watching.

An exciting event!

There was a time I attended Super Bowl religiously. Eleven consecutive ones till I retired to Key West. Key West replaced the Super Bowl trips for me pleasure wise and fun wise..

The most memorable Super Bowl in history involved the New York Jets and Baltimore Colts. The AFL and NFL.

The AFL was relatively new. NFL teams were the powerhouse.

Super Bowl III was played January 12, 1969.

Joe Namath was quarterback for the New York Jets. Considered a loud mouth at the time. The AFL second rate.

The Colts were projected to win decisively. Namath did not agree. Three days before the game he said, “We’re gonna win the game. I guarantee it.”

The Jets won 16-7. Namath was correct. Eventually became respected as one of the great professional quarterbacks of all time.

Enjoy the Super Bowl!

Enjoy your Sunday!

MORNING STEW #32 was originally published on Key West Lou

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patriotsnet · 3 years ago

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What Republicans Are Running Against President Trump

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/what-republicans-are-running-against-president-trump/

What Republicans Are Running Against President Trump