Lurker > HeroicSpiderPig

I'm having trouble understanding Van Drew's political calculus here. By all accounts he's said multiple times Trump is crazy, so in order to avoid a Republican primary challenge from his right, he'd have to lie and (probably) make votes he doesn't believe in. But if that's something he's willing to do, why not just do the same for Democrats and vote for impeachment? His opposition to it was allegedly based on strategy reasons, not because he thought Trump was innocent of the crimes, so there's no moral dilemma there. I guess he's just banking on Republicans being so grateful for the good news that they'll help him fight off a primary challenge?

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Yesmar

Nelson_Mandela posted...

You can have your self-respect. I'll take my electoral victories!

If nothing else, the Trump years have made the crowd's reaction to Edea's speech in FFVIII finally make sense to me.

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Yesmar

Which Republican voted Yea?! I literally gasped when that came up.

Edit: Oh, it's gone now. Must have been a mistake, lol.

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I was listening to the second season of Slow Burn, and it made me realize how much of a nostalgia trigger the name Monica Lewinsky is for me.

Whatever happened to "I'll Be" by Edwin McCain? I mean I'm not a fan of it or anything, but there was a 5-6 year period when this was a "new standard." It was played at every romantic event and moment that you could think of, and it was so clich that one of the early seasons of American Idol had a montage of all the people using it in their auditions. But when was the last time you heard it? I mean I don't go to many weddings, so maybe it's still played there, but it's pretty much evaporated from public consciousness otherwise. "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing," and "I Hope You Dance," two songs from the same time, which fill a similar cultural niche, have endured.

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Yesmar

Hmm, just noticed that the three Representatives most involved with impeachment (Pelosi, Schiff, and Nadler) represent the three biggest gay neighborhoods in the country. Clearly the Gay Mafia strikes again!

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Yesmar

I go to another message board that has gossip from celebrity insiders from time to time. Not as much for politics really, and take this with a grain of salt, but someone did once post that they were involved in Washington politics, and that Harris's reputation was that she was intelligent and a hard worker, but that she has a tendency to listen to and go with the last person she talked to. Over the past couple of months, that has explained a lot.

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Yesmar

Term limits for legislative bodies are a bad idea. Most people aren't in there very long anyway. Who cares that a handful of Senators have been there for decades? The amount of people in both houses that are there for more than 15 or so years is not that high.

If you want more turnover sounds like another reason to support random voting!

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red sox 777 posted...

He was fired for not investigating Burisma or not investigating other corruption? Remember, this is Ukraine. Just because the prosecutor was corruptly turning a blind eye to other companies doesn't mean that he wasn't pursuing a legitimate investigation of Burisma - it just means Burisma didn't pay him enough. Or maybe they found an alternate way of dealing with things that was cheaper.

I don't think he was fired for not investigating Burisma specifically, but he had stopped investigating them when Biden put pressure on Ukraine to fire him. That is my understanding, at least.

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Oh, I totally get Buttigieg's appeal. I'm just not coming across as many supporters as I feel I theoretically should.

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red sox 777 posted...

So people keep saying that Hunter wasn't on Burisma's board until after the incident they were being investigated for occurred, but does that matter? If you were on the Burisma board and there was a big investigation pending, wouldn't it make a lot of sense to hire the US Vice President's son so that his father would make the investigation go away? Looks like a classic case of quid pro quo.

The prosecuter that was fired was specifically choosing NOT to investigate Burisma, presumably after being bribed. There is no way that firing the prosecuter would have made an investigation of Burisma less likely.

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I don't have any ill will towards him like a lot of my other liberal/progressive brethern, but I have yet to come across either online, or in person, the number of Buttigieg supporters that his numbers imply. Where are they? Do I need to know more liberal soccer moms? All of the white collar white liberals I know/know of are in for Warren. I don't know where this is coming from.

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xp1337 posted...

GOP: "What did you hear the President say about A$AP Rocky?"
Holmes: "I did not hear the President's side of the conversation about A$AP Rocky."

now we're getting to the real stuff

"He told the President 'You can tell the Kardashians that you tried.'"

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Yesmar

If Pence looks like he's going down too, I doubt Pelosi would want to be in that position anyway. The House probably appoints someone like Colin Powell as Speaker, and we get Caretaker President Powell for a year.

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Nelson_Mandela posted...

Emmy Squared is great, but I don't think Menji is going to want to trek out to Williamsburg

I think there's a location in the East Village too.

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Nelson_Mandela posted...

Seconded

Thirded.

I was going to recommend General Deb's in Bushwick, but apparently that is permanently closed due to some standoff with the state and the gas company (??)

Last month, a friend and I went to a charity pizza party event where for a dollar a slice you could sample pizza from around the city. Both of us had the same pick for which slice was the best, and IIRC it was Emmy Squared.

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red sox 777 posted...

If you're going to charge him with witness intimidation or whatever based on them, then yes, that does violate his freedom of speech rights.

So it's not illegal to intimidate someone through speech? That would certainly...not hold up in any courtroom anywhere.

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Is the GOP counsel throwing Guiliani under the bus here? lol

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GOP Counsel: "But the way it sounds like here, is that Zelensky was excited to meet America's Mayor."

Literally made me laugh out loud.

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Great_Paul posted...

That's a shame

https://twitter.com/TristanACooper/status/1194298167824650240

Boourns!

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I still think Biden should choose Gillum.

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Bubble tea works fine with plastic straws actually, since you don't have the problem of the straw hole pinching the paper until it becomes useless like with an iced coffee lid or something. I support paper straws, but if you're gonna do that you need to change some of the closed lids that are used as well.

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Regarding Epstein, while I lean away from conspiracy generally, even if it was suicide, I mean, there's ways to talk someone into doing that too. Suicide isn't incompatible with a conspiracy theory.

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red sox 777 posted...

If Warren is winning liberal elites, it seems like her messaging is failing pretty hard.

She's winning "liberal elites," not "liberal" elites.

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Not official, but people on Twitter seem to think that Democrats have won control of the Virginia State Senate.

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Ferroseed posted...

Who was it that said today's superhero movies are just getting the same vitriol as yesterday's mobster movies, and westerns before that, and so on?

Because that's basically it.

Those older movies received vitriol from whom? Elite film critics? The original Caheirs du Cinema crowd loved American crime films and westerns.

Is there a single one that is controlled by an auteur who is making all final creative decisions, research and studio be damned?

To be fair, the original directors that were considered auteurs were the ones whose vision shined through the studio system. I think the issue is more that "auteurist" directors just aren't the ones making the top Hollywood movies like in years past. I mean, how many big franchise films post-Nolan have been directed by someone considered an auteur? Black Panther and The Last Jedi? I guess The Hobbit movies count as well.


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Good news for Dems in VA:



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red sox 777 posted...

Biden is the "friendly" option this far out, but if he becomes the nominee, people are going to ask themselves if they really want a Democrat. And a lot of people are going to vote for the mean Republican over the nice Democrat.

Oh, don't get me wrong, his lead will totally decrease from where it is now. I'm just saying that there tend to be limits on these kinds of things, and getting to 50% this consistently, (and during a competitive primary at that), tends to be the limit. This is the Trump administration we're dealing with though, so the potential for some kind of Black Swan event is always present.

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I'm fairly confident Biden would win an election against Trump. He's consistently able to get above 50% in polls, and what I've learned from watching this stuff over the past 10 years, is that if you're able to break 50% this far out, you generally win short of some massive scandal/blunder. Everyone else is still up in the air, IMO.

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Oh, speaking of Twilight Zone, the 80's version is supposed to be good, although not on par with the original. I haven't seen any of it though.

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Since we're counting Community, MST3K's initial cancellation and move to the Sci-Fi Channel would qualify. The Netflix version is fine, but a step below the original series, although some people consider it on par.

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*gif of Elaine saying "Food's not all that good anyway."*

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red sox 777 posted...

Also, supposing the prosecutor was corrupt and wasn't investigating some known corrupt people, that doesn't imply his investigation of Burisma wasn't legit.

The corrupt prosecutor that Biden wanted fired was deciding NOT to investigate Burisma. That's why Biden having done this to protect Hunter doesn't even make any sense.

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What a glorious day!

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LordoftheMorons posted...

Also wow this Hillary quote: https://twitter.com/aaronblake/status/1185196559941722113?s=21

Hope shes doing wrong about this unnamed female Dem candidate, but Im not holding my breath!

Something that I am sure no one ever could have predicted!

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LOLIAmAnAlt posted...

Do people look forward to those m&m fun bags?

This is probably just me, but an empty M&M bag is one of my least favorite smells. There are smells that I know are "worse," but there's something about that smell I just can't stand.

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I notice no discussion about the best comic book movie:

https://a.ltrbxd.com/resized/sm/upload/b3/fj/5k/es/t9uXmc321EzCp6uUYU3XtghjqTq-0-230-0-345-crop.jpg?k=c267561096

;)

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Eddv posted...

I think there is something a little stupid about like "oh yeah Captain America 2 was a really good piece of cinema"

Because while it is without the context of some questionably good movies its hard to make sense of and it's like....not capable of joining the ranks of the truly classic films.

We won't ever look back on it the way we do say Shawshank. And that's a shame in some ways.

Adding to this, it's interesting to note that the two comic book based movies in the past decade to really enter the cultural zeitgeist and discussion in a serious way are Black Panther and Joker, which are two of the least dependent on a cinematic universe.

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The issue with the MCU films, if there is one, isn't that they are bad, or not of a good quality. It's that their quality level, as it is, should be considered the baseline for a Hollywood studio picture, not its peak.

And that's not to mention all the other franchise films of a lesser quality that have replaced more adult dramas as the top movies at the box office, which is more of a problem than Marvel. Sure people love to "turn their brains off" whatever that means, but if so, that's a recent development. There was a time when movies like Kramer Vs. Kramer, Rain Man, Forrest Gump, Saving Private Ryan, Dances with Wolves, Terms of Endearment, Titanic were massive hits that were in the top 3 or so of their year. No similar type of movie would come close to their box office numbers today. I know people will quibble with the quality of some of the films I mentioned, but regardless of how successful they might have been at it, all of those films were attempting to appeal to something deeper than "Oh hey, I recognize the characters and settings up on the screen," and audiences of the time clearly reacted to them. But those days are gone, and in our current climate of social fragmentation, content glut, and siloing, it will be hard to get back.

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Into the Groove

HM: Frozen

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In the interest of bipartisanship, let us all acknowledge the anniversary of one of the most maudlin, condescending, passive-aggressive, and utterly brilliant speeches in American political history:

https://watergate.info/1952/09/23/nixon-checkers-speech.html

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Taft didn't believe in the divinity of Jesus. That's kind of close.

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"This Day and All the Rest" -- Leelee Sobieski



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Clearly our generation's version of Chase the Chuck Wagon.

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This whole conversation needs to be about 30% more toyetic.

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I mean the suggestions are basically:

-Have Spider-Man do something cool and say "No big deal" afterwards.
-Have an EDM soundtrack
-Have some sort of Snapchat promotional account.

None of that seems particularly stupid to me. You have to work to reduce PR people's language down to its barest essence.

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Hot take alert:

-Honestly, while it's written in horrendous, embarrassing PR speak, I don't think the suggestions in that Nick Shore email are particularly bad.

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Why is Spider-Man's incorporation into other MCU films, plus a large profit in merchandising, not a fair trade for time spent developing Spider-Man films? That was Disney/Marvel's goal, no?

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The second movies certainly diverged, but the total box office for the first Tom Holland and the first Andrew Garfield movie are roughly comparable, so it's not clear that Sony needs the MCU to hit similar numbers for Spider-Man, IMO.
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Are home theaters still increasing at the same pace as they were 10 years ago? With cord cutting, and smart phones I would figure that people are less invested in television purchases.

In regards to the fate of movie theaters, I'm not too worried. Per capita film attendance in the US is quite a bit higher than most other major developed countries, minus France, and movie theaters haven't collapsed anywhere else to my knowledge, so there's quite a ways to fall. Per capita attendance has been relatively stable throughout the teens, so while this year has been bad, I don't necesarilly see a future where attendance keeps dropping every year. The collapse of the adult drama is certainly a cause for concern for the film industry on an aesthetic level, but I don't think that theaters themselves are going anywhere anytime soon.
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LordoftheMorons posted...

Republican FEC commissioners are blocking an investigation into whether Russian money funneled through the NRA was used to illegally help Trump get elected:

https://twitter.com/ellenlweintraub/status/1162429772590387203?s=21

Another one to file under I guess its okay to break election laws as long as you win

The problem here is that Trump supporters believe that there is some New World Order that has been funneling money from overseas to Clinton and other establishment people for years. When issues like this get brought up, it's not that Trumpers don't believe it per se, but that they just think it's "evening up the score."
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