amsel

Yep, just like "cancel culture" (Berkeley canceling him) and solar panels (waiting for the installation to get completed), he wants COVID to magically go away because it's affecting HIM. The guy is a narcissist. The current crisis truly revealed it. I disagreed with him often in the past, but he's become a mean, selfish prick. And of course Barry Weiss is a guest again. I'm sure Andrew Sullivan and Matt Taibbi will appear soon.

One explanation could be that he realized he found himself close to Dawn's house and just went there on foot as he didn't have a phone and it was late night and fearing a bunch of people believed he was a murderer and serial abuser, not realizing he'd be in danger entering her house. Not sure why it needed to be 8 episodes. The reporter narrative should have taken about 5 minutes, but it took them an entire episode to introduce a bunch of uninteresting characters. Overall, pretty entertaining show, though slow at certain points.

Rafe quickly transformed from a dumb, entitled kid on drugs to a criminal mastermind. I agree that he's one of the better actors on the show, but he does the thing where he doesn't close his mouth for a long time to show rage and I can't unsee it. He will need to develop different faces of rage as an actor. Ward just needs to die because he drags the show down. I finally saw the last episode of Season 2 tonight and I realized we're back where we were at the end of Season 1. But that makes sense since the show wouldn't have a reason to exist if they got all the treasures that they wanted. I look forward to Season 3. This show is so ridiculously awful. I can't stop watching it, for now. Maybe two more seasons before I lose interest.

Bill said that MSNBC doesn't cover Trump's overperformance among some minority groups. It's just not true, as I have seen multiple segments on MSNBC talking about it, particularly his performance in the Rio Grande Valley. I think he's mad his buddy and fellow creep Chris Matthews got fired. Kmele Foster was just full of shit. Race is the most important factor in American life, and has been for four hundred years. It affects almost everything. His dismissal of race is just total nonsense. There is so much scholarship, evidence, and history that tells the exact opposite story.

Kellyanne is just a professional filibusterer, a troll. She spent more time talking about charter schools and the corporate tax rate than she did talking about the insurrection last week. The nonchalant way she described that event was remarkable. "We accomplished so much during the administration, though I agree what happened last week was unfortunate." WTF? It was also interesting that she thinks that historians that will write about the Trump presidency have not been born yet. Says who? I happen to be a historian, and there's nothing wrong about writing about something that happened during my lifetime. It's almost impossible to have a reasonable interview with her. She keeps talking just to fill the time.

I didn't expect this show to be great and I kinda enjoyed some of the ridiculousness, but what bothered me throughout is the dialogue. I've seen worse dialogue in many other shows, but teenagers don't talk and behave like that, even rebellious ones. It would have been easy to write scenes in which teenagers would talk and act like teenagers. While I expected some violence, what I didn't expect is batshit crazy violence from a bunch of people. We saw a character almost beaten to death by a couple guys using golf clubs in the open, which happened after an almost-drowning witnessed by a bunch of people. It's just unreasonable levels of violence, which is somehow forgotten the next day. Unless there is a John A or John F, there is no need to say John B every 10 seconds. Episode 9 was the worst. We had a guy, found with a dying body on a tarmac, accusing a teenager of killing a cop, and the other cop buys the story without ever questioning it. And then the whole town starts hunting for the 16 year old as if he's a monster. At no point did anyone question if the story makes any sense. "Why would a 16 year old kill a cop for no reason?" no one ever asked. And speaking of the dead cop, she didn't tell anyone beforehand that she was about to arrest that guy? You'd think she would have informed people that she was about to arrest the richest guy on the island, and would have brought some people with her. I gotta admit, it made me laugh when that guy told that kid "shut up you little bastard!" after the kid thought he should get the reward. Probably the only scene that genuinely made me laugh. I still enjoyed it. If it wasn't for the pandemic, I probably would never have watched it. But with so much time to waste, this show was a good way to waste it.

I understand inviting conservative/right-wing guests from time to time, but Dennis Prager is just a troll who is not interested in any meaningful exchange of ideas. It is such a waste of time that I couldn't take 2 minutes of it when I turned to the channel and I saw his face. Now I read that Maher was spewing some BS about vaccinations as well. Maybe this is the show's jump the shark moment. Bill has turned into an insufferable character. The show has become pointless.

Schlapp is just a good old political hack, and his arguments are awful. After Bill read through the "If Obama Did It" book, Schlapp came back by saying that Trump promised a lot of things and he delivered on them, and, therefore, his criminality, indecency, dishonesty, and hypocrisy are irrelevant (I've seen Schlapp a lot on TV, and that's his usual counter). What Bill should have said is that Obama also delivered on a lot of promises he made during the campaign, but if Obama had done 1/10th of the awful/criminal things Trump has done in office, the Democrats would not have supported him anymore and would have impeached him and/or demanded his resignation, and therefore Schlapp is a morally bankrupt person. Personally speaking, if Obama had turned out to be a crook, that would have been the biggest political disappointment I can think of. As we are seeing in real time, as Trump is becoming worse, his support among Republicans is getting stronger. But no, Maher just moved on, and he did the same thing on other issues that he brought up with Schlapp. As has been said many times in these threads, Maher is not good and maintaining pressure on his guests when they're clearly wrong. Or maybe he just doesn't care. The panel discussion was mostly good, though that Rothman guy used a lot of words but said little. Jonathan Alter was fantastic, as usual. Michael Steele's 2020 prediction is full of holes. The best argument to use is this one: Trump needed a deeply flawed opponent, interference by an adversary, billions of dollars of free coverage on TV, Jim Comey's interference, etc. and that perfect election night amounted to a 70,000 vote victory in the right three states that Democrats almost always win. Will he have another perfect night? It's possible, but unlikely. What happened in 2016 was also unlikely, but Trump had about a 25% chance of winning, and that 25% chance became reality. Alter tried to make that point, but it was buried in the noise. And no one brought up the historic victory by the Democrats just a few months ago as a great symbol of the dissatisfaction among the electorate. The discussion on Israel started well, but Maher ended it by saying that Palestinians are victims, but not of Israelis but of themselves. That's just objectively false, and I'm not anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian, or vice versa, but to absolve Israel from blame is just absurd. I just wish Alter, who is Jewish and is pretty objective on this particular issue, would have added a sentence or two to correct Maher's stupid claim, but they moved on to something else, as usual.

They were not talking about the general election, it's about winning South Carolina in the primary due to the high percentage of African-American voters that vote in the primary. If you can't win over African Americans during the Democratic primary, you can't win the nomination. Just look at Bernie Sanders, who lost in South Carolina and lost throughout the South by huge margins. As I said above, Bret Stephens might be right about the importance of South Carolina in the primary, but John Hickenlooper won't be the one winning it.

Yes, but it ain't gonna be John Hickenlooper.

The only conclusion that I can draw from Bret Stephens' bizarre comments about 2020 is that he wants Democrats to lose so that Trump stays president and Bret Stephens therefore stays relevant as a commentator. John Hickenlooper and Maggie Hassan? Seriously, dude? I like how Cornell countered that when you nominate someone like Obama, you win. And yes, in an ideal world, Democrats would win both houses and win every other election, but it's not an ideal world. Stephens and Maher being Debbie Downers dragged the whole show down.

Maybe it's because he doesn't want Warren to win the nomination. :D Trump would use the Pocahontas label constantly, and then she would attack him back, and then the campaign would become a joke. The Democrats do need a fighter, but someone who is young and new. As of now, I'm on the Kamala Harris train, with Chris Murphy as her VP. But let's see how things develop in the next couple years. I thought the show was good. I loved Lawrence (I watch his show every night, so that's no surprise :D). The confrontation between Pinker and DL was unfortunate because their views, I think, are compatible, but they couldn't really articulate them well enough to make it clear that they are compatible. So it ended it being this awkward thing where the white man tells a black man that things are better. My favorite part was "there's hasn't been any non-evidence," in New Rules.

Best show in a long time. Great guests, good humor, informative. Everyone got to talk and there was no shouting. New rules was fantastic.

I wish Schiff was on the panel and that midshow guest came first. It's easier to just skip the first guest. Overall, pretty good show. Overtime was great, too.

That was one of the worst episodes in the show's history, ruined by one guest. I just wish that, at some point, someone would have told the audience that the Mooch doesn't believe in any of that nonsense and that he simply wants publicity (the closest anyone came was when Frum said that his anger is not a performance, implicitly saying that the Mooch is just performing). But they treated him like a rational person. All that nonsense about the working man and this that, the guy couldn't even make the whole act believable. Either Bill didn't foresee the possibility that the Mooch would take over the show, or maybe he just wanted that chaos to happen. Overtime was even worse.