random chance

In case you were referring to my post I don't think that. Checks and balances are useless against the likes of Trump.

I have always thought that one of the best things we've got going for ourselves is the system of checks and balances. If those groups broke off and formed their own country, the first group's wouldn't be much different from any of the religion-ruled countries that they themselves hate so much, and the second group would probably go broke in a few years because they'd be giving out free tuition and health care and so on. I'm sure he has plenty of respect for a dictatorship. That is the thing I tell myself in case he does win, so that I have some shred of something to keep me from sinking into a pool of despair. It will be Chinese-curse-type interesting times. I will laugh a hollow laugh as his supporters discover, one by one, that they've been had.

Orange Julius Caesar is my new favorite name for him. (Damn, now I want an Orange Julius - how ironic.)

Well that is too cool, how wonderful of her! And of you for taking one! Stickers work just fine for adults because as it happens, we don't stop enjoying a hat tip just because we're grownups. (Exhibit A: the Like button.)

AHahahahahaha. I know it's wrong but that's what I always call her in my head. Also, whenever she talks all I can think about is "bring me the head of Moose and Squirrel." Yeah if he was just commenting on the election I'd probably find him entertaining. I thought the debate clips were funny way back when I thought he had no chance of making it out of the primaries. (Not so funny NOW of course.)

I'd bet good money that if he loses the election he'll be trading her in for a younger model in a few years. There is no way he's going to stick with someone who's losing out to gravity. Or hell, even if he wins, since none of the usual rules seem to apply to him.

Me too. I can watch (fictional) people do any number of godawful things to each other without crying, but show me an animal in a bad situation and I'm toast. Even cartoon animals.

That was literally my first thought when I glanced at the clip of her speaking. It has had that effect on me too. Along with whittling down the list of people whose opinions I respect.

Oprah isn't stick-thin but she's also not 400 pounds, I point out only because I worry that someone will read that and feel discouraged. She struggles but in that sense she did win at least one struggle.

You have got to wonder at this point if somebody is messing with her on purpose.

Oh that's excellent, that really sums him up. Smoke and Mirrors Trump, watch all his promises vanish once he's conned you into electing him.

I agree, I think this is the crux of it. I flip through the channels and there's Hillary saying something like "we need to stop being divided by divisiveness and come together to build a better tomorrow for the future" and then there's Trump with something like "when I'm elected I will invent the fountain of youth! You will be ten years younger IMMEDIATELY! Make America Young again! Youth for all! Youth for all!" And that is actually the most frightening thing about him, to me. Nobody stands up to him. Even the Pope backed down.

It reminds me of How I Met Your Mother, except in this one at least they aren't taunting us with a "mystery," they're telling us upfront that Ted and Robin wind up together (so to speak).

This murky cat situation reminds me of a scene from the Tom Hanks movie Nothing in Common where they shot a commercial about an old lady who gets a last minute ticket to spend Christmas with the grandkids, and he nixes it because the old lady had a cat. He said everyone who sees that commercial is going to wonder if the old lady just left her cat there to die. Really, at this point I have to wonder why this guy didn't manage to kick heroin and raise the child himself. Your aunt did that kid a major big favor.

I remember every one of those fads. It'll be interesting to see Kate's journey of diet fads through the decades! In the end I don't think anything matters but the calories. If you lose weight at 1200 calories a day, they can be any damn thing at all - 1200 of ice cream, 1200 of sugar, 1200 of bacon, doesn't matter. I'm also dubious about the current "information" that diet coke (or artificial sugar) causes a person to gain weight. Show me the proof, I say. (When you think about it, it's pretty sad that we don't know much more about weight loss now than we did when Kate was a child.)

Even so, he won't be doing any of the fabulous things Trump has promised, because they simply aren't possible. There will not be any fantastic cheap health insurance, there won't be millions of new jobs, the miners and steel workers will not be going back to work, U.S. jobs won't be coming back from overseas, there won't be a wall, and so on. He won't be "draining the swamp," because he can't do that without the swamp's cooperation. He won't be making America "great" again because he doesn't have a time machine to take us all back to when his fans thought America was great (I'm guessing in the 50's). And since he's gone on record a thousand times about how fast everything will change, it'll be clear pretty quickly that it was all delusional jibberjabber.

This is what I'm telling myself: if he wins, it'll be crystal clear early on that he's an utter fraud who won't do any of the things he claimed he would do, and the Trumpsters will turn on him like a pack of rabid dogs.

I wish that just once when someone is rabbiting on about God's forgiveness of Trump that a reporter would ask, so does God also forgive people who had abortions and gay marriages and adulterers?* And if he does - do you as well? Because the hypocrisy is so thick it stings my eyes. *Not to put gay marriage in the category of a crime in general, I mean because it's a crime to them.

I wonder how this would have gone if the Dem was a man.

Yeah that was just painful. Especially when he went to check if the kid was still there, because there was no earthly reason to do that except to make the rest of the episode happen. It was like those jokes where someone asks a stupid question that nobody would ask in real life, in order for the punchline to proceed. I used to live in a state that had a law forcing convicted sex offenders had to turn off their porch light on Halloween. For that reason I would never let the ex turn off our porch light, because I didn't want the neighborhood to think a sex offender lived there.

I'm pretty center-right, except on social issues where I'm a bleeding heart lefty, and I'm from a red state where everyone I know is happy to lecture me on Trump's holiness and "Crooked Hillary's" recent murder spree (or so you'd think to listen to them). It irks me that some of the things I'd actually be for otherwise, would require me to vote for Trump. And even if he could guarantee those things, I'd never vote for him.

This reminds me of the time I tried to explain to someone that they were falling for a scam, and instead of listening to my explanation - or even not listening, but at least taking my advice to check it out further - they just got madder and madder at me. And then they did what the scammer asked them to do. Defiantly. Like, "screw you and your scam nonsense, I'm going to cash a check and meet up with this complete stranger who wants to give me a free new car for no good reason!" I guess that for some people, it's more painful to admit that they might have fallen for a scam than it is to actually be scammed.

Supposedly one of them has him saying the n-word, but I can't imagine why people think that would turn off his supporters. So far as I can tell, the only thing that might turn them against him is if he: 1) came out as gay 2) was exposed as a Muslim or 3) forced someone to have an abortion and he paid for it - and they have his cashed check and his words on tape.

I'm even avoiding print at this point, but I do come here in case there's anything breaking. I was using Mute for awhile but I could still see Trump smirk and do his finger-circle-point thing and I just can't take it anymore. I think it might have been a mistake to "go high," maybe they should have gotten into the gutter with Trump.

That is the big question for me too. He insults someone for weeks with all kinds of slimy insinuations and terrible names and then all of a sudden they're supporting him. He's accused of several things no Christian should want to be associated with and suddenly some Christian bigwig is defending him - and with a defense that for some reason is never pulled out for gays or other "sinners," such as "judge not" and "let he who throws the first stone" and "he repented so it's cool." What is his hold on people? It can't be that they admire his ethics and he has no charm or wit, and his only accomplishments seem to be getting other people to give him money and then not paying taxes on it. Does he blackmail them? Are they afraid of him because they heard some story of what he did to someone who crossed him? Is it hypnosis? Drugs in their water? It's the biggest mystery of this godawful endless torture of an election year, for me. Why is anyone on earth taking him even remotely seriously, let alone defending him and propping him up?