freddi

I know that "Postcards from the Edge" will never be on a "Best" list for Meryl Streep, but I was so delighted and surprised to see it on TCM last night. The scenes with Shirley MacLaine and Streep are such a perfect balance of humor and deep strife, and the small roles are so perfectly cast. My utterly favorite scene, which I caught just in time last night, is the stroll and conversation of Streep and Annette Bening. A scene of two characters in completely opposite modes: one disgusted and one delighted, one police officer and one cheesy hooker: what a world of contrasts. "Geeze, I thought for a minute you were part of a celebrity AIDS notification program." "Endolphins." And that scene where Streep in a calm three minutes transforms MacLaine from a frightened, intimidated, eyebrowless gnome into a swaggering star: so deeply touching and mesmerizing. Richard Dreyfuss. Gene Hackman. All gems.

I love "Harry and Tonto," but the realism is just so raw for me. It certainly captured the feel of the early 1970s, just by pointing the camera. My first cat had the exact same color/markings and happily walked on a leash and lived 20 years (walking a quarter mile many days). I usually stop watching about five minutes before the end.

Amid all the sadness and politics, I had to smile at the image HRC described of Bill Clinton and RBG excitedly getting into the weeds of constitutional law in her initial interview. A golden age.

What is that college list Joe keeps reading? I assume it it football, but he’s talking like it is the new higher ed rankings. Minus Princeton, heh, heh, Professor Glaube. How is Kasie going to do a 5:00 AM morning show with an infant? They had her welcome at the start of Morning Joe time; I had not heard about this. No more KC/DC <lightening bolt>, Mika? ⚡️

This shriveled sorry excuse for a person will be studied and analyzed far beyond our understanding, especially once the backstories start to emerge and the full financial picture is assembled. It is a question of either how close he came to destroying our governance institutions, or how he did destroy those institutions. And Rachel's theory tonight makes perfect sense, in that he doesn't care how many Americans have to die to prove his point of "herd mentality". Has he ever acknowledged that his rally killed Herman Cain?

Imagine having to report these repulsive stories every day.

I agree. His emails/texts were very unprofessional, even if they were on his personal accounts. Of course it is fine and *necessary* to have opinions. but if he had been sending those to me, I would not have been responding. They were a little too many Red Bull-late night level of excitability. And this was the second time that Lawrence O'D referred to her audiobook show.

Got to hear Rachel's sentence in the handoff: "I'm legitimately shocked". And she looked shocked, still. That is saying a lot.

Oh, yes, her final comments were the most hard-hitting. All the Nixon tapes did ("all") was to show criminal intent and knowledge, and it was enough to get the votes to remove him from office, which he avoided by resigning. As Rachel said, this is so much worse, as it actually cost lives. This is the Trump tapes, and like the Nixon tapes, no one knew they existed until they knew they existed. Everyone is in shock, including Rachel, and the sonic boom from this revelation of the "tapes" and their *contents* is coming, one way or another. If this is Woodward's career bookend to the Watergate investigation, it is a resoundingly solid bookend.

This is hilarious, in the first segment of the interview with Cohen: for whatever reason, Rachel is avoiding saying Hannity’s name, and Cohen similarly is saying that he won’t say the other news host’s name, “but your listeners are smart, and they’ll figure out who it is.” YET, at the start of that thread, the quote Rachel was reading was printed on the screen, and it totally stated, “Hannity said” in the midst of the quote. I’ve seen comedy episodes do that schtick, with the inadvertent revelation. And yeah, I would have figured how who it was without the answer being printed.

I’ve never run into him, but know plenty of people who have, here in Seattle, and everyone who has met him in the streets or shops is lit by the enjoyment of talking with him. He comes across as very genuine.

Was the entire second Friday hour a repeat of her show from a few days ago? I was not paying close attention when the second hour started. Then I saw the introduction to the Wolkoff book and interview, and stopped watching.

Yes, MSNBC is now promoting the Cohen appearance on September 8. (Would not be surprised if Rachel takes a long weekend starting on Friday. This has been a long slog the past few weeks.)

Lawrence O'Donnell, in the handoff, was still talking to Rachel when he said "when you were in the audiobook segment of your show," and that is exactly what it was. Again. But she gave this author two segments; Michael Schmidt maybe needs longer to start to open up, and a good interviewer could have pried more perspective out of him in two segments.

24 minutes reading from the book and summarizing it -- and 10 minutes with the author. Schmidt is not the most riveting speaker, but he is intense and knows what he is talking about. I would have preferred more time with him, and less reading. But a good line from Rachel was "Hide your ice cream" (what? I thought) "He is a fearsome scooper."