KerleyQ

I was definitely thinking "push him over, Brooke. Push him!!"

I really don't think so. And he (and his kids and Kellyanne) will argue that his being so "accessible" and "of the people" is why he has the job. If all else fails, he'll be hiding phones around the White House or grabbing Jared's phone when he's not looking. He won't stop.

I think that this was a case where Guza would have done what he wanted, but, once Frons put the Jason/Courtney idea in his head, it was a chance for Jason to get another win over AJ, so he went with it. And, once they were a couple, of course they were going to get front burner status, because anything Jason did was front burner under Guza. Guza's only investment in Courtney was in how she related to Jason, Sonny, and Carly. He eventually got bored with her and tossed her to Jax and Nik.

Brooke. Why? Why? Please just slap the smug off of his face and go marry Bill. And Ridge with his "you'll walk away from me, from RJ." No, ass. She is not walking away from her son by marrying another man. Shut up!

NLG definitely crosses the line at times, but I just took a look at Ingo's Facebook page, and his replies to some of the people who commented are really out of line. He had to know he'd be stirring things up with his post, and he seems to relish in it.

The overtime rule thing is a great example of what I was saying in my last post - that the GOP manage to control the narrative and get their supporters to place blame where it doesn't belong. I've honestly seen GOP voters saying things like "well that rule was going to ruin small businesses. You can't force a small business to give anyone who makes $30,000 per year an instant raise to $47,000 per year." They managed to pick a couple numbers out of the actual rule, and then they rearranged them to make the rule look like something it isn't, to justify taking a sledge hammer to it. A lot of those voters have no idea how close they came to having something good happen for them, something that could make a real positive difference in their economic situation, only to have Ryan kill it before they can experience it. Trump may be the master at manipulating the narrative, but the GOP has been working up to him for years.

The thing is, though, the GOP have become masters of getting their supporters to always blame whoever they tell them to blame. And they fall for it. That's how the GOP exists and hasn't either been forced to change or gone into extinction. Even though they have control now (or will come 1/20), they will still find someone else to blame for their mistakes. It won't be logical to any of us who weren't buying the GOP's bullshit to begin with, and it may result in a small portion of their voting base saying "hey, how can this be Elizabeth Warren's fault when you guys have control of both houses?" But, overall, their base will believe them when they say that their policies are being undermined by something Warren, Sanders, et al, are pushing for, or that their changes would work if only they're allowed to make this one more change, or their policies would work if it wasn't for the illegals/poor/elderly/Muslims/gays/minorities who aren't pulling their weight. And, of course, "this policy will work once we've had a few years to undo the damage President Obama caused." You know that's coming. They'll buy themselves enough time to win the midterms, ensuring their majority remains intact. This is what his grasping son-in-law should be working on - suck up enough to make sure that he and Ivanka are the ones to be in charge if something happens to him, then 5150 his ass. At this point, we've moved beyond Punk'd. Now we need Andy Kaufman to rip off his Trump mask. I still believe (and his behavior since the win reinforces it) that he never wanted the job. He just wanted the win. He hates that the other billionaires don't take him seriously. He's considered a grasping joke among their circle, especially among the really wealthy real estate developers (a group he likes to consider himself the leader of, even though they don't even like to claim him as a member). He wanted to prove that people love him and that he's a winner. That's why he's embarking on this victory tour - to bask in more of the adulation he received at his rallies and to reinforce that he won. It won't wake them up at first. He'll spin it as another example of what a great business man he is, and how of course he knows how to do this, because business is his thing. And one of the things about him that his supporters have cited from the get go has been that he's a successful business man, so, of course, he'd be great at running the country. Since a decision to privatize the VA would fall under the heading of a "business decision" in their eyes, then he's just trying to do the right thing to fix the system that the politicians haven't been able to run right. Agreed. I wouldn't be happy if, say, Kasich, Bush, or Romney had won, but I wouldn't fee like we were careening towards an epic disaster. I think they're all basically decent men who want to do what they think is best most of the time (and sometimes let themselves be misguided by party leadership or the interests of their biggest donors), even if I don't necessarily agree with them on what is "best". I'd just figure we were in for at least four more years of W. We survived 8 of those, we'd survive 4 more. Trump is a whole other animal. His ego will always come first. And that is a very dangerous way to run a country. I'd be willing to bet that, before Johnson's infamous "Aleppo" moment, Trump had exactly zero idea what Aleppo was either. I'd like to think that, at minimum, our President should be required to know at least as much about our Constitution as I needed to know to pass 8th grade. Unfortunately, that is not the case. Seriously. I think his tweet this morning about flag burning may actually be his scariest moment yet. That is some serious totalitarian regime stuff there. He actually tweeted that he wants to imprison people for a year or revoke their citizenship if they exercise their Constitutionally protected right to free speech. Ironically, he figuratively burned ALL the flags with that tweet. I'm sure he wouldn't get that, though. Side note: I love this country and I love our flag, but I'm so sick of how some on the right have fetish-ized the flag. If there is anyone out there who is eligible for Medicare who hasn't enrolled (because they still have coverage through a spouse's plan, for example), they should absolutely enroll as of 1/1, to make sure they are covered under it before Ryan gets his hands on it and makes any changes that might make it difficult for them to enroll or might kick the can further down the road so that they aren't eligible to enroll for several years. Ditto to anyone who has put off receiving their SS benefits. You may want to start receiving them now (and invest them if you don't currently need them) before the age where you can receive them gets pushed back. You might find yourself in a situation where you need them in a couple years, but you can't start receiving them yet. I think it's a little of each. I am one hundred percent positive that he doesn't understand any of it. But, I'd be willing to bet that some of his team does. They've just witnessed how his supporters don't get that he doesn't understand it, so they figure they may as well play along with him and use that to their advantage. I cannot wait until Arnold's version of Apprentice starts airing. We are going to get some comedy gold out of Trump's Twitter account. That and his tendency to use one word declarations (like "Sad") as punctuation. And I just got an ugly mental image of him sitting on his (no doubt gold) toilet at 4 AM, tweeting his little fingers off. You just know that's what he's doing. That's why nobody manages to grab his phone from him once he starts these Twitter rants. He's locked away in his bathroom with his phone.

I just saw that Roger Stone said that Trump would re-examine prosecuting Hillary if she goes along with the recount. Nice that they don't feel any pressure to even pretend this isn't going to be a dictatorship.

That's my thought - someone in his camp gets him riled up about something whenever they determine a distraction is needed. Then they just hand him his phone and let him do his thing.

It's really a statement on how much the GOP has pissed me off over the past 8 years that I genuinely can't decide if I want him impeached or not. It would almost be rewarding them, to impeach him and let Pence take the job. And Pence is his own kind of mess that won't be as blatantly obvious to many voters when it comes time for re-election in 2020. Trump may be an unmitigated disaster, or he may be just enough of a disaster to make it so that they lose big in 2018 and 2020. And who knows how much they would actually be able to get done in 2-4 years of his lead, vs. 4 years of Pence. I'm honestly, genuinely stumped here. If his VP had been Kasich, Romney, someone like that, I'd be all for impeachment. Pence, though? Pence is the exact nightmare they've been trying to give us for years.

I highly doubt he knows enough about the Constitution to know they have this power.

My thoughts exactly. You didn't really do anything by stepping down. You just stepped aside and let it happen, even knowing it is a disaster for this nation. People have become awfully snowflake-y about their "conscience" when exercising their conscience amounts to throwing their hands up in the air and letting someone else decide for them. That's what all the "I'm going to vote third party because I refuse to vote for the lesser of two evils" people did three weeks ago, and it's what this guy is doing now. Apparently their conscience tells them to step back and just let bad shit happen to their fellow citizens.

The ones I encounter seem to be split into two camps. None will admit, outright, that this was a huge old mistake. Half just simply don't talk about it at all. They ignore all news items about him, they've stopped responding to argue if you post anything negative about him. They've just shut down. I think they do have some buyer's remorse, but they will never admit it. The other half are the obsessive fans of Trump. They're still out there slugging away for him, using cognitive dissonance to explain away anything and everything. Present actual facts to them, and it's merely "liberal spin." There is nothing he can do to lose their support. That whole "I could shoot someone on 5th Avenue" thing? That's them. Alex Jones. It blows my mind that we have a P-E who treats whatever comes out of Alex Jones's fevered imagination as fact. Oh, I don't believe for a second that the ranting will stop. He'll keep having hidden phones that he hasn't told staff about, no matter how many they find and take away. He'll never stop. He can't. He has a pathological need for it. My brother is a Trump supporter (one who seems to have fallen in the first camp I discussed above - he basically hasn't said a word about Trump since the election, he just keeps ranting about Hillary). He spewed the same kind of "the country is a disaster, the economy sucks, etc, stuff that Trump fear mongered. I said to my Mom once "exactly what is so bad in his life that he keeps ranting about what a disaster the country is?" He and his wife both have very high paying jobs, and his requires very few actual hours in the office. He's at work less in a week, generally, than my kid is in school. They have a huge, like 5,000 square foot house for the two of them. They take a minimum of two week long vacations each year (I think it's 3 or 4 they've taken this year) to place like Hawaii and the Bahamas. They both drive expensive luxury cars. They're not drowning in debt for any of this stuff, either. So, I fail to get what he's talking about when he rants about the economy and how miserable life is in this country. And you can't get a straight answer if you ask him, unless he decides to honor you with one of his rants about Muslims. Explain to him that more deaths in the past 15 years (post 9/11) have occurred from home grown white Christian terrorists than Islamic terrorists, and he just rants at you about being anti-Christian. Trump managed to fear monger tens of millions of people, because he found a way to convince them that anything that goes wrong, either in their own lives, or around them, is someone else's fault, and, if only those people were stopped, life in this country would be for all of us like it is for him (or as they envision it is for him) - living in tacky gold leafed palaces, with super model wives, beautiful, successful family, jetting all over the globe in a private plane, etc. They don't get that that's not how any of this works. He's told them that life sucks in this country, and only he can make it better, and, for whatever reason, they bought into it, hook, line, and sinker. Nope. They don't need to understand it. They just trust that he knows best. So if he's saying it, it's gotta be wise.

Can you even imagine him and Melania laughing and interacting with the kids at those events? It's impossible to picture it.

I actually saw one of his supporters say "you don't see him whining every time something doesn't go his way, like you butthurt liberals." Um, what? If you take away whining, you take away 99 percent of his tweets, at minimum.

Does the Oompa Loompa not remotely understand how reckless it is for a POTUS to tweet wild conspiracy theories as fact? This is just as bad as his various tweets about "failing" businesses or fabricated stories about companies looking to move their US locations out of the country. The President of the US cannot be so wildly irresponsible in the things he says/tweets. It means something.

Nope. Not even a little bit. The most infuriating part is that the bar for him to act "presidential," is as low as humanly, no, sub-humanly, possible. As long as he doesn't actually have Hillary brought up to the podium and executed during a speech, he's "presidential." Didn't smear his own feces all over the walls? Presidential. Didn't answer every reporter with "fuck you, asshole" during a press conference? Presidential.

Sonny really having to pay, for a lengthy time, over killing AJ would have made for some interesting story. There was so much potential there. They could have had Michael go after his legit business (and Carly's hotel), while also helping the authorities take him down for his criminal enterprises. I know leaving him in jail for any extended period of time was never going to happen, because they want Sonny/MB out there front and center. So, fine, don't leave him incarcerated for long, but he should have lost everything. I'm guessing that I'd be way more interested in watching Mo's Sonny try to essentially start over with nothing. Watch him have to earn people's respect and trust. There are ways for this show to keep Sonny heavily featured while actually telling some interesting story, but they steadfastly refuse to do it. And, now, we could have had some interesting story where he accepts his responsibility for Morgan's death and has to actually truly deal with the fallout. But, nope, he'll be all sparkly clean again before Valentine's Day (at the latest). And he'll just carry on being a mob boss, without a single thought for the fact that his lifestyle has repeatedly endangered his children.

Seriously. I can't even with this "torn between two loves" narrative. No, she's not. She's torn between the guy she loves and the manipulative asshat who just can't stand for her to be happy with someone else; the same guy who was willing to let her marry another man when it was going to be to his advantage in business. Fuck him.

When I read this I got mad at myself, because I just realized I wasn't already following Cary Elwes on Twitter. Another example of why Romney has no shot at SoS - Trumperdink is going to give all the posts to people who kissed his ass during the campaign, and the less qualified for the spot, the better. Romney definitely did not kiss his ass, and, my disagreement with his politics aside, he would actually be qualified for the job. So it's never happening. I wonder how many of his cult members have already convinced themselves that those letters were written by some secret Clinton operative trying to make him look bad (while simultaneously thinking it doesn't make him look bad because they completely agree with the letter writer). Self awareness is really not his strong suit. I swear, if he paints JFK's desk that crappy cheap gold... Any chance Comedy Central can get a show together for Keith to take the 11:30 time slot after The Daily Show? We're going to need him to get through the next four years. Of all that pisses me off about Sgt. Small Hands, this may be the biggest. The most he can do is issue a limp "stop it" when pressed on it during an interview. And the reason for that is that he cannot go against someone who likes him. It's flattering to him that people are doing this shit as some kind of twisted tribute to him. He won't forcefully condemn it, because it's an honor in his view. And, as long as you like him, you're golden in his book. It's why he wouldn't forcefully denounce Duke and the KKK during the campaign - they like him. It doesn't matter how deplorable they are, because they like him. Instead, he boasts "lots of people like me." It's so disgusting and narcissistic, and it's one more way that he's wildly unqualified for the job. You can't base decisions, as POTUS, on whether the players involved like you enough for your fragile ego's tastes. It can't be a coincidence that the people he keeps putting in charge of various departments are people who would like to dismantle those departments, can it? He's the Koch Brothers' dream POTUS. He's going to go ahead and do their dirty work, and they haven't even publicly affiliated themselves with him, so, when it all goes south, as it will, they're not on the hook for the blame.

Agreed. As far as I can tell, if Nelle does pull the "get drunk Sonny into bed and make him think they slept together while he was too out of it to want it" thing, the only difference between that and Franco/Sam or Ric/Carly would be that Sonny can't end up pregnant and unsure whether the mother is his wife or the person he believes sexually assaulted him. I don't have a blanket "no rape stories whatsoever" policy for soaps. Some rape stories over the years have been very powerful. But, the last time GH managed to do it right was Liz's rape. And, in the years since, they've managed to shit all over that one. And I don't know if any soap has ever done a good sexual assault story with the man in the role of victim. Michael's story could have been good, and it did have some well done moments, but then it just turned into Sonny and Jason's pain, and Sam hiring a strooker to help him get over it. And then there's the Sonny element. I don't want Nelle's actions to free pass Sonny's actions. He's done a lot of shit over the years that he should be paying for, and there's always some reason to wave the magic wand of forgiveness over him. Screw that. Let him suffer for a good long time here. I don't want this to become "poor Sonny" being victimized by "evil Nelle."

To be fair to President Obama, he's in a unique situation right now in that he in position to potentially have some influence on Trump through the transition. Sure, he can aggressively call him out on stuff, but that will just cause Trump to do things just to spite him. I'm sure he's figured out by now that Trump is, to some degree, malleable if you have his ear and he thinks you like him. If he's publicly neutral, and if he is friendly during their private conversations, he has a greater chance of influencing decisions. I'm sure that, privately, he'd love nothing more than for these recount efforts to lead to a change, but until they do, he has to try to do what's best, and, for now, that's maintaining a position to have some level of influence on Trump during the transition.

I just saw that Putin said at an event last night (I think last night) that Russia's borders do not end anywhere. Of course, I could discount it as the normal boastings of a dictator, but, considering his ties to Trump and Trump's Putin-friendly foreign policy ideals, it's a bit unnerving. I've seen more than one person say they voted Trump because Putin said that, if Hillary won, there would be war. My response was "did it ever occur to you to wonder why he's so invested in our outcome and in Trump's win? And, why would you want to condone a hostile foreign leader's attempts to influence our electoral process?" There's a reason that man so badly wanted Trump in the White House. I'm genuinely concerned as to how we'll all find out what that reason was.

I think you're right. It amazes me how, every four years, you see people asking what the electoral college is. I think their basic understanding of it pretty much falls to something like this - "my state always goes blue/red, all that matters is what happens in {insert swing state here}." I'd be willing to bet that the vast majority don't know, for example, that the actual results aren't going to be official until December 19th, or that it is even possible that a state could go against the person who won it. I'm guessing that more people know that this year than in the past, since it's been brought up on social media so much over the past two weeks, but I think they still don't actually get the concept. Exactly. I think that most of us who are upset aren't being sore losers. If Hillary had lost to a Jeb or a Kasich, there wouldn't be so much anger and protesting. Yes, there would still be some people who are angry that the person who took more than 2 million more votes lost, but that would eventually die down or at least quiet down to some die hards over time. But, the situation we have now is not like that. A lot of us are in genuine fear for various communities in this country who are going to be targeted both by his stated policies and by the hatred and anger towards them that he stoked and validated among his supporters. Trump supporters tend to find it handy to break down Hillary supporters to a very broad and simple generalization. First it was "you're only voting for her because she's a woman." Now, it's "you're just being crybabies because your candidate didn't win." Neither is accurate. Might there be some who fall into those camps? Of course. But, there are a whole lot of us who were voting for her because we took the time to research the policies proposed by both candidates and we felt hers were the best for our country. And there are a lot of us who aren't taking this like it's a loss for their favorite sports team, but we're taking it as a loss for humanity. We're concerned that this man, with his combination of hateful, careless rhetoric and complete lack of preparation for and understanding of the job, will be a genuine danger to people in our country and around the world. We're concerned that this man has deep ties to Russia, that those deep ties resulted in various hacks to his opponent's campaign and into government systems. We're concerned that he's expressed a desire to decimate our relationships with our allies in favor of supporting Putin and his regime's desire to take over various small countries in his region. We're concerned that his alignment with Putin may mean that we join Putin in supporting Bassad's murderous regime in Syria, which has led to countless deaths of innocents, including children. We're concerned that his cabinet appointments will be disastrous for our economy, our environment, and our education system, so, basically disastrous for our children's future, our grandchildren's future. We're concerned because he has a casual, almost eager attitude towards nuclear weapons. We're concerned because he's proudly pro-torture. We're concerned because he will destroy decades or centuries old alliances because he doesn't like the way the leader of another nation blinked when meeting him. No crybaby mentality here. My candidates have lost in the past, and they'll lose in the future. That's how the system works. But never before has my candidate lost to someone who's reign (and let's make no mistake about it, he thinks of this as a reign) can be so damaging to so many. And not simply on an economic level, but on a life and death level. On a being able to walk to school or the store without being harassed or physically harmed level. There is nothing in me that will allow me to not speak up when this stuff happens. Trump himself whined about the "unfair" EC system back in 2012. And, another fail on the media here - it's still out there, and the media hasn't brought it up at all, even in light of the extreme disparity between the EC and popular vote this time. How can they not ask Trump, or one of his minions, about his anger at the EC back then, and how it ended up that the EC system is what got him the win, regardless of the actual vote totals?

I agree. That could be an interesting way to calculate the electoral votes. So, for example if you win 60 percent of a state's votes, then you get 60 percent of the state's electoral votes? It would be interesting to see how something like that would affect how candidates campaign. For example, Texas - the Dem candidates typically don't spend much time there. But, if the percentage was at stake, they'd likely spend more time there, trying to get a decent percentage of the vote, even if they wouldn't get the majority. It might also bring more voters to the polls. A lot of people have the attitude of "well my state always goes this way, so my vote doesn't really matter." It could essentially make us all "swing states" instead of the intense focus on a handful of states that determine the outcome.