Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

After roe, women are no longer free.

I like you, you’re my kind of trouble.

Infrastructure week. at last.

All your base are belong to Tunch.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

Roe isn’t about choice, it’s about freedom.

“But what about the lurkers?”

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

The GOP couldn’t organize an orgy in a whorehouse with a fist full of 50s.

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

Not so fun when the rabbit gets the gun, is it?

Republicans do not pay their debts.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Breaking Bad/True Blood Open Thread

Breaking Bad/True Blood Open Thread

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Have at it.

*** Update ***

Another bleg- some happy thought for my buddy Matt’s 18 year old son who lost a couple fingers in a lawnmower incident yesterday, but like good German stock, he got in the truck and drove himself a couple miles to help and has been a super mensch throughout the entire ordeal and even stayed awake throughout the multiple plastic surgeries.

Reader Interactions

106Comments

  2. 2.

    Ted & Hellen

    True Blood?

    For real?

    You’re still watching that horrible sludge after the second season?

    Gag.

  4. 4.

    YellowJournalism

    Dexter. Must get home to watch Dexter. Am currently stuck riding ten hours in the car with my family. I’d make a Dark Passenger crack, but my boys are being good.

  5. 5.

    Suffern ACE

    Does that / mean “either or” or “vs.” cause I think the characters of true blood would probably do some ass kicking if they were to bring back battle of the network stars.

  6. 6.

    Mike in NC

    In tonight’s episode of ‘Breaking Bad’, Walter and Jesse travel to Brazil and shoot Glenn Greenwald just to watch him die.

  7. 7.

    Splitting Image

    I have the first season of True Blood on DVD but I havan’t started watching it yet. Breaking Bad I have yet to encounter.

    Up next for me is season 2 of the Bob Newhart show. Get off of my lawn.

  9. 9.

    Bruce Lawton

    True Blood has turned into a juvenile freak show. Every week it has become “can you top this”. I quit.

  10. 10.

    Bruce Lawton

    True Blood has turned into a juvenile freak show. Every week it has become “can you top this”. I quit.

  11. 11.

    giterdone

    Wr0ng Way Cole has got to be a moron for always believing everything Greenwald writes without question.

    I wonder if he can managed enough reasoning ability to wipe his a$$ after a dump.

  17. 17.

    dance around in your bones

    Breaking Bad! Jessie’s throwing money around like a drunken sailor (wish he’d throw some on MY lawn!) . Oops! Back on – gotta run.

  20. 20.

    Suffern ACE

    @NotMax: I don’t find that warning brain eating at all. It’s rather well written and actually opens new directions for me.

  21. 21.

    fuckwit

    @giterdone: You’re being perhaps more exaggerated and mean-spirited than I can get behind, but I do expect that, as he has never been shy about doing in the past, Cole is painting with a broad brush and will refine his opinion on this sometime soon.

    What kills me about all this is that we do have a serious problem with civil liberties, both at the local and national levels, and large-scale Military-Industrial overreach in this country which dates back at least to WWII, and we can’t have nice things like discuss it and come together to work on it because it’s all emotions and freakouts and exaggerations and yelling.

    I was reading recently about the post-WWII American coddling of Klaus Barbie, and Operation Paperclip, and put that into the mental grinder along with the firebombing of Dresden/etc and off course Hiroshima/Nagasaki and Internment camps. I sometimes wonder if we’ve ever really recovered from WWII; perhaps we had to become our enemy in order to defeat them– we made that deal with the devil–, and, we ended up assimilating way too much of what they were about. The Russians and Chinese certainly did the same, in their own way, via Stalin and Mao and successors.

    It seems like none of the major victors of WWII emerged without elements of totalitarianism entering deeply into our own DNA, if it wasn’t there already anyway.

    Then again, and speaking of DNA, I could go back to Rome and Egypt and Sumeria and who the fuck knows how far back: humans are assholes, and humans with large amounts of power are screaming assholes. It’s a human problem: power is inevitable, and it also corrupts, and what to do about those two facts is not at all obvious or settled.

  22. 22.

    Narcissus

    @Mike in NC:

    In tonight’s episode of ‘Breaking Bad’, Walter and Jesse travel to Brazil and shoot Glenn Greenwald just to watch him die.

    Kramer takes up Capoeira.

  23. 23.

    dance around in your bones

    @Yatsuno: Aw, he was doing it last episode too.

    I thought I was fairly non-specific? No? Sorry, I’ll keep my big mouth shut (for now :)

  25. 25.

    fuckwit

    @NotMax: Interesting article, but, oh for fuck’s sake, I’m so tired of religious stupidity. Look at these two sentences, right next to each other:

    “…We are grateful for the continued prayers from Kali’s supporters, which no doubt drive her recovery.”

    Kali’s doctors treated her with Impavido, and reduced her body temperature to 93 degrees, the same technique used to protect the brain from injuries that cause swelling.

    SAY WHAT??? No doubt? “Prayers” are not “driving her recovery”. Fucking Impavido and fever-reducers are driving her recovery. I mean, right there in the article, it says what is driving the recovery: fucking SCIENCE motherfucker. A new drug, which kills parasites, is driving the recovery of someone infected with a parasite, who knew?

    Why do people insist on being medeival and superstitious?

  27. 27.

    Hal

    @fuckwit:

    I’m hoping Obama steps up and takes back the reins on this issue, because I would hate for an obvious derp like Rand Paul to turn this into an a catapult into a Presidential run that could actually be challenging.Put forth specific legislation to overturn the Patriot Act and specific checks and balances to monitoring information with the impetus being an agreement from many people left, right and center that there is a concern about the abridgment of civil liberties. I say leave it up to the American people.

  29. 29.

    geg6

    I hate Sundays in August. Nothing that I can watch at all. John won’t be subjected to True Blood or my Food Network/HGTV addiction on one of our togetherness nights, so I’m at a loss. We’re actually watching the Colts/Giants. Good thing tonight’s wine was good, a new one for us and French surrender monkey wine at that. It’s called Tariqet Amplitude and it’s a cotes de Gascogne. Very nice.

  30. 30.

    geg6

    Oh, and I hope your friend Matt’s son has a speedy recovery. He sounds like he’s tough and a fighter.

  33. 33.

    raven

    You want to fire up your progressive chops? Watch The West produced by Ken Burns. Fucking white people are barbarians.

  34. 34.

    Billy Dilly

    I know a lot of people don’t care about Hell On Wheels, but so far I am pleasantly surprised so far, glad that the Swede is back, still a chance that they go Derp, we shall see. One more thing I wish AMC would drop the celebrity guests on Talking Bad, the one from Modern Bad needed Mike Armentrahlt or the Salamonca Cousins to get her to STFU!

  38. 38.

    Gravenstone

    @raven:

    Fucking white people human beings are barbarians.

    Fixed that for ya. The fact the whites held the technological upper hand at the time was what allowed us to run up the body count in such cold blooded ways.

  39. 39.

    geg6

    @scav:

    Heh. Thankfully, I am old enough to not need one of those any more. This is a really delicious wine. I highly recommend.

  45. 45.

    Redshirt

    @raven: White males, specifically, are responsible for unbelievable amounts of death and destruction, worldwide, for many centuries. There’s no more dangerous creature.

  46. 46.

    Mike in NC

    @raven: Scalping wasn’t invented or even unique to North America, but it was practiced mostly here between 1600 and 1900.

  47. 47.

    Joel

    Farrell is a great manager, but WTF with Dempster? Christ he sucks. 5 innings, 3 runs and 1 punk move is a decent outing for that guy.

  49. 49.

    Hawes

    reminds me of that scene in The Meaning of Life when the tiger takes that guy’s leg.

    Also, does Walt kill Shylar or Hank?

    Or Jesse?

    Or someone like Marie that we secretly are happy that she’s dead?

    I think Saul survives, because cockroaches always survive.

  52. 52.

    PaulW

    Go Rays!

    Also, is next week’s episode just going to be Hank and Jessie in that interrogation room? Are we gonna get Breaking Bad’s version of Man In the Glass Booth, 47 minutes of two actors taking their characters to the edge of all that is holy?!

    If it’s just 12 minutes of it ending on a commercial break I will be seriously underwhelmed.

  56. 56.

    Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason

    @Splitting Image: The last show of the 2nd Bob Newhart series was the most brilliant in all of television sitcom and will never be topped.

    He was still good in Big Bang Theory this season (or was it last season)?
    @fuckwit:

  57. 57.

    Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason

    @fuckwit:

    power is inevitable, and it also corrupts, and what to do about those two facts is not at all obvious or settled.

    I dunno, James Madison among others seemed to realize it and put a plan together to avoid it, but we seem to have found a way around all the checks and balances he and the other guys put together to prevent any one part of government to gather all the power to itself.

    Or maybe it was television. Or the V-2, which traced Gravity’s Rainbow screaming across the sky. SOMETHING happened after WWII anyway.

  58. 58.

    Redshirt

    @JCJ: Not exclusively – anyone can be bad. In general, white males are historically the worst. Hitler! Stalin! British Empire! Catholic Church! “Discovery” of the Americas! Etc…

  59. 59.

    Long Tooth

    Geez, Cole, between yourself, family, and friends, you could darn near open a digits museum and charge admission. If memory serves, your father alone lost two appendages over the past couple of years, and you yourself are always at risk to collide with a table saw or, indeed, a lawn mower.

  60. 60.

    Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason

    Just finished watching a marathon of “Bar Rescue” with my teenage son. I dunno why, but this show is like crack for me. I did, at one point, turn to him and promise we would never never never have a family business.

  63. 63.

    Billy Dilly

    @JCJ: In the 20th century, if looks at some of the dictators from Africa, Idi Amin would be average, there were some real bastards in that crowd.

  64. 64.

    Billy Dilly

    @JCJ: In the 20th century, if looks at some of the dictators from Africa, Idi Amin would be average, there were some real bastards in that crowd.

  65. 65.

    Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason

    @Redshirt: I read “Bloodlands” this year. 14 million dead in the 20th Century in the lands between Germany and Russia, primarily Poland and Ukraine. Pol Pot and Idi Amin needed to step up their game.

  67. 67.

    dance around in your bones

    @Hawes: I think Jesse will be the one that brings the whole shebang down. But his testimony will be compromised because of his history.

    But Walt will be dead before it happens. What will happen to Skyler then? Will Hank keep his mouth shut because of family loyalty and lack of real proof?

    Oh, the tension!

  70. 70.

    fuckwit

    @Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason: Yep, Hamilton, Madison, Jay, et al did a pretty damn good job of figuring out how to reconcile the inevitibality of power with the inevitability of human douchiness, in general. The problem is those checks and balances need to be continually updated to deal with the latest technology. I think it got really broken during and after WWII, we had a minor correction during the Church Commission, it got broken again by Reagan, then the technology got way ahead of us in the 90s, the balances got thorougly fucked over by Shrub/Cheney, and it’s still pretty clearly broken now.

    It needs legislation. Oh wait, we have maniacs in charge of the Congress, who won’t pass anything. OK, first step is take back the Congress, put sane people into office, THEN we can have legislation that adjusts the system into something approximating working order.

  71. 71.

    mai naem

    I just can’t get into True Blood kind of crap but is anybody watching Newsroom this season? Way better than last season – it’s moving at a pretty fast clip this season. I wonder if they’re going to get rid of Jeff Daniels and have Olivia Munn take over a la Olbermann/Maddow.

  74. 74.

    BruinKid

    I don’t get those who “hate-watch” The Newsroom and complain that it’s not exactly how a newsroom operates, even though many of the stories are from real-life examples. Like last week’s WND story was almost a carbon copy of Ben Shapiro’s “Friends of Hamas” smear against Chuck Hagel where a journalist later admitted to being the “source” of the JOKE he told.

    And Neal had a nice smackdown of a pro-Ron Paul reporter tonight.

  76. 76.

    mclaren

    @Hal:

    I’m hoping Obama steps up and takes back the reins on this issue…

    “If only the Tsar knew what his cossacks were doing!”

    You fool, Obama knows exactly what the British immigration authorities are doing — in fact, Obama probably phoned up the British P.M. and demanded that he get the immigration authorities to harrass Greenwald’s partner.

    When are you people going to let go of the delusional fantasy that the wonderful saintly Ghandi-esque Obama knows nothing about all these depredations and despotic grotesqueries emanating from the American national-security state?

    Obama is in charge of the national security state. Obama has ordered DOJ prosecutors to indict people who are teaching how to beat lie detector tests. Obama has ordered the indictment of a record number of whistleblowers under the 1917 Espionage Act, more whistleblowers indicted than all the other president before him.

    Obama personally pores through a bunch of photos of teenaged boys and girls presented to him as assassination targets every day, and then signs off on the ones to kill (according to the NY Times).

    Obama personally approves those drone strikes.

    And you still think Obama is some saintly guy with good intentions who just doesn’t know what his securitat goons are doing…?

    Fuck a duck, you people are hopeless.

    Absolutely hopeless.

  77. 77.

    The Other Chuck

    Great. True Blood has gone zombie apocalypse. Pretty soon it’s going to be zombies in The Newsroom.

  78. 78.

    MattR

    @Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason: Hey. I think you were the one who recommended Jekyl Island as a destination on my drive from Fla to NY and I wanted to thank you for the suggestion. It was very cool to see how the richest of the rich lived 80-90 years ago and a very beautiful island in general (which is probably why they chose that to be their vacation spot). Absolutely crazy to hear that 1/6th of the world’s wealth was on that island when all of the ~50 members were there. My friend and I agreed it was definitely a highlight of the trip.

    Also have to give thanks to all those who suggested Poogan’s Porch in Charleston. Had a fantastic meal there. Unfortunately, the weather rolled in and we decided to bail early and get north of the storm so we didn’t get to see too much of that city.

  82. 82.

    Redshirt

    @Yatsuno: I’m sympathetic to the argument that I’d go apeshit if this were all going down during Bush 2; however, unlike our good friend McClaren, I still find Barack Obama to be sincere. Taking him to be sincere, I believe he’s also doing the best he can to act out his vision of not just America, but the world. And that vision is positive, peaceful, and fair, not greedy, corrupt, or hateful. Thus, I support Barack Obama in all things, including this NSA dustup, and believe he will ultimately prevail over – yes, indeed, Orwellian control.

    OBOT, out.

  83. 83.

    Mary G

    Breakfast by HBM. He made burritos for dinner, but I was too hungry to go get a camera. Now he is talking about the perfect golden edge on the piecrust he is baking for tomorrow with strawberries.

    And I just found the original “House of Cards” on Netflix. WOOT.

  84. 84.

    Yatsuno

    @Mary G: That’s a frittata! And a really good looking one at that! Please let us know the results of the pie baking endeavour!

  86. 86.

    YellowJournalism

    @Yatsuno: Just got home. We went to meet up with my sis. The boys had been in Washington with the family for a few weeks. Surprised you didn’t feel a disturbance in the force!

  87. 87.

    Suzanne

    I am letting Munchkin the Younger watch an episode of “Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood”, which is not as good as Mr. Rogers, but is a worthy successor. Not having a functioning dishwasher sucks ass. Mr. Suzanne and I went and picked one out today, but it will have to wait a paycheck or two. It’s preeeeeeetty.

    I am starting to feel exam anxiety. I really want to be done with this shit.

  88. 88.

    Yatsuno

    @YellowJournalism: The millions of voices of terror may have been drowned out by the noise. I had a strange week last week. I need some serious border collie attention soon!

  89. 89.

    eemom

    I guess it makes me a bad person, but I’m kind of glad the Greenwald par-tay is still going on, cuz I never watch the Sunday night shows.

    Right mclaren?

  92. 92.

    Yatsuno

    @Redshirt: Oh yeah, fergot about that one. But that was before TBogg (pbuh) announced his calling it quits. We need one more in his honour. Thread’s almost there in fact.

  93. 93.

    bago

    Man, if I were Glenn Greenwald, I’d make a fortune. Invest in the power generation utilities that serve NSA datacenters, and then send out a million encrypted emails a day with a 4096 key. Factoring that would eat multiple Hoover Dams worth of electricity. Building that many power plants to fuel the decryption would be a sound investment.

    Ka-Ching!

  97. 97.

    wasabi gasp

    Breaking Bad went off the rails shortly after the bad guys were killed off (season 3?) and then it fell into the same pit of drudgery that most shows eventually fall into – caulking the plot together with amplified character fee fees. Knowing the whole show was soon coming to a close, I hung on all the way through season four. But when it was announced that season five was gonna be split across two years, I split too.

  99. 99.

    Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason

    @MattR: Hey, thanks, glad to see that the recco was worth it. The rail barons really knew where to vacation in the US, before worldwide travel got affordable. They were in the Thousand Islands in NY, too. And I think some of the hotels in the National Parks were their stomping grounds.

  100. 100.

    Comrade Colette Collaboratrice

    @Yatsuno:

    town named Condom

    I’ve actually been there. Lovely town, delicious wine. Of course, that is not the French word for the item in question – and I never had any trouble asking the pharmacist for un préservatif (or several), but struggled mightily to find a latex-free way to inquire whether some food item contained preservatives. Perverse language.

  101. 101.

    Studly Pantload, the emotionally unavailable unicorn

    @master c: “breaking bad -meh.”

    There are a number of shows discussed on this (and other) boards that I’m not all about, and yet I’m still somehow able to skip over those threads without stopping first to spit in other people’s punch bowls.

  102. 102.

    Yatsuno

    @Mnemosyne: Unit has been achieved. You may rest well m’lady.

    @Comrade Colette Collaboratrice: Ahh francais. Has a word for everything unless it doesn’t, then contorts a linguistic pretzel to avoid pollution of the mother tongue. I think I know why my ancestors bailed from there.

  103. 103.

    Radio One

    @wasabi gasp: I disagree. I though Gus Fring was a great antagonist for Walter in seasons 3-4. The worst plot arc on Breaking Bad was probably the plane crash over Walt’s house in Season 2, which seemed for most of the season to mean that Walt had been caught/compromised somehow, but ultimately ended up being nothing other than a bizarre yet sort of related coincidence,

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