Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Live so that if you miss a day of work people aren’t hoping you’re dead.

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires.

Speaker Mike Johnson is a vile traitor to the House and the Constitution.

The republican ‘Pastor’ of the House is an odious authoritarian little creep.

“That’s what the insurrection act is for!”

So many bastards, so little time.

I desperately hope that, yet again, i am wrong.

Dear Washington Post, you are the darkness now.

Baby steps, because the Republican Party is full of angry babies.

Republicans choose power over democracy, every day.

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.

Whatever happens next week, the fight doesn’t end.

People really shouldn’t expect the government to help after they watched the GOP drown it in a bathtub.

I conferred with the team and they all agree – still not tired of winning!

The desire to stay informed is directly at odds with the need to not be constantly enraged.

Every one of the “Roberts Six” lied to get on the court.

Republicans cannot even be trusted with their own money.

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

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74Comments

  3. 3.

    Laertes

    I always ask this of Breaking Bad fans:

    At what point, if ever, did you turn against Walt?

    Spoiler warning: Don’t rot13-decode the following if you aren’t done with the first half of the final season.

    For me…vg unccrarq cerggl yngr. V’z fubpxrq gb nqzvg gung uvz cbvfbavat gur obl qvqa’g rira qb vg. Vg jnfa’g hagvy ur snxrq tvivat n fuvg nobhg gur zheqrerq obl ba gur zbgbeplpyr gung V svanyyl ghearq ntnvafg uvz.

  4. 4.

    moh

    Amid all the talk about how deep and wonderful the show is, I never see anyone mention how funny it was, especially in the first couple of seasons (not so much any more, as we come to The End). Maybe I have a dark sense of humor, but I remember laughing out loud at some point in most episodes, and I don’t usually LOL except at episodes of the Big Bang Theory. Enjoy, John!

  6. 6.

    Beemer

    I’m in the second half of season 2, and the way that Walt treats Jesse breaks my heart. Walt can be a total asshole.

  7. 7.

    Beemer

    I’m in the second half of season 2, and the way that Walt treats Jesse breaks my heart. Walt can be a total asshole.

  8. 8.

    trollhattan

    @Laertes:

    I think after Jane I knew there would be no redemption for Mister White, but I’d still root for him in the subsequent battles with Gus et al. The prison hits meant I couldn’t even do that any longer.

  9. 9.

    Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader

    I tried to watch it a few weeks ago but nothing happened in the 5 minutes before I lost interest and changed.

  10. 10.

    Robert

    One, Breaking Bad is awesome.

    Two, I just watched a great vampire film for my weekly horror review column at Man, I Love Films. It’s called Stake Land and it’s a must-see for any fans of intelligent horror. It’s a post-apocalyptic story with vampires that pulls from the structure and style of classic zombie films. The whole thing is very dark, clever, and well-made. It’s low budget indie horror, so some of the CGI-enhancements are a little cartoonish, but everything else is so strong that you quickly forget the Dreamcast-era blood splatter.

  11. 11.

    Laertes

    @trollhattan:

    It’s funny. I wanted to turn on him after Wnar, but somehow it didn’t stick. And, man, I guess I’m some kind of savage because the cevfba uvgf barely registered at all.

  13. 13.

    the Conster

    Oh, just wait. It just gets more and more fucking amazing, until you start to wonder why the hell anyone else bothers telling their stupid little stories with their boring one-dimensional characters on the television machine. BB is what television was invented for. I felt that way after episode 2 of S1.

  17. 17.

    Keith P

    I don’t put it above The Wire, Deadwood (my favorite), or GoT, but I think it’s better than The Sopranos, which had a craptacular last season with way too many dropped storylines and flameouts.

  19. 19.

    MikeJ

    Finally got my trip to Mt St Helens in. It was raining so hard you could not see the mountains from I-5. Pressed on anyway, it cleared up, blue skies. Hiked over to the Spirit Lake overlook from Johnston. As I turned back, the clouds rolled in, but since I was at 4500′ they were below me. Very cool to watch them roll up the ridge towards you.

    Got back home, had a meatball sub, some bourbon, some beer, Red Sox on TV.

  20. 20.

    trollhattan

    @Laertes:

    Those bastards (writers) set that up perfectly–one’s predisposed to not give a shit about dudes in prison but the sheer calculation involved (they MIGHT hurt him) and the scope of it lingered with me, and the more I thought about it the more I understood he’d acquired a piece of every prior victim’s personality. Or should I say, Heisenberg had acquired.

    Anyway, am now hoping Saul gets a spinoff series.

  21. 21.

    TaMara (BHF)

    My tuxedo cat decided to go on walk-about last night. He’s been yowling at me from my neighbor’s yard all day. The good news is I met my neighbor across the alley now, since I’d been traipsing around his backyard all afternoon. Nice guy. Total animal guy, so didn’t freak that my cat was hiding out in his bushes. Somehow cat was unable to jump the 6 foot fence again to get home.

    Cat has now moved from backyard to under the guys trailer in the driveway. He seems incredibly angry at me…like somehow this is all my fault.

    Bastard. He’d better come home soon so I can stop fretting.

  23. 23.

    the Conster

    @Keith P:

    Breaking Bad is 1, and The Wire is 1(a). GoT is up there too, but BB is on cable, which means no sex or vulgar language, just violence, but a sterile kind of violence – the kind of violence that ends up with bodies being pink slime. You know, tongue in cheek family fare. Also, there’s no gratuitous violence, and women aren’t hacked to death and tortured solely for viewing entertainment, and “bad” is a relative concept.

  26. 26.

    Dave

    Walt lost me fairly late, at the end of season 4. I actually had one of those crystallizing moments where I even thought to myself, “Oh yeah, Walt’s the bad guy.” As if I’d forgotten!

  27. 27.

    Jamey

    @the Conster: There are at least three uses of “shit” per episode. And that one time Gus Fring was at The Old Folks Home band camp… I mean, shit, there’s even an episode called, “Box Cutter.” Point is, I don’t think BB suffers from the lack of violence or foul language.

    Also: just not feeling the love for GoT. It’s cable-y and HBO Sunday Night-y, but SO not in a league with The Wire, or even Six Feet Under and Big Love. Sorry, nerds.

  30. 30.

    Yatsuno

    Today I set a couple medical appointments, got my brace fixed, and set my surgery date for December 17th. I was busy bee. Tomorrow and Friday be early days. Thank the FSM for coffee.

  31. 31.

    Mnemosyne

    @Jamey:

    It depends on how you feel about Peter Dinklage. If you think he’s one of the greatest actors working today (which I do), you love GoT. If you can take him or leave him, you won’t like the show.

    I did skip last season, though — the torture scenes were getting a little much for me.

  32. 32.

    Laertes

    @Jamey:

    I’m with you. You don’t have to be The Wire to be a really good show, and it’s silly to suppose that GoT is playing at that level. People set up their cameras and freaked the fuck out right on cue at the “surprise” of the red wedding, and that’s just good clean fun, but nothing that has ever happened or will ever happen in GoT will hit you in the gut like that closing shot of Dukie.

  34. 34.

    Yatsuno

    @Mnemosyne: Troo dat. Especially since tomorrow I have all day to prep for my next instructing assignment that starts Monday. And I have to make a dry as toast topic at least somewhat interesting. Doomed, I iz.

  35. 35.

    Mnemosyne

    @Yatsuno:

    Pooh-pooh. I have to try and make this topic interesting to a general audience while the experts who are supposed to give me the information keep saying, “Well, sometimes you do that, but other times you do this, so you can’t say either way.”

  36. 36.

    trollhattan

    @Laertes:

    Much as I loved “The Wire” and love it I did, its many high notes were not as lofty as the high notes hit by “Homicide.” But since I glued myself to every Wire episode because of Homicide, I can only fit a knifeblade between the two, anyway.

    My vote for underappreciated series of the last half-decade goes to “Rescue Me.” Sometimes I swear I’m the onlyiest one on the planet to bother watching. Ah well.

  37. 37.

    Mike E

    Futurama finale aired tonight, and Comedy Central had a web only live show of the voice actors and creators before AND afterwards. All Hail Hypnotoad!

  38. 38.

    Mike in NC

    I went out to pick up a pizza tonight for dinner and spotted a little old man with a big white beard walking down the road. He had no backpack but was carrying a flag and on both his chest and back wore a sign that read “Treason: Impeach Obama”. No idea where he was coming from or where he was going.

  41. 41.

    Comrade Luke

    @Laertes:

    Just so I don’t give anything away: Season 2, Episode 12.

    And periodically, every time I start to feel the tiny bit of sympathy for him, he does something to remind me of that original moment.

  42. 42.

    Schlemizel

    @Rekster:

    I really wanted to love Rescue Me, I loved Dennis’ cop show for a bit too. Both suffered from the same problem though. Tommy couldn’t just be a guy with anger problems and a drinking problem, he also had to be a junkie who was cheating on his wife while dealing in stolen goods having a political fight with his supervision who sees a shrink and is in trouble with the mayor. There were some good moments but he would have been twice as interesting with half the issues.

    I never considered “rooting” for Walter the drug dealer. I have a lot of sympathy for him and I hope he can take care of his family but he is not a hero. Its been interesting, the writers have done an excellent job of building the story. Watching Walt turn into evil has been very interesting. I’m wondering if Jesse, who was introduced as a bad boy will end up good while Walt who was good ends as evil.

    My fear is it will end with Walt and the family sitting in a diner when we notice a guy in a members only jacket sitting at the counter . . .

  43. 43.

    Irony Abounds

    I’m just getting started in it and my problem is that I just have a hard time with the entire subject matter. I just don’t enjoy watching people’s lives destroyed by drugs (the meth head Hank used as an object lesson for Walt Jr. made me ill), and in my simple little world I like protagonists who are, well, decent people. And early on, Walt is not a decent person. I recognize that it was Vince Gilligan’s concept to turn Walt into a monster, but that doesn’t mean I have to enjoy it.

  44. 44.

    Rafer Janders

    @Schlemizel:

    I’m wondering if Jesse, who was introduced as a bad boy will end up good while Walt who was good ends as evil.

    Jesse the meth cooker who murdered a man by shooting him in the head, blackmailed Walter, got his girlfriend re-hooked on drugs after she’d gone clean, joined a rehab group so he could deal drugs to the people in rehab, became a bag man for a drug lord, and is so concerned with kids that he deals meth to anyone with money? That Jesse will be the good guy?

    Between Walter and Jesse, sure, Walter is the more calculating one. But Jesse knows what he’s doing is wrong and yet keeps doing it, time and time again. He doesn’t have much of a moral leg to stand on. Sure, he’s never deliberately poisoned a child — but does he know that none of the meth he’s sold has never ended up in a child’s hands?

  45. 45.

    Console

    The 2nd season of Breaking Bad pushed it into arguably being the best show on TV. The 4th season killed all debate.

    As far as hyping TV shows goes, there are some shows that can’t really be hyped enough. If you end up underwhelmed by Breaking Bad, then you don’t like nice things. Orphan Black though is a show that I love that I try not to hype too much because it’s nothing more than a pleasant surprise and a fun watch. But back to the best shows on TV:

    -Game of Thrones can be incredible at times, but I don’t think it’s reached it’s potential yet.

    -Homeland’s season 1 was amazing, but it’s gone from interestingly subversive spy procedural to soapy pulp. Still good though.

    -Enlightened was one of the best shows on TV in a long time but that got cancelled this year.

    -Treme… I get why people don’t watch Treme, it really can be boring and meandering. But season 3 was this very beautiful experience. Treat Treme as a sensory experience rather than The Wire:New Orleans and you’ll end up watching one of the best shows on TV

    To me, that’s Breaking Bad’s competition. And I think it holds up really well.

  47. 47.

    Schlemizel

    @Rafer Janders:

    But he seems to be upset about whats happening, now that might just be because its happening to him or it could be that the writers are going to flip the two characters & have the “good guy” become the bad guy in the end while the “bad guy” becomes the good guy in the end. OTOH he could just take down Wally & take over the work himself but wheres the fun if we can’t speculate?

  48. 48.

    dlwchico

    WW’s refusal to accept money from his rich friends to help pay for his cancer treatment (and instead, cook meth to pay for his treatment) made me dislike him a lot, but it was the situation with Jane that put me against him completely.

  49. 49.

    debbie

    As much as I liked The Wire, I thought it went downhill when it left the docks and branched out into schools and City Hall. BB (I’m waiting for the final season to come out on DVD) has been consistently strong throughout the entire series.

    I’ve got a couple friends who are watching the final season of BB week to week, and their heads are about to explode from the intensity. One even tried watching both BB and Dexter, but it was too much for her. She’s saving Dexter for later.

  50. 50.

    Manyakitty

    @Heisenberg: I use that line on a regular basis. For the record, Heisenberg my cat earned his name long before I started watching the show. Now I sit and laugh when it’s on and he’s gamboling around the living room, but stops when he hears his name.

  51. 51.

    Manyakitty

    @moh: I still laugh uproariously at it. My favorite scenes are the incredibly uncomfortable meals, and the best of those is when Jesse eats dinner with Walt and Skyler. (See? Not spoilery!)

  52. 52.

    Rafer Janders

    @Schlemizel:

    But he seems to be upset about whats happening,

    Who cares if he’s upset? That, in a way, is even worse — like I said, he knows that what he does is wrong, but he keeps doing it. I’m not sure that the fact that Jesse is “upset” matters too much to Gayle’s or Jane’s ghosts, or to the kids of all the parents whom Jesse has strung out on the meth he cooked and dealt. Jesse has dropped a bunch of bodies at this point, all so that he could make money. He’s not a good guy, despite the fact that he has puppy-dog eyes and has a few regularly scheduled and ostentatious emo breakdowns.

  54. 54.

    Manyakitty

    @Keith P: DEADWOOD, FTW. Yes. The language is absolutely stunning. Ian McShane blows my mind with his blank verse delivery. I presented a paper on the Shakespearean aspects of Deadwood at a conference several years ago.

  56. 56.

    Birthmarker

    @Laertes: I thought one of the themes of The Wire (played out through Dukie,) was the bleakness of the cycle, b/c we as a society are unwilling to commit to the resources necessary to stop the loss of these kids. In the beginning of the show this group of kids are happy go lucky 8th graders, like any kids anywhere in America. Then they just get devastated by their circumstances. One gets out b/c he has special help.

    We could really turn a lot of our society’s problems around in 20 years, through the public school system, but we as a society choose not to.

  57. 57.

    Birthmarker

    @Console: Treme to me is like the hopeful flip side of The Wire. I think Treme suffers from having a weak main character (whose name escapes me now-the white guy). kind of like how WKRP suffered from the main character being less than stellar.

  58. 58.

    Birthmarker

    @dlwchico: Was there ever an explanation as to why Walt simply didn’t use his school insurance for his medical treatment? If there was I missed it.

    That never made sense to me.

  59. 59.

    Comrade Jake

    Glad you finally came around Cole. I’ve been hooked since episode 1.

    Best series on TV right now, IMO. The write-ups over at Grantland have been fantastic as well.

  62. 62.

    Laertes

    Okay, so what I’m getting here is that pretty much everyone turned against Walt long before I did. That’s something for me to think about.

  63. 63.

    Rafer Janders

    @Laertes:

    I don’t know, I’ve never really turned against Walt. But then again, I accepted him as a bad guy from the beginning.

    Same with Deadwood — did I ever turn against Al Swearengen? Well, I knew right away that he as a murderer and a pimp and a thief. But he was a great character, and I wanted him to win and survive.

    It’s true throughout all great literature — do you “turn against” Macbeth? Richard III? Raskolnikov? Tom Ripley?

  64. 64.

    Hawes

    I’d put Breaking Bad above the Wire, which I’m finally binge-watching now and have three episodes left. Season Two of The Wire was exceptional. Absolutely exceptional.

    But to me The Wire is like Dickens. (It has that Dickensian Aspect.) And I’m not crazy about Dickens.

    Breaking Bad reminds me of Shakespearean villainy. Richard III, Iago, Macbeth. As awful as those guys are, you’re conflicted because you SEE how they became awful. And Jesse won’t be the Good Guy. There are no Good Guys. Everyone “breaks bad”.

    In their company, I’ll put Justified, Rescue Me (though I finally quit on Tommy by the last season), Deadwood (did anyone see the boxed set of Deadwood on Hank’s shelf last episode?)

    Yeah, GoT, too. And The Walking Dead. The episode with Morgan last season had me weeping.

    It’s the Golden Age of Television.

  65. 65.

    DFH no.6

    Like Rafer Janders I have never “turned against” Walter White. I’m still rooting for him, which makes me a bad person, no doubt (I also rooted for Stringer Bell and Omar in The Wire, too. And Tony Soprano).

    BB SPOILER

    I didn’t even turn against Walt when he employed the neo-Nazis to murder Mike’s 10 guys in prison. If that didn’t do it, I suppose nothing would.

    And as Hawes said, it really is the Golden Age of TV (I go back to the time of the original Mickey Mouse Club, Captain Kangaroo – loved that show – and Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone, which my Mom and Dad actually let me watch before I was even in school).

    And BB is the best of them all.

  67. 67.

    Manyakitty

    @Rafer Janders: Swearingen was arguably one of the most moral characters on Deadwood, at least if you view morals as a set of self-defined rules to live by. As such, I never saw him as a villain. Sure, he did lots of bad stuff, but he was mostly honest about what he did and why he did it.

  68. 68.

    Ms. D. Ranged in AZ

    @Beemer:

    I actually turned on Walt a little earlier than that, I think. NOTE: Spoilage ahead if you haven’t gotten to the middle or end of Season 2!!!!!!!!!!!!

    It was the scene where he comes back home and his wife is standing in the kitchen with the green facial mask on, and he basically sexually assaults her. It wasn’t just because she said No and he didn’t listen. It was that he is getting off on all the danger and he’s so desperate to feel good, that he doesn’t recognize he’s no better than Jesse or any of his drug addict friends. He enjoys the high too much. Add that on top of the fact that it took him WAY too long to realize his wife was saying “stop, no” and the level of force he used on her, that was it for me. I might have wavered a little after that but in the ep where he is breaking into Jesse’s house to get the 38 lbs of meth from under Jesse’s kitchen sink….I turned to the BF and said, “At what point does Walt realize that the Universe is telling him to stop this madness?” That was the second nail. The third nail will probably have something to do with Jesse’s girlfriend, Jane. She’s an obstacle as far as Walt is concerned and I have a bad, bad feeling about what he might do to remove her.

  69. 69.

    Rafer Janders

    @Manyakitty:

    As such, I never saw him as a villain.

    Um, he arranged the murder of the pioneer Metz family, and was going to have Dan cut the little Metz girl’s throat if Jane hadn’t stopped him. I’m sorry to say, but a man who murders an entire family just so he can steal their money is a villain, no matter how “honest” he is about it.

    And that’s not getting into any of the other murdering, lying, pimping, sexual slavery, and raping he did.

  70. 70.

    Rafer Janders

    @Manyakitty:

    Swearingen was arguably one of the most moral characters on Deadwood, at least if you view morals as a set of self-defined rules to live by.

    If your set of self-defined rules allow you to freely murder, beat, rape, steal and swindle from others with no compunction solely for your own personal economic gain and power, then no, that’s not how I view morals.

  71. 71.

    Manyakitty

    @Rafer Janders: Yeah…I know. Still, he was probably the “roundest” character of the series. Bullock’s relentless seriousness was just annoying and he never seemed to get beyond it. Flat, flat, flat.

  72. 72.

    Rafer Janders

    @Manyakitty:

    Oh, I loved Al. Thought he was a great character, and one of the heroes of the show. But you can be a hero of the drama and still be a villain at the same time. I don’t need to “like” the character to like the character.

  73. 73.

    Birthmarker

    @DFH no.6: Stringer, Omar and Tony keep a spark of humanity despite doing despicable acts, so we can continue to sympatize with them at least on some level. They struggle with things we ourselves struggle with.

    I don’t think Jesse’s character was so well developed that I still feel that sympathy. Walt, I just consider him to be like watching a train wreck. I expect it will all end badly, and how can they expect anything else?

  74. 74.

    KSE

    @Ms. D. Ranged in AZ: I’m surprised that that isn’t more people’s answer… But then again I guess I’m not that surprised.

    Up until that point we see many angles of Walt – a put-upon loser, an unfulfilled genius clinging to the last remnants of his pride, a man prone to sudden outbursts of righteous anger, a man with a markedly idiosyncratic attitude as regards the wearing of pants – all of which are key to his character. (Except maybe the pants thing, pretty sure that’s just there for laughs). But when he assaults Skyler, that’s where the final, tragic flaw in Walt’s character is revealed: his myopic selfishness and lack of regard for the people he claims to value the most.

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