I really hope the media loses these hard, honestly. At this point I don't even mind if Trump benefits some, I just want to see the media that sanewashed Trump and pretended there was anything reasonable about him returning as a presidential candidate get what they deserve.

At the end of Obama's term wouldn't have made any difference because by then McConnell was committed to holding the seat open for the next Republican.

But people called for her to resign back during the middle of Obama's presidency, when the Democrats controlled the Senate, and he hubristic old ass decided to fuck everyone else by hanging onto power and prestige and trying to be even more historically important.

Woman had a bigger ego than Trump and Musk, and I really hope that historical opinion of he fucking remembers that.

Upside is the cult of personality is attached to Trump, and no one else has been able to pull it off him. Trump is only effective because somehow, for some insane reason, he, personally, has a lot of devoted followers.

Depends on what lesson you think they're trying to teach. "When you know the right thing to do, don't let people use rules and obstructions to stop you from doing it." can be a good lesson.

Sam aged, Frodo did not. I recall several mentions throughout the books that Frodo was considered unusually young-looking for a 50-year old hobbit, just as Bilbo himself was very young-looking for 111. Owning the ring seems to basically just pause your aging, even if you're not using it.

Sam was also twelve years younger than Frodo, but since Frodo stopped aging for 17 years, he wound up effectively older, physically speaking.

Yes, I have always from the first time I saw the movies thought that's what they needed. A five second clip of that and nothing else about the movie has to change!

If your only source is the movies, one of the annoying gripes about them is they have this deceptive editing that makes it seem like Frodo left the Shire within a relatively short timespan after the birthday party.

Frodo got the ring on the 22nd of September of 3001. He leaves Bag End on the 23rd of September...of 3018.

This is not quite accurate. The vice president must be eligible to be the President, not to be elected President. The 22nd amendment has some very specific language.

"No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once."

It prevents someone from being elected President, but does not make the person ineligible to be the President since it only restricts that one method of gaining the office. A person can definitely become President through succession even if they have served their full two terms already...at least by the constitution as written.

That gives a false picture since it only counts legal declared spending.

For instance, what's the effective value to Trump's campaign of Elon Musk buying Twitter and using it to explicitly promote right wing views? How much did Russia spend this time to promote Trump? What about Israel, cause I'll wager Netanyahu prefers having Trump in office, since Kamala might've demanded at least some holding back.

Actual spending to promote Republican and right wingers was way higher.

I find the opposite more annoying. If your memory of those events is accurate there's plenty of things to point to to back it up.

But then you have older people like my father who...I don't know, something has completely rewritten their memories of significant events to the point where he claims many things happened differently than verifiable recorded history. It's impossible to argue with that because of him seeing me pointing out that's not true as an attack and accusing him of lying.

That's one of those paradoxes with human behavior around problems. If you put in effort to resolve the problem before it becomes significant, either no one notices, or they claim your effort was unnecessary because it wasn't a problem in the first place.

Y2K bugs are a great example. Lots of effort, time, and money was spent ahead of time to prevent it from becoming a problem...and you get people claiming the whole thing was just nothing to be worried about at all and the expense was pointless.