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why is it only considered racist in regards to people coming from south of the border?

Are we detaining people coming across the other border?  AFAIK we're still doing "catch and release" on that end.

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You can absolutely walk into Canada.  People do it all the time.  Out west it's common for Americans to cross the border with their guns and camp in Canadian territory during hunting season.

As for human trafficking, Jeff Sessions said back in February that the administration had been very successful at reducing it.  There's no indication that this new, more draconian approach is needed.

ireactions wrote:

From a 2000 standpoint -- all the emotional difficulties Slider_Quinn21 raises are too convoluted for SLIDERS because they interrupt what should be a very simple, straightforward premise: the sliders are lost in the multiverse trying to find a way back home. Addressing merged Quinns and Kromagg invasions and Kromagg Prime origin stories and resurrecting Wade and wrong Arturos is too complicated, and even pilight's dismissals (Quinn and Wade don't remember their traumas!) would still require addressing them. There is, in fact, a decidedly unsettling undertone to saying Wade should simply forget that David Peckinpah raped her.

I agree with all of that.  I'm just saying that if someone were determined to do a revival of the original series with the original characters there are ways of making it work.

IMO, the best we could hope for in that ballpark would be a reunion movie that served as a jumping off point for a new generation of Sliders.

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Migrant children are certainly not a new subject.  People have been going back and forth across that border since long before it was a border.

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Informant wrote:

Anyone else getting super tired of fad outrage? Y'know, where everyone gets really, really fired up about some issue that they've done zero research on, just because they read a meme about it or saw an Oprah tweet, and logic or reason have absolutely no place in the conversation, because if you don't agree with their outrage, you are *literally* a Nazi?

How can people not recognize when they're being manipulated? It happens constantly, so people should learn the signs.

Unfortunately, we elected such a person president

Slider_Quinn21 wrote:
pilight wrote:

[She was drugged and the Kromaggs have mind altering abilities, so she likely wouldn't remember any of what happened after she was captured.  When they encountered her in Requiem she didn't even know where she was.  As for rape, the series never said that explicitly.  I prefer to think she was used as a surrogate; Kromagg egg fertilized by Kromagg male implanted in her for gestation.  Still bad, but not quite as bad.

Quinn also might not remember his time being merged.  Certainly he wouldn't have any memory after New Gods for Old.  It's a manageable problem.

Possibly.  But this is all assumption.  There's just as equally a chance that Wade's experiences would closely match Jessica Jones' (Netflix version).  Even if she couldn't remember everything, she'd view it as a huge violation, and she'd have huge trust issues even if she didn't know that her friends, essentially, stopped looking for her.  And the last we saw her, she was a head locked in a computer smile

As for Quinn, you're right that he could've been "asleep" after New Gods For Old.  Alternatively, there's a chance that he still experienced everything but couldn't say or do anything.  That's a Black Mirror episode if there ever was one.


It would make a good Black Mirror episode.  It would not make a good Sliders episode.  I've been on the reboot team for a long while, but if they decided to continue the old characters 20 years later it could be done without making it quite so dreary.

Sliders left the four main characters stranded on four different worlds in four different sets of peril.  To reunite the original Sliders is extremely problematic and depends on a number of different fake-outs, coincidences, and unbelievable scenarios to pull off.  Even if you could write it off with a time jump (where Quinn or Arturo has found his friends in the past, and we catch up to them in the present), there are still a number of problems that you'd, realistically, have to deal with.  Wade was captured and raped, and her friends didn't look for her.  Arturo was replaced with an evil imposter, and none of his friends noticed.  Rembrandt was forced to watch all his friends die one by one.  Quinn was locked in a prison in his own mind.

Wade and Quinn would be pretty easy to deal with.

She was drugged and the Kromaggs have mind altering abilities, so she likely wouldn't remember any of what happened after she was captured.  When they encountered her in Requiem she didn't even know where she was.  As for rape, the series never said that explicitly.  I prefer to think she was used as a surrogate; Kromagg egg fertilized by Kromagg male implanted in her for gestation.  Still bad, but not quite as bad.

Quinn also might not remember his time being merged.  Certainly he wouldn't have any memory after New Gods for Old.  It's a manageable problem.

Slide Override wrote:

Once you get to the point where these characters that you have been watching, witnessing their journey together, and going through emotional dramas with ... are not the characters that we all thought that we were watching - then that is the point where you completely lose the audience and their emotional investment.

That's not necessarily true.  If John Rhys-Davies had wanted to come back to the series and they brought him back saying it was really our Professor who got left behind on Azure Gate Bridge world, would anyone really have been upset?

Sliders would work more easily in this context, since the world at large changes every issue.  The only continuity is among the Sliders themselves.

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Kangaroo Jack, as Down Under was eventually called, actually did decently at the box office.  Made $90M on a budget of $60M.

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I met a woman named Diana Davis today

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My opinion hasn't changed much from the last thread we had on this topic.  Do it as a reboot, with new characters or with characters that are younger doubles of the old ones (remember The Guardian established that worlds can run on different times).  Have them encounter some of the old sliders once a season, as guest stars.

The Siskel theory was that if you like westerns you're going to see whatever western comes out regardless of reviews, and thus won't need critical appraisal.  If you hate westerns you won't see it regardless of reviews, and again won't need (or likely bother to read) critical opinion.  He saw his job as informing people who are lukewarm about westerns whether this particular one was worth seeing.  His all time favorite film was Saturday Night Fever, nominally a dance movie but one that transcended the genre to appeal to a broader audience.  I'm not a huge fan of dance films generally, but I agree with him that Saturday Night Fever is worth seeing even if dance films are not usually your thing.

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Cars have uses besides hurting people.  Weigh the positives and negatives and nearly everyone will conclude the value of cars is greater than their hazards.

Informant wrote:

Maybe. That just doesn't make sense to me. If someone who doesn't like musicals goes to a musical, they will probably not enjoy it. Shouldn't the critics be trying to decide if the movie is a good musical, for the people who may be interested in seeing it?

That was the dynamic that fueled Siskel & Ebert to fame.  Roger tried to judge films by their own standards; if it's a western then how good of a western is it?  Gene looked for movies to transcend their genres; will this western appeal to people who aren't aficionados of westerns?  Both are defensible approaches, IMO.

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TemporalFlux wrote:

Don’t get me wrong - I don’t blame the gun or even the cigarette; people make their own  choices and people must be held accountable for them.

The difference being with guns one person's bad choice mostly leads to other people suffering

Informant wrote:

I was just reading about the new Death Wish movie, since I remember my father watching the old series of movies when I was a kid. So I checked out the Rotten Tomatoes page, and the difference between the critics reaction and the audience reaction is pretty hilarious. 14% critic score, 85% audience score. So the question remains, what is the point of a critic is they can't relate to the audience?

The audience is self selecting, they go in already liking the kind of film it is.  Most critics try to compare films with others from different genres and styles, to weigh whether a film-goer who doesn't have a predilection for the kind of film it is would enjoy it.

As for Death Wish, the original and all its sequels were awful and wholly undermined the theme of the book.  I imagine the remake will be in a similar vein.

ireactions wrote:

the First Order being able to track the Resistance ship through lightspeed is declared as an impossibility; then immediately understood as a technological concept by those who moments ago called it impossible. It's arbitrary and forced.

Not to mention that people have been tracking ships through lightspeed since the first movie.

"You're sure the homing beacon is secure aboard their ship? I'm taking an awful risk, Vader. This had better work."

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There is almost zero chance the bill gets signed before January because of the PayGo rules.  If they don't pass a waiver (which the Dems would surely filibuster) the tax bill would cause massive cuts in medicare and other programs.  Despite GOP rhetoric, they're not actually interested in cutting spending.  That's why the bill hasn't actually been enrolled yet, let alone signed.

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Paying these bonuses this year means they had the spare cash to do so under the old tax rate and chose not to until they could make political hay out of it.  There's no way a tax bill which still hasn't been signed into law yet could affect this year's bottom line.

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I call bullshit.  Companies like that budget months ahead.  I wouldn't be 100% convinced it would affect next year's bonuses.

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It seems unlikely that a tax cut that hasn't been signed yet and won't take effect until next year is affecting this year's bonuses.

reversed the ending of RETURN OF THE JEDI by establishing that the Rebels ultimately didn't win the war

They won the war, but lost the peace.  Which was inevitable, if you think about it.  The power structure was too entrenched and the one living jedi had no experience in how to unravel all that bureaucracy.  Unless Luke was going to declare himself emperor and slowly dismantle it, the galactic government was going to continue to be oppressive and cruel.

Barge of the Dead was originally conceived for TNG, as a Worf story

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The FBI and the Kromaggs are not mutually exclusive.  It could be that the FBI's #1 priority is defending their world against the Maggs, through gathering information and finding new weapons.  It could also tie in to why they're after the Sliders.  If the Kromaggs catch Quinn and company, it would lead them right to Earth Prime.  Therefore the FBI wants to stop our heroes from sliding around.

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We can be sure that he ran multilevel marketing schemes and executive coaching workshops

Those are the scammiest businesses is existence.  It's shocking to me that people still fall for both of them.

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I guess we're about to find out how Sabrina would work.  The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is in development as a companion series.

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Racial tension has been present in the US from day one.

Trump isn't evil, he's just incompetent.  He also lacks any real conviction about his political beliefs, which is why he's pulled a 180 on so many of the things he ran on (NATO is obsolete, or not.  China is a master currency manipulator, or not.  A federal hiring freeze is needed, or not.  We need to withdraw from NAFTA, or not.  DACA should be eliminated immediately, or not.  We should pull out of Afghanistan, or not.  And so on...)

He'll never be impeached, but he might resign.  In any event, there's not much chance of him seeking a second term.

tom.holste wrote:

in the Narnia community, fan fiction is strictly forbidden. (They mistakenly believe it to be piracy, even though it's non-profit.)

Something can be piracy even if not done for profit.

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Maybe they want female representation that's not just a love interest.  I've heard that women are capable of other things.

I was thinking about cross overs while rewatching an episode of Pitch.  A cross over doesn't have to be the main thrust of the story, it could be almost like a cameo.  In the case of Pitch, a quick aside where the Sliders are leaving the ballpark after a game and remarking about how they never thought they would see a woman who was good enough to play in the majors but Ginny Baker is something special or such like that.  It would be a fun little Easter Egg.

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Grizzlor wrote:

Meanwhile Trump and co. are just racking up the potential obstruction of justice complaints

Who's going to charge them?

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Slider_Quinn21 wrote:
pilight wrote:

I'm not talking about North Korea nuking Japan.  What if one of their test missiles with no warhead lands in Tokyo?  That would require subtle, level headed diplomacy.

We survived the Cuban Missile Crisis with an alcoholic womanizer in the White House.  Survived the height of the Cold War with an egomaniac asshole covering up his own crimes leading the country.  Survived the 1980s with a movie star president with Alzheimer's. 

Even if Kim Jong Un is suicidal, reason tends to prevail no matter who's in the White House.

Those guys each had a fully staffed state department with a secretary experienced in international relations.  Trump has a former CEO who seems content to let many positions remain vacant.  There's no undersecretary for Arms Control and International Security.  There's no assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs.  There's no assistant secretary for International Security and Nonproliferation.  There's no no ambassador to South Korea.  Any of those positions sound useful in this situation?

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I'm not talking about North Korea nuking Japan.  What if one of their test missiles with no warhead lands in Tokyo?  That would require subtle, level headed diplomacy.

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Slider_Quinn21 wrote:
pilight wrote:

Trump is showing how unqualified for the job he really is.  The question is whether he can handle a real crisis.  Suppose the next North Korean missile test hits Japan.  What are the odds of getting a reasonable, proportional response from the US?

Why would we need to respond at all?  This is why we have the United Nations.  Or, you know, China can handle it since they don't benefit in any way by a war in their backyard.

Because we're obligated by treaty to defend Japan.  That's why they never built their military back up after WWII.

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Trump is showing how unqualified for the job he really is.  The question is whether he can handle a real crisis.  Suppose the next North Korean missile test hits Japan.  What are the odds of getting a reasonable, proportional response from the US?

Informant wrote:

Just watched Rogue One. Holy crap, that movie was horrible. Like, truly horrible. It's like the script was produced by an app of some sort, not a writer.

Wow.

And the CG people were very distracting. The Uncanny Valley has not yet been crossed.

The third act, with all the action, was well done.  And it did establish that the Death Star had hyperspace capability.

It sucks that there are so many missing episodes from the first two Doctors

The Doctor changes personality in each regeneration.  That was established back when Patrick Troughton took over as the Second Doctor.  Changing sexual preference could easily be incorporated as part of that.

Slider_Quinn21 wrote:

The song was weird, but I didn't think twice about it.  Bands of people sang for entertainment back then.

"Back then" when there were dragons and ice men who animate dead bodies?  lol

Westeros may look like medieval Earth, but it's not.  There are many differences, one of which is apparently the style of music minstrels play.

It's not really a rewatch if I didn't watch it the first time, right?

RussianCabbie_Lotteryfan wrote:

btw, it is sad to see dimensionofcontinuity.com is no longer with us..

It is sad indeed

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CNN has become the left wing equivalent of Fox News, pretending to be journalists when they're actually propagandists.

PRIMAL FEAR is a good flick, but it would not have been transformative for Wheaton like it was for Norton because Wheaton isn't as good an actor.

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A more "realistic" Sliders would have the heroes dead within a slide or two.  They would slide into a world with no atmosphere or some other factor that makes it unable to support life.

I agree that worlds similar to Earth Prime generally make for better story telling.  Still, there would be nothing wrong with throwing in a really strange one from time to time.

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Episodes like The Guardian, As Time Goes By, and Dust show that they can go to worlds where the time flow is different.

As for being the mid-90's, it's surprising to me how nearly every world uses the same calendar, right down to starting the new year on the same random day in early Winter.

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Quinn says this several times throughout the first two seasons.  With The Guardian, however, it is established that worlds can be experiencing the same timeline as ours but be at a different point along it.  In that case the world was 12 years behind ours, but there's no reason the Sliders couldn't come across one hundreds or thousands or even millions of years ahead or behind Earth Prime.  It doesn't even have to come from differences in planetary rotation speed, as it did in that episode.  Suppose life formed 200 years later than on Earth Prime.  That's a blip in the cosmic scale, but for our heroes it's the difference between 2017 and 1817.  That could be huge if they had a malfunctioning timer or needed medical attention.  Technically it's not time travel, since whatever the Sliders do won't affect Earth Prime, but in many ways it is functionally the same.

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In the latest reversal of campaign rhetoric, the Trump administration is not ending the DACA program.  "Dreamers" will continue to receive work permits and be protected from deportation.

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Informant wrote:

Someone help me out. I was just looking at boxofficemojo.com and comparing numbers to see how Wonder Woman is doing. To me, it looks like the weakest of the DCEU openings, but the headlines are calling it a box office smash and the savior of the DCEU. Am I missing something, or is this more about critics than numbers? I'd say that it could have been about when it opened, but Man of Steel opened around the same time and seems to have made a bit more.

Well, it's more about expectations. Batman vs. Superman was supposed to do Avengers-like numbers, and came up about $40 million short on opening weekend (and terrible word of mouth cut its legs out from underneath it). Suicide Squad got terrible reviews, but the $325 million gross domestically exceeded most reasonable expectations (i.e., the people that either thought it would open to $150, or the ones that thought it would have to do at least that to be considered anything but a flop).

Wonder Woman, on the other hand, was a bit of a wild card. Would people (read: the assholes that harass women for being women that dare to do male things, etc.) go see a woman super hero? Would the baggage from the other DC movies drag it down? Most people seemed to be thinking $80s, so to wind up at $103 million when the dust settled is pretty impressive. Plus, those great reviews should give it the kind of legs the previous entries haven't been able to have. In fact, you can already kinda see it since it's basically doing the same numbers for the first Monday and Tuesday that SS did ($27.4 to $26), with the handicap of doing it in early June, when a lot of schools are still in session compared to SS in August. BvS was in that $27 million range for that first Monday/Tuesday as well, despite both of them opening well higher than WW.

TOS and TNG got very preachy sometimes.  Kirk and Picard were both known for making speeches

It could be that the Klingons are in the process of changing from the ridge headed type of TNG (which we saw in ENT as well) into the smooth-foreheaded TOS Klingons.

Grizzlor wrote:

I'll watch, but as a friend said on Facebook, it's a hot mess.  These producers simply do not understand the predilections of Star Trek fans.  Greatly altering the look of Klingons is a BIG DEAL.

TNG greatly altered the look of Klingons and is beloved.

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Informant wrote:

Okay, I have a question. Say there's no evidence of Trump messing with the election or working with the Russians, or any of that stuff that people have been going crazy over. Undoubtedly, there will still be speculation and all sorts of anonymous sources full of mysterious references to documents that we will never see, but let's say that there is no actual evidence.

Now say that despite this lack of evidence, political machines manage to turn these accusation into an impeachment and boot Trump from office (this is hypothetical, so don't ask me to explain how).

At that point, do you celebrate Trump being gone? Or do you protest the corrupt and underhanded method by which it happened?

There's no political machine that can impeach Trump that WILL without (from this week on) damning evidence of misdeeds presented by the special counsel's investigation. At least on the Russian matter. Trump can still go off in some other way that causes Republicans in the house to draft articles of impeachment. I would like to say how unlikely that is but you NEVER know with Donald Trump. It's impossible to predict what he will or will not do and what the subsequent fallout of something Donald Trump could do might be.

As far as what ifs around there not being any there, there? I think many people have suggested that Trump's resistance and reactions to further and prolonged investigations on Russia might very well be blindly based on his insecurities over being perceived as somehow not having won the White House on his own. That it's all a Democratic effort to discredit his victory and de-legitimize his presidency. And that he, and this is the blindly part, with no perception of proper boundaries for a president has trampled into many potentially impeachable areas just out of his own personal insecurities. That sounds like a perfectly reasonable scenario actually.

But... the cover up, as they say, is ALWAYS worse than the crime. And in this case, the cover up might be all there really is. In a fair and just Washington, it really should be all that's needed to remove Donald Trump from office. Fair and square. Comey's notes, as we've all heard, are, like any FBI agents contemporaneous notes, taken as having a high evidentiary value. Those notes show a president clearly attempting to improperly influence an FBI investigation into his campaign. And he admitted that his firing of Comey was based on Comey's FBI investigation of the Trump campaign. His spokesperson, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said that they, the White House, hoped for a speedy resolution of the FBI investigation AND that their dismissal of Comey was something they hope would help that to happen.

Stunningly stupid admissions that completely back-up Comey's notes and the concerns he's voiced through associates of a president attempting to influence him to drop the Russian investigation. We would and should celebrate the removal of office of a president who does just these things and nothing more.

So... your hypothetical is what exactly? That we should assume for a second that this stuff that actually happened DIDN'T happen? I don't understand. If Trump hadn't done all of this stuff and was being railroaded out of Washington without justification? No that wouldn't be something to celebrate.

The real problem is that, instead of making America great again, something many people quite honestly hoped he could do, Trump remains, as long as he is in office, an existential threat to liberty and justice and many other more specific linchpins of the American political system. He threatens a free press. He is actively attempting to brush aside long-established independence between the White House and FBI, something that would leave essentially nothing with any teeth in it that has political independence that could check this, or any subsequent, White House's actions.

So... again... not saying there's any actual collusion with Russia, etc. There's already IMO enough in the public record to warrant or justify Trump being removed from office. I suggest that if the investigation only turns up what we already KNOW, confirms it through Comey's notes, and supporting materials like public statements and like... confirming through testimony whether Trump DID ask the VP and AG to leave the room before talking one-on-one to Comey, etc. that this would be enough to remove Trump from office.

So what corrupt and underhanded methods are you referring to? What's YOUR evidence of anything like that happening? What's your reasons, for example, for thinking Robert Mueller might participate in any corrupt and underhanded methods that would result in the removal from office of the President of the United States?

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Informant wrote:

What we learned from those released emails is that Hillary and the DNC actually took steps to manipulate the election. Should I assume that everyone is equally outraged by that?

She shouldn't be president either...

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Informant wrote:

Are we talking about discovering the truth here, or are we discussing finding any excuse to get rid of Trump? If it's the first option, people are putting the cart before the horse. If it's the second option... Have fun with that.

There appears to be plenty of proof to convict Flynn.  If it's as bad as it looks, it becomes a game of what-did-he-know-and-when-did-he-know-it with Trump and other senior officials.

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Grizzlor wrote:

Walls closing in on Donald.  Shared CLASSIFIED INTEL with Russians in the White House.  Bob Mueller, and not a lacky, now in charge of the investigation.  If he makes it through 2017 without resigning I'll be shocked.

Watergate took over two years to reach Nixon resigning, at which point formal impeachment proceedings had barely started.  And that was with the opposing party in charge of both houses of congress.  If there's anything to this, it will take a while before it's resolved.

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Informant wrote:

You eventually blur the lines between Kimye, and the people who control the nation's stash of nukes.

That line is gone.  Our current president is a reality TV star.

It's been coming a long time, really since Kennedy and the widespread ownership of televisions.  Presidents have always hung out with the beautiful people.  TV allowed us to see it instead of occasionally reading about it.

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Informant wrote:

Hell, the only reason Obamacare passed in the first place is because nobody knew what was in it.

Some things never change...


A bunch of House Republicans admitted they didn't read the GOP healthcare bill

http://www.businessinsider.com/gop-hous … ill-2017-5

Collins also had to ask a reporter from The Buffalo News to explain to him a provision of the AHCA that would cut $3 billion in funding to help low- and middle-income New Yorkers pay for healthcare.

The result being...

Republicans misstate, again and again on TV and at town halls, what’s in their health-care bill

https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpos … story.html


Either the GOP congressmen don't know what's in the bill or they are deliberately lying about it.

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Informant wrote:

There was no Muslim ban.

Yeah, that's just another in a long line of campaign promises Trump never had any intention of keeping.

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Informant wrote:

in the fascist nightmare that America's become

Wait... did I miss something?

Really.  There's no way Trump could make the trains run on time.