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Oh, come on. Bryan Fuller doesn't work on lots of TV shows that we all enjoy watching.

Ah, sorry. Well, I stand by my position. There's too much money to throw away here. Negotiations may stall, actors may wander, but THE X-FILES is coming back unless Gillian responds to my tweet to tell me otherwise.

TF's idea for replacing Barry Allen with Bart is hilariously bonkers. I love it. Does Grant Gustin play Bart in this scenario? That said, I think if they were going to swap Barry with Wally to adhere to DC's bizarre fiefdom divisions, they'd have done it by now -- and they got Deadshot back on ARROW and Deathstroke's returning too, so the leashes are being loosened gradually.

**

I didn't feel SUPERGIRL and THE FLASH were particularly different and will default to my opinion that Informant just hates fun. THE FLASH had all of the odd physical spacing issues of SUPERGIRL; the heroes find the President but demand for his release rather than Atom or Firestorm of Supergirl grabbing him and flying away. The 'training' with Supergirl consists of her invulnerably tolerating a barrage of energy blasts and projectile weapons. Barry's superspeed still has him ducking for cover from Firestorm and Heatwave when they should be frozen if Barry's in motion.

There's other writing issues. The President's abduction is played as some sort of strategic coup, but he didn't seem to have much to contribute and it's not like we lost Dumbledore or something. And Oliver at the end says the heroes must contact Lyla Michaels to inform them the Dominators are hostile as though their kidnapping the President didn't communicate that already?

You could drive yourself crazy thinking about these things. These are children's characters. Melissa Benoist and Grant Gustin are adorable. Stephen Amell did such a great job playing Grant's big brother in Eobard Thawne's secret man cave. Slider_Quinn21, my second SLIDERS REBORN editor has resigned and declared me to be mentally unfit; would you be interested in being the third?

I would wait for an official announcement of anything. It's not the first time Gillian Anderson's been misquoted or misunderstood regarding her willingness to return to the series. And given the huge ratings success of the revival, I can't see FOX giving up. Negotiations may stall, availability may delay production, but this is a situation where there's money to be made. If THE X-FILES isn't coming back, FOX and Chris Carter would at least explain why to the press and until they do that, we shouldn't doubt the series' return... even if some of us admittedly think the show was better off on permanent hiatus.

I'm sorry, but I have a terrible migraine right now, so I'm just going to side with Slider_Quinn21 on whatever this is about. I'm sure he has made some good and valid points about how the movie was lots of fun but has some problems when examined under scrutiny.

All the actors are available -- except Constance Wu who played Polly. At this point, there can't be any contractual obligations holding the actors to the show. I think, given how much time it's been, it might be best to treat PARALLELS is a rough pilot and simply start over again, but they might pick up on the series with a different set of characters who discover the Building or make Polly an occasional guest-star. It's a pretty wide concept, although I think that bringing in a new cast of characters when the original characters has only had the pilot would make THE BUILDING rival SLIDERS in being dismissive towards its leads.

Nigel has set me some additional constructive criticism -- he thinks that the bulk of the finale outline is filled with irrelevant and confusing incidents and events. He advises that I turn the end of the script into the middle and get rid of the existing middle.

He could be right. Not sure yet. I'd say that I'm attempting a certain effect -- the "As Time Goes By" effect as well as the DOCTOR WHO effect where the story is filled with throwaway ideas that could each potentially be their own episode, the idea being to show how rich and boundless the SLIDERS concept can be where you can have a superhero movie next to an eccentric dramedy next to a hard boiled detective story next to a father-daughter dramedy. Nigel is the second editor to work on SLIDERS REBORN and the second one to think the story is absolutely crazy and out of control. Nigel is the best SLIDERS writer to ever touch the property. Yes, I know we all like Steve Brown and Jon Povill and Mike Truman and Marc Scott Zicree and Chris Black, but Nigel is the best and if he has concerns, they're worth serious consideration.

I think I'll continue onward as I am, but if the script truly becomes unmanageable, then Nigel's proposal is Plan B. I can't deny that what I'm attempting is completely nuts. The entire project, a SLIDERS revival in the feature film format with some extras, is lunacy. But... I mean, I've been thinking of Ian McDuffie (the Think of a Roulette blog) and his appearance on SLIDERSCAST in which Jim Ford described the plot of "In Dinos Veritas" and Ian remarked: "Everything you said is just insane! Dinosaurs! Truth collars! Poachers! Holographic rangers! And then the poacher got eaten! One of the best parts of trying to explain SLIDERS to anyone is a synopsis. They’re always bonkers. Like a sentient worm that poops the elixir of life."

Maybe that's what's happened with Nigel here, although anyone who dismisses Nigel Mitchell's opinion does so at their peril.

So, I sent the outline for the final SLIDERS REBORN to SLIDERS genius Nigel Mitchell like a year ago. But it was written in a thin, vague, general sense without much detail and I found the story a bit lacking in depth, detailing an average day in San Francisco now that it's a city of overlapping alternate realities followed by a big finish. Nigel pronounced that it reached the dizzying heights of good enough, but I knew there wasn't enough material for a screenplay.

Over the course of a year, I added more material to the outline. Subplots. Details of the city and its inhabitants. Side stories and examples. Scenery descriptions. More characters to better illustrate the themes. Anything and everything I might need so that I wouldn't be coming up with ideas on the spot and getting stuck in corners.

Nigel informs me that he cannot make head or tails of this expanded outline, that he can't keep track of who all these supporting cast characters are or why they matter or how they serve the plot or what the hell is going on. And I myself an experiencing something similar -- there's too much material for the script.

As a result, things are being shortened down. A complex chain of deduction is reduced to looking up an address. An extensive car chase has been excised. A complex series of six different mysteries has been reduced to two. It's hell on the editor, but it feels like it's better to have too much than too little?

Um. Trump just made noted white nationalist Steve Bannon his chief strategist. I don't know how having no filter and a tendency to exaggerate diminishes the racist attitudes in play and in power here.

Uncle Informant, I have some very bad news for you. I am really scared of Donald Trump. I am so terrified that I had to write some script pages of Quinn Mallory telling me how to keep moving forward so that I could fall asleep at night. But Quinn is only a fictional character and he can only go so far, so I will be depending on you heavily to de-escalate the left-leaning hysteria and possibly direct me to some better news sources. I'm frightened and I don't even live in America.

"Flashpoint" was a terrible, incoherent, confusing episode and I'm not surprised that Slider_Quinn21 got lost. In terms of what subsequent episodes indicate: after Thawne killed Nora Allen and then mocked Barry that the present would be different, he sped off -- only for his speed force to deplete from his body, just as it did in the original timeline. As a result, the Season 1 - 2 timeline unfolds as we saw but with differences where events and outcomes that depended on random chance experience a second round of variability.

The reason why this does not come through properly: "Flashpoint" has Thawne taunt Barry and then speed off, leaving it completely unclear if he engages in some other villainy or if he loses his speed as he did in the original timeline due to too many time jumps. This is also problematic because the episode that showed Thawne losing his speed in the year 2000 didn't really provide a strong rationale for why his speed vanished, and if the jump to 2000 ran him nearly dry, he shouldn't have had any speed left in "Flashpoint."

I honestly can't believe "Flashpoint" aired the way it did. It should have run in a two hour timeslot. As for Thawne's appearance in LEGENDS -- I'm assuming up to this point that we're seeing the Reverse Flash *before* he killed Barry's mother and got stranded in the 21st century.

I'm not sure what's worse, the supposedly liberal people protesting with fists and fire or the rash of bigoted and racially motivated assaults from people who feel emboldened by the white supremacist who is their new president. Plenty of bad to go around.

I do wish people wouldn't boil down Hillary Clinton's failure to being a woman. The truth is that the Democratic Party sold out to corporate interests a long time ago, they just had friendlier PR that presented a public facade of concern for equality, civil liberties and acceptance whereas a man like Donald Trump doesn't feel the need to conceal his contempt for minorities and women or his profiteering at the expense of the poor. And I do wish people wouldn't see Trump's ascendance as some sort of successful backlash against the system that system remains completely in power -- just on the other side.

Really happy with SUPERGIRL's take on Alex's sexuality. I thought "Crossfire" was really fun, but a lot of production issues are still apparent, like Kara and Mon-El loudly discussing their secrets in a crowded newsroom (unless the joke is that the newsroom is so busy that they have no need to worry anyone bother to listen in). That said, pretty much every superhero show on the air is a bit detached from physical reality.

ARROW is also going very well this year. I think the problem with Seasons 3 - 4 was that there were too many fantasy elements in addition to the crime in the city stories. The earthquake machine of Season 1 was crazy but workable. The supersoldiers of Season 2 were a bit more detached from reality, yet effective. The key is that these threats exist on an extremely physical, ground-level setting.

But with Season 3, you had immortal leaders of assassin cults, two separate methods of resurrecting dead characters, bafflingly unmotivated characters (R'as is obsessed with Oliver because... ? He wants to destroy Star City because... ?) and then you have Brandon Routh playing Iron Man and flying around in a metal suit.

With Season 4, your villain has magical powers. Somewhere around there, Felicity has become a perfect fantasy woman. The fantasy elements got out of control, although I understand it's hard to tell what's too much and what's not when your lead character's secret identity doesn't wear a mask. I think this season has found the right balance: Ragman's surrounded by otherwise street-level vigilantes, Prometheus fits into ARROW's world of bows and arrows rather than THE FLASH's world of magic and mutants. Church is a thug rather than a faith leader. Felicity has been de-romanticized significantly.

FLASH has recovered nicely from "Flashpoint," but the loss of Tom Cavanaugh as an effective mentor is really unfortunate. Harrison Wells has always been the father figure of the series and it's tough to adjust to him playing the annoying cousin who tests your patience and whose eventual departure is a relief. Wells in Season 1 was like Arturo: the glue of the group. The wise mentor who was too good to be true. And the fact that it was all a lie was heartbreaking.

Wells in Season 2 was a genuine leader and father figure, but with a bitter, caustic edge that was redeemed by his talent and compassion. I would rather keep him around.

CHUCK's fourth season got extended. The original finale was Chuck proposing marriage to Sarah in the hospital. The extended episode order resulted in the writers coming up with a new 11-episode arc -- essentially a fifth season of the show, except because it served as a sequel to the first 13 episodes' storylines, it still felt like part of Season 4. So Timothy Dalton's defeat in episode 13 led to episodes 14 - 24 introducing Timothy Dalton's daughter and bringing Dalton back as an imprisoned antagonist.

I'm re-reading the President Lex Luthor storyline in SUPERMAN comics right now and I'm really heartened by how Clark Kent reacts: he politely congratulates Lex on his victory. In public, Superman maintains his composure. In private, Clark goes between deeply cynical depression and a seething rage, at times struggling to get out of bed in the morning, at others smashing his fists into the moon in frustration. Eventually, he composes both sides into a solemn dignity and a resolute defiance, knowing that respect doesn't preclude dissent and that it's simply a matter of time before a very sick-in-the-head man falls apart and leaves himself open to defeat.

I'm sorry about your back, Informant. Keep us posted.

Well. I decided to reduce the action in the way that Informant advised and got it down to 26 pages. I guess that's okay for a Bondian opening. http://freepdfhosting.com/885454a1c8.pdf

Actually, I've worked out a solution. I need to divide the script into episodes and make the episodes like separate chapters of a novel. They'll still be one script, but each segment will have a separate title card. Not a title, I want to keep the "Regenesis" banner, but I'll find a decent quote to start each portion and focus on a specific character or pairing. That way, a 46-page SLIDERS-meets the Marvel Cinematic universe episode can be followed by a lightweight Season 1-esque comedy of mistaken identities, then a David Peckinpah-style detective story, then a pacey science fiction adventure like in Season 2, and then back to the superhero material for the last installment. They'll all, individually, feel like TV episodes.

I'm hitting another weird situation -- the opening is a bit like a James Bond movie where we have an introductory action sequence. They're not supposed to be that long. But this opening action sequence is shaping up to be FORTY PAGES of script. The thing is -- there's a lot more description here than in a real screenplay. If filmed, it would only be 15 minutes. But something that takes twenty seconds to show -- like an office complex of gadgets and a quick-paced fight scene -- is taking a page to describe. This could possibly be a 250 page screenplay when it's done.

I guess this effectively destroys the (fragile) illusion that SLIDERS REBORN is a filmed revival of the series. It's a novel that happens to use the screenplay format.

I'm having a bit of trouble stringing some of my setpieces together. This is something Michael Piller wrote about in his unpublished MAKING OF STAR TREK INSURRECTION book:

There’s a new kind of action writing in Hollywood that I simply don’t know how to do. It begins -- even before a word is put down on paper -- with identifying set pieces, big self-contained action moments that are thrilling and memorable, and then finding some way to string all your set pieces into a coherent narrative.

This approach almost never results in a good movie because it abandons the fundamental demands of storytelling. Of course, I want top-notch visuals and effects, but I don’t go to the movies to see them. I go to see stories about interesting characters.

The opening of the last SLIDERS REBORN script involves Quinn taking on a small army of gunrunners followed by a car chase through the streets of San Francisco. I'm having trouble communicating the chain of logic for why Quinn feels compelled to fight these people or chase down three humvees and a stolen police car, why he doesn't just call the cops and go home or why an investigation into secret weapons caches in San Francisco suddenly becomes a rescue mission. The weird thing is that all these reasons are in the outline itself, but when laying them out in the story, it became necessary to truncate them to throwaway lines of dialogue, just enough to somewhat (or barely) justify the action sequences.

However, the action sequences were not intended as eye candy. The idea is that the fight with the gunrunners could show off how sliding technology has advanced significantly and show off some of the sliding flourishes that Quinn's now capable of -- I needed to set up and show off the sliders' superpowers. The car chase was a way of having the story lay out the surroundings of San Francisco and give a sense of what this now-interdimensional version of San Francisco is like. However, in converting the outline to script, a lot of these details are being reduced to the point of having only enough to get to the next scene and it's a struggle to make sure that the details that stay present are at least the alt-history details.

Ah, screenwriting.

Informant's character has me thinking of Saoirse Ronan or Taissa Farmiga.

**

The thing about doing a stageplay about a SLIDERS obsessive -- I wonder if my lead character would be a fan of SLIDERS if I'd go the GALAXY QUEST route and make the character a fan of JUMPERS and its lead character, Quintin McConnell. If it's SLIDERS, it ties you to the show more vividly and intimately. If it's JUMPERS, you have the option of potentially hiring someone to play Quintin and let the fan interact with his fictional hero.

The other thing I wonder about -- in order to write a stageplay with conflict and drama, I would need to vastly exaggerate my obsessiveness with SLIDERS. The truth is that I regularly blow SLIDERS off for more important things. I remember Laurie and I sitting down at a market restaurant to work on our projects. But then Laurie started talking about her dead father and my vague grunts in response only seemed to encourage her to keep sharing about him and I put the laptop away and accepted that I would not be getting any scripting done on SLIDERS REBORN because I needed to listen to her talk about her dad.

But, for entertainment purposes, I would probably rewrite that entire scene so that the lead character is so obsessed with SLIDERS that he doesn't notice his friend is trying to share something emotional and important. It would be fictionalized severely. And I would probably make the lead character a woman and ask my stage actress friend Emily to play her because my quirks have always seemed more suited to someone like Emily.

Oh my God! Will you people make your own damned zombie show thread? This is the god-damn STATUS UPDATES thread and unless this WALKING DEAD conversation is going to lead to someone revealing a lengthy struggle with necrophilia, it has to go somewhere else.

**

So, I'm setting up an S5. Another one. I'm collaborating with someone on a Christmas gift for a friend. The thing is, as much as I know Informant appreciates Samsung's post-processing and HDR algorithms for flash-free photographic excellence, I deal with absolutely none of it. When I install the Google version of Android on a phone, I lose all of those features. When I deleted Touchwiz from my old S3 and my current S5, I lost the night mode, I lost all the detailed sharpening, I lost the grain reduction, I lost the multi-exposure-merging.

The truth is I don't care about any of that; I like using a flash and I like the texture of grain on photos and I tend to run every photo through Photoshop anyway for flash glare reduction. All those fancy camera features are part of the Touchwiz ROM and without it -- well, you still have a terrific Samsung lens and shutter and that's really all I need. However, after the future recipient ranted about photography a couple days ago, I realized that she would not be happy with losing all of Samsung's camera features. But I also know that she hates Touchwiz.

So, I'm currently in the process of reflashing the phone with the original firmware and OS and I'm going to see if I can work with a new Samsung App called Good Lock. Good Lock is apparently Samsung's new app (well, it's been around since at least April) that lets you theme Touchwiz and it seems that some of that theming can create a Nexus style look. Hopefully, with that and Xposed and rooting, I can get most of the Google style function on the phone while still keeping Samsung's camera app.

I wanted to see if Good Lock could go on the S4, but it seems you need Android 6 for that and the S4 was never updated that far. Damn. But it does have me wondering -- how vital is lowlight photography without a flash? Someone asked me to help them figure out if the Moto X Play was a worthwhile phone for their photography needs. The reviews are all universal: the camera is beautiful in daylight hours, hopeless in low light. But all those low light reviews are taken without a flash. Is it really reasonable to review how a camera performs in night conditions when the flash is turned off?

This wasn't established terribly well, but Kara is trying to emulate Clark a bit more by dressing like him in her civilian life. But regardless. I'm not blind to SUPERGIRL's faults, but it has a certain earnest love for humanity and superheroes that makes leaves me untroubled by its flaws.

The Lynda Carter performance was seriously off and no reviewers seem to have picked up on how poor her acting has become. The truth is that Carter was never a great actress, but what skills she had -- being comfortable in a ridiculous outfit and projecting effortless confidence on camera -- were uniquely suited to playing Wonder Woman in a TV show as Carter's somewhat distant screen presence was suited to Wonder Woman being a stranger in a strange land.

But the President is a very different role and Carter can't be an offbeat outsider; the script requires that she be endearing and charming on sight and that she can recite hollow platitudes about hope in a completely convincing, totally earnest, utterly sincere fashion. It doesn't come off that way; her line, "How can hope be false?" gives me the impression the actress doesn't really grasp the subtleties available for her delivery; her speech made me feel like she doesn't grasp how to weigh and pace words and sentences for oratory.

This is not a role for a former model and singer who hasn't received any real training in acting, who hasn't refined her abilities with experience. For this role, production either needed to hire Carter an acting coach on how to be convincing as a politician or hire someone else -- someone like Allison Janney who can come off as an experienced, world-weary politician who can be heartfelt and truthful. Or Gina Torres, who can present authority and regality while being totally earnest. Or Dina Meyer or Carrie Anne Moss. This is a job for a real actress and Lynda Carter is awesome in many ways, but she's not an actress.

SUPERGIRL has been a lot of fun and I find the grousing about Superman saying "your language" in one sentence to be incredibly pedantic, and I say that as someone who spent two weeks trying to come up with an in-universe explanation for SLIDERS episodes airing out of order. I was enjoying the Metallo fight scenes too much to worry about the makeup, although J'onn giving up all his Kryptonite and Superman being so unhappy about the DEO having it struck me as absurd. I liked the third episode too and while I did indeed think Winn was going to be gay, I guess it's going to be Alex and the Maxwell Lord fauxmance is truly over. I found Lynda Carter's performance oddly charmless and lacking in layers, although that may have been the point. Regardless, the President's appearance finally explained why the hell J'onn was permitted to continue operating the DEO on her command back in Season 1's finale.

**

I think the voiceovers at the start are cool, but I say that as someone who continues to think that the SLIDERS Season 2 opening is the coolest piece of television ever created. I wonder what SLIDERS would be like with a Berlanti voiceover and since I did an X-FILES pastiche of a SLIDERS voiceover, let's have a Berlanti pastiche:

My name is Quinn Mallory. When I was in college, I created a gateway to parallel universes. But then an accident ripped me out of reality itself. Today, the world at large knows me as an ordinary engineer at a hamburger company. But secretly, my friends and I use our knowledge to protect our world and find other visitors like me. We saved the multiverse from total destruction, but in doing so, we opened all realities to new threats. And we are the only ones who know what's out there; we're the only ones with any hope of stopping them. We are the Sliders.

I'm not really a horror fan, so I tend to think all horror is terrible whether it is or isn't.

**

This election cycle has me wondering if I should take a hard look at my life, document every single potential scandal and put it online with apologies and descriptions of corrective measures taken so that it won't come back to haunt me in a decade.

My research is more specific. For example, in Part 3, there's a scene where Quinn looks around the city and immediately determines that there's an undiscovered WWII bomb shelter the sliders can go to for safety.

The outline did not specify how Quinn knew that -- I decided I'd just figure it out when writing the script, but at that point, I got stuck, couldn't figure it out, looked blankly at photos of San Francisco, spent a day pondering it before working out a solution where Quinn notices that a missing building on the skyline means the foundations were never dug and the bomb shelter is undiscovered.

Later in Part 3, Quinn looks around a coffee shop and the outline says, "He uses the Sherlock Scan to tell that the whole world is suffering from an ecological crisis." When I got there in the script, I spent two days trying to figure out how Quinn would do this and fretted and got stuck and it just drained me. With Part 6, we've got San Francisco being attacked, so I thought it best to know the names of different neighbourhoods and have basic descriptive detail for them.

And then there's also the sliders' feats of brilliance. In Part 3, I wrote that they successfully stop the destruction of the multiverse, but I hadn't fully worked out a solution yet and thought I'd improvise when I got there only to get stuck and Transmodiar had to bail me out of that one. So for Part 6's outline, I did what I did before and wrote in vagaries ("Rembrandt uses peanuts to stop the animal human hybrids"), but then I went back and made sure to actually write out the solution step by step so I wouldn't have to think of it in the moment of writing the scene in full length script. Hopefully, this will mean a smoother process for this draft.

**

In other news, despite claiming I would stick with my Moto G3, I decided to buy one of those cheap Samsung S5s I've been encouraging Informant to get. I had a bad experience with my G3 this week. I was at an event as a photographer, but due to an incident involving a cat and the curb, I cracked my camera lens. Not the lens, really, just the external filter, but it couldn't be removed immediately and I had no camera to do my job. So I used my phone. The photos were unacceptable. I guess the Moto G3 is fine for still shots and posed photography, but for event photography in an indoor space with light coming not from bulbs but windows, the G3 just flat out failed. Every image was blurry and mislit, nothing was in focus and thankfully, at the halfway mark, a colleague asked me why I was using my phone and loaned me her camera.

Since then, I've been finding myself increasingly irritated with the Moto G3's occasional freezes, brief pauses, moments of lag -- all the stuff you deal with when your phone is a budget model with limited memory augmented by a microSD. These things didn't bother me before because the phone got the job done as my voice recorder / notepad / navigational device / calendar / alarm -- but it let me down as a camera and now everything that seemed acceptable about it seemed unacceptable, especially when the Samsung S5 was on sale at a nearby warehouse at shockingly low prices.

So, I have left the world of 8GB Android phones with slow processors and 1GB of memory and gone back to a flagship, albeit a flagship of 2014. But it's cool. The S5 is like Sharon Stone; not the hot new thing anymore and admittedly past prime time, but as capable today as back in the day and more than up to any challenge other than Samsung Pay. This phone's waterproof and I got one-day shipping on a case and tempered glass protector, so I'm sure it'll survive. I'll keep the Moto G3 as a backup.

Oh GOD. Is this my life now? Spending stupid amounts of time talking about ****ing James O'Keefe? I want to die.

The Attorney General confirmed that Vera contacted the police in their investigation and report with their findings from reviewing the full, unedited footage. The full Vera videos show Vera asking for O'Keefe's contact information, times, dates, locations and all of O'Keefe's plans for human trafficking, showing him gathering as much information as possible -- but O'Keefe cut all that in his video so that he could emphasize Vera's apparent willingness to assist in slavery. In other ACORN interviews, O'Keefe and Gilles were met with either information-gathering tactics, stalling, referring them to victims groups and outright refusals of involvement -- all of which would have made it blindingly clear to O'Keefe that ACORN wasn't going to help human traffickers. Instead. O'Keefe edited his footage to present the opposite. In one case an ACORN employee encouraging someone to keep trying to find a place to live was re-positioned as encouragement for creating a human smuggling ring.

O'Keefe's intro is deliberately placed to mislead the viewer to think he wore the fur coat and absurd outfit into ACORN's offices. It's meant to mislead. O'Keefe omitting any footage where ACORN workers offered Gilles help or declared they would not help is again a deceit designed to smear ACORN regardless of truth or facts.

There is no sensible argument to be made that O'Keefe genuinely thought ACORN was a human trafficking operation or that O'Keefe's recontextualizing wasn't purposely designed to fool the audience, and this approach is to be found in all his subsequent work. There's his Medicaid 'interviews' where the edited videos show his trained monkeys successfully scamming for medical care -- while the full footage shows them being asked to leave.

There's the environmentalist groups where O'Keefe's voiceover describes how these groups all accept money from fossil fuel companies and then we hear environmentalist administrators going through a list of all the organizations that take such donations -- except the full footage makes it clear they're just listing off other environmentalist groups they worth with. The NPR interviews show an NPR exec declaring Republicans racist when the full version has the man talking about his Republican heritage, his own conservatism and how he had a conversation with two Republicans and he recounts their reasons for why they voted Obama -- which O'Keefe re-edited to make it seem like this was the the man's own viewpoint.

I've been through the O'Keefe spin-cycle of scandal too many times, I would not trust this man to tell me that water is wet.

Ugh. Talking about O'Keefe makes me sick. This is his Wikipedia Page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_O%27Keefe

Believe what you want. I'm going to go take a long shower to wash O'Keefe off me.

I think I'm going to back out of this area of discussion now because pointing out to someone that James O'Keefe is a fraud and a liar is like pointing out to them that autism isn't caused by vaccines. It's simply not going to go anywhere; our positions are what they are.

**

I'm glad Slider_Quinn21 appreciated Quinn wading into politics. I think what really works about Quinn's opinion and why I like his character so much -- Quinn would never tell you who to vote for, he would only give you some thoughts as to a strategy on how to make up your own mind.

Is there voter fraud? I do think so, but is it possible to organize it effectively to impact a US Presidential election in the fashion that it could make a difference? Not in the ways O'Keefe claims. The country's too big and spread out; O'Keefe's described techniques for rigging may seem simple (bus people around to vote under false identities) but would be so convoluted to set up that you couldn't possibly get the number of false identities and willing participants and successful outcomes in place to pull it off at any significant scale. The reports of actual, verified voter fraud show it to be incredibly minute and irrelevant although no less an attack on liberty and freedom.

As for O'Keefe, his 'work' on Shirley Sharrod and Juan Carlos Vera where he edited their footage to make them seem racist and to be a human trafficker -- his fraud is a matter of public record. In the case of Sharrod, she was fired from her job at the US Department of Agriculture. Then the videos were reviewed in full and her 'racism' was shown to be her describing attitudes she didn't agree with. She received a full apology from the US Government and the offer of a new position. With Vera, police officers had records showing that he immediately called the authorities to report potential human trafficking. He sued O'Keefe and O'Keefe paid out $100,000. You can Google it yourself and it's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to O'Keefe being completely dishonest and untrustworthy. I would sooner trust pilight to give me constructive criticism.

Currently, there is no proof that his latest work is fraudulent, but considering he's never produced anything that wasn't, he has accumulated sufficient reason to dismiss his material given his past history.

I don't really have the time to gather and present further research to you to bolster what is a known, proven, and very validated set of criticisms against O'Keefe and his 'journalistic' practices; it's all out there on the internet anyway, Informant. If you don't agree with the truckload of courtcases and wrongful firings where O'Keefe's lies were later exposed, you and I will simply have to do what we usually do -- shake hands, agree to disagree and move on to this week's ARROW.

Hmm. I have a number of lady friends and they are all, without exception, pretty much like Jill Stein. I adore my Jill Steins, but I wouldn't want any of them to be President. I could see them in some department of arts and culture. If they were to run for President, I would politely explain why I think this is not their calling. There was a point to this rambling, but it has temporarily escaped my mind, so please instead enjoy John Oliver's take on how you all have a very tough choice ahead of you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3O01EfM5fU