Pidesco

I'm not a big fan of the new portraits for the returning characters. Aloth is ok, but Eder and Pallegina are a downgrade by my estimation. The original portraits just had a lot more personality to them, I think. The paper dolls are a gigantic upgrade. They look vastly better.

Pretty good CG. There just isn't much point in calling it BGE2. Online and a prequel? I don't think so.

I read that as "throw up in your hands", at first.

This might surprise you but the day has 24 hours.

Are a religious person or is he just Satan to reason? As for the other paragraph, care elaborate how? I'm not sure I'm parsing your reply right but, if I am, he and his route to power and success is kind of anathema to reason. I did think a bit about whether to use the word "evil", and I probably shouldn't have used it. As for the last paragraph I thought it was plainly apparent. Trump has been quite evident in showing how much a sexist womanizer he is, how corrupt he is, how ignorant of the political process he is, and how dumb he is. His appearance and demeanor are of course plain for everyone to see.

Well, yeah, no argument there. The election last year was humiliating for everyone involved, from the voters to candidates, to the press.

That no one seems to be able to distinguish Trump from every sleazeball politician the US has ever had is something that continues to annoy me to no end. Trump is not like the Clintons, or the Bushes, or Obama, or Nixon, or Reagan or essentially any American politician you'd care to name. The "Trump is like every other politician schtick" is a ghastly normalization of an amoral, incompetent human trash fire, who is the evil embodiment of all the ways in which vast amounts of money tip the scales in life. I wouldn't have trusted him with being an assistant manager at a fake McDonald's, much less President of a major country, or owner of a multimillion dollar company, or host of a major TV show. Next to Trump Bill Clinton appears to be an ascetic monk, next to Trump Nixon seems like a dedicated public servant beyond reproach, next to Trump W. Bush seems a wise politician, next to Trump Dan Quayle is intelligent, next to Trump Hillary Clinton looks like a human.

Trump needs no help with being disliked. He has done very well at that for the past 30 years.

Trump being plainly and openly a hopeless idiot is a media tactic? Also, I don't see how Trump being directly under investigation is particularly relevant to the discussion given what was already known. Russian interference in the election is under investigation, there are Trump associates who were caught lying about meeting with Russians, including Sessions, and Kushner. Trump tried to have Comey drop the Russia Investigation, and he fired Comey specifically because of that investigation, which everyone knows to be a fact because Trump himself said so, effectively exposing a lie of his own administration. Basically, that Trump wasn't individually investigated by the FBI before the firing isn't all that important, given everything else already established, and after the manner in which Comey was fired, I'd be utterly amazed if Trump wasn't under investigation, now.

Not really. At best Trump showed massively inappropriate judgement in his interactions with Comey. At worst, he tried to get Comey to drop the Flynn investigation. He also appears to be a massively incompetent buffoon, but that's nothing new. Of course the whole handling of things by the Clintons with the matter/investigation word change was bafflingly stupid as well. Basically, the defence on Trump's side is that Trump used the word "hope" when suggesting Comey drop the Flynn investigation. That's kind of akin to saying "I'll make you an offer you can't refuse" is fine because Vito Corleone used the word "offer". Of course, it's nothing impeachable, especially given the fact that the congress is Republican, but the whole thing is still atrocious. More atrocious than everything else? Not really.

Are we living in interesting times? Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain and the UAE shun Qatar, Turkey backs Qatar, there's an ISIS attack in Iran, Trump blames Iran for it, Iranians blame Saudi Arabia for the attack. Also, I hear the Middle East has some oil.

Fixed that for ya. It's already too late. The issue now isn't how to solve climate change but how to mitigate the catastrophe as much as possible. The Paris agreement will help, somewhat, but Trump's asshatery will certainly be a blow to its positive effects, given the US's weight in the world, in terms of emissions.

Talking about those and other tiny drops in the budget amounts to discussing angels and pinheads. There's a gigantic raise to the already gargantuan defense budget and a proposal to spend I don't know how many billions on literally useless infrastructure, that dwarfs all the comparatively tiny budget cuts.

Yeah, you don't get that kind of fidelity without SVGA graphics.

It's kinda playable:

Usually statues of guys in impressive poses aren't built to be a poignant criticism of those guys and a reminder of the terrible things they did. From what I read the monuments being removed were all built in support of the Lost Cause narrative, which seems kind of abhorrent to me. Quote on one of the monuments, covered up in 1981: Also, the monuments will be moved to a museum, apparently.

https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2017-05-18/house-may-be-forced-to-vote-again-on-gop-s-obamacare-repeal-bill Outstanding work.

I am not the best person to ask about corruption in Sweden but as fast I know corruption here is relatively low compared to the rest of Europe. Regarding the corruption I mentioned is mostly about taking bribes in order to defend the rights of those that bribed as opposed to the rights of the people the politician supposedly represents. In the US this seems to be rampant and used to be the biggest problem of the government, there. Thankfully, it is now a minor problem, compared to having the increasingly extremist right pushing a xenophobic agenda. There are other types of corruption, of course. For example, the current administration appears to have maxed out its nepotism skill tree.

I don't think I agree with that last part. There are plenty of decent candidates that did run for the Republicans and could have run for the Democrats. This is purely my own opinion here so take that for what it's worth but I do think I'm pretty well read on there things: For the Democrats these candidates should have performed better than Clinton nationally: James Webb US Senator VA: Smart, practical, level headed and good name recognition. US Army Vet. He wasn't socialist enough to get traction in the primaries but would have shown well vs Trump. He has no negative baggage. Brian Schweitzer Governor of Montana: Big advocate of Federalism, He's likable with a good record or states rights and workers rights as well as practical environmental regulation. The quintessential Jacksonian Democrat. But he's anti-gun control so the national Democrats won't have him. They don't tolerate dissent on any issue. Tulsi Gabbard US Rep HI. The DNC showed her the door when she endorsed Sanders (dissent on any issue will not be tolerated by the DNC) but she has a clean record, military service, opposed the TPP and sequestration, and bank bailouts. She should be the rising star of the Democrat Party but they won't have her. Corey Booker US Senator NJ: Centrist Democrat with a reputation for working with opposition party. Of everyone on this list he's be the most likely to make deals and compromises to accomplish goals. He has some great ideas about tax free enterprise zones to rejuvenate inner cities. His gun control advocacy would hurt him in flyover country. Republicans. The thing that helped Trump the most is the number of candidates in the Republican field. Trump was not winning primaries by majority. He just was getting more because support was spread so thin among all the others. Take away Rubio, Kasich, & Cruz (or any combination of 3 prior to Super Tuesday) and it's likey Trump would not have been nominated. Trump is president today in large part because a few GOP candidates didn't "take one for the team" and bow out so support could coalesce around one of the others. Rand Paul US Senator KY: OK, this was my choice. If he won the nomination I'd have voted for him. I did donate to his campaign during the primaries. He's more in the traditional Republican mold than his father is, but still has a strong libertarian streak. Of all the candidates he would have been the biggest advocate for fiscal responsibility. Nikki Haley US Ambassador to UN: Think Sarah Palin with a brain. She checks the conservative box without being a fanatic and a four year stint as UN ambassador will giver foreign policy cred. But she could have gone on the strength of a successful term as governor of SC. Marco Rubio US Senate FL: There is nothing wrong with Rubio. For some reason he was never able to get his campaign in gear. I think he was focusing on defeating Clinton when he should have been focusing on Trump. But nationally he would have performed better to the general electorate than he did to the primary. Tim Scott US Senate SC: OK, this one is a bit of a reach because he's still light on electoral experience but he's the balance between fiscal conservative and social liberal that general election voters would gravitate to. Put any of those Democrats vs Trump or any of those Republicans vs Clinton and I think they would have won a general election. I just noticed I made a gigantic typo that completely changed the meaning of of my post: This tiny sentence: "I don't see a candidate the Democrats could have put up that would be massively better President than Trump." Should actually be this: I don't see a candidate the Democrats could have put up that wouldn't be a massively better President than Trump. Now regarding your list of candidates to replace Trump/Clinton, my point that the difference between candidates, as far as the popular vote is concerned is tiny. Obama got less than 4% of the vote over Romney, Clinton had a little over 2% of the vote over Trump, Bush had 2% over Kerry, Bush Sr had 8% over the Dukakis, the same for Clinton and Dole. Other than 1984, every presidential election of the past 40 years was decided by what are effectively tiny margins, with huge swaths of the population voting the same no matter what. I think the story of the 2016 election is that Republicans had results similar to all other candidates in recent history, despite having a candidate with a history of racism, sexism, sexual assault, and general mismanagement of his various businesses. Politicians are already generally a bunch of corrupt, seedy rat bastards, but Trump comes along and not only normalizes their behavior, but shows himself to be vastly worse during the campaign, without essentially any effective backlash. Sure there was lots of pearl clutching as the scandals rolled out, but nothing ever really happened to him that was substantial. He only had 4% percent less of the popular vote than, say, Bush in 2004.

I don't think the Trump campaign did much during the run up other than winging it as much as they could. Trump's victory was as much a surprise to him as to the rest of the world.

That's all well and good but the media was always a bunch of biased muckrackers, even back to the days of the beginning of your country. The mainstream media is continuing as it always was, sometimes good, sometimes bad but most times just mediocre. Trump as President was the result of a weird confluence of factors, the strongest of all being the subprime financial crisis, but also the cult of celebrity, the increased awareness of underlying prejudices in society, the rise of internet powered extremists, the hard partisan divide, demographics, the electoral college, the slanted perception of crime and terrorism, the return of fascism as a relevant political force, and more things that haven't crossed my mind, right now. One could argue that the pivotal event leading to the Trump Presidency was Comey's shenanigans a week before the election, but really, Trump shouldn't even have made it out of the escalator, much less the Republican primaries or the actual Presidential campaign. You all that is true to an extent. But I really believe the biggest factor in electing Trump was the absence of a viable alternative. If the Democrats had nominated nearly anyone else (except Sanders, that s--t will never fly in the US as a whole) We would have a congress in control of one party and executive in the control of the other and we'd all be sleeping better. Hillary Clinton and all the baggage that came with her was a nonstarter. I mean she lost Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Democrats don't lose those states. She nearly lost Minnesota. Even Mondale won Minnesota. It was the only State he won. So for all of Trumps flaws, Clinton was equally flawed. And the voters were facing a choice of SoS or something different. Unless they were smart. The smart ones said "to hell with both of you" and voted 3rd party. I know that saying all the GOP/DNC candidates are pretty much the same is your thing, but that was always obviously not true about Trump and is, incredibly, becoming even more blatantly obvious as time passes. I don't see a candidate the Democrats could have put up that would be massively better President than Trump. That was also true of the candidates that the GOP put up against Trump in the primaries, as terrible as that field was. What Trump was, was a huge litmus test of partisanship in American politics. Once a upon a time you could say something along the lines of the following, albeit without evidence: "Republican voters would vote for their party even if Justin Bieber/Carrot Top/Donald Trump/Kim Kardashian/Paris Hilton was the nominee". well, now there's evidence, and I think the same is true of Democrats. Hell, if you could have magically exchanged the nominees in the last election, I'm pretty sure the end result would have differed very little in terms of the popular vote.

Pretty much.

That's all well and good but the media was always a bunch of biased muckrackers, even back to the days of the beginning of your country. The mainstream media is continuing as it always was, sometimes good, sometimes bad but most times just mediocre. Trump as President was the result of a weird confluence of factors, the strongest of all being the subprime financial crisis, but also the cult of celebrity, the increased awareness of underlying prejudices in society, the rise of internet powered extremists, the hard partisan divide, demographics, the electoral college, the slanted perception of crime and terrorism, the return of fascism as a relevant political force, and more things that haven't crossed my mind, right now. One could argue that the pivotal event leading to the Trump Presidency was Comey's shenanigans a week before the election, but really, Trump shouldn't even have made it out of the escalator, much less the Republican primaries or the actual Presidential campaign.

It's a good thing Trump agrees with that then, as he wants to spend money on an ineffectual wall instead of actually needed and useful infrastructure.