AdamSmith

@Lucky, the above observation is laser-like on point. You, over the years here, have expressed deep dissatisfaction when any one of your posts did not elicit direct responsive posts from other members. That is simply not how social media works. Very many of us have appreciated very many of your posts, without feeling a need to post in reply. That is just how this medium works.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/twitter-erupts-obama-makes-melania-041741861.html

Actually, our current Executive enacts only too well the Grand Theory Why. ...Nonetheless, if Kim comes genuinely to the table, we shall see...

Having myself built and then sold a couple of businesses, these observations completely accord with mine, with respect to interacting with current clients/participants of the no-longer-owned entity. I have not at all any Grand Theory Why, just that Stepping Completely Away seems always necessary.

I come more and more to admire this bitch a rather lot, against my first impulse in the opposite direction. Melania Trump looks to history for inspired state dinner with the Macrons https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/21/politics/melania-trump-state-dinner/index.html

Comey memos: six of the biggest takeaways https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/apr/20/comey-memos-trump-what-biggest-takeaways

"Donald Trump’s theory that the Democratic National Committee hack could have been the work of a 400-pound hacker..." https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2016/09/27/tech-crowd-goes-wild-trumps-400-pound-hacker/91168144/

Be careful. Be very very careful...as if I needed to tell you...you know that I know you are not speaking literally...still...

Madame... Ze problem with posting professionally composed pics taken from the hotel venue's own web site...? One must confess oneself guilty to this selfsame sin. When I certainly did stay there. What is your evidentiary source of suspicion here?

Mickey D's sells Grouper?!

Hardly that, now.

It's only the Electoral College effect.

Mine usually do too, so I have no space to bitch.

I am going to do a somewhat uncharacteristic thing (actually not: explore my history here; and impugn my motives as you will) and am going to defend @RockHard against what seem to me silly objections. I like his post very much. I love the pics. I greatly enjoy the text. I have no doubt that he was in all those places, and shared them out of a sense of mutual interest. If he has some amount of 'ego' in all this, who among us doesn't? And what is the problem with that? Ego is the strength of sense-of-self that propels us along through life, and was conceived by Freud as not at all a negative concept. What is the problem here?

No doubt ze feeling iz mutual, dahling.

Another of my role models...

Absolutely. He is doing it instead out of his own: Lack of courage Lack of creative imagination how to figure out (or engage help) to solve legally the problem Lack of commitment to the cause Realization that fixing the current situation is going to cost him more than it brings in $$$

...Think I have mentioned that one time I sat a couple tables away from Bar and GWB and another couple dining at this place in Kennebunkport... https://www.gracehotels.com/whitebarninn/grace-dining/ ...close enough to overhear them. They of course occupied this table closest to the window. With a couple of black-suited, earpiece-outfitted SS agents sipping soda water at the bar. And two black and blacked-out-windows Ford SUVs just outside the door. She was hilarious! Droll, Sahara-dry witty, catching every nuance in the convo. I don't think even Joan Rivers was really as funny and witty as I overheard Bar Bush being in her talk with friends, right there behind me. I spent my whole meal trying my best not to laugh out loud. George was pretty funny too -- in, again, that family-inherited, southern-Connecticut-based, driest possible way.

...It's noteworthy that while Barbara Bush could relate to people from different backgrounds, she came from one of great privilege. Raised in a wealthy New York suburb and educated at boarding school, she met her future husband, George H.W. Bush, in 1941 at a country club Christmas dance in Greenwich, Connecticut. She was just 16 and he was 17. They became engaged before he went off to fight in World War II as a Navy torpedo pilot. "I married the first man I ever kissed," she said, adding with her usual dry sense of humor, "when I tell my children that, they just about throw up." She and her husband had six children, including former President George W. Bush and former Florida Governor Jeb Bush... https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/17/opinions/barbara-bush-opinion-brower/index.html

Most telling, and moving, how the Bushes (George H.W., even George W. [heresy! ], and now Bar) are looking better and better with time, given the current scene. (Today's world a low bar, to be sure; but still.) I post the below with admiration for a kind of iron-assed personality that we can, maybe in a fairly short time, hope to return to in our leaders. Barbara Bush redefined the role of first lady ...In 1989, she famously visited Grandma's House, one of the first homes created to care for infants infected with HIV. She spent nearly an hour at the facility near the White House and held babies infected with the HIV virus, which causes AIDS -- at a time when that disease carried a crippling stigma and stoked widespread fear. Through this simple act she helped disprove the myth that the disease could be caught simply through physical contact. "You can hug and pick up AIDS babies and people who have the HIV virus" without hurting yourself, she said during the visit. "There is a need for compassion," she said as she cradled a baby. That one visit helped change public perception and likely spared an untold number of people infected with the virus from further pain... https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/17/opinions/barbara-bush-opinion-brower/index.html