This is an open thread, all topics (TV-related or not) welcome.

How much TV can I watch in one night? There's the Democratic debate and Sean Penn on 60 Minutes. There's the Good Wife, Downton Abbey, Shameless and the Royals. I even like Guys' Grocery's Games (I don't like Worst Cook in America.)

Two shows I tried to like and really didn't, so I won't be watching any more: Ruta 35 on Unimas and the most awful, gratuitously violent novela I've ever seen that just started last week on Telemundo. Called La Querida del Centauro, it seems to be a thinly veiled take on the prison romance between El Chapo and Zulema Hernandez. Sony generally does not make good novelas. The only passable one was En la Boca Del Lobo. I think novela-land will be barren until the return of Senor de los Cielos (season 4) in April. (La Viuda Negra Part 2 may start before then, but it's just okay.) The best, if you speak Spanish is El Capo (Seasons 1 and 2. Season 3 has English subtitles but isn't as good as the first two seasons.) Ranking up there with El Capo: El Cartel (Seasons I and II, not the movie); La Reina del Sur; Pablo Escobar Patron de Mal; and En La Boca del Lobo. [More...]

Sean Penn's interview with Charlie Rose airs on "60 Minutes" tonight. Here's a recap from Variety.

Penn believes he failed to accomplish his goals, which was to talk about the U.S. government’s was on drugs. “We all want this drug problem to stop. And if you are in the moral right, or on the far left, just as many of your children are doing these drugs, just as many of your brothers and sisters, your mothers and fathers, the teachers at school, are doing these drugs. Just as many,:” he said. “And how much time have they spent in the last week since this article come (SIC) out, talking about that? 1– 1%? I think that’d be generous.”

Even so, Penn said he has no regrets about his actions, and was simply trying to offer readers a look at a hard-to-reach figure in order to illuminate discussion around a heated issue. “I’m really sad about the state of journalism in our country,” he told Rose. “It has been an incredible hypocrisy and an incredible– lesson in just how much they don’t know and how disserved we are.”

There's another Democratic debate tonight, the last before the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary. In what reads more like an op-ed than a news article, reporters at the Washington Post say Bernie Sanders seems to be picking up steam and Hillary could be in trouble.

She arrives here in the middle of a rocky stretch, all of a sudden on the wrong side of a new narrative that suggests Sanders is surging and she is weakening, facing possible defeat in the first two contests of the year.

The Vermont senator continues to lead the polls in New Hampshire, and now he has closed the gap in Iowa, the state where Clinton’s campaign fell off the tracks eight years ago. For Clinton, it wasn’t supposed to be this way against a septuagenarian, self-identified democratic socialist who began his campaign with no national profile and no financial network.

How is the following news rather than opinion?

[Heads up: This will not be a popular post with Sanders supporters, so if he's your idea of the best choice for President, you may want to stop reading now. Nor will Trump supporters like it, but I don't much care about them.] [More...]

Thread.

Thread.

thread.

Update [Jeralyn]: I have no interest in watching the Republican debate, but if you're watching, you can put your thoughts here.

I'm busy with other things today and tomorrow, so will just make a short post on El Chapo. I'll also fill in the missing source links in this post tonight.

On El Chapo, I wondered as soon as the Sean Penn connection was revealed whether El Chapo was motivated by a crush on Kate del Castillo. Penn intimated as such in his Rolling Stone article.

... maybe he watched her on TV and developed a crush on her. (Penn seems to intimate infatuation may have been the cause.)

The text messages between El Chapo and Kate published by Milennio also suggest he was infatuated with her. But another piece has now been disclosed in Mexican papers: During the search of the room he occupied at the raided house (the one with the secret switch that opened the way to the tunnel), police found 4 videos of various episodes of La Reina del Sur.

[More...]

The gold standard for polling in Iowa is the Selzer Poll for the Des Moines Register. And its latest poll of the Iowa Dem caucus shows a very tight race = it's now 42-40 Clinton. In their previous poll it was 48-39.

A couple of interesting points - (1) the tightening is due to some Clinton supporters moving to undecided. Sanders support has not moved up (up a point which is statistically insignificant with a MOE of 4.4.) (2) Sanders support is very concentrated in college towns and thus may not translate into a delegate win even if he prevails in the popular vote.

Iowa is a very strange state for reporting results. It is actually very hard to get a popular vote read out of Iowa. So watch for how the results in Iowa are reported.

But the reality remains the same - Sanders has to win to have a chance. A split of Iowa and NH (Sanders leads there) leaves an unchanged landscape with the primaries moving to South Carolina and Nevada where Clinton's dominating leads among PoC put Sanders in a very tough spot.

Of course it would be uphill for Sanders even if he sweeps Iowa and NH, but without that I see it as basically ending the race.

I'm honestly surprised to be asking the question in the title - thinking the answer would be "of course it is!" But the structure of ACA, with Medicaid expansion and means tested insurance subsidies makes this not so clear according to Austan Goolsbee:

2) Sanders is right that we shouldn't just think of his single-payer health plan as a $15 trillion tax increase. We should ask whether people would be better or worse off in total. But even by that measure, lots of low and middle income workers would, in fact, be worse off and paying higher taxes.

More . . .

Ruta 35: The Escape Valve is finally airing on Unimas (with English captioning.) It's about the snitches recruited by the DEA and ICE to rat out the drug cartels in exchange for leniency for their own misdeeds, and is based on the career of long time ICE agent Dylan Wilkins .

This dramatic series is the story of Dylan Wilkins and the criminals he recruits to assist him in his relentless pursuit of drug lords and other wanted felons. These criminals become informants for ICE and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) in exchange for reducing their charges and avoiding prosecutions.

However, Wilkins’ informants are not your typical criminals- he introduces an array of men and women who, all driven by different motives such as fear and revenge, risk their lives everyday on a dark and risky mission. Among his informants are a 75-year-old grandmother who transports drugs, an IT engineer who has close ties and unparalleled access to a Mexican cartel, a “professional” informant who has been living a perilous double life for years, and the cousin of a ruthless mafia king, thirsty for the reward over her cousin's head.

[More....]

I just tuned into the State of the Union. How's Obama doing? Does he have anything new to say?

Here's a new open thread, all topics welcome.