Friday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
·
Friday, July 5, 2024
·
37 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a retired Professor of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
Follow Steven on
Twitter
WBC expels Ryan Garcia after boxer’s racist and Islamophobic slurs on social media
‘Once-in-a-lifetime event’: rare chance to see explosion on dwarf star 3,000 light years away
NASA’s page on this phenomenon.
Sky & Telescope’s star chart.
Here is a 1987 interview with Reagan and four reporters:
https://youtu.be/98Dd_ba6q3A?si=BQ3ygU-eYaoSWg-5
Not suggesting any conclusion, just happened on it as a possibly useful data point.
Gotta toddle off to the hospital this morning for some pre-ops before the event itself
next Wednesday. I’ll check in later.
I’d like to see an analysis of the vote the Reform party got last night.
Raw votes they got 4 million, which is impressive considering Labor got 9.68 million. But only four seats to Labor’s 412. from a quick look at totals per seat, it seems Reform got a lot of votes that would have gone to the Tories, making them second place in a lot of constituencies (iks this the right term?)
So maybe they’re getting the more extreme Conservative voters, those who love Brexit and Rwanda, and not so much the more moderate ones, much less the rest of the population.
@CSK:
Good luck.
@CSK: Hoping everything goes well today.
@CSK:
Have the best day possible.
@CSK: Be well with wishes for a good outcome.
@CSK: Hope everything goes quickly & well. Thinking of you!
@CSK: Good Luck!!
@Kathy: @OzarkHillbilly: @Sleeping Dog: @just nutha: @Jen: @Beth:
Thank you all very much for your good wishes. I appreciate them.
@CSK:
Best wishes from me also,
Hope all goes well.
@Kathy:
We don’t have the post-election voter polling surveys yet, with multiple mapping to age, education, income, region, voting history etc etc.
Or full downloadable seat voting data for me to play about with.
But the pattern of votes at very superficial glance seems to chime with pre-election polling: the Reform voter demographic mapping is like Conservatives but more so.
Over 60, no post-school education, white, home-owner, not wealthy but not poor, “upper working class/lower middle class” in UK (not US) terms.
Largely from less prosperous constituencies, but more smaller towns than the larger cities
Immigration very, very high salience in issues: over 50% “most important issue”.
Overwhelmingly Leave voters.
One interesting question is how far Conservatives base is now more “Remainer” than it was, and what impact that might have.
Reform came second in 103 seats.
The key thing will be plotting out the patterns of combined Con/Ref vs Lab/LibDem votes.
And working out where LibDems won or came close, the proportions of peeved Con vs loaned Lab votes.
In the ought-to-be-good-news-but-isn’t-really department, July 3 did NOT see an all-time record high sea surface temperature for that date. It was the first time in nearly 500 days that this could be said.
Of course, the record that it failed to beat was set 366 days ago, and was a full standard deviation higher than any year before that, but let’s take our minor victories where we can…
@JohnSF: @Kingdaddy:
Thank you both. I just have to have a femoral endarterectomy, which means I gotta have some plaque dredged out of it. No biggy.
Ex-Israeli military spokesman blames Netanyahu for ‘loss of international trust’ during war (CNN):
The Lt. Col. is either pushing antisemitic double standards, or he is naïve and doesn’t know anything about war.
We’re having our celebrations a day late so the kids and grandkids could be here. The pork shoulder with my own dry rub went into the smoker around 10:00 this morning. The ribs went in at 1:00 again with my dry rub. I’ll brush the ribs with Sweet Baby Ray’s at 4:00. Everything should be ready around six. We’ve got cole slaw , potato salad, beans, fresh corn and squash, and of course, ice cold Dos Equis. Warm peach cobbler for those with room. Heavan!
@a country lawyer:
I’ll be right there.
@JohnSF:
It certainly was a pleasant distraction from the Biden Piñata Fest.
I wonder how well the actual results will track with the pre-election polls. And if they are close, why can it be done in the UK and not the US.
@DK:
Generally speaking (pun not intended, but appropriate) much of the Gaza operation has been a right royal fuckup, operationally, politically, and diplomatically.
Certainly UK military/political opinion generally seems to be that we walked in harms way to help protect Israel from the Iranian missile attacks, and small regard have we had for it.
Netanyahu continues to refuse to address the requirement for a sustainable governance of Gaza, to sustain his support coalition.
Probably increased due to the decision of the Israeli Supreme Court that Haredim (“ultra-Orthodox”) are liable to military draft, which is a massive problem for Netanyahu: a coalition splitter, if ever there was one.
Israel is coming perilously close to losing critical international support that it has been able to take for granted.
And at a time when indications are that a full-on Israel/Hezbollah war may erupt.
Netanyahu is a very short sighted person.
To put it mildly.
@CSK: You’d be welcome but I’m afraid that might undo your surgery.
Kathy (from yesterday)
As with much in the UK “unwritten in any one place” constitutional law, it’s not definitive.
But the legal powers of a UK executive depend upon the Royal commission and warrant.
Which the monarch may exercise if the Place determines that the PM has “lost the confidence of the House of Commons” and dismiss said Prime Minister.
Probably after convening a Privy Council for advice.
After that, the Civil Service and Armed Forces would almost certainly refuse any order from the illegitimate “PM” as unlawful.
The Monarch could then call upon any MP to serve as Prime Minister; in practice, of course, the leader of the majority party.
And it would be a very, very foolish wannabe usurper PM who would calculate on the Brigade of Guards and the Household Cavalry (who are very far from being purely decorative guys on horsies) not to obey the orders of the Sovereign as transmitted via the Chiefs of Staff Committee and affirmed by the Privy Council.
@JohnSF:
Look at that! An actual monarchy has more safeguards that a fucked up pretend one.
I also like how the new PM has decided that the first course of business is to make life harder on trans people.
@a country lawyer:
Aaah, the surgery’s not till July 10. But have a wonderful time with family and all that great food.
@Beth:
Oh, FFS. Seriously? That’s Starmer’s priority????
Happy news time!
Final election seats results:
Labour 412
Conservative 121
LibDem 71
SNP 9 (down 38! Labour slaughtered the SNP!)
Reform 5 (dammit!)
Greens 4
Plaid 4
(ignoring NI because that’s such a different case)
So, about half way between my prediction and the exit poll, more or less.
Yay me!
And now for a selection the Conservatives most prominent names told to bugger off in a parade of shame:
(you may not recognise them, but trust me, they are each worthy of a celebratory drink)
Jacob Rees-Mogg
Andrea Jenkyns
Michael Fabricant
Penny Mordaunt (tbh, a bit ambivalent re the Mordauntster: she was a reasonably sane contender for the leadership)
Johnny Mercer
Therese Coffey
Grant Shapps
Ben Bradley
Jonathan Gullis
Liam Fox
Steve Baker
Greg Hands
Daniel Kawczynski
And…
… wait for it…
LIZ TRUSS roflmao
Also George Galloway.
FWAFO, Georgie boy.
Less good: Corbyn won in Islington North, dammit.
Farage and his mini-me’s getting 5 seats.
And most disappointing to me: Conservatives hold Bromsgrove.
With 32.8% of the vote.
If just half the LibDem vote had gone Labour it would have fallen.
Drat.
Dammit.
@DK:
@JohnSF:
That’s one of the things that can happen when someone holds an office to stay out of prison.
@JohnSF:
I can see all that. Still, if we imagine someone like Wannabehitler who’d deny the results, claim the election was stollen, fraud, etc., I can totally see him take the simplistic course of simply not resigning.
@Beth:
?
I may have missed something, but I’m unaware of Starmer saying anything on policy re trans rights in the last 12 hours.
The legal problem in the UK seems to be NOT trans-persons at all, but a small number of pretty definitely het-males claiming to be trans, with unfortunate consequences.
And then those cases being opportunistically propagandized against trans-persons.
I still think this can be resolved on a reasonable basis.
And I suspect most Labour MP’s think pretty similarly.
@Kathy:
Then, encountering the Household Regiments, he might take the simplistic course of being somewhat dead. 😉
There’s an unspoken reason why the Royals are the Colonels-in-Chief of many of the key Regiments.
In practice, it would never get that far: there is zero chance that the Civil Service or any part of Armed Forces would obey the orders of a defeated PM.
A key difference between the US and UK systems: in the US most senior departmental secretarial positions are appointed by the President.
In the UK none are.
The Civil Service is the Civil Service of the Crown; not of the Prime Minister.
@CSK:
Glad to hear it’s minor. May the stay be short and the recovery swift.
@dazedandconfused:
Thank you!
@JohnSF:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/07/01/labour-frontbencher-refuses-to-answer-trans-toilet-question/
See also:
https://www.assignedmedia.org/breaking-news/labour-landslide-leaves-trans-folks-losing
Thanks Kier my by boy, guess I’ll just get the shit kicked out of me for using the pisser. Also, I am a biological woman.
If you have any articles on this:
I would love to read them, I’m not being snarky at all. I have yet to see one and I obsessively read trans coverage. My life depends on it.
As for the legal problem, it’s actually that cis people fundamentally don’t understand us and think we’re all lying perverts. That’s the whole point of the GRC in the UK and the old Harry Benjamin standards. The whole point of it is to legally torture us as much and as horrifically as possible so that we’ll kill ourselves or at least go back into the closet and leave the “normal” people alone.
Watching Biden -Stephaopolis interview,
Thought a good question would be:
“If you were running against Haley, would you more open to dropping out?”
IMO, Biden is running BECAUSE his opponent is so clearly awful.
@a country lawyer:
Omg. Wow. *drool*
God bless Merica.
On other news, season 2 of Star Trek Prodigy is out on Netflix. As per this streamer’s habit, the whole season dropped at once.
No spoilers, but it won’t be as easy as having Gwyndala visit her home world. Otherwise it would be a very short season.