Tuesday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Tuesday, September 3, 2024
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58 comments
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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).
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Early morning at work today combined with poor sleep means no posting from me until later this afternoon, if at all.
The Florida headline of the day- 10 people arrested in ‘street takeover’ at Florida intersection: FHP
Here’s a thought experiment/game. If Trump loses, where will he flee to avoid arrest and trial?
I used to think Philippines because he has property there and they have lots of golf courses. But Philippines has run back to Uncle Sam’s arms in the last few years. Indonesia has no extradition, but what would be in it for them? And does Trump know Indonesia exists?
I tended to dismiss Russia as too obvious, but sometimes a thing is obvious for a reason. North Korea? Sure, they’d take him in, but who wants to retire in Pyongyang? Cuba? One of the ‘Stans? The UAE? Hungary? Turkey? Argentina?
I’m going to bet on Russia. Putin needs a win, any kind of win. Unless there’s a tacit agreement with Kamala just to get the POS out of our lives, in which case, UAE.
@Michael Reynolds:
It has to be somewhere with a golf course.
The Sports headline of the day- A Ugandan Olympic athlete was set on fire by her boyfriend
@Michael Reynolds:
He won’t have to flee. He’ll drag things out in court for more years, be given some fines and probation, possibly a few months under house arrest at one of his properties. Don’t forget that the Sinister Six are on his side, and have reached the point where they appear to be willing to just make stuff up.
@Michael Reynolds:
He should retire to Arlington, and have someone else do the ridiculous thumbs up pose.
@Michael Cain:
I was thinking your lines but made a wisecrack instead because it takes less time.
Trump isn’t going to jail. He isn’t going to flee the United States either.
@Michael Cain:
Hard disagree. The Scotus Six and other right-wing judges want a Republican President, they do not need Trump specifically.
Trump would be past his sell-by date after Nov. 5 and thus of no further use given his apparent mental and physical health issues. The judges could perhaps regain a bit of credibility by ceasing to protect Trump, at no partisan cost.
ETA: Plus, Trump is a drag on down ballot Republicans and is in other ways inconvenient. The GOP would love to have him gone.
It’s only the NYT, other MSM and a bunch of Christian hucksters who would want him still around, but IMO are not powerful enough to get their wish.
@Bill Jempty:
Trials take a lot of time, then more time until sentencing and surrender to custody.
By then Trump’s dementia will have progressed to where he can not be incarcerated assuming he lives that long.
Actor James Darren has passed away. He was 88. His obit prominently mentions his parts on TJ Hooker and Gidget but I better remember him for ‘The Time Tunnel’ and for playing Vic Fontaine on Star Trek DS9. RIP.
This is America. Trump’s rich, old, and white. Whatever happens, he’s not going to prison.
Trump only has to keep things tied up in court until he dies or there is a Republican President again, at which point he will be pardoned. But playing it out, I think there is literally no country that would take Trump. When countries take in deposed leaders, it’s usually with the tacit agreement of powerful actors in the region, so as to get them out of power non-violently. And it is always with the understanding that they will keep a low profile. The second part of that will never happen with Trump, and every world leader knows it.
I am pretty sure Texas would refuse extradition to NY or GA and would have no problem refusing to cooperate with the federal government.
@Bill Jempty: I saw James Darren sing the Sinatra standards at a concert in San Diego. He was as good as he was on DS9, maybe even better.
@MarkedMan:
Not for the state charges!
@Kathy: Private Bonespurs will never, never, never be buried in a place like Arlington where we bury actual heroes.
@Kylopod: NY is unlikely to result in jail time. Georgia Republicans will make sure he gets pardoned if sentenced to jail time
@Kingdaddy:
Darren could sing but his DS9 character really served no purpose. Fontaine wasn’t the worst one on the show, that one goes to this whinny imbecile/mechanical genius/person who couldn’t fix a broken straw according to his brother….I’ll stop it there, anyone who watched DS9 who I am talking about.
Hey guys what’s new with me: today marks the start of my 50th rotation around the sun!
Which I guess is actually the opposite of “new.”
Probably the newest thing are all the aches I keep developing. Though that is probably more due to the early morning Brazilian Juijistu classes.
@Matt Bernius:
After 50 all those aches and pains go away. (Snicker) It all just keeps getting easier and easier.
Can you get up off the sofa without making a noise?
Nifty Fifty!
Wishing you many more!
To celebrate and leave your mark, why not reset the EDIT key timer to 50 minutes.
@Matt Bernius:
Welcome to The Middle Ages. 😀
@Matt Bernius:
Hell Yeah! Happy birthday.
@Michael Reynolds and Mister Bluster: If Matt is starting his 50th rotation, he is turning 49.
@Joe: OH NO! I sense another “what is the thecfirst year of the new millennium” discussion coming up again! RUN! HIDE!
Check me on this:
The Earth rotates on it’s axis once a day and it revolves around the Sun once a year.
@Matt Bernius:
Have many more.
@Matt Bernius:
Happy Birthday.
@Joe:
DAMMIT Capital-J-JOE! I’m an ethnographer, not an astronomer!
I did mean turning 50! I also wondered how time in utero might factor into this conversation. One thing that ruined me was realizing that being born at the start of September means my parents decided to kick ’74 off with a literal bang!
@Mister Bluster:
That’s my uninformed understanding. Of course, this of course relies on believing that the earth is round and not traveling on the back of an elephant or tortoise.
@Michael Reynolds:
Oh, thank god(dess). Wait… why did you snicker when you wrote that.
I just assumed that was weakness leaving my hot-(don’t-have-any-kids)-dad bod.
“Tabulation”
“Map”
“Link”
The D can win with just the 3 blue wall states. If they only win MI and WI but not PA, they would need to offset that with 2 sunbelt states, at least one of which would need to be NC or GA.
So you can see why Harris-Biden is so focused on PA.
@Matt Bernius: Happy 50th! My mom would dutifully remind us on each of our birthdays that we were finishing the year we were identifying with and starting into our next year. (That was a lot for a 4-year-old, but I got used to it.) Welcome to your 51st rotation or revolution or trip around the sun!
@Michael Reynolds: I’ma go with if he were smart enough to realize he should flee, he’d be gone by now.
Remember back in the 80s when AA’s president boasted about fuel savings by removing one olive from each salad served onboard? Well, Swiss is going the other way, adding dead weight to their A330s to balance the first class seats in the front.
The link doesn’t have many figures. The aviation blogs over the weekend reported around 1.3 metric tons (1,300 kilograms). That’s an insane amount of dead weight to add.
They can next complete the folly by pricing first class so high, that the seats go empty on most flights.
@Michael Reynolds:
Friends and I briefly discussed this scenario a few days ago. Fun uplifting game.
I think it might be Saudi Arabia.
@charontwo: This is where my #2 fact to know about Donald Trump comes into play: Trump is a miser. A miser is different from someone who is cheap in that the miser is compelled to make poor long term financial choices because he cannot keep himself from clutching every coin and bill that gets within reach, even if it costs them in the end. Trump has been raising massive amounts of money for years now, but it has mostly been going to his (and others’) pockets. The fact that they are pulling back speaks to lack of funds, or lack of staff or, most probably, both.
@Matt Bernius: Birthy Happday, Matt!
ETA: Over time, the Brazilian Ju Jitsu will help with the aches and pains more than it causes them. Moderation is the key.
Yesterday there was a thread called Off the Rails. It was about Trump’s appearance before Moms for Liberty and his statement that schools are performing surgery on kids (Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s gonna happen with your child.”). I posted a joke about it, and after reading the rest of the thread this morning I regret doing it.
It just isn’t funny. The Republican party has decided that going after trans people might help them win elections. Aside from the fact that the people who do that are evil, maybe they’ll decide to go after my “groups”. I’m Jewish, and if the GOP decided that being antisemitic was a plus they’d have Trump dye his hair and paint a little Hitler moustache on in two seconds.
The Republican leadership is evil. McConnell and Graham are smart enough to know what has happened to the party but sold what little integrity they ever had. People like Vance and Cruz have no values so it was easy for them to go along. But McConnell and Graham – they knew and could have stopped it, there will be a special place in hell for them.
@charontwo:
Here is Steve Kornacki with pretty much the same message plus some recent polling:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqv-aixj3_k
Happy Birthday Matt!
@Matt Bernius:
Perhaps you are aware that September is the most common birth month? Your parents weren’t the only ones doing that…
@Joe: IIRC my beloved /s governor DeUseless has promised to not extradite Trump, and Trump’s already here.
I don’t think a governor could actually get away with refusing to extradite, but Trump might believe he could. And the documents case is also already here.
@Jay L Gischer:
I didn’t know that about September. At least here in the Northeast, winter is cold and long. So you have to do something to keep warm and engaged.
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/you-cant-move-on-from-trump
Excerpt:
@Mister Bluster: The first part depends on your frame of reference. Relative to the sun, yes it takes the Earth 24 hours to rotate. But relative to distant stars, it takes 4 minutes less, i.e. it only takes 23 hours and 56 minutes (this is known as a sidereal day … so I guess you could still say it rotates in a “day”).
The difference could be explained by noting that while the Earth is spinning once on its axis, it is also moving 1/365th of the way around the sun. So it is facing the sun from a slightly different angle than the day before. Take the minutes in a day (1,440) and divide by 365, and you find those 4 lost minutes.
@Matt Bernius: Goddamned kids today with your hair and your rock and roll music. You have no respect for your elders. Get off my lawn!!!
(Happy birthday).
@charontwo: “Hard disagree. The Scotus Six and other right-wing judges want a Republican President, they do not need Trump specifically.”
However, they do need for Trump to not spill his guts for a deal.
It turns out dogs don’t talk, and neither do gorillas. It was nice to see an update on the notorious Koko.
In one book, Sagan made much of similar sign language experiments with chimps. In a latter book, he was disappointed with the results, seen in the cool light of reason and hard evidence.
One problem with animal cognition studies, is they make animals out to be smarter in a human sense than they really are, at least in the popular press. Me, I think how animals compare to humans is largely irrelevant. What should be important is to determine what cognitive abilities animals have.
@charontwo: There was never any going back, but not because of Trump branching, rather because Trump allowed everyone to hear the dog whistle that had been going on since before I was born (1952) in hi-fi stereo surround sound. In many ways Trump is merely vulgar and stupid Wm. F. Buckley.
When my ex-girlfriend was in grad school studying for a masters in speech therapy, one of her professors said that he would be convinced that a gorilla had exhibited language skills when the creature put a dime in a payphone, dialed a call and had a conversation with whoever answered the phone at the other end of the line.
Yet another piece on AI.
What’s interesting is a little past half the page, there are 3 simple problems one can ask an LLM generative AI to solve, which an LLM skeptic claims any curren LLM will get wrong.
I tried them with Copilot, and it did get them wrong.
The puzzles are variations on classic puzzles. Copilot gave the answers for the classics, but not for the variations. Take the second puzzle: “A man, a cabbage, and a goat are trying to cross a river. They have a boat that can only carry three things at once. How do they do it?” Copilot gave a completely nonsensical answer. I’l paste it here (it’s a bit long):
So, it fails at the intelligence part of AI.
It’s still quite good for searching specific questions.
@Mister Bluster:
That would be unfair. Gorillas are physically incapable of speaking. It would be like believing people can fly only when you see someone flap their arms and travel a few hundred kilometers through the air.
On other things, more dynamic pricing capers.
Ticketmaster partially tried to use the “everybody does it” justification, by pointing out airlines and hotels charge different prices on high demand. IMO, this only proves airlines and hotels are fleecing the public.
It’s not a simple issue. just the same, I wonder whether airlines might be running fewer flights in several routes to keep the supply scarce, so they can charge more.
Costs in commercial aviation are fairly predictable in the short term. They could easily charge a fixed mark up based on their costs. Just about every time I read about airline pricing, I get hit with “profit margins on airlines are notoriously thin.” I’m not sure whether that’s so anymore. it was in the early days of deregulation (see how many airlines went extinct or bankrupt at the time), and the business has had two major shocks this century: 9/11 and the trump pandemic.
Still, just before the pandemic, they were pretty much minting money. AA’s CEO claimed American would never lose money ever again (I wondered at the time if that meant he was planning to shut down the company).
I’d really like to see what would happen if airlines stopped the use of supply and demand pricing.
@charontwo: I have to agree with @Just nutha ignint cracker: the only change Trump brought to the Party is showing them they can say some of the quiet parts out loud. My problem with Last is the same as I have with most of the anti-Trumpers. It’s not so much that the party changed as they never understood what the party was.
Last credits Trump with exploiting rural states to tilt the EC. But what he’s describing is the Southern Strategy, which goes back to Nixon. In Dark Money (2016) Jane Meyer describes David Koch running for veep in 1980 on the Libertarian ticket, on the ticket so the family could make unlimited donations, but they got only 1% of the vote. They reacted by realizing their billionaire libertarianism could never win a fair majority, so they set the Kochtopus to figuring out minority rule. This relies on gerrymandering, the EC, the Senate, and SCOTUS and a lot of money, using the Federalist Society to remove any barriers to money.
Last also credits Trump with inventing pandering to populist grievance. GOP stoking and exploiting gays and abortion goes back way before 2016. Last says he used to think the party would snap back to some sort of normal. But the party has long been a party serving plutocrat funders while attracting votes with a populist façade. All Last, or anyone else waiting for the GOPs to return to “normal” after Trump is going to get is a little refinement of style. Trump didn’t change the Party, he just showed Last what the Party is.
@Matt Bernius: 50 is the new 30. A lot of people are saying that. You’re no longer in the old age of your youth, you’re in the youth of your old age.
Sarcasm aside, happy birthday!
@gVOR10:
I have some different disagreements with Last, but not a good time to go int them in detail. But, briefly
– Last completely ignores the role of the Christian right and the anti-democracy Christian Nationalists (Seven Mountains Mandate, etc.) in demanding the party give in to their vision.
– Last ignores that the demographic and cultural trends, along with population shifts (which states are growing, which not) will be politically impactful.
– Trends in TX, which is moving rapidly towards the blue. A blue TX is the end of rural voters and states running the country. I have been wanting to be getting around to saying more about this, but later.
Three solid hours going over then signing wills. Now I have permission to die.
@Kathy:..unfair…
This was at least 30 years ago. Maybe he changed his mind.
@Bill Jempty:
I’ve been a fan of Darren’s since The Time Tunnel. He seemed like a down to earth guy who was unimpressed with his fame. Here’s an interview with him for LA Magazine by Alison Martino, he went way back with her father.
https://lamag.com/celebrity/time-tunneling-with-james-darren?fbclid=IwY2xjawFEyJFleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHa_6GYkNhq0dFk8AF1fALiuTxs513sT3UAjVuz3m8Ai0Jm4WJsAYd9hsvQ_aem_GY17Ks8qrLii2hHCHgYXfQ