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Steven L. Taylor is a Professor Emeritus 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 and/or BlueSky.
In a way, the MAGA movement is driven by a slow motion mob mentality. A mob, in the moment of its fury, is animated by a maelstrom of anger, resentment, the desire to lash out and destroy, and eventually to kill, in which all of the higher reasoning functions are subsumed by adrenaline and mindless rage. Before MAGA I didn’t realize a lower wattage, but just as toxic, version of this mentality could be sustained essentially indefinitely.
I chanced upon this old, science fiction short story yesterday. It’s not that good as a story, but it gets into ideas about AI. I must say the notion of home computers (called “logics”), all of them interconnected and even streaming TV, is quite prescient for a late 1940s story.
But what got me thinking is the implicit notion that there is a solution for every problem and an answer to every question, and that super intelligent machine with access to all the available data produced by humans can find such answers and solutions without fail. The story brings up such gems like how to murder someone and get away with it, how to counterfeit money that will be very hard to tell apart from real money, and my favorite:
I’m drivin’ blind when a social-conscious guy asks how to bring about his own particular system of social organization at once. He don’t ask if it’s best or if it’ll work. He just wants to get it started. And the logic—or Joe—tells him!
This got me thinking. There are questions for which there must be a right, precise answer, but we can’t determine it. For instance, how many atoms exist on Earth? We know the number is finite, but it fluctuates due to several factors, and that there is no way to count each and every one of them. We can make an estimate, given we know Earth’s composition reasonably well and its density with great precision.
Then there are questions or problems for which there may be no answer or solution. For instance, how to end racism, how to make communism work well, why does anyone vote for El Weirdo, etc.
It’s possible some answers or solutions do exist, but we 1) lack the necessary knowledge to find them, 2) have not thought to correlate some data which holds the solution, 3) lack the theoretical knowledge to determine (think of an ancient trying to determine what lightning is, before many discoveries about electricity were made).
Last, some problems can be solved by eradicating the source, but then the solution is counterproductive. For instance, we could end crime by killing every last human on Earth. But then we’d get no benefit from ending crime.
A few years ago, Boeing tried to “partner” with Embraer by acquiring its commercial airplane division (they also make military and private planes in addition to regional jets). A big part of the reason is that Embraer has a better engineering base, and at the time Boeing was looking into a long overdue replacement for the 757 (still overdue, BTW).
But then the MAX was grounded and then the pandemic hit, and TL;DR the deal fell through.
Embraer is still looking for partners and/or capital investment. They seem to be aiming at a new, larger aircraft that could compete with the mainline narrow bodies of the Airbus/Boeing duopoly. This won’t be easy, even with all the massive problems Boeing faces. For one thing, the A220 is eating into the A320neo market. For another, China’s COMAC is making progress with its C919 narrow body; thus far mostly in China, which is a huge market, but interest is beginning to stir in other places (partly because the duopoly’s backlogs are really long now).
I wonder if any existing aerospace company other than Boeing would be willing to enter such a partnership, or make such an investment. Say Lockheed-Martin, for example. It’s a big gamble, but one that might pay off big. The world could use another major mainline commercial aircraft manufacturer, and thus far it’s only COMAC in China stepping up.
Though the way things seem to be working out lately, a successful Embraer/someone else mainline family of jets might just lead to the demise of Boeing in that space over the next few decades.
From time to time I find myself struck by the science-fiction-ness of our world today. Just read a report about people with no power and no cell service in the hurricane struck regions using their iPhones to send texts via satellite. This is probably a combination of the “old” (2 years?) feature of being able to send SOS texts to a kind of 911 service and get back updates (which works even with my five year old phone) and the brand new (September 15th) feature of being able to send and receive texts anywhere without cell phone service, if you are outside with a clear view of the sky (works with the last 3 generations of iPhone). I honestly find it almost unbelievable that a terrestrial phone, normally locked to local cell towers, can send signals to a satellite. It’s only slightly less miraculous that it can receive them.
@Stormy Dragon: JFC that’s dumb/hilarious. I don’t know of, nor can I fathom, one single couple determining the number of kids they have based on the stringency of car seat regulations.
Parent 1: “Shall we have that third baby?”
Parent 2: “Nah, we’d have to comply with those new car seat regulations. Too much work.”
No one decides whether or not to have a baby based on car seat regs.
Israel is dealing with their Hezbollah problem, Iran is feeling exposed since Hezbollah is disrupted.
US East and Gulf coast ports are closed due to contract expiration.
And Biden has declared he’s sent all the federal aid he’s going to send to the five state disaster areas in the wake of Helene. Likely only speaking stupidly, but it’s out there.
I’ve never flown Southwest, so I can’t say much about how the old system will compare to the new one. The airline, however, struck me as being focused on a good(ish) passenger experience and decent service (though there was that meltdown…), and about the only major airline that did not go crazy for ancillary fees.
That’s about to change.
I get assigned seating*, and even extra leg room seats. What I dislike if the seats marked “preferred” in the seat map at the link. These are regular seats, no extra anything, that just happen to be closer to the front. This mare fact will let them charge extra for them.
This is commonplace in most airlines. And given Southwest does plan to keep including two checked bags in the fare, it doesn’t seem too bad. To me, charging extra for seats that aren’t any better, and at most may wave you a couple of minutes getting out the plane, is one fo the worst developments in commercial aviation ever.
There’s the matter of overhead bin space. One assumes these “preferred” seats will also include earlier boarding (after military, elites, various credit card tiers, and extra legroom seats), which means a better chance to find free bin space. I still don’t like it.
*I did fly twice on an airline with unassigned seating. Namely Viva Aerobus. I did not care for it, though I scored window seats on both short flights. Since then, they’ve gone to assigned seats.
During remarks at the White House, Mr. Biden said he might need to call Congress in for a special session to help with the response to what he called a “catastrophic” and “history-making storm.” Lawmakers left Washington last week after passing a stopgap spending bill to fund the government until Dec. 20 that did not include additional disaster relief funding.
“It’s devastating,” Mr. Biden said of the storm, which made landfall as a Category 4 hurricane and wreaked havoc across Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia. “They’ve never seen anything like this before.”
My morning routine with Sadie is up at dawn and out the door. There are no sidewalks, just hilly one lane roads, lots of woods and millions of interesting sniffs.
We stop at an old dilapidated house every morning and chat over the ancient picket fence with Johnnie Richards, 94 years old and sharp as a tack. Originally from rural Alabama, she was a Navy wife until her husband up and left her for an old flame after over 25 years of marriage and four kids. She had never worked outside the home. She worked a lot of menial jobs, after the divorce, to get by. My favorite stories are the ones about her job as a cook on a Mississippi River tugboat. Iced in for a week once!
Today I learned that squirrel tastes like chicken. Squirrel and dumplings are a thing, as is barbecue squirrel in sauce. Johnnie hasn’t eaten possum, but had friends that loved it. Talking country cooking with her is a blast. I know she enjoys telling me stories and the history of our lake community, too. Win-win.
If we hadn’t adopted Sadie, I wouldn’t be out walking and getting to know my neighbors and taking in the natural beauty that surrounds me. Just saying.
@JKB: And Biden has declared he’s sent all the federal aid he’s going to send to the five state disaster areas in the wake of Helene. Likely only speaking stupidly, but it’s out there.
Though a friend and former co-worker grudgingly gave up her SUV for a minivan she swore she’d never own, due to the difficulty of car seats for 3 kids under 5. Those kids are now in their 20’s and she still curses minivans. But she still would have adopted those kids.
after passing a stopgap spending bill to fund the government until Dec. 20 that did not include additional disaster relief funding
While this is true, insofar as it goes, it elides an important part: the bill didn’t have the disaster relief funding because the crazy caucus in the Republican Party would have been successful in derailing the bill if it had remained in. Squarely on the GOP leadership and House congress critters.
Pretty amusing to complain about “using a disaster” after what Democrats and the media did with Katrina and it wasn’t even an election year and Bush was in his last term. I was there, saw the lies in real time and how the media diverted attention away from the real devastation on the MS coast. Granted the career federal government response was slow due to all the DC denizens rushing out of DC for the Labor Day holiday just the SAR run by the state was concluding and federal help was being needed. But come the next Tuesday, the DC a-holes were burning up the phones to try and cover their being AWOL. Well I guess strictly they were absent with leave and not letting anything interfere with their Labor Day vacay.
People should listen to the clip – as usual RNC “Research” lies about what Biden said and JKB passes it on. Did you listen to the clip, JKB? Or do you enjoy making a fool of yourself in public like this?
And Biden has declared he’s sent all the federal aid he’s going to send to the five state disaster areas in the wake of Helene.
To back it up, you linked to a RNC Research tweet which has a video from CSPAN of Biden which it summarizes as:
“Do you have any words to the victims of the hurricane?”
BIDEN: “We’ve given everything that we have.”
“Are there any more resources the federal government could be giving them?”
BIDEN: “No.”
Apparently you didn’t actually listen to what Biden said in the attached video, or assumed that none of us would listen to the video, because that is not remotely what he says in the video.
This is what Biden actually said in the clip you linked to:
The reporter asked if there are plans for additional resources.
President Biden said “No, we’ve given them, we have pre planned a significant amount of it even though they didn’t – haven’t asked for it yet.”
The past two weeks have once again highlighted the White House’s favoritism for the people who live in states that helped elect Trump in 2016. With the 2020 election less than three months away, Trump has shown he has no intention of playing nice with the jurisdictions he stands little chance of winning in November. Along with threatening to punish fire-scorched California, he and his team have sought to paint other Democratic-run cities and states as dangerous, crime-ridden and mismanaged ― and insisted that Trump, even though he leads the nation, bears no blame for anything happening there.
“These are Democratically-led cities and most with Democratic governors,” White House senior counselor Kellyanne Conway said Thursday during an appearance on “Fox & Friends,” when asked about ongoing unrest across the country. “It’s not Donald Trump’s watch.”
BTW, if Governor Cooper is speaking stupidly by saying this:
NC Gov. Roy Cooper shamed his citizens at today’s press conference, saying that “people in low-lying areas were told to evacuate.”
How do you categorize not only what Kellyanne Conway said? Or what about this comment from Donald Trump:
At an Aug. 20 campaign rally in Pennsylvania, he insisted California has “gotta clean your floors, you gotta clean your forests” of “leaves and broken trees,” adding: “Maybe we’re just going to have to make them pay for it, because they don’t listen to us.”
@JKB:
So your response is just to ignore that you were wrong about what Biden said.
Classy as usual.
Even the governor of NC is speaking stupidly.
At least you were smart enough this time not to link to a Tweet that actually contains a video of the Governor speaking or a link to the transcript of the conference. I did some googling and couldn’t find one. But I’m sure that that X user, who is a writer for… Red State… is totally unbiased in her representation of the comments.
@JKB: BTW, sounds to me like you are agreeing that Bush administration did a poor job. But that it was media’s fault?
But also it feels like you are simply trying to make this into Biden’s Katrina not because you have evidence but because you simply are a partisan hack.
@Sleeping Dog: Sure, but decision on what vehicle to buy when you have kids is very different than considering regulations on whether or not you want to have them!
Speaking of October surprises, are we going to address the longshoreman’s union president, an ardent Trump supporter, deciding to tank the economy or no?
I wonder what it feels like in JKB’s brain when we point out he’s not making the point he thinks he’s making. Is it like….a glitch in the matrix? Does not compute?
I know sometimes when I’m counting cattle through a gate, my brain glitches on the numbers between 6 and 9. I don’t know why, but it’s like my eyes and my brain skip a moment and I’m not sure if that’s 36 or 37. Or 48 and 49. Thank God they make counters you can physically push with your thumb. I don’t think they make anything to fix JKB’s problem.
If you’re committed to thinking/believing/insisting that Trump is the greatest president in U.S. history, then you do what you have to do to maintain the illusion.
A question I’ve often pondered, especially when commenting here: why doesn’t autofill work with email extensions? Some autofill works for the entire email address, like my streaming services and some bills, which autofill my entire email either immediately or after the first three letters. But others either don’t ever autofill an email address, or will fill in the personalized portion, but not the extension. OTB is one such site: once I start typing my email, it will autofill my personal part, but it always makes me hand type @yahoo.com. It’s not the only site that does this. Autofill surely realizes that @ means you’re about to type the extension, and that @gma is going to be gmail and @yah is yahoo. Why doesn’t it finish them for you, since autofill is so eager to finish so many other things you type?
I wonder what it feels like in [a generic trumper’s] brain when we point out he’s not making the point he thinks he’s making
I don’t think it makes any difference at all. It’s just bullshitters throwing up bullshit. If one line of BS doesn’t work another will do. And “work” here, means getting a rise. For this particular trumper, the fact that Trump makes him feel actively good about being a racist is the be-all, end-all, full stop reason to support Trump. All this economics and foreign policy means less than nothing to him, but he knows it gets a rise out of people here.
A similar line of argument can be made for the creepy woman-hating one.
@Fortune: I get that, and that’s a reason to not autofill the personal portion of my email address. But why not autofill @gmail.com or @yahoo.com, etc., as soon as autofill realizes that’s what you’re spelling? I either get 1) autofill all of the email address; 2) autofill none of it; or 3) autofill the personal part, not the extension. The last one is the one I don’t understand.
@Jen: From what I’m reading, the strike will affect about a third of US ports, and economists do not believe it will be a bigtime drag the economy unless the strike lasts for months and months — after which the election will long be over.
FWIW, the longshoremen’s requests seem fairly reasonable except the desire for a non-automation pledge. This doctrine of stalling technological advance to preserve outdated occupations is crazy work. For example, delaying renewables to appease the “My grandpappy was a coal miner, and my daddy was a coal miner, so me and my kids gotta be coal miners” crowd. Should automobiles and aircraft have been eschewed to cater to coachmen and mariners?
Time marches on, situations come and go accordingly. No profession should get to hold progress hostage.
Unfortunately, you can’t counter disinformation with information. At best, they fight to a draw. The GOP is all-in on The Big Lie, and it’s pretty much been working for them. The rubes believe that the economy sucks, unemployment is up, inflation is rising, teens are getting sex-change operations at public schools, the Democrats are controlling the weather to target red states, millions of criminals are pouring across the southern border (raping and looting as they go), red states are subsidizing blue states, rural people are underrepresented in government, raising taxes on the rich will kill the economy and jobs, steel refining and heavy manufacturing could come back if the government would just Do Something, the Mexicans will pay for the wall, the Chinese will pay for massive tariffs on their goods, COVID wasn’t really dangerous (and you can treat it with bleach and/or ivermectin), etc. etc. These beliefs are neither random nor accidental; they require both a coordinated campaign against education and a media empire dedicated to “just asking questions” — both of which the GOP has enabled and promoted.
@DK: The wage request that is being reported is 77% over 6 years. I have trouble imagining that the shipping companies have such a high Return on Investment that they can afford to give a raise that high and maintain a level of long-term profitability that they would even counter with an offer in the ballpark.
Surprising and disheartening to see Trump with a six point lead in Georgia. I really thought it was more in play. Very disturbing to see him up two in NC, and that is with Robinson definitely dragging down the ticket. As horrible as he is, as bad as his campaign is, and despite his terrible debate performance he’s still basically tied in the overall race. No faith in my country given that 50% will vote for a rapist, took me a long time to realize Trump is mostly a symptom, the disease is with his followers.
@DrDaveT: While speaking about the potential loss of U.S. auto manufacturing jobs to foreign countries, former President Donald Trump said if he isn’t elected, “it’s going to be a bloodbath for the country.”
President Joe Biden’s campaign quickly accused Trump of fomenting “political violence.” The Trump campaign said Trump was clearly using the term in the context of an economic bloodbath.
“If you actually watch and listen to the section, he was talking about the auto industry and tariffs,” Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Trump’s campaign, told the Washington Post, adding that “Biden’s policies will create an economic bloodbath for the auto industry and autoworkers.”
That explanation seems the most plausible, given the context of Trump’s comments.
Happy 100 to Jimmy Carter!
In a way, the MAGA movement is driven by a slow motion mob mentality. A mob, in the moment of its fury, is animated by a maelstrom of anger, resentment, the desire to lash out and destroy, and eventually to kill, in which all of the higher reasoning functions are subsumed by adrenaline and mindless rage. Before MAGA I didn’t realize a lower wattage, but just as toxic, version of this mentality could be sustained essentially indefinitely.
I chanced upon this old, science fiction short story yesterday. It’s not that good as a story, but it gets into ideas about AI. I must say the notion of home computers (called “logics”), all of them interconnected and even streaming TV, is quite prescient for a late 1940s story.
But what got me thinking is the implicit notion that there is a solution for every problem and an answer to every question, and that super intelligent machine with access to all the available data produced by humans can find such answers and solutions without fail. The story brings up such gems like how to murder someone and get away with it, how to counterfeit money that will be very hard to tell apart from real money, and my favorite:
This got me thinking. There are questions for which there must be a right, precise answer, but we can’t determine it. For instance, how many atoms exist on Earth? We know the number is finite, but it fluctuates due to several factors, and that there is no way to count each and every one of them. We can make an estimate, given we know Earth’s composition reasonably well and its density with great precision.
Then there are questions or problems for which there may be no answer or solution. For instance, how to end racism, how to make communism work well, why does anyone vote for El Weirdo, etc.
It’s possible some answers or solutions do exist, but we 1) lack the necessary knowledge to find them, 2) have not thought to correlate some data which holds the solution, 3) lack the theoretical knowledge to determine (think of an ancient trying to determine what lightning is, before many discoveries about electricity were made).
Last, some problems can be solved by eradicating the source, but then the solution is counterproductive. For instance, we could end crime by killing every last human on Earth. But then we’d get no benefit from ending crime.
And now it’s the rudders on the 737, MAX and NG, with potential lethal issues.
A few years ago, Boeing tried to “partner” with Embraer by acquiring its commercial airplane division (they also make military and private planes in addition to regional jets). A big part of the reason is that Embraer has a better engineering base, and at the time Boeing was looking into a long overdue replacement for the 757 (still overdue, BTW).
But then the MAX was grounded and then the pandemic hit, and TL;DR the deal fell through.
Embraer is still looking for partners and/or capital investment. They seem to be aiming at a new, larger aircraft that could compete with the mainline narrow bodies of the Airbus/Boeing duopoly. This won’t be easy, even with all the massive problems Boeing faces. For one thing, the A220 is eating into the A320neo market. For another, China’s COMAC is making progress with its C919 narrow body; thus far mostly in China, which is a huge market, but interest is beginning to stir in other places (partly because the duopoly’s backlogs are really long now).
I wonder if any existing aerospace company other than Boeing would be willing to enter such a partnership, or make such an investment. Say Lockheed-Martin, for example. It’s a big gamble, but one that might pay off big. The world could use another major mainline commercial aircraft manufacturer, and thus far it’s only COMAC in China stepping up.
Though the way things seem to be working out lately, a successful Embraer/someone else mainline family of jets might just lead to the demise of Boeing in that space over the next few decades.
From time to time I find myself struck by the science-fiction-ness of our world today. Just read a report about people with no power and no cell service in the hurricane struck regions using their iPhones to send texts via satellite. This is probably a combination of the “old” (2 years?) feature of being able to send SOS texts to a kind of 911 service and get back updates (which works even with my five year old phone) and the brand new (September 15th) feature of being able to send and receive texts anywhere without cell phone service, if you are outside with a clear view of the sky (works with the last 3 generations of iPhone). I honestly find it almost unbelievable that a terrestrial phone, normally locked to local cell towers, can send signals to a satellite. It’s only slightly less miraculous that it can receive them.
@Kathy: The link isn’t working for me. What is the name and author?
Vance has apparently decided the key to winning this election is tying up the key “killing more children in car accidents” vote:
JD Vance’s past remarks on car seats deterring people from having kids go viral
@MarkedMan:
Works fine for me. It’s “A Logic Named Joe” by Murray Leinster.
@Stormy Dragon: JFC that’s dumb/hilarious. I don’t know of, nor can I fathom, one single couple determining the number of kids they have based on the stringency of car seat regulations.
No one decides whether or not to have a baby based on car seat regs.
@Kathy: Now it is working for me too. Thanks!
A good look into the kind of Christian Nationalists who are supporting Trump and Vance.
https://open.substack.com/pub/popularinformation/p/vance-appears-at-conference-hosted
It’s October of an election year, so Surprise!
Israel is dealing with their Hezbollah problem, Iran is feeling exposed since Hezbollah is disrupted.
US East and Gulf coast ports are closed due to contract expiration.
And Biden has declared he’s sent all the federal aid he’s going to send to the five state disaster areas in the wake of Helene. Likely only speaking stupidly, but it’s out there.
Et tu Southwest?
I’ve never flown Southwest, so I can’t say much about how the old system will compare to the new one. The airline, however, struck me as being focused on a good(ish) passenger experience and decent service (though there was that meltdown…), and about the only major airline that did not go crazy for ancillary fees.
That’s about to change.
I get assigned seating*, and even extra leg room seats. What I dislike if the seats marked “preferred” in the seat map at the link. These are regular seats, no extra anything, that just happen to be closer to the front. This mare fact will let them charge extra for them.
This is commonplace in most airlines. And given Southwest does plan to keep including two checked bags in the fare, it doesn’t seem too bad. To me, charging extra for seats that aren’t any better, and at most may wave you a couple of minutes getting out the plane, is one fo the worst developments in commercial aviation ever.
There’s the matter of overhead bin space. One assumes these “preferred” seats will also include earlier boarding (after military, elites, various credit card tiers, and extra legroom seats), which means a better chance to find free bin space. I still don’t like it.
*I did fly twice on an airline with unassigned seating. Namely Viva Aerobus. I did not care for it, though I scored window seats on both short flights. Since then, they’ve gone to assigned seats.
@Jen:
No kidding. The first time you really think about how the car seat fits in your car is right before you bring them home from the hospital.
@JKB: You mean this Biden?
Biden Says He Could Ask Congress to Pass Aid for ‘Catastrophic’ Helene Damage
My morning routine with Sadie is up at dawn and out the door. There are no sidewalks, just hilly one lane roads, lots of woods and millions of interesting sniffs.
We stop at an old dilapidated house every morning and chat over the ancient picket fence with Johnnie Richards, 94 years old and sharp as a tack. Originally from rural Alabama, she was a Navy wife until her husband up and left her for an old flame after over 25 years of marriage and four kids. She had never worked outside the home. She worked a lot of menial jobs, after the divorce, to get by. My favorite stories are the ones about her job as a cook on a Mississippi River tugboat. Iced in for a week once!
Today I learned that squirrel tastes like chicken. Squirrel and dumplings are a thing, as is barbecue squirrel in sauce. Johnnie hasn’t eaten possum, but had friends that loved it. Talking country cooking with her is a blast. I know she enjoys telling me stories and the history of our lake community, too. Win-win.
If we hadn’t adopted Sadie, I wouldn’t be out walking and getting to know my neighbors and taking in the natural beauty that surrounds me. Just saying.
@JKB: Also: kudos to all the right-wing jerks trying to politicize a disaster immediately and without any facts or evidence one way or the other.
@JKB: And Biden has declared he’s sent all the federal aid he’s going to send to the five state disaster areas in the wake of Helene. Likely only speaking stupidly, but it’s out there.
Liar.
@Jen:
Though a friend and former co-worker grudgingly gave up her SUV for a minivan she swore she’d never own, due to the difficulty of car seats for 3 kids under 5. Those kids are now in their 20’s and she still curses minivans. But she still would have adopted those kids.
@Steven L. Taylor:
While this is true, insofar as it goes, it elides an important part: the bill didn’t have the disaster relief funding because the crazy caucus in the Republican Party would have been successful in derailing the bill if it had remained in. Squarely on the GOP leadership and House congress critters.
@JKB:
I think it’s a six-state disaster area: Florida, Georgia, both Carolinas, Tennessee, and Virginia.
@Steven L. Taylor:
No, this Biden. I did say Biden spoke stupidly.
Pretty amusing to complain about “using a disaster” after what Democrats and the media did with Katrina and it wasn’t even an election year and Bush was in his last term. I was there, saw the lies in real time and how the media diverted attention away from the real devastation on the MS coast. Granted the career federal government response was slow due to all the DC denizens rushing out of DC for the Labor Day holiday just the SAR run by the state was concluding and federal help was being needed. But come the next Tuesday, the DC a-holes were burning up the phones to try and cover their being AWOL. Well I guess strictly they were absent with leave and not letting anything interfere with their Labor Day vacay.
@JKB:
People should listen to the clip – as usual RNC “Research” lies about what Biden said and JKB passes it on. Did you listen to the clip, JKB? Or do you enjoy making a fool of yourself in public like this?
@JKB:
Here’s what you said:
To back it up, you linked to a RNC Research tweet which has a video from CSPAN of Biden which it summarizes as:
Apparently you didn’t actually listen to what Biden said in the attached video, or assumed that none of us would listen to the video, because that is not remotely what he says in the video.
This is what Biden actually said in the clip you linked to:
Note the “YET.”
Additionally Republican Governor Brian Kemp has stated that Biden keeps asking him what else he needs. See: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/trump-georgia-governor-brian-kemp-unable-talk-biden-hurricane-helene-rcna173236
Looking forward to your completely ignoring this or just disappearing. Because there is no way to spin your disengenous reading.
Even the governor of NC is speaking stupidly. But as people get internet back, the story of what happened in the mountains is coming out.
Not to mention, that water is still working its way down to the sea so low lying areas are still at risk.
Additionally, I’m not sure of any Trump voters should really be comparing Biden’s responses to Natural Disasters to Trump’s actual track record:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-disaster-response-red-vs-blue_n_5f47fa1bc5b6cf66b2b4d29c
BTW, if Governor Cooper is speaking stupidly by saying this:
How do you categorize not only what Kellyanne Conway said? Or what about this comment from Donald Trump:
@JKB: The criticisms of Katrina didn’t start as soon as the storm hit.
You are being a partisan ghoul.
@JKB:
So your response is just to ignore that you were wrong about what Biden said.
Classy as usual.
At least you were smart enough this time not to link to a Tweet that actually contains a video of the Governor speaking or a link to the transcript of the conference. I did some googling and couldn’t find one. But I’m sure that that X user, who is a writer for… Red State… is totally unbiased in her representation of the comments.
@Not the IT Dept.: indeed. The clip does not say what JKB says it does.
Oh, FFS, I just saw what our resident trumper is arguing about. What a f*cking waste of time.
@JKB: BTW, sounds to me like you are agreeing that Bush administration did a poor job. But that it was media’s fault?
But also it feels like you are simply trying to make this into Biden’s Katrina not because you have evidence but because you simply are a partisan hack.
@Sleeping Dog: Sure, but decision on what vehicle to buy when you have kids is very different than considering regulations on whether or not you want to have them!
Speaking of October surprises, are we going to address the longshoreman’s union president, an ardent Trump supporter, deciding to tank the economy or no?
I wonder what it feels like in JKB’s brain when we point out he’s not making the point he thinks he’s making. Is it like….a glitch in the matrix? Does not compute?
I know sometimes when I’m counting cattle through a gate, my brain glitches on the numbers between 6 and 9. I don’t know why, but it’s like my eyes and my brain skip a moment and I’m not sure if that’s 36 or 37. Or 48 and 49. Thank God they make counters you can physically push with your thumb. I don’t think they make anything to fix JKB’s problem.
@Jax:
If you’re committed to thinking/believing/insisting that Trump is the greatest president in U.S. history, then you do what you have to do to maintain the illusion.
A question I’ve often pondered, especially when commenting here: why doesn’t autofill work with email extensions? Some autofill works for the entire email address, like my streaming services and some bills, which autofill my entire email either immediately or after the first three letters. But others either don’t ever autofill an email address, or will fill in the personalized portion, but not the extension. OTB is one such site: once I start typing my email, it will autofill my personal part, but it always makes me hand type @yahoo.com. It’s not the only site that does this. Autofill surely realizes that @ means you’re about to type the extension, and that @gma is going to be gmail and @yah is yahoo. Why doesn’t it finish them for you, since autofill is so eager to finish so many other things you type?
@Monala: Mine does, but I use Opera as a browser. Works across all websites I’ve found so far.
@Jax: I’ll expand on this
I don’t think it makes any difference at all. It’s just bullshitters throwing up bullshit. If one line of BS doesn’t work another will do. And “work” here, means getting a rise. For this particular trumper, the fact that Trump makes him feel actively good about being a racist is the be-all, end-all, full stop reason to support Trump. All this economics and foreign policy means less than nothing to him, but he knows it gets a rise out of people here.
A similar line of argument can be made for the creepy woman-hating one.
@Monala: I don’t experience any autofill issues here. You have my sympathy, tho.
@Monala: European computer anonymity laws forbid some systems from keeping email info.
@Fortune: I get that, and that’s a reason to not autofill the personal portion of my email address. But why not autofill @gmail.com or @yahoo.com, etc., as soon as autofill realizes that’s what you’re spelling? I either get 1) autofill all of the email address; 2) autofill none of it; or 3) autofill the personal part, not the extension. The last one is the one I don’t understand.
@Jen: From what I’m reading, the strike will affect about a third of US ports, and economists do not believe it will be a bigtime drag the economy unless the strike lasts for months and months — after which the election will long be over.
FWIW, the longshoremen’s requests seem fairly reasonable except the desire for a non-automation pledge. This doctrine of stalling technological advance to preserve outdated occupations is crazy work. For example, delaying renewables to appease the “My grandpappy was a coal miner, and my daddy was a coal miner, so me and my kids gotta be coal miners” crowd. Should automobiles and aircraft have been eschewed to cater to coachmen and mariners?
Time marches on, situations come and go accordingly. No profession should get to hold progress hostage.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Unfortunately, you can’t counter disinformation with information. At best, they fight to a draw. The GOP is all-in on The Big Lie, and it’s pretty much been working for them. The rubes believe that the economy sucks, unemployment is up, inflation is rising, teens are getting sex-change operations at public schools, the Democrats are controlling the weather to target red states, millions of criminals are pouring across the southern border (raping and looting as they go), red states are subsidizing blue states, rural people are underrepresented in government, raising taxes on the rich will kill the economy and jobs, steel refining and heavy manufacturing could come back if the government would just Do Something, the Mexicans will pay for the wall, the Chinese will pay for massive tariffs on their goods, COVID wasn’t really dangerous (and you can treat it with bleach and/or ivermectin), etc. etc. These beliefs are neither random nor accidental; they require both a coordinated campaign against education and a media empire dedicated to “just asking questions” — both of which the GOP has enabled and promoted.
@DK: The wage request that is being reported is 77% over 6 years. I have trouble imagining that the shipping companies have such a high Return on Investment that they can afford to give a raise that high and maintain a level of long-term profitability that they would even counter with an offer in the ballpark.
Surprising and disheartening to see Trump with a six point lead in Georgia. I really thought it was more in play. Very disturbing to see him up two in NC, and that is with Robinson definitely dragging down the ticket. As horrible as he is, as bad as his campaign is, and despite his terrible debate performance he’s still basically tied in the overall race. No faith in my country given that 50% will vote for a rapist, took me a long time to realize Trump is mostly a symptom, the disease is with his followers.
@Lucysfootball:
Trump gave them license to be their worst selves.
Watching the VP debate. Walz is doing OK, Vance speaks well but he’s lying a lot. So pretty much what I expected.
@Matt Bernius:
Trump. “Bloodbath”
Selective outrage.
Unserious people.
@Jack:
Absolutely. Outraged by things that deserve it, not so much by things that don’t (or that are pure fiction). Sorry if that confuses you.
@DrDaveT: While speaking about the potential loss of U.S. auto manufacturing jobs to foreign countries, former President Donald Trump said if he isn’t elected, “it’s going to be a bloodbath for the country.”
President Joe Biden’s campaign quickly accused Trump of fomenting “political violence.” The Trump campaign said Trump was clearly using the term in the context of an economic bloodbath.
“If you actually watch and listen to the section, he was talking about the auto industry and tariffs,” Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Trump’s campaign, told the Washington Post, adding that “Biden’s policies will create an economic bloodbath for the auto industry and autoworkers.”
That explanation seems the most plausible, given the context of Trump’s comments.
https://www.factcheck.org/2024/03/trumps-bloodbath-comment/
Unserious