Monday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Monday, December 20, 2021
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61 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).
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I just finished reading the book Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration’s Response to the Pandemic that Changed History by WaPo’s Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta.
The book is told largely from the perspective of the health officials, notably Fauci, Birx, Redfield, and Hahn (who reportedly formed a resignation pact–if Trump canned one of them, the other three would resign). It brings out very clearly how the fear of being fired or sidelined and the desire to appease the toddler-in-chief helped compromise and damage the reputation of long-time civil servants and agencies. The FDA’s emergency use authorization for hydroxychloroquine (quickly revoked) is a good illustration of that.
There’s a lot to discuss here, but one thing I’ll note is that the book seems to back up Mark Meadows’ claim that Trump was infected with Covid by the time of the first debate, even though this book came out earlier than the Meadows book. It doesn’t confirm it, but it heavily implies it, based I think on the timing and how dodgy the Trump people were acting in the days before he became ill.
Tornadoes do some weird things.
@Kylopod:
Weren’t resignation pacts sort of a thing during the Trump administration? I seem to recall that Mattis, Kelly, and McMaster had one for a while.
A thread.
Valley Regional Hospital targeted over man’s COVID treatment
Truth seekers. That’s a tell.
@CSK:
Yes. What’s notable to me is that Fauci et al weren’t cabinet officials, they were civil servants who are traditionally supposed to maintain some level of independence from the WH–a relationship that became very strained in 2020. Only Fauci himself managed to escape the trap. The fact that he couldn’t be fired directly (it would have required a Saturday Night Massacre type act to get rid of him, and Francis Collins the other day said he was being pressured to do so) protected him to some degree.
Trump did get rid of many of his people throughout his presidency, but it was the way he held that threat over admin members’ heads that gave him his power, and led to the pathetic groveling behavior we saw in many of them. The book details how Alex Azar gradually became one of Trump’s biggest bootlickers–he came within a hair of actually being fired (or at least that’s how he perceived it), and he scrambled to get back in Agent Orange’s good graces.
But Trump was apparently scared of mass resignations in 2020–he knew it would look bad–and it gave some of the officials leverage over him.
Are Harris’s struggles novel or normal?
We discussed Harris a couple of weeks ago, with the loose consensus that her troubles were a combination of all VP’s wearing a sign that says kick me and a hysterical right wing media determine to define her.
With the continuing pandemic, I’m really getting exhausted resetting my expectations for retirement options.
With a life spent playing the frequent traveler game, I have banked an outrageous number of points in AA, AmEx, Marriott and Hilton. Add to that some decent investments, the portfolio is fairly flush for a 60 yr old. My plans were for my wife and I to travel the world, living 3-4 months at various locations at a time, renting homes at those locations.
Now it’s a question if it makes sense and is within acceptable risk to go to the grocery store, even triple vaxed. (the answer is no.)
Burgess Meredith, Time Enough At Last, with broken glasses.
@OzarkHillbilly: I read about that yesterday.
Hospitals are full of better people than I; I’d be inclined to say to the wife “you think you know how to care for someone this ill? FINE.” Then I’d discharge him to her care and wish her the best of luck.
I am so, so, so tired of these idiots who take their loved ones to the hospital for treatment–because they opted not to be vaccinated–and then think they can dictate how doctors care for them.
@Jen:
Let me guess: The woman wants her husband to be given ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine, or both.
I never see it mentioned by the right wing, but didn’t Trump claim to be popping hydroxychloroquine pills as a preventative in the spring of 2020? Sure did him a lot of good, didn’t it?
Good news for a change. they’re giving the flu vaccine today at the office.
I got mine some weeks ago, so I won’t get it today. But it’s good to know more people will also get it.
Spoke with a friend yesterday, who is probably the only evangelical that I actually have discussions with. The church he belongs to has managed to continue having services throughout covid using masking and social distancing, while curtailing things like singing etc. That ended this week as Omicron and delta have swept through the congregation and they have cancelled services. He told me that it appears that the most have contracted the virus outside of church, but the rapidity of the spread led them to go to online services.
Interesting.
@liberal capitalist:
That is remarkably similar to our situation, and very similar to our plan of bouncing around in 3 or 4 month increments in places that offer plenty of side trips. At the moment I’m hoping to salvage at least some of a two month preliminary ‘survey course’ of Europe. I lived in France as a kid, the Azores in my late teens and Italy for seven months a decade ago.
There’s a rights company offering us Colonel Steve Austin money for our catalog and along with what we have, and social security (I’m holding off on that til I hit 70 in a couple years), we could go anywhere. I used to insist that I’d work til I died and for a couple weeks after that. But now, occasionally, I get images of us on Mediterranean beaches, dog, wine, tapas and late nights on a balcony overlooking some Portuguese/Spanish/Greek version of las Ramblas.
@Jen: A few decades back I collapsed a lung at work. My roommate was an older black gentleman who also had a collapsed lung. He was very unhappy (not a complainer or a whiner but one look at his face told you he was miserable). He finally had enough and asked to go home. They told him it was a really bad idea and how he would either be back or dead in just a few days. He repeated that he wanted to go home.
Somebody brought in an AMA* for him to sign. He did. They pulled his chest tube and stitched him up and rolled him out the door. I don’t know NH law but I rather suspect this woman is free to do the same.
*Against Medical Advice
@OzarkHillbilly: I’m sure it’s the same here–hospitals are not usually going to detain someone against their will.
Which means that she wants it both ways–she wants her husband in there, receiving care from doctors, but she wants to dictate what the doctors are doing.
It drives me absolutely batty that we’ve gotten to the point where people think that going to the hospital is some variation on Burger King “Have it Your Way” (TM).
@Jen: I think all they really want is to absolve themselves of their own bad decisions and blame it all on the Docs.
@Michael Reynolds:
On IP rights selling, there is an article in this AM’s Times talking about it in terms of the music biz. If you haven’t seen it, it maybe worth the read.
Trump has filed a lawsuit against Letitia James, NY AG, on the grounds that she has violated his constitutional rights and is harassing him for political reasons.
At The Guardian Robert Reich has a particularly succinct analysis of what’s wrong – big lie, big anger, and big money.
It’s important to put this into a larger context. Saving American democracy requires stopping three powerful forces already on the way to destroying it.
The first is Trump’s big lie that the 2020 election was stolen. That baseless claim is now believed by some 60% of registered Republicans. The lie fits with the Republican party’s understanding that demographic trends will work against it in future elections unless it shrinks the electorate.
The second is big anger spread by the media, especially Fox News and Facebook. Big anger is boosting their ratings and revenues by inciting divisiveness, racism, panic and paranoia. Yet it’s undermining trust that democracy depends on.
The third is big money, from large corporations and wealthy individuals. It’s inundating political campaigns, supporting one-sided issue ads and bribing lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to support measures that will further enrich corporations and the wealthy and block measures that will cost them.
The big lie, big anger and big money reinforce each other because they all depend on Americans believing that democracy is rigged against them. And, to a shameful extent, it is. Urgent steps must be taken against all three.
@gVOR08: No edit. I proofread the blockquotes in that but got it wrong somehow .
@Sleeping Dog:
My wife texted it to me this morning. I’m thinking maybe IP is having a tulip craze moment, because the money they’re talking is not rational in our opinion.
@Michael Reynolds:
This is the same group who approached you the other day, right?
@Michael Reynolds:
If it is, then you should contact a similar group and get them to bid against each other.
But take cash up front only. When the craze ends, there’ll be no money left.
@CSK:
That’s the kind of thing that should get him laughed at and dismissed, but that’s what we thought of his candidacy.
On the other hand, he has a near perfect record of losses in court.
@Kathy:
I think he’s getting scared, and this is his tactic to try and delay the probe.
In other amusing Trump news:
In Dallas, at one of the roadshow events Trump is doing with Bill O’Reilly, he and O’Reilly confessed to getting the Covid booster. Some in the crowd booed at this revelation. Trump said the naysayers were only “a very tiny group.” He pointed to his left.
@Michael Reynolds:
While tulips are a few months out, IP could be the current color of the day. If the terms are right and they don’t force you to produce in the future, it maybe a take the money and run situation. Good luck.
News in Cow Hampshire. Once again the states favorite murderess is seeking clemency. Yup, Pam Smart wants out of the pokey. One can only imaging her Tinder ad: Attractive mid 50’s widow who has multiple college degrees and a doctorate in divinity is seeking a special friend. For the past 30 years, I’ve lived a quiet, monastic life and now I’m ready to cut loose.
@CSK:
I’m sure Benito was scared 9/10ths to death when he caught COVID.
@CSK:
She already basically laughed it off, Trump is not nearly as scary as he believes himself to be. Also, now that social media companies know that letting him back on could lead to them being connected to a person who still wants to overthrow the U.S., he is not the draw he once was to these companies.
Funny how an attempted coup causes FB/Twitter to rethink their all information should be free and in the wild no matter if it is only messages designed to owns the libs ethos. One of these days his base will start to see him as the sad pathetic old man he has become. Trump could have been a contender, so sad.
@Kathy:
Indeed. He was said to have asked: “Am I going to be one of the di-ers?”
Di-ers??? He can’t even manage rudimentary English locutions.
@Kathy:
He was so scared they had to practically beg him to go to the hospital, then after he went there and barely escaped death, he insisted on leaving prematurely.
I’m not accusing him of bravery–far from it. I’m saying the thing he fears most is looking weak. It’s so all-consuming it overrides his survival instinct.
@Sleeping Dog:
Smart still won’t admit that she plotted her husband’s murder with Flynn et al. Maybe she’s managed to convince herself she had nothing to do with it. As someone once pointed out, those kids would never have done what they did without her hearty encouragement.
@Kylopod:
Well, Trump did express fear that he’d be a “di-er,” as I commented. But you’re absolutely right about his need to be the roughest, toughest, bravest alpha male of all. What a pathetic joke.
@inhumans99:
Watch for him to get more and more frenzied.
@inhumans99:
If it were me, I’d send an intern to argue to dismiss the lawsuit as lacking merit.
Become?
Left Twitter is driving me nuts. Last week they were declaring that they won’t vote for Democrats because Joe Biden hasn’t forgiven all student loans. Somehow they think that handing the reins back to Republicans will make that happen, as a way to “stick it to the libs.”
This week they’re criticizing the Biden administration for not ending the pandemic. While I do think there is room for criticism—for instance, they waited far too long to make rapid at-home testing freely available, and they ended the mask mandate too soon—Left Twitter’s solutions don’t seem tenable:
1) somehow Biden should be persuading or making the unvaxxed get vaccinated, apart from the incentives, pleading and mandates he’s already done. What that persuasion should look like, no one seems to say.
2) we need another lockdown with $2000 monthly checks to all Americans until the pandemic is over, and the only reason we don’t do it is because Big Business doesn’t want it, and the Biden administration is beholden to them. This ignores the many costs of lockdowns apart from business—such as parents struggling to both work from home and watch their kids, the parents who can’t lockdown who have no childcare, the kids who fall behind while doing remote school, the isolation that takes a toll on many people’s mental health, and the fact that many essential workers would still be at risk.
Hell Week at work has entered week 3, which is not really a record*. It does keep me from posting, and especially from posting cogently.
Still, any reaction to the presidential runoff in Chile? The leftist candidate handily won over the Pinochet apologist, with 56% of the vote. On the other hand, Mr. Boric is 35 years old. That’s awfully young for a country’s chief executive.
@Michael Reynolds:
There is no shame in cashing out.
Do it if you want to.
@Michael Reynolds:
I can only share my own thoughts. And writing prose for a living is def different than writing SQL for a living.
Once I let go I am happier, less stressed, less anxious, less anxiety prone.
It was pretty easy for me. I don’t want a big house, I def do not want a big yard. Yard work sucks – fuck that. I basically do not want money things. Big money things come with expectations and obligations.
I like medium priced AV and gaming gear and fairly decent looking furniture. Four walls and a roof. Walking access to a grocery store. I’m easy.
A trip or two a year. Nothing fancy pants. Actually, fancy pants shit turns me off and annoys me.
I cannot tell you what to do. Will not. Walking away was the best decision I ever made. You are free from professional obligations.
Walk away if you want to. You owe jack diddly squat to anybody but to your loved ones and yourself.
@Monala: I share in your frustration, so much in fact that I sometimes step away from Twitter/social media for a while and remind myself that Left Twitter very much over-represents the very progressive and it’s not reflective of Democrats in general.
To @Jax and company from the Sunday open thread, I have decent feedback on gnocchi.
Eyeball what you think looks like a portion then put a third of that back in the package.
Gnocchi is dense and filling. You want less than what your eyeballs think you want. Portion out by eyeball, then put a third back. Learned that the hard way. I gd hate wasting food.
@de stijl: Oh, none of it went to waste. Every last one of them went in a belly in record time. 😛
Nothing goes to waste when you have chickens, either. My chickens love “fridge cleanout day”.
@Monala: @Jen: I have a question: If one has 2 or 3 critical issues, Say climate change, police violence, and abdication of equitable taxation of the uber rich, which party would you vote for?
The party that stands in absolute opposition to what you want or the party that says they are on your side but repeatedly fails to follow thru?
Why wouldn’t a person say, “F this sht.”?
I mean, it’s easy to say they are naive and don’t understand how our system works but I have to say that maybe they do in fact understand all too well how our system does not work and fails us time after time after time, and that we are in fact the naive ones who somehow someway convince ourselves of the lie that eventually it will work after it has repeatedly failed for over 60 years, better than 400 years, and turned tail and run for the past 40 years?
I for one can’t blame them for thinking I’m an idiot because I’m not at all sure they aren’t right.
@Monala:
The latest fight I’ve been having with Online Lefties is their fervent belief that the DNC, not “Democrats”, not Biden (although he apparently controls the DNC), and not any individual Democrat politician. The all seeing, all powerful DNC has failed us.
I don’t get it.
@CSK:
I have an acquaintance who taught with Smart at that time, I need to remember to ask about it at some point. No, Pammy doesn’t quite get that to receive clemency, you need to accept responsibility for the crime.
@Monala:
Ignore left Twitter. Life is more pleasant then. Even better ignore Twitter.
@Michael Reynolds:
I’ve stayed out of this so far, but I think I can boil it down to one simple question:
How much money would make it okay with you to see the Animorphs being used in campaign ads promoting Trump for President?
@Sleeping Dog:
Smart’s mother, Linda Wojas, has been on a 30-year crusade to prove her daughter’s innocence. (Hah.) In fact didn’t she write a self-published book about it recently?
@Jax:
Recipe for soup:
1) Put a bunch of water into a big pot.
2) Open fridge, remove contents, chop, and dump in pot.
3) Add spices and simmer.
I just made [insert catchy name for “cook all the shit that’s been in the fridge too long and put it over noodles”]
It was yummy.
@Mu Yixiao:
My paternal grandmother referred to this as “garbage soup.”
@Mu Yixiao:
Chasing external affirmation was a fool’s game for me.
@OzarkHillbilly: Democrats represent a broad spectrum. It’s a helluva lot harder to maintain a solid voting bloc when there are a variety of positions.
That said, free college etc. are issues that even Dems don’t agree on and if you’ve decided that is the straw that breaks the camel’s back and you’re not voting rather than getting BBB passed, well, I wish them the best. When Republicans win back the House and Senate, I’m sure they’ll keep free college in mind, and I’m certain they’ll play fairly when the next Supreme Court seat opens up.
@Jax:
@Mu Yixiao:
My biggest issue with food waste is that I also crave variety.
I unthaw too many things and buy too many things that are ready and available simultaneously. I have become way better at this, but I am always of the type that wants every taste option available always which is a bad trait.
Sometimes I get grumpy when eating leftovers, not that leftovers are bad, but the thing I passionately wanted yesterday rings hollow today.
I also despise food waste on general principle. The absolute worst is letting things go bad / off before you can eat it. The type of food waste bothers me deeply – I see that waste as a strong personal failure to me.
I now put smaller portions into freezer bags and defrost as needed.
One thing I no longer fret about is if cilantro or that type of fresh produce goes off. Green onions. For a single person, the bunch size is off -way too big. I cannot use all of the cilantro in a grocery store bundle before half of it gets tossed in the trash.
But that is out of my control. You just gotta accept it and move on. If I could buy that type of fresh produce in smaller amounts I would. I cannot.
@Michael Reynolds:
If you do walk away, put in a proviso that if they do nothing with the IP for n years (5 or 6 seems to the the going duration) all rights revert to you and your wife.
It’s the fish or cut bait clause.
@de stijl: You should look in your freezer section! Last time I was in civilization, I found freezer cubes of all the major herbs and spices that I use the most. Throw a cube or two in the recipe, it works really nice. I rarely make it to civilization, so I was pretty excited to find them.
@de stijl: I tried growing and dehydrating them myself, but it takes an awful lot of dill/sage/green onion/cilantro/parsley to last through the winter.
I’ve tried growing an indoor herb garden. Well, trays on windowsills, anyway. No special lights or anything. Beginner stuff.
It worked up to late autumn. Winter was the plantpocalypse. Everything died. It was kinda sad. Lil dudes were pretty cool. I liked them. The gave me their leaves, their flavor. Greenery on windowsills made me happy.
I was bummed when they died.
Decades ago I had a bonsai tree. A tiny juniper. I loved that little fucker. He was super cool. Bonzo was a bad-ass. I did everything I could, kept him going for almost two years. I spritzed. Watered, but not over-watered. I bought special soil. I put him in direct sunlight for n hours then gave him a rest for n more.
It hurt when Bonzo died. I was very attached. I know it sounds stupid, but it hurt.
@de stijl: It’s hard to keep them alive the further north you go. I had a whole-ass outside garden here with all the herbs and winter squashes that I love so much, it froze in August, and I’ve given up ever since. We just can’t do it here without a greenhouse, and I can’t afford to run a greenhouse that size in these kinds of temperatures.
@de stijl: I have a spider plant I barely water that lives in coldest part of my house and refuses to die. My ex, Micah, gave her to me as a tiny rootling. Micah the person has since passed away, but I think that spider plant he gave me will refuse to die no matter where she’s at. 😛
@de stijl:
I had a boss who bought pants that had the corduroy running sideways rather than up and down, and striped lining in the pockets that were cut to ensure everyone could see the striped lining.
I called him Mr. Fancy Pants. He was not amused.
@Gustopher:
That amuses me greatly. Sideways corduroy? On purpose. Special request? That’s ballsy.
I used to have a boss where everytime we went to eat, he requested off the menu treatment. Ev – very fucking time. Without fail. I want the scallops, no garlic, and a side of au gratin potatoes.
In my head, I was screaming “They don’t serve that. You just made up a thing from three different menu items. You are such an asshole!”
Every fucking time he wanted special treatment. To be catered to. To be in control. What a fucking douche he was.
He was my boss. I had to pretend to not be appalled. If possible, I would roll my eyes where the server could catch it. It was so embarrassing.
He tipped decent, but he was a total asshole.
I bailed as soon as I got an equivalent gig. Life is too short. My exit interview was blunt. You should fire that guy. He is toxic.
@Jax:
It is really interesting that we gender plants we are attached to. Your spider plant is a she. My dearly departed bonsai tree was a he.
Pour one out for Bonzo. Good dude, and gone too soon. He was a good tiny tree.
What is up with that?
@OzarkHillbilly:
I’d rather be an idiot than an asshole.