Tuesday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Tuesday, August 13, 2024
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28 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
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).
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BlueSky.
Trump interview with Elon last night:
https://x.com/atrupar/status/1823187232100090241
https://x.com/KamalaHQ/status/1823194536983556377
Your “paper of record:”
https://x.com/ok_post_guy/status/1823237865268203
Unbelievable stuff from the same rag that diagnosed Biden with “clinical frailty” after the debate
@charontwo: Oh please please please please please please …..
God doesn’t love me that much.
Judge rules against Robert F Kennedy Jr in fight to be on New York’s ballot
Liars gotta lie. Grifters gotta grift. They just can’t help themselves.
The US air force is refusing to comply with an order to clean drinking water it polluted in Tucson, Arizona, claiming federal regulators lack authority after the conservative-dominated US supreme court overturned the “Chevron doctrine”. Air force bases contaminated the water with toxic PFAS “forever chemicals” and other dangerous compounds.
Though former US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) officials and legal experts who reviewed the air force’s claim say the Chevron doctrine ruling probably would not apply to the order, the military’s claim that it would represents an early indication of how polluters will wield the controversial court decision to evade responsibility.
It appears the air force is essentially attempting to expand the scope of the court’s ruling to thwart regulatory orders not covered by the decision, said Deborah Ann Sivas, director of the Stanford University Environmental Law Clinic.
“It’s very odd,” she added. “It feels almost like an intimidation tactic, but it will be interesting to see if others take this approach and it bleeds over.”
@OzarkHillbilly: This is all a quote. Meant to hit the blockquote button but my brain short circuited and I hit the post comment button instead.
@OzarkHillbilly: Just to note is the reason he lied about his residency: he picked a billionaire Californian as his running mate and there is a little known electoral clause that a state’s electors cannot vote for two people from the state they represent. This could lead to the California Electors giving their votes to RFKjr and their VP votes to someone else. In a close election, the opposing party VP could actually win the Bice Presidency.
@MarkedMan:
“there is a little known electoral clause that a state’s electors cannot vote for two people from the state they represent.”
Also known as the 12th Amendment to the Constitution.
So, I’m walking the dogs (Astrid and Boss) at 6 AM as always because by 7 AM in Vegas the heat is fatal. I spot a pink RV down Elvis Presley Boulevard, and think it’s a Pinkbox donut truck. Turns out it wasn’t, it was just a construction site food truck. A terrible disappointment.
We have newspaper boxes that offer and display fine publications such as, Chicken Ranch, Larry Flynt’s Hustler Club and Adult Finder. (Because apparently some people still don’t have internet.) Sun-bleached photos of strippers and hoes look out through brittle, yellowed plastic windows. I ignore them. Usually. But today I noticed that every stripper and ho had googly eyes. In my search for donuts I passed a second box: googly eyes. A third box: googly eyes. Someone applied by my estimate, three dozen googley eyes.
@Michael Reynolds: Eyeboming! It’s a thing
@Michael Reynolds:
Not all heroes wear capes.
Revisiting a topic opened by our resident grammar pedants, whom I’m happy to join, a gift link from NYT, Is It Harris’ or Harris’s? Add a Walz, and It’s Even Trickier.
You don’t get “epenthetic schwas” from FOX.
And, resolving my uncertainty, WIKI says it’s “wallz” with no “t” sound. Which led to a cartoon of Trump watching TV and saying “I’m still popular, they’re chanting, “walls, walls, walls”. “Sorry, sir, that’s, “Walz”.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Seems like a lot of trouble to go through, when Junior’s electoral vote count has a 100.01% chance of being zero.
Random googly eyes everywhere means its a good day to recommend watching Everything, Everywhere, All At Once, in case you didn’t catch it when it came out a couple years ago.
@Moosebreath:
Okay. But that doesn’t make this clause well known. In fact, I’ve heard reporters explain it incorrectly in the last few weeks.
@Tony W:
I did not know this was a thing. Despite the fact that I stay so well-informed on all memes. Is keyboard cat still around?
@Neil Hudelson: Hey, I received your correspondence yesterday (the one you sent to Michigan); I was thrilled to make almost human contact with a fellow commenter! Thank you for that – how’s the campaign going?
@MarkedMan:This is exactly why I didn’t think that Rubio would be selected as VP. The only way that would have worked is if Trump had changed his residency back to NY, although I was kind of hoping that due to all of the chaos someone would have forgotten about this clause and then they’d lose half of Florida’s EC votes.
A girl can dream.
I think “weird” is like “socialist” — there’s only a vague definition of what it is with how it is used, but it resonates with supporters and is really hard to defend against without sounding like a lunatic.
I have, in these threads, expressed confusion about where the NYT is coming from. I tend to attribute their FTFNY moments to having column inches to fill, a loyalty to the NYC upper crust, and hedging against a GOP victory. But they provided an interesting data point a couple days ago, a long piece about Bari Weiss. (Gift link, but I don’t recommend reading it. It’s not really very informative, but it is long, very long. I couldn’t manage to more than skim a lot of it.
You may remember that Weiss tried to get fired from NYT as a way to market herself to the right. After failing to get fired, she resigned, claiming a hostile workplace. She had a role in creating the University of Austin (not UT Austin). She has, according to this article, done very well with an online media company called The Free Press. From my point of view (totally rational and unbiased) she’s just another self promoting RW media entrepreneur, unattached to reality. But this NYT article is a huge, did I mention really long, puff piece. (One wonders if the author isn’t angling for some piece of her action).
I have to wonder how much of the staff of NYT is deep into this milieu of personal branding and self promotion to the exclusion of anything else. It seems silly for NYT to market itself to the MAGA, but it makes more sense for individual writers. It’s all very post modern.
@Gustopher: Also hard to defend against when you really are a socialist, or weird.
@gVOR10: Well, has anyone counted the number NYT reporters that withheld reporting to save it for their books?
Is it really shame? I doubt it.
Texas judge in lawsuit by Musk’s X against advertisers exits case
Russia is complaing to the UN that Ukraine has invaded and occupied parts of Kursk. Complaining that The West is not condemning their incursion and occupation of their sovereign territory.
The chutzpah! The gall! The cojones!
How could any sane organization, reporting consortium not laugh at Putin and Russia in that instance? It’s so ludicrous! They did to us what we did to them. We did not expect that. It’s unfair! Waah!
Do they not understand the concept of hypocrisy?
Do they not understand how [bleeping] weak they look at being stymied at failing to invade, occupy, and supress Ukraine’s relatively meager military? Ukraine is making Russia’s military look weak and ineffective, and Putin looks pathetic.
This would be like the US military not being able to invade and occupy Washington state. It was a way to establish how effective Russian military actually was. Piss poor, apparently.
I grew up during the Cold War. We assumed Soviet / Russian forces were equivalent to ours. That was an over-reaction. They suck at their jobs, apparently.
They can’t invade and occupy Ukraine in a week and are seemingly perpetually stymied. They have exposed their weakness for the world to see.
I highly applaud Ukraine’s counterpunch. We’ll invade you, too.
The utter ballsiness of Russia’s complaint to the UN! That takes utter chutzpah.
@gVOR10:
It’s Harris’. As in belonging to her.
Walz is pronounced Walls, per the dude, per the guy whose name you’re talking about, they get to call how you pronounce their name which is the only way that counts.
I have a last name that folks easily mispronounce. It means beautiful waterfall in Swedish. Pronounced in a way that is a bit counterintuitive to native English speakers. They stress the wrong syllable often. It’s not a big deal. I cope. I correct them.
Seriously, Russia being unable to invade and occupy Ukraine successfully is just pathetic and sad.
Arguably, you are the second or third most effective military on the planet and you are utterly stymied. One thing is certain, Russia’s military is incapable of invading, occupying, and securing Ukraine. With which they share a land border.
They wanted a proud, definitive show of force, especially in what they consider their backyard, and they fucked up, screwed the pooch. Couldn’t advance at all.
They outed themselves as a paper tiger incapable of achieving the simplest objectives against an inferior force.
The Russian “invasion” of Ukraine has failed spectacularly and called into question Russia’s capability and capacity and leadership.
@de stijl: You could argue one of the mistakes Russia made was taking only Crimea. When they did that it caused the Ukrainians and the world in general to wake up. Ukraine spent the succeeding years sending their troops to various western countries for extensive training. I would give credit to Donald Trump for not fucking that program up but I bet he didn’t even know it existed.