Wednesday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Wednesday, October 16, 2024
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37 comments
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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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Waking to the sound of waves crashing on Nice’s rocky beach is not the worst way to wake up. Why yes, I do have café au lait and a basket of Viennoiseries.
Beautiful weather yesterday, wet and cloudy today and for the next two days. But somehow, even under clouds, the water remains blue.
My wife now agrees that we should look into long-term stay visas in Portugal or Spain. France is not welcoming, sadly. When I was a kid (8-10 years old) I lived in France – not the cool part, Fouras – and attended French schools first in Royan and then in Rochefort. I was completely fluent. Even dreamed in French.
Now, I’m trying to dredge the language up from the murky depths of my aged brain. It seems to me that there are four parts to this: Reading (not bad), Understanding speech (meh in Nice and worse in Paris), forming speech (I’m at a bright toddler level), and actually enunciating. This last one, I still have. To the extent that I am confusing staff by having a flawless accent and the vocabulary of a 10 year-old minus 60 years of non-use. I will not be debating existentialist philosophy.
Tonight we’re dining at Le Chantecler just down the prom at the Negresco. They’ve emailed me twice to remind me not to wear flip flops and a tank top, which is a bit much from a place that has only a single Michelin star.
@Michael Reynolds:
Have you considered Ireland? A friend of mine is moving there as soon as he wraps up his business.
@Not the IT Dept.:
Apparently in Ireland, authors don’t pay income tax.
@CSK:
Mike, you listening?!?!?!?
@Not the IT Dept.: I believe Michael has said before that temperature/weather matters…Ireland and GB have a fair number of cold, wet days.
@Michael Reynolds: You could always try Monaco. Heck, you could go apartment hunting today.
Trump is claiming to have invented IVF now: https://edition.cnn.com/2024/10/15/politics/ivf-donald-trump-abortion/index.html
Assemble the world’s smallest violin string quartet. I have gastroenteritis, or possibly Covid though I tested neg. So no Chantecler. I’ll be dining on crackers. Fuck.
@ptfe:
In Arkansas I’d be rich. In Vegas, well off. In Monaco I’d be shoeshine boy.
@Michael Reynolds:
But at least you can do that with flip flops and a tank top eh?
Hope its a short bout and you feel better for the rest of your trip.
@Neil Hudelson:
But wouldn’t that be like a capital offense in France?
While I’m not fully on board with Will Stancil’s “The reason for everything is media-driven vibes” outlook, I do think Democrats will pick up on “vibes” and panic accordingly, and that is what’s going on right now with the Internet Discourse about how Kamala is obviously now failing, we need a new “weird” to take the fight back, all hope is lost, etc.
Last night and today quite a few new national polls showed good numbers for Kamala, about equal to the minor* 1 point dip from this past week. I’m curious to see if, like throwing a light switch, the vibes among dems will switch right back to a more confident posturing.
Marist: 52/47, Harris. Two previous Marist polls showed 50/47 and 49/48.
Marquette Law: Harris 49/48; with RFK its 44/41. (Previously showed Harris up by 8 in early August, but most people identified that as an outlier).
Ipsos/Reuters: 47/44 Harris,
Somewhat related, the Independent running in Nebraska and GOP are releasing dueling internal polls. Dan Osborn, the independent, released two poll showing him ahead 4 points, breaking 50% for the first time. When politico ran with coverage of this, in response the GOP released to politico internal polls from a bunch of campaigns that, conspicuously, were not in Nebraska.
*I recognize that in a race that will be decided by 0-2 percentage points, a 1 point change isn’t ‘minor’ in context. But given that polls are not perfect measures, with a built in MoE, 1 point is noise, fluff.
For a change, a story with a happy ending:
http://www.wcvb.com/article/dylan-smith-pediatric-long-covid-completely-healed/62612990
@Michael Reynolds: I live in Portland, OR, on SS and a small–less than $600/mo–pension*. It just takes adjusting your lifestyle relative to your income relative to your setting.
Harder for a couple than a single, I’ll admit. “Two can live as cheaply as one” is one of the great lies of the post-Depression era.
*What I live on in PDX would qualify me for public assistance and Medicaid to supplement Medicare. What I pay income tax on varies from year to year and disqualifies me more years than not. Call me “Shoeshine Boy.”
Completely out of ideas on what to cook this weekend, I started to list ingredients and came up with this:
caramelized onions
chicken
tomato puree
white beans
broth
barley
paprika
I’m not sure how to cook all that, there being a few options, but it sounds tasty.
For a side I want air fried or oven baked potato slices.
@Kathy: as long as you have garlic as well…
I’d be making a stew with the chicken and the beans and the tomato purée. Wouldn’t use the barley, however. Barley goes better with beef short ribs in a stew or as stuffing in traditional cabbage rolls.
@Grumpy realist:
I very rarely make any entree without onions and garlic. I don’t even list them in the ingredients I write down for myself. I mentioned onions this time because they are caramelized.
I figure a stew in the pressure cooker, otherwise the beans take forever to get done. Maybe I’ll reserve half the onions to mix with the finished stew.
56 years ago today:
On 16 October 1968, two black US athletes – Tommie Smith and John Carlos – stood on the podium at the Mexico City Olympics, heads bowed. They wore black socks with no shoes; Smith wore a black scarf around his neck. As the US national anthem played, they each raised a black-gloved hand in silent protest.
Source
@Stormy Dragon:
The Felon said he’s the “father” of IVF.
I can see how he’d get that wrong.
What he most likely means is that he is a father because of IVF. I can easily see all of his many wives would not consent to conceive his children by any other means.
Some days, irony just rules: Fire station in Germany burns down. It had no fire alarms.
@Jen:
What nonsense!
The Islands are known for being warm and sunny the whole year round, apart from snow on Christmas Day!
*Looks out of window*
Raining again.
Bugger.
Looks at news
Floods in Shropshire and Herefordshire.
Soddit.
Has to be said, even by British standards it’s been bloody wet this year.
Wettest September on record, after a pretty cool and damp summer.
And October is looking to follow the pattern.
And then November, which is miserable most years.
And then it’s Winter…
Looks like being a consequence of having a warming North Atlantic: lots of active systems driving in fronts and depressions, and collapsing the summer high pressure.
Which explains things, but helps little in getting the garden in shape.
Weeds and slugs just love it, of course.
Wretched weeds. Horrid slugs.
Bah!
@Kathy:
@Grumpy realist:
Mid-Autumn officially began in England two weekends ago, when I made the first beef, kidney and ale stew since March.
With suet dumplings.
Mmm, dumplings!
And a bottle of Gigondas to wash it down.
Autumn does have its good points.
The leopards eating people’s gender presentations party:
Anti-trans woman with no hair devastated when she faced anti-trans harassment herself
@Michael Reynolds:
“…not the cool part, Fouras .”
Had a couple of family holidays not far from there in the mid-1970’s, near Royan.
Personally as a teenager, I thought it was pretty cool.
But then, I’ve always liked France pretty much without exception.
To someone used to California or such, might not seem much.
But to a teenage kid from Coventry, back then, it seemed really exotic.
Sun! Sand! Surf! Baguettes! Cheese! Steak et frites! Cheap wine! French girls!
@Kathy:
Whatever he “meant”, he said he invented IVF, and I’m not interested in massaging his words into sensible paraphrases in order to sanewash his verbal diarrhea
@Stormy Dragon:
I thought I was mocking him. Evidently my sarcasm needs work.
@Michael Reynolds:
That’s a pisser.
Recall having to abandon a planned meal in Angers some decades back due to gastric nasties.
No star, but is/was a “Bib Gourmand”, iirc.
Which usually means good eats.
I hate missing a good meal.
Hope you recover swiftly.
@Kathy: Why would a fire station need alarms? Isn’t it chockablock full of fire fighters? 😉
Jay G
I’ll cede your point. “Stupid” is hyperbole. I should take more care in wording. But I would not back off on Harris as vacuous. The video clips are out there in spades.
This is the penultimate point: despite all the current juvenile and hysterical accusations made about Trump, (including a blogger here who absolutely publicly embarrassing himself with wild eyed notions of fascism) the country had a good run under his tenure, until COVID. Its an empirical fact. The current administration, and its VP, have been a dud. And the people know it.
For the record. I think its a horrible choice. If I was still in FL I would not vote for either. But I am in GA. And GA matters. And Kamala Harris as President is an unthinkable horror. So there you go.
Here is something for people to chew on. Want to know a person(s) I might vote for if the Dems could jettison their loony ways? Harold Ford Jr. Or maybe Shapiro in PA. But I don’t think that is realistic. The Party is dancing with the IL and CA guvs. Insanity.
@Jack:
I’m an external observer, but President Trump appears to have achieved very little of effect, either domestically or internationally, during his term in office.
He was hardly a fascist, more a rhetorical poseur and implementational nullity.
But some in his circles (Bannon in particular) seem to have been at least inclined to sidle up to fascism and conduct a coy romance.
Events subsequent to his electoral defeat seem a lot more concerning.
The current administration has been fairly effective: US economic performance is the envy of almost all the rest of the OECD, and most of the world.
Including China, it should be noted.
A dud?
Really?
In foreign policy, I can lambast the Biden administration, from a damn foreigner perspective, on a lot of points.
BUT on most of those a second-term Trump administration seems unlikely to have done much better on most, and a lot worse on some.
@Jack:
Perception is everything. My take on Trump until COVID was that it might have been possible for him to be more inept than he was, but it was tough to imagine how. “A good run under his tenure” is not even on my horizon. Wow.
ETA: But you and I obviously wanted different things from government. Probably still do.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
On economics metrics alone, El Felón’s tenure pre-COVID was not as good as Obama’s.
And while we can overlook such metrics during COVID, his lack of leadership and abundance of obstruction made the pandemic much worse than it should have been. Not just in America, though it won the excess deaths title, but in other countries whose leaders chose to imitate him.
Until someone provokes a US-Russia mass exchange of nukes, no one will ever get close to being responsible for deaths in the numbers that stalin and hitler and Mao reached. But El Weirdo can be blamed for the largest number of deaths in the Western world in peacetime.
So, what comes after mRNA vaccines?
It’s really hard when faced with a revolutionary development to imagine how anything will top it. But it turns out there’s a lot, and I mean a lot, going on in immunology and vaccination. From improvements to mRNA delivery and functionality, to new types of vaccines, to delivery methods which may be more effective.
There’s way too much of it for me to grasp, yet. So I’ll expound on two easy ones.
One is to include the RNA to code for the mRNA in a vaccine. This would let cells make the mRNA that makes the viral proteins. This in turn means more viral protein production with a lower dose of the active agent.
The other is intranasal vaccine delivery for respiratory infections, and oral delivery for gastroenterological infections (think polio for one). The idea here is that having memory immune cells in the place where viruses infect the body, will likely make for better protection.
For all the money thrown at medical R&D, developments tend to move slowly and gradually some time, especially radically new developments. Had there not been a trump pandemic in 2020-2023, we probably wouldn’t have any kind of mRNA vaccines available. As is, I’ve heard of no new mRNA vaccines for anything other than the latest COVID variants.
I wouldn’t expect any kind of new tech vaccines for several years, absent another serious pandemic.
@Jack:
Nope. Nothing juvenile or hysterical about indentifying Trump’s fascism. Juvenile hysteria is 78-year-old Trump screaming “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT” on socials.
Trump picked a running mate who once called him “America’s Hitler.” Trump said he’d be a dictator for the first day of his presidency. Trump called for ‘termination” of the constitution. Trump has (hysterically) called for the execution of and military force against his enemies — Liz Cheney and Mark Milley aming them. Trump incited the Jan 6 terror attack after spending months trying to overturn an election he lost by 8 million votes.
Based on these incontrovertible facts, it is perfectly reasonable to opine on Trump’s fascistic leanings.
You are just incapable of holding Trump accountable, and tantruming because others do what you can’t in acknowledging Trump’s own statements and actions you prefer to ignore and erase.
@Jack:
Well no. It’s an empirical fact that economic growth slowed from Obama to Trump, and was higher in Obama’s last three and Biden’s first three years than in Trump’s first three. Trump’s initial performance was a chaotic melee of broken promises, anemic legislative success, a failed trade war, and internal division that Trump faced a historic Blue Wave backlash in 2018.
That said, there’s no such thing as “until COVID.” It’s no more relevant than saying Jeffrey Dahmer had a good run until cannibalism. Trump’s tenure included his abject COVID incompetence, worsening outcomes around mass death and record economic contraction.
There’s no erasing Trump’s COVID failures, just like there’s no erasing Trump’s own words and deeds that imply fascist tendencies.
@Jack:
Convicted criminal Trump spent years promising to repeal Obamacare and replace it with a glorious new healthcare plan, to lock up Hillary, to build the border wall and make Mexico pay for it, to pass the biggest infrastructure bill ever, and to make “the hedge fund guys” pay up.
He failed. No healthcare, infrastructure, or border bill. All we got was tax cuts for billionaires, record job loss, abortion bans, farm bankruptcies, and COVID dead being stacked in freezer trucks.
Within 10 months, the Biden-Harris administration signed the long-awaited bipartisan infrastructure bill. They shored up unions and took the first halting steps to marijuana decriminalization. They also made law historic legislation on gun reform, climate, vet healthcare, Rx drug pricing, marriage equality, anti-lynching, and advanced chips manufacturing.
Consequently, though there is more work to do uplift the relatively poor, as always, America’s post-pandemic recovery is the envy of the developed world. Economic and job growth are strong. Stocks soaring. Crime near 50 years lows. Domestic energy production at record highs. Millions unburdened of usurious student debt.
Biden was poised to sign a bipartisan border bill negotiated by a conservative Oklahoma senator and endorsed by Border Patrol — until a jealous Trump killed it.
The dud was the big giant Red Wave promised in 2022 by critics of the Biden-Harris admin. Where were “the people” then? And why is Rep. Chip Roy, a MAGA member of the failed Republican House majority, now publicly saying Republicans have done nothing to earn reelection and have nothing to run on?
Oops.
For some reason the Weirdo Felon tried to pay money to Stormy Daniels again to silence her.
Oh, and the Iranians have time travel.