Friday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Friday, July 23, 2021
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91 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a 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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Joe Biden changes the subject when asked if Democrats want to defund the police:
https://twitter.com/itsdylan46/status/1418402191467941888?s=21
@Gustopher: He gave their question all the respect it deserved.
Not for nothing, since we’ve been expecting it for a while now, but the first explicit challenge to Roe v. Wade has been teed up at SCOTUS.
Fasten your seatbelts; it’s going to be a bumpy ride.
Republican bid to limit health officials could cause ‘preventable tragedies’ – experts
ProLife my ass.
Dumbass headline of the day: ‘They’re a little crazy’: the ultramarathon runners crossing Death Valley – in a drought
The avg yearly rainfall in Death Valley is 2.36 inches. It’s always in a drought.
Trump’s PAC collected $75 million this year, but so far the group has not put money into pushing for the 2020 ballot reviews he touts
LOL
@Teve: Here’s the Video for anyone who’s interested.
Fun facts.
The states Biden won in 2020 (plus DC) collectively contain nearly 50 million more people than the Trump states, or about 35% greater total population.
The Trump states are collectively nearly a million square miles larger in area than the Biden states, or a 71% increase.
It’s a sad day, Democracy still exists in Misery: Medicaid expansion measure did not violate state constitution, Missouri Supreme Court rules
But don’t worry, the state GOP will find a way to gut it anyway.
@OzarkHillbilly: Now, now, as Gary Abernathy pointed out in WaPo yesterday, we liberals need to reach out and talk to Trump voters. It’s our fault for not engaging. They’re fantastic people, we’re just being smug and mean.
Hacks is very good but emotionally taxing. I think this weekend Imma binge the first season of Ted Lasso. I do want a WWTLD bracelet.
@Teve: God, I love you so much right now, Teve!
Nothing says “We’re not a bunch of racist rednecks.” like purposely silencing black voices.
Wondering why some Republicans have flipped to urging vaccinations? In 2018, Rick Scott beat Bill Nelson by 10,033 votes. Someone did a back-of-the-envelope calculation that by the election, assuming nothing changes, Covid will kill 80,000 more Florida Republicans than Democrats.
@becca: you love Ellen Hopkins, I just repeated the joke 😀
@Teve:
We’re going to start seeing more child death over the next month. It was emphasized that COVID strangely didn’t hurt children like adults so many people internalized “even if the hoax was true”, the kids would be fine. Delta’s not so kind and we’re starting to hear stories of younger and younger victims daily. We’re seeing stories of pregnant women suffering miscarriages or stillbirths. We’re seeing young previously healthy children die in days. Now, it’s not grandma on the ventilator who’s gonna end up on the ventilator, it’s the teenager or the sixth-grader.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Tangent, but where did this business with capitalizing the B in “black” start? It seems to have popped up out of nowhere just a year or so ago and suddenly is being treated as the standard in most written media. I find it baffling since I don’t believe I ever heard any official explanation for it, not like when the term “African American” first began to gain widespread usage in the ’80s and there was a lot of discussion over it (there was a brief period when “Afro-American” was more common). I mean, I have for years occasionally run across this usage in some people’s writing, but quite frankly I used to think it sounded a bit ignorant; it appeared to call needless attention to a person’s blackness and, I thought, sounded rather patronizing. But now it’s suddenly the preferred usage. At least it doesn’t make a difference in speech. But I’m still puzzled by it, especially the way it happened without any apparent public discussion over the change.
@KM: Yep. I just read a story this morning about a healthy (meaning no pre-existing conditions like T1 diabetes) 5-year-old boy who died within days in Georgia.
My BIL & SIL still refuse to get vaccinated, and there are 2 kids under age 8 in that household.
@Kylopod: Most journalists and media outlets follow AP style guides. AP made the change last year, so that is why it’s everywhere now.
Link: https://apnews.com/article/archive-race-and-ethnicity-9105661462
@Kylopod:
News organizations made the decision. This may help:
http://www.cjr.org/analysis/capital-b-black-styleguide/php
@Teve: “Mean” is my second default mode, coming right after “Sarcastic.”
@Teve:
It was already doing that regardless. They’re OK with the deaths because they’re convinced the electoral rigging will hold.
No, it think somebody finally got through to them the bill for COVID care is coming due. It’s almost “here’s how much more your insurance premiums jacked up” season and businesses are going to be *screaming* about how their sick employees tripled that expense. Since damn near everyone is going to have higher premiums due to shared costs, every business out there is looking at a rate increase they likely can’t afford, even if they pass it all off to the employee. Money, money, money makes the world go ’round and now the whole country is weeks away from getting slapped with rate increases due to COVID denial…. and insurance companies ain’t gonna be quiet about why. “Oh, your premium went up $50 a month? Yeah, that’s because of all the unvaxxed COVID patients in the area using services. Get vaxxed or the bill will be higher next time!!”
Change in this country will only come when it hurts companies enough. They can’t drop the insurance because of Obama, they can’t go back to the scammy cheap stuff legally anymore and they can’t afford massive rate hikes due to employee stupidity. What’s left to do but change your tune and tell the idiots to stop wasting your money? What’s a politician left to due but not piss off Big Business when they realize what’s happened and start pushing the shot?
@Kylopod:
It came out of the BLM “surge” after the death of George Floyd. Media decided that “black” wasn’t a reference to a skin color, but an ethnicity (some are now also capitalizing “brown” in the same context).
Mostly, I see it as a “Look! We’ve done something!” action (like no longer saying “master bedroom” or “slave cylinder”). But it took about a week for all the major new outlets to adopt it.
NY Times
@Jen:
Apparently we had the same thought. That happens fairly often. 😀
@KM: I’ve been fully vaxxed since May. But I live in a heavily Trumper county in Florida*. My mentality last week was, “I’ll get it, but I probably won’t even notice it.” My mentality after reading about the delta variant is, “I’ll get it, and i hope I’m not sick for more than a few days and don’t develop Long Covid.”
* 2020 Presidential election, my county:
Trump 70%
Biden 30%
Fully vaccinated, my county:
Age 12+ 33%
Age 18+ 35%
@CSK: Most of my clients follow AP style, so I keep a close eye on it and make adjustments when I need to in my writing. It’s why I’ve found the mixed styles for COVID so interesting/confusing. It’s an aberration. NYT uses Covid-19, WaPo uses covid-19, but AP Style is COVID-19.
@Jen: I have wondered if it was at least in part a response to the BLM protests following George Floyd’s death, or if it was coincidental. In any case, it seemed to appear very suddenly without much comment.
I also notice the explanation in that AP guide rejects the idea of capitalizing W in “white,” but I’ve been increasingly seeing that, too, although not necessarily in the mainstream press.
Ever since terms like “African American” and “Asian American” started to gain wide currency several decades ago, you occasionally ran across the phrase “European American,” though generally the people most into that have been white supremacists (I remember David Duke was big on that phrase back in the day), partly as an attempt to coopt the language of multiculturalism to imply whites are a persecuted group, but also because it was a way of being more sneaky about their agenda–instead of White History Month they’d say European American History Month, which tended to attract less attention.
@Kylopod: Jen and CSK gave you the answer I was ignorant of. I do it from time to time, probably because I’ve been reading it that way. It’s certainly not a conscious thing on my part.
If you are referring to the ACA, I know of companies that did exactly that after it became law. They just increased their employees’ pay to cover the cost of an ACA market policy.
@OzarkHillbilly: Off to the CRT camps with you, apostate scum!
@OzarkHillbilly:
But adding Black voices won’t help to justify/ignore systemic racism and call it something else.
@OzarkHillbilly: All is not lost. On the same day, the Supremos said that caps on damages the most seriously injured victims of malpractice can receive are just fine. All in all it was a pretty good day in Misery for the Chamber of Commerce and the hospitals they align with.
@Teve: What? Again???
Presidential Commission appears to favor term limits for SCOTUS.
18 years seems to be the sweet spot.
@OzarkHillbilly: Dammit. Those camps are so wussified. We never should have put Gwyneth in charge of them.
@Kylopod: Any time you start noticing a widespread change in the way media outlets spell things, I recommend checking to see if AP had held forth on the topic. It’s almost always a standard change.
Some of them have taken me a really long time to become accustomed to–for example, Internet used to be capitalized, because it was considered a proper noun. AP made the style change to lowercase “internet” a few years ago and I still occasionally find myself capitalizing it. As a writer who works with multiple companies and organizations, it’s really useful to have a standard to point to. Sometimes my clients ask for changes to AP style to fit internal style guidelines and that works too. But for the many that have operated with a sort of haphazard mix of internal writers who each learned something different, it’s nice to have a standard.
@Jen:
Did the AP change the style on this before the individual papers? Because all the explanations I’ve seen (from the various media outlets) have described it as an internal choice, not a matter of following AP.
Interestingly… CMOS allows for the capitalization of “White”.
(June 22, 2020)
@Mu Yixiao:
I’d support it, but the likelihood of getting both parties to agree to the constitutional amendment that would be required to achieve it in sufficient numbers to get the required 2/3rds majority is next to nothing. Whichever party happens to enjoy a majority of its justices on the court at the time will oppose it. It would be nice though, I agree.
Tell it like it is David.
I have.
@Jen:
Aren’t acronyms generally capitalized? (NATO, DOD, etc. ) I know there are exceptions (Benelux, for example, not BENELUX), but I’m generally not sure why those are the case. It seems like COVID-19 should be correct.
@HarvardLaw92:
Acronyms are generally capitalized–unless you’re the bloody idiotic BBC.
(It’s NASA, goddammit! Not Nasa.)
@HarvardLaw92:
Second note:
There are some acronyms which have “dropped into common usage as words” (my phrasing). So words like radar, scuba, laser, etc., are lower case because they’re now words, not acronyms.
The Edit Gods have blessed me!
COVID isn’t an acronym. It’s an abbreviation: COrona VIrus Disease. So… technically, it should probably be written CoViD if there was capitalization. But covid is appropriate.
COVID, however gets the point across better. 🙂
@HarvardLaw92: Well, first of all, Covid isn’t really an acronym but a contraction (of coronavirus disease); it may even be a portmanteau, and those typically are not capitalized. (We don’t write BRUNCH or MEDICARE.) But also, acronyms can lose their capitalization as they become accepted as regular words–one notable example is laser.
The more curious thing to me is the initial capital, since that isn’t typically something we do with common names for illnesses–we don’t write Polio or Strep.
I’m not a music person, but it amuses me to no end that here in 2021 people tweet at Tom Morello, ‘I used to like your music til you got all political.’
@Mu Yixiao: AP made the style change announcement in July of 2020, which was after some papers had already made the decision to change. Once AP formalizes it, it becomes the standard and pretty much everyone starts using it, from media outlets to PR and marketing firms.
On a Rogers adoption curve, AP making a style change statement basically accelerates the early majority phase of the curve.
@HarvardLaw92: Yes, and WHO continues to use all caps, as does AP Style. (Mu’s observation that this is an abbreviation not an acronym is correct.)
That’s one reason why I’ve found the different copy edit decisions so baffling/fascinating.
@Kylopod: My guess there–with the first letter capitalized–is that someone at NYT decided it was a proper noun.
@Teve:
I remember hearing that last year. I also remember Paul Ryan in 2012 professing to be a fan of RATM, and then Morello responding that Ryan is the epitome of the machine they were raging against. Of course Ryan wasn’t being ignorant about RATM being a political band, and on some level I get it–you don’t have to agree with a band’s politics to enjoy their music, and although politically charged lyrics have always been central to RATM, let’s face it, you really don’t need to care about the lyrics to get into Morello’s killer riffs.
I have trouble thinking of a comparable situation on my side–my loving music but disagreeing with the political content of the lyrics. I suppose even RATM may be a marginal case since I’m a long-time fan of theirs although they’re still well to my left, and they’ve occasionally annoyed me with some of their views, as in their video for “Testify” which implied there was no difference between Gore and Bush. But I also have a great appreciation for their political songs overall, and that’s certainly a reflection of my leftward leanings–“Killing in the Name” drew significant attention to entrenched police racism more than 25 years before it became a common point of the national conversation.
We’ve spoken before here about the Charlie Daniels song “Simple Man,” which is quite simply an ode to lynching. Ignoring the lyrics and just listening to the music, I like the song even though the lyrics are abhorrent. That’s about the closest I can come to an example of being on the other side–the equivalent of Paul Ryan liking RATM. I don’t encounter it that often, as I’m not in general a fan of country music (I do like a lot of Southern rock though) and let’s face it, most musicians in most genres are pretty liberal.
@Kylopod:
After I wrote this I thought of a more complex example than the Charlie Daniels song: Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama.” This is a song I long liked going back to childhood, and it was only after starting to listen to the lyrics and reading more about the origin of the song that it gave me pause. It was written as a response to Neil Young’s “Southern Man.” (Reportedly Young took the bashing in stride, and even performed the song as a tribute shortly after Van Zant’s death.) The problem with deciphering the song is that the lyrics are cryptic and it’s not quite clear what was intended. There’s been a lot of discussion over the years of the verse:
In Birmingham they love the governor (boo-hoo-hoo)
Now we all did what we could do
Now Watergate does not bother me
Does your conscience bother you
This was apparently a reference to Gov. George Wallace, and some have interpreted this verse as an attempt to distance themselves from Wallace’s racism and simply to argue that Southerners shouldn’t be painted with a broad brush (and that’s pretty much what Van Zant said in interviews). But there are other possible interpretations, and I have a hard time giving them the benefit of the doubt given how often they played this song while flying a Confederate Flag on stage.
In 1991, a Southern rock band (though the lead singer is from Wisconsin) called Drivin n Cryin did a song I really love, called “Fly Me Courageous.” Wikipedia reports that it sold well because the title struck a patriotic chord in the run-up to the Persian Gulf War. Yet the lyrics include the following line:
Mother America is brandishing her weapons
She keeps me safe and warm with threats and misconceptions
I suspect the reactions to this song are a case of Springsteen syndrome, where a song criticizing American foreign policy is misinterpreted as an expression of fervent patriotism.
@Jen:
All of that (and the folks above as well) makes sense, thanks. I legit wasn’t sure why it all worked out as it has. I have to admit that I probably get it wrong a lot in my own writing and that gets quietly fixed by my assistants.
(Also why I was a little embarrassed to ask them for the explanation – I really didn’t want to know just how often I actually do screw it up 🙂 )
@Kylopod:
There are a fair number of songs that I like, but disagree with. The one that pops into mind first is one by Howard Jones (I forget the title, but I first heard it on Miami Vice). It sounds like it’s a creep song about a serial killer. When I finally read the lyrics, I found out it’s about vegetarianism.
Odd Girl Out was a band I did a lighting gig for once (Anne DeChant actually went on to be rather successful). Great music, but so bleeding-heart liberal that I just ignore the lyrics and enjoy the tune. (to be fair, I think they were all liberal-arts college students when I saw them).
@Kylopod: I try to find the most ferocious music I can to propel workouts that I really shouldn’t be doing at 45. It always winds up being testosterone-drenched Eminem and DMX etc. If I paid attention to the lyrics I’d be too put-off to workout. 😀
(I defy anyone to find a more intense song than this around 1:28)
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/07/vaccinated-america-breaking-point-anti-vaxxers/619539/?scrolla=5eb6d68b7fedc32c19ef33b4
Vaccinated has had enough. Good essay by David Frum. One small snippet:
In the United States, this pandemic could’ve been over by now, and certainly would’ve been by Labor Day. If the pace of vaccination through the summer had been anything like the pace in April and May, the country would be nearing herd immunity. With most adults immunized, new and more infectious coronavirus variants would have nowhere to spread. Life could return nearly to normal.
Experts list many reasons for the vaccine slump, but one big reason stands out: vaccine resistance among conservative, evangelical, and rural Americans. Pro-Trump America has decided that vaccine refusal is a statement of identity and a test of loyalty.
In April, people in counties that Joe Biden won in 2020 were two points more likely to be fully vaccinated than people in counties that Donald Trump won: 22.8 percent were fully vaccinated in Biden counties; 20.6 percent were fully vaccinated in Trump counties. By early July, the vaccination gap had widened to almost 12 points: 46.7 percent were fully vaccinated in Biden counties, 35 percent in Trump counties. When pollsters ask about vaccine intentions, they record a 30-point gap: 88 percent of Democrats, but only 54 percent of Republicans, want to be vaccinated as soon as possible. All told, Trump support predicts a state’s vaccine refusal better than average income or education level.
@EddieInCA: The correlation between politics and vaccination rates is especially striking when you consider that there is one countervailing factor that probably reduces the effect to some degree: the fact that Covid has the greatest effect on the elderly. That’s an age group that’s likeliest to be conscious of their health, but it’s also the most conservative age group in the country, and the one with the largest contingent of hardcore right-wingers parroting talking points from Fox. Young people, on the other hand, who vote Democrat the most of any age group, tend to be less worried about their health–partly because that’s always true about young people in general, but also because of the perception that Covid is a disease of the old.
Of course none of this is universally true–there are plenty of young right-wingers in the country, and there are plenty of young people dying from Covid or suffering debilitating long-term effects from the disease. I’m just saying that I’m sure there are many young people avoiding the vaccines simply out of indifference rather than politics, and that there are many old people regardless of politics getting the vaccines simply because they’re under strong pressure to do so from their doctors, and the correlation between politics and vaccination rates would probably be even stronger if not for these factors.
The Delta variant has changed that calculus. The avg age of a covid patient today is much lower than it was in March/April 2020.
I read an article this morning that I’m trying to find again to post here, because it might have something to do with the sudden turnaround by many conservative elites in regards to vaccines.
The article stated that DeSantis beat Gillum for the FL Governors race by 11K votes. Currently Florida has about 35K deaths from Covid, and of the 35K deaths, they’ve gone about 80%-20% GOP to Dems, based on public records. That means approx 28K GOP voters and 7K Dem voters. That right there is a 21K net GOP loss of voters in a state that often has razor thin margins. I’m guessing the polling is similar in PA, Michigan, WI, AZ, MO. GA and OH. So it’s all hands on decks from purely a survival standpoint (no pun intended). I’ll come back and post it when I find it, but it had interesting data, all from public records.
IMO, the primary reasons for this are relentless propagandizing by FOX News and the other Conservamedia also Evangelical pastors – so peer pressure in communities where these are prevalent.
Fox does not care about people getting sick or GOP politicians losing elections, as riling up the rubes is a great way to goose ratings, what Fox really cares about.
@OzarkHillbilly: That may be (although–and correct me if I’m wrong–it still remains true that the majority of people dying from Covid are elderly), but I was talking on a broader scale about the relationship between how people voted in 2020 and how often they are vaccinated. This is something that’s remained pretty consistent, even before the rise of the Delta variant.
Mean-spirited thought but really not practical or viable to implement.
My guess this latest surge is escalating so fast it will run out of victims and burn itself out by Thanksgiving – but will do plenty of damage by then.
I’m not sure it’s only politics.
this week France passed a law requiring vaccination certificates, or negative COVID tests in order to access restaurants and bars, and other places, starting in August.
The announcement of this law prompted a record number of people to register for vaccination. Of course there were also protests against it, and no doubt there will be a boom in fake certificates.
You can’t do the same in the federalized US system. Sure, proof of vaccination could be required for all air travel, as well as for commercial interstate travel, but that own’t affect all vaccine holdouts.
How about a daily fine for each day an elegible person, without a compelling and valid medical impediment, is not vaccinated? The fine could stop at the moment an appointment is booked, then restarted if the person involved does not show up. Naturally it would also restart if they delay or avoid the second dose.
I don’t think the law would allow insurers for refusing to cover COVID treatments if an elegible patient is not vaccinated.
@Kathy: The relationship between Covid and politics isn’t the same in every country–look at Israel for example, where the right-wing government took it quite seriously.
@Kylopod: I googled younger people becoming sick with delta variant and came up with a number of articles all saying some variation of(headline wise)
Young, unvaccinated people are being hospitalized with Covid-19 as delta variant spreads, officials warn
I suspect fewer of these younger healthier patients are dying in comparison to older cohorts, but there are more of them ending up in the hospital than in times past. Even still, considering the fact that we have no idea of the full effects of long covid, it is concerning.
@OzarkHillbilly: Thank you. It also relates to what I was talking about before: how a lot of young people avoid the vaccines because they think Covid is a disease of the old. Even with the original virus this was a foolish stance to take (apart from the issue of getting it oneself there was also the issue of spreading it to other unvaccinated individuals), but it has also predisposed much of the public to continue thinking of it as an old person’s disease, despite that being increasingly less the case as time goes on.
@Kylopod:
Exactly, But there seems to be a great deal of vaccine refusal the world over as well.
@OzarkHillbilly:
The original strain and the earlier variants has plenty of targets available. Now with vaccination they have fewer. So the variants that will prosper, and hence dominate, can either evolve to break through the vaccine immunity, which is not easy*, or to better infect the remaining targets available, which is far easier.
There’s also the matter of opportunity. Viruses lack both metabolism and mobility. They’re randomly carried where the host organism, in this case H. sapiens, takes them. younger people tend to gather more in groups of their peers (how many lone teens do you see at the mall?), therefore one infected youngster with a variant that’s good at infecting their kind, is more likely to find other hosts to spread into, many of whom are unvaccinated.
Now, it’s true that the more a virus circulates the more likely it is to evolve into variants. That said, not all variants are worse, as regards us humans, than the original. But the lower-performing variants tend to die off earlier. America, despite having the most confirmed cases of any country, has not produced any of the more dangerous variants.
Two concerning variants, Gamma and Delta, were first identified in Brazil and India, two other countries in the running for most confirmed cases.
*In particular soon after vaccination. Not only does the virus have to contend with B cells and T cells tailored to attack it, but also to lots and lots of antibodies that fit its spike proteins very well.
Unfckingbelievable 10 sec video:
Broken shoulder, broken ribs, and he still got up and went into the pub for a pint.
@Kylopod: Stephen Jay Gould, who was Jewish, did an essay about how much he enjoyed Wagner, not so much despite Wagner being a raging anti-semite, but aside from it. He was all for set aside the politics and enjoy the music
@gVOR08: Can’t possibly resist posting this.
I personally make a distinction between artists who happened to hold bigoted views on the side and those whose works contain those views. Eric Clapton may be a racist, but the music he’s famous for isn’t. I think what makes Wagner a touchy subject for a lot of Jews is how much his music was promoted by the Nazis. Chopin was also an anti-Semite, but nobody seems to care because it doesn’t have that historical association.
In a surprise to absolutely no one who has paid even the slightest bit of attention to the American legal system, Tom Barrack has been released on bail.
If I have to move soon, and I might, I’m thinking Eugene, OR.
1) cost of living only 5.3% higher than national avg, compared with Portland at 30% higher, Seattle 72% higher, Denver 29% higher, Boulder 70% higher.
2) college town
3) west coast
4) 1 hr to the Pacific
5) 2 hrs to downtown Portland
6) will probably be Florida temperatures by the time I retire.
It’s got a nice mix of characteristics.
@Teve: I lived in Eugene for a while. I liked it. Lots and lots of hippies. I always thought if I moved back to Oregon, I would try to move back to one of the smaller towns/communities between Eugene, the coast, and Coos Bay.
Find Out Friday:
Rick Dennison out as Minnesota Vikings assistant after refusing COVID-19 vaccine, sources say
@Teve:
47 inches of annual rainfall too, so it’s not about to turn into a desert or burn down like some places.
@Mu Yixiao:
It seems to be a Brit thing, not just BBC. The UK Defense Science and Technology Laboratory refers to themselves always as Dstl.
@Kylopod:
There’s a similar phenomenon where songs that use Christian terminology or imagery are misinterpreted by listeners as being religious in intent, even when they very much aren’t. Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” is probably the poster child for this one, with “Take Me to Church” a close second.
@Teve:
My best friend from HS lives in Eugene. We refer to it as “Yevgeny” 🙂
It has many wonderful features (you left off proximity to amazing local wines) but it is relentlessly damp. Every time I have visited there, everything I owned was musty within 3 days. I say this as someone who lives in a notably humid place already.
@Teve: @OzarkHillbilly:
Ah, c’mon over to the camp I’m detained in, Ozark. All the murthering scum are there! Besides, we have cookies!
@flat earth luddite: I would never join a camp that would have me, but the right kind of cookies might make me rethink that policy.
@DrDaveT: Hey! Don’t leave out “One Toke Over the Line!” It even specifically has Jesus and Mary, both, in it. How much more Christian can you get than that?
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
I love that song. Now I have to go listen to it.
@Jax: a friend in the bay area texted me to say that Eugene was full of hippies. I wonder what the job situation is like?
Really what I’m looking for is
1) west coast
2) college town
3) not exorbitant cost of living like Portland or Seattle
4) decent enough job market
@Teve: There are a LOT of hippies and homeless, I’m not gonna lie. That’s why if I were going to move back I would triangulate between Eugene, the coast, and Coos Bay. I would actually prefer Coos Bay, but their job market is not what Eugene’s is. Maybe as far south as Medford. That’s my ideal climate and kind of people I’m willing to deal with if I had to get a job where I dealt with people.
Here’s what I don’t get: Somewhere, somewhen, someone looked at this and said to themselves, “Mmmmm mmmmm, Doesn’t this look yummy? I just gotta try it!”
eta: forgot where I was and put this in the talk to trump voters thread. sigh…
@OzarkHillbilly:
No, actually, what they said to themselves was “We are starving. This is the only maize we have left. We either eat it, and die, or we don’t eat it, and die.” The “holy sh!t that’s delicious” was an unexpected bonus, which might still have ended up with “… but we die anyway.”
@DrDaveT: yeah, the only reason we know what lobster tastes like is because for some prehistoric dude, the choice was Eat Giant Sea Bug or Die.
@Teve:
Well, lobsters and insects are both arthropods, so…
Why isn’t Steve Scalise also pissed about the nursing home deaths in RED states?
https://republicans-oversight.house.gov/release/scalise-where-is-the-justice-for-nursing-home-victims-their-grieving-families/
@Kylopod:
I believe it was due to an AP style sheet update a year or so back. Most pro media outlets follow their guidelines.
Don’t hold with it myself. I think lower case black and white is more appropriate. YMMV.
I was dating a reporter at the Des Moines Register before she got downsized out of her job and she had to move to Minneapolis. AP stylebook was gospel. My understanding from her is that it is the standard industry wide.
@Kylopod:
Maybe Morrissey. Or Eric Clapton. Kid Rock.
@Teve:
Missoula is a fine town worthy of being in the mix.