Saturday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Saturday, December 3, 2022
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53 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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C’mon USA men’s national soccer team! Might be an early morning beverage in hand kind of day. So excited.
Apple is ramping up efforts to diversify away from China.
My, my, my, pretty quiet over here in the morning, innit? Good morning, everyone. Got an early start on my coffee and Gurkha as the cats insisted that 6am was time to get up. Cold but pretty up here in Puddletown, with a cold breeze blowing out of the Gorge.
@Flat Earth Luddite: what is Gurkha?
This whole saga gets weirder and weirder. From Salon via Rawstory:
http://www.rawstory.com/trumps-dinner-2658825050/
@MarkedMan:
A Gurkha is a Nepalese soldier in the Indian army. Also a knife they use.
@CSK:
If this keeps up and Benito keeps getting splattered with his own filth, the GQp will claim Democrats are against eating dinner.
Five years ago at the end of 2017, the Dow Jones was just under 25,000. Now it is over 34,000. This seems like a decent growth to me. GDP growth is back on track, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDPC1 . Yet the news is full of gloom. Is bad news just more interesting?
@CSK: Those I knew about. But unless Luddite typically eats breakfast while playing numbly-peg with soldiers from the Raj I think he meant something else…
@clarkontheweekend: We lost 3-1. But the Dutch were very good. Today was the best US team I’ve seen in the field. One bad mistake led to the 3rd Dutch goal. But other than that they were World Cup class
@MarkedMan:
Yeah, but I can’t figure out what.
@CSK:
Yes, the Dems did it through the Biden crime family, the details are all there on Hunter’s laptop.
@Kathy: @Sleeping Dog:
As far as I can tell, the MAGAs are blithely ignoring the whole story. Never happened, as far as they’re concerned.
@Slugger:
They’re disappointed that the Dow didn’t hit 36000.
The truth is the markets were wildly overvalued and have suffered a major correction, but they’re still a bit rich. The overvaluation can be blamed (but not exclusively) on an asset bubble caused by trump’s tax cuts and exacerbated by the huge amounts of Covid relief pumped into the economy. So investors have taken a loss of ~13-15% and they’re not happy. To add to the misery, the 10 year outlook for market valuation growth is now in the range of 4-5% while we saw growth of over 10% during the past decade.
As Krugman points out, the market isn’t the economy. The economy isn’t doing bad, see employment rates and wage growth, but is suffering from debilitating inflation, the cure for which is a likely recession.
EDIT: With regard to the Fed, there role is to keep inflation down and a booming economy where folks are spending money and companies are hiring, doesn’t help them achieve that goal.
@MarkedMan:
@CSK:
In my case, I got a deal on a smaller ring seegar that’s good for a winter smoke. Usually save this stuff for evening, but I was up early and didn’t want to go out for a sunrise photo shoot.
@Flat Earth Luddite:
A Gurkha is a cigar?
@Slugger:
Jerome Powell is openly trying to tank the economy, so we’re in a weird situation where good economic news is bad news because it means another round of sabotage.
Reappointing Jerome Powell is far an away Biden’s biggest mistake of his entire presidency.
@CSK:
In this yes, it’s a cigar. Although I’d be happy to have any local gurkas (or for that matter any OTB members in the area) join me for sunrise and a cup of coffee. Or at least what passes for coffee at Casa Luddite – Cracker can attest that what I drink is about a half a step short of unrefined crude oil. My fruffy drink is a four shot 20 oz latte or mocha
@Flat Earth Luddite:
Ah-ha! http://www.gurkhacigars.com
Glad we got that straightened out.
Uber and Lyft are allowing their evangelical Christian drivers to proselytize their passengers.
Talk about a captive audience.
@CSK:
Sounds like a reason to stiff them on the tip.
@Sleeping Dog:
Or jump out of the car, even if it’s going 65mph on Route 93 in Massachusetts. Or New Hampshire.
If anyone here enjoys a good lawyer letter, this one is *chef’s kiss*. Lawyers suing Elon Musk over his Twitter Follies.
@MarkedMan: @CSK: Gurkha is famous for making cigars of large ring-size. One of their products is 9-inches long and 80/64 inches in circumference, IIRC. Gurkha’s are also reputed by some to be the some of most expensive cigars in the world. It’s not unusual their price even at the discounter that Luddite and I buy from to be as high as $25 or $3o each, and one episode of The Glades had a character smoking Gurkha cigars that were over $100/each.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: Late to the game as usual. I will simply note that Luddite and I do not buy cigars from their Ultra Premium selections. Though I sure they are splendid cigars. (And worth a visit to that part of the website to see really primo examples of conspicuous consumption.)
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Ayup. $20 cigars and $50 scotch are out of Luddite’s budget. $2-5 cigars and $20-30 hooch are more in my range.
What this country really needs is a good five-cent cigar!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_R._Marshall#:~:text=Responding%20to%20Senator%20Joseph%20Bristow,books%20and%20his%20memoir%2C%20Recollections.
Aha! Cracker, my evil plan to run this thread off the rails has succeeded! Bwa ha hahahaha!
@Flat Earth Luddite:
Wait a minute. You can’t run an open forum off the rails. As the late Doug Mataconis was wont to observe, “You can’t be off-topic, because there IS no topic.”
@CSK:
Cars go 65 on I93, I thought the only allowable speeds were 35 (when not stopped) and 85.
I have to retract what I said upthread about the MAGAs blithely ignoring the saga of Donnie’s Dinner Party. Don Surber has informed them that it’s a smear, that no one has done more for Jews and Israel than Trump.
Trump wants the Constitution’s election rules to be voided, and for him to be declared the winner of 2020.
http://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-calls-termination-election-rules-191856676.html
@CSK:
I thought we were done with days that end in “y”
On other things, I just re-signed up to Netflix and began streaming Disenchantment. Great show. The bad thing is with Hell Week 1 going on at work, I’ll have to stream all ten eps by Monday if not sooner.
@Kathy:
Apparently Trump’s rationale for overturning the Constitution has something to do with Twitter and Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Peter Baker of the NYTimes says this is a dangerous new milestone, even for Trump. Baker observes that he “can’t think of a time when a former president (and would-be future president) has called for suspending the Constitution to let him seize power.”
Nah, they were happy as a clam with trump saying the quiets parts out loud, but now he’s getting trashed from both sides and so they are afraid to stick their necks out. Turns out their racist nirvana had a sell by date and now they are trying to bury it’s rotting carcass before the stench of it gets too bad.
Actually, I think they like that stench and just aren’t sure of how far they can go now.
@CSK: Good thing I don’t do Uber or Lyft. One or the other of us would not survive the ride.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Oh, I’m sure they were.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Same here.
@Jen: Beautiful, nothing like a sarcastic lawyer to put a MOTU in his place.
@CSK: trump is just pissed because he didn’t get to see Hunter’s dick pics.
@CSK:
@OzarkHillbilly:
@Sleeping Dog:
Come on, think of the potential for a little amusement.
Like my late father’s attempts to covert annoying Jehovahs’s Witnesses to the worship of Mithras:
😉
Dad had a twisted sense of humour at times.
@JohnSF: Bourbon MO has a 7th Day Adventist church. After services on Sundays they would go out and proselytize. One Sunday in July they made the mistake of knocking on my door. It was a mistake because it happened to be my birthday. Normally I would’ve just wordlessly closed the door in their faces. But this time, I decided that it being my birthday and all, I deserved a little treat After all, I’d been good all week (or at least what passes for good in my opinion). I spent the next hour plus arguing with them about the various parts of the bible. Not much proselytizing happened that day.
And oh yeah, my youngest made the mistake of talking to them once, and they kept coming back trying to save his soul. I was there when they came by once and they very politely asked my permission to talk to him. I gave them my blessing and muttered under my breath, “He got his ass into this, now he can get himself out of it. I ain’t gonna save him from them.”
Yeah, I was a real shit.
via Anne Laurie comes this little gem: The Year of Finding Out
.
My Freude has been thoroughly Schadened.
@OzarkHillbilly:
There are two things here that concern me. The first is that this is, even for Trump, an
extraordinary statement to make. The second is how the die-hard MAGAs interpret it. What kind of instructions will they read into Trump’s rant?
TBH, I stopped worrying about anything trump said* when Biden was sworn in. He’s not president and I really doubt he ever will be again.** The man is an absolute qanon whackjob and the more he speaks the less and less people listen, and that includes magas.***
* which is not to say some idiot maga with a martyr complex won’t grab his ar-15 with 100 round drum magazine and a bump stock and attempt to slaughter as many lieberals, blacks, muslims and jews that he can. That possibility will always exist, it’s just that if/when it does happen it is highly unlikely to directly impact me or any of mine. Regardless, it will still be horrible for those whom it does.
**My doubting it does not mean it can’t happen again, just that I have a limited # of worries I can tolerate at any one point in time, so I don’t even bother with the things I see as vanishingly small possibilities. DeSantis on the other hand… Well, not even him yet. If he gets the nomination, then I will worry.
*** Every week it seems like I see fewer trump flags than I did the week before. It won’t surprise me if in 10 years I still see a few, but they will be very far between.
PS: I am only talking about me and how I prioritize these things, you and most others will feel differently. I am not saying I am right and everybody else is wrong, there is no right or wrong when it comes to one’s feelings, worries, etc.
In today’s installment of the utter nothingburger known as Hunter Biden’s laptop, Russian apologist reporter Matt Taibbi put out a story, which the MAGA morons have blown up into bunch of hooey about how the Deep State conspired with Twitter to suppress Huge! Revelations! about what was found on said laptop.
Turns out the only thing one might or might not call huge is…Hunter Biden’s junk.
Wait, what?
Over at The Bulwark, Tim Miller takes all this bullshit apart in epic fashion.
No, You Do Not Have a Constitutional Right to Post Hunter Biden’s Dick Pic on Twitter
He relates some of the more breathless pronunciations of various Trumpist imbeciles, for example
then continues in some detail about the ins-and-outs (Ha!) of content moderation, and ends up where we all know this is: a gargantuan steaming pile of…nothing.
But hey, with inflation cooling and gas prices dropping toward the basement and record-low unemployment, what else do these morons have?
Indeed. The other afternoon I filled up my truck and took note of the price per gallon: $3.019. Then I took notice of something I hadn’t seen in a long long while: The lack of a Biden “I did this” sticker.
Gee… I wonder what happened to all those stickers?
@OzarkHillbilly: As for me, I won’t even worry about DeSantis (I just about wrote “DeSatanist” again 🙁 ). In the bigger picture, though my total situation is economically spare, I’m still white, living in an outpost of Red State ‘Murka (though the good citizens of the district DID vote for a Democrat over a “Murka First” MAGAt), have a small equity stake in the economy, and spent the previous 3 decades of my life living so modestly that my income is larger now than it was pre-retirement. There’s little that Republiquanism can do that will affect me, and even though I will feel sad for those who will suffer from DeSantis’ election, I can do little to change that situation. Every nation gets the government it deserves, and from what I’ve been seeing at other stops on our intellectual discursion today, we deserve a lot of what we may get. Even if we are liberal. 🙁
@One American: Yessss, my precious, inability to post Hunter Biden’s dick pics is deffffinitely going to bring America down. Youuuu are ssssoooo tallllented, and so preccciiiious, to see the truth. Please consssider the donnnnate button if you want to continue beeing a Paaatriot.
Jesus Fucking Christ, nobody cares about Hunter Biden. Or his dick pics. He’s not even part of the Biden Administration, he’s just a failson.
And if you really want to get jiggy with First Amendment violations, the guy who was actually President at the time, Donald J. Trump apparently also asked Twitter to take shit down. Maybe Don Jr and his cocaine binges? Surely not Eric. 😛 😛
@Just nutha ignint cracker: Yeah, I don’t see his shtick translating to the rest of America either. Mind you, I said the same about trump, so take my prognostications with the proverbial ton of salt. But I have much bigger worries on my horizons at the moment: Like, will my grand daughter win her weight class at the KC wrestling match??? Priorities mf’ers!
@One American: So… you want to see Hunter’s dick pics. You know, away back when, when I was still growing up (back when the first dirt was being laid down) we referred to other people’s genitals as their “private parts”. You know what we called people who wanted to see other folk’s private parts?
Take a guess…
Go ahead…
Perverts.
Today, y’all call them “groomers.”
Just a suggestion, stay far away from my granddaughters.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Well, as a friend said to me back when my daughter was that age, people like that aren’t a problem as long as you’ve got acreage and a backhoe. (Insert Snark emoji)
But although I’m not in Cracker’s economic strata, I don’t expect to be there for the “DeSatanist” term either
@Flat Earth Luddite: I have a little bit of acreage (12.57 acres) but the truth of the matter is, I know a whole lot of places in the hills and hollers that could never be found if one didn’t know where to look. So far, it has never been more than a niggling thought at the back of my brain, one I am not proud of and one I hope to never engage with.
Dawg willing and the creek don’t rise… Neither will I.
Tho, I saw/learned a couple things today that give me pause.
@MarkedMan:
The offense played well, should have scored at least one more goal given the opportunities they created.
The defense… was a disappointment. The first 2 Netherlands goals were scored from nearly identical crosses to the penalty spot, where there MUST be a defender. But wasn’t. The holding midfielders really screwed the pooch for the US on those plays.
Overall score, B+. Best possession play I’ve ever seen from a US team, good pressing defense, decent offense (minus the finishing). Excellent goalkeeping, adequate back line defense. The midfield defense was the difference.
@DrDaveT: 4 more years!!!!
Seriously, they will get better.
@OzarkHillbilly: Good point! I’ll root for her, too. No one can have too many fans!