Saturday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Saturday, June 12, 2021
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77 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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I’d like to say, “Only in Russia” but Florida is tapping me on the shoulder saying, “Hold muh beer. Watch this!”
A new set of polls from Pew about perceptions of America is out.
Too bad the Democrats can’t make the EU into several states.
Greg Abbott putting the ass in Texas: Texas will build a wall along its border with Mexico, governor says
They could spend this money on Medicaid expansion, or maybe winterizing their electrical infrastructure, or possibly actually educating their children, but no, instead Texans will be treated to a billion dollar series of xenophobic performances in court rooms for at least a decade. And they will probably vote for more of it.
@OzarkHillbilly:
They should also apportion money for ladder insurance.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Red meat for the GOP base, he thinks he has a shot at the GOP 2024 Presidential nomination.
Also, trying to outflank Ron DeSantis.
US vaccine surplus grows by the day as expiration dates loom
I kinda doubt t rump has given permission.
@Kathy:
I think Rick Perry said that if you build a 20 foot wall, there’ll be a boom in 30 foot ladder production.
@OzarkHillbilly: Would it Shock you to learn that Texas is in the bottom quintile of educational attainment?
(For any Texan readers, that means bottom one-fifth. 😀 )
@CSK:
Come to think of it, an investment in ladder futures would make more sense. After all, if Texas submits insurance claims for every instance of ladder use, their premiums would go sky high.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Trump will be too demented by then to deny him, in a wheelchair at best, or bedridden and inarticulate more likely.
@Teve: Would it surprise you that the Texas State Board of Education picks the textbooks for our country?*
*well, a whole lot of our country at least.
@charon: We can dream anyway.
Speaking of Trump, he claims he’s turned down two offers from publishers for a book, because he’s working on “a much more important project right now.” But nonetheless, he’s “writing like crazy,” and when he’s finished it will be “the book of all books.”
No word on who the publishers he rejected might be.
Teen who recorded Floyd’s arrest, death wins Pulitzer nod
@CSK: In other words, nobody want to ghost write it for him. I’ll bet Lindsey Graham is available.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Several hundred authors and people in publishing signed an open letter last January begging the industry not to give Trump and whoever his ghost might be a book contract.
Trump is said to be quite jealous of the multimillion dollar deal Pence got. I’m sure he’s seething with resentment.
@CSK: He’ll get a deal eventually, some RW publisher will do it. I suspect the hangup right now is money. Nobody thinks tfg’s memoir is worth anywhere near what he thinks it is, especially when the only people who’d buy it have spent all their excess dollars on ammo.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Regnery might do it, since they picked up Josh Hawley’s book after Simon and Schuster canceled it in the aftermath of January 6. But sure, if Trump wants 70 million, to top Obama’s 60 million, he won’t get it.
@CSK: Yeah, they will, for the right money. What does every RW publisher love far more than trump? Profits.
ps: is regnery the one publishing Pence’s book? I haven’t been paying much attention to it.
@OzarkHillbilly:
No, Simon and Schuster offered Pence a two-book contract.
Oddly, S&S does the distribution for Regnery.
@OzarkHillbilly:
All publishers love profits.
Even as Covid winds down we keep having problems. One of my advanced practice nurses has become a vocal anti-vaxxer. Ha been spreading the idea that the vaccine will magnetize you. Had to pull him into the office to remind him that it what it really has is micro-chips sending information to Bill Gates.
Steve
@CSK: What is more, all publishers love profits more than trump.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Oh, absolutely.
@steve:
But what about that 5G coverage?
@steve: put money on the table. Get a neodymium magnet and pull out a $100 and ask him if he’d like to wager $100 that the magnet will jump up 1/4″ and attach to the underside of your forearm.
My long history as a math tutor showed me that if there is a way to put a math problem in terms of money, people immediately become much smarter.
@OzarkHillbilly: If only Nikolai Gogol was still alive!
BTW, is being magnetic bad? It might come in handy if you were working with lots of small screws and nuts.
@Slugger:
I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the iron present in our bodies has always been magnetic.
@Teve:
Yes! Thinking in bets. Skin in the game. Specific predictions. These bring so much clarity to opinions, discussions, etc. And yet it is so very rare to see such things. I wonder why…
I’m trying to get some tips on how to paint my stove which got damaged in a grease fire. (Alcohol may have been involved, but we should look forward, not back). And I made the mistake of trying to do it on my work computer. And it reminded me that without ad blocking most of the internet is unusable. After I click the fourth auto-play pop-up ad out of the way I’m not going to keep trying to read your site, I’m going to leave.
@OzarkHillbilly:
There have been occasions where ghostwriters would work for loathsome people, but on the very strict condition that a) they get a lot of money and b) that their names appear nowhere in connection with the book.
I was amused that Trump allowed Tony Schwartz’s name to be on the cover of The Art of the Deal, and even more amazed that Trump paid Schwartz so well, but apparently The Former Guy’s only concern was that his own name appear in BIG GOLD LETTERS on the dust jacket.
@OzarkHillbilly:
For the record: the Social Security Administration wrongfully declares about 14,000 people dead every year, it takes months to correct, and causes all sorts of problems even afterward because you keep getting accounts at private businesses randomly closed because your name is circulating around on privately compiled “these people are dead” lists.
Social Security wrongly declares 14,000 people dead each year
@Stormy Dragon:
As a side note, this is also why things like mandating e-Verify are a terrible idea. Even if there’s a tiny false positive rate, that leads to potentially millions of people being banned from being able to work.
LOLOL
@Teve:
What goes around, comes around. This is what you get when you cater to “the base.”
@OzarkHillbilly: And they will probably vote for more of it.
Other than the lives of my family, I would bet anything on it.
@CSK: That, Regnery, or someone like them, will print it. And they’ll sell a lot of copies, most in bulk to be handed out at rallies and conventions.
@gVOR08:
All this depends on whether the ghostwriter can get Trump to sit still long enough to interview him.
@CSK:
I thought the adult coloring book fad had passed.
On the other hand, if El Cheeto publishes a book (we know he won’t write it), he’ll expect the RNC and others to buy millions of copies of it, because if they don’t exist to enrich him and stroke his ego, what good are they?
@Kathy:
Indeed. Although to be fair to Trump–and I hate being fair to Trump–he won’t be the only
politician whose memoir gets bought in bulk and handed out like party favors at conventions and such. Publishers know that, and not only expect it, but encourage it.
I used to use Goodreads just for a quick summary, but now that I have an account on the site it’s really fantastic and I can organize the stuff I want to read, which used to sit in a neglected text file on my phone.
For a change of pace, news from the nation of FG’s BFF.
@OzarkHillbilly: The thing I can’t figure out is that when I was younger, Del Rio was a big agricultural area (grapefruit were grown there in addition to other crops). How is Abbot’s announcement good news here? Do grapefruit pick, sort, and box themselves now? Will people crossing the border legally work for a lower piecework rate than illegal crossers to? I’m not seeing the bottom line here.
@CSK: Well, they could be Moonhak and Scholastic, but I suspect that they’re far more prestigious publishers.
@OzarkHillbilly: Ask yourself, do you really want a book with your name on it ghosted by Lindsey Graham?
@Just nutha ignint cracker: My attempt to duplicate the coding failed. Here’s the link as hot: https://www.jacketflap.com/moonhak-soochup-publishing-co-ltd-publisher-26814.
It’s always great to have one’s priors confirmed by “experts”. So I loved this piece about how misinformation works these days from two professors of the philosophy of science:
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
I don’t think Moonhak actually publishes anything. Or was that your point? 😀
https://thebulwark.com/thucydides-on-partisanship-insurrection-and-the-risks-of-civil-war/
@Teve:
An ad-blocker. A cookie-manager. And in my case, a piece of JavaScript that runs against almost all pages I download that forces font family and font sizes into a small number of values. It makes everything look much tidier and more consistent. I started writing it one day years back when I had encountered a larger than usual number of sites that made you want to find the designer and ask, “Did you study ugly and unreadable at school, or are you just naturally gifted that way?”
@Stormy Dragon: Who do I have to pay to be declared dead? Just think of all the bills, lawsuits, and warrants I can ignore if I’m dead!
@Michael Cain: I used to run all those, the problem is I now only use an iPad and a cell phone, and it’s much more inconvenient to fix those problems. You can’t run plugins on iPad browsers for instance.
It’s just that today I’m at a remote office and wanted to use the nice big screen at my desk so I opened up chrome and searched for a few things and dear god. Half the pages I encountered I just wound up closing before I even tried to read any more. The text keeps jumping downwards because you’re loading multiple auto play videos in multiple directions? Fuck your website.
@Kathy: A couple weeks ago there was a letter to my local FL semi-pro newspaper bemoaning how no one overseas respects America under Biden, not like how everyone loved us under Trump. Since the Pew report came out I haven’t quite convinced myself it’s worth a letter to them. Data never seems to make any dent, but I guess I should try.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: Forest, trees, all that.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: I don’t want a book with my name on it. But we aren’t talking about me, we’re talking about trump and I doubt he thinks about anything that deeply.
@Teve: the really shitty thing is that one company is responsible for the persistence of that garbage. If Google put out a press release tomorrow saying that all web pages with autoplay video and pop-ups were going to be immediately deprecated to the second page of search results, 3 hours later there wouldn’t be a single page with that shit on it anymore. But Google makes money selling those ads so that’ll never happen.
@gVOR08:
Those of us with direct familial connections to overseas could have told you that was horseshit before the Pew poll came out… 😉
@gVOR08:
they did love them some Orange Turd in Russia, North Korea, and assorted other third-world dictatorships, just like they’d like the US to be.
@Michael Cain:
So, is this package available from your on-line store? How much —-no no no, I don’t really care what the price is! Sold to the Luddite!
@CSK: Moonhak was the publisher in Korea for the Eric Carle illustrated books that I used reading to preschool and Kindergarteners while I was there–Today is Monday, Brown Bear, Brown Bear and the others. I probably should have tried to connect to the Bandi and Luni’s bookstore webpage for a better link (with pictures of the books), but I just saw they’re going banko. So sad… 🙁
ETA: And Moonhak may well NOT publish anything anymore. I’ve been gone for 6 years now. (Good point.)
@OzarkHillbilly: “…we’re talking about trump…”
Point taken. —
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
I just looked at the site very quickly, but it seems to be a clearing house for connecting Kidlit and YA authors with publishers.
Speaking of international affairs and reputation, it seems a major subplot at the G7 has been various foreign leaders telling PM Johnson that it’s about time to get his act together and fulfill the UK’s agreements with the EU.
Even got ambushed by Pierre Trudeau, LOL.
However, afterwards Johnson doubles down again.
Either this is just BS for the base, or we’re heading for a real row with both the EU and the US.
It appears clear that Macron is about done, and even the phlegmatic Merkel is showing signs of getting weary with it.
And I suspect President Biden is not best pleased about distractions from his key agenda (climate and China) by Johnson’s antics. Especially when Washington issued a clear warning pre-summit, and the Conservatives are now trying to downplay it as “nothing much really, storm in teacup, US isn’t really onside with Brussels.”
Twits.
@JohnSF:
Pierre Trudeau’s been dead since 2000. I assume you mean Justin? 😀
@CSK:
Oopsie.
Though at this rate Trudeau Snr. rising from the grave to slap Johnson’s silly head wouldn’t surprise me that much.
@Kathy: And if I point out they love Biden in Europe, it’ll be because Biden’s a pushover while they didn’t like Trump because they feared his America First machismo.
@gVOR08:
Interestingly, I’ve read quite a few reports out of Europe (didn’t bookmark them, sorry) indicating that in some ways Biden is rather peturbing some European govts.
WRT Russia, Biden\Blinken\State seem relatively relaxed re. Russia: it’s an irritant, not a real challenger.
Contain it and it will wither on the vine.
And there’s no point escalating Nordstream; it’s virtually a done deal, and does it really matter if Russian gas gets to western Europe bypassing Ukraine? Ukraine can be secured in other ways.
And US also seems to have relegated Mid-East to a second tier issue.
But what has raised eyebrows: Biden is NOT reverting to the “neutral umpire” default stance of Obama and Bush 2 and Clinton and Bush 1.
This administration appears deadly serious about constructing systems of counter-pressure re. China.
And expects Europe to get on board.
This may lead to some tensions with Berlin: Germans hate interference with trading relations; and it’s difficult to disentangle self-interest from “all will be well if only we all have happy tradings” of varying degrees of sincerity (a long term theme in German foreign policy).
Also London, where the recipients of China’s “generous assistance” bank the proceeds of their side-deals, while loading their countries with debt on loan-shark terms.
Biden is NOT the “placeholder President” some Europeans naively expected.
@gVOR08: so, Trump was tough with our allies and Kissyface with Russia and North Korea, whereas Biden is the opposite, huh?
OK. Guess I voted correctly.
Also: the question of the stashing of the ill gotten gains of China deals is probably another reason why Chancellor Sunak was ill-advised to suggest a exemption from G7’s global taxation regime for the City.
London appears determined to tread on Washington’s toes lately.
Unwise.
@flat earth luddite:
It’s a GreaseMonkey script that works on Firefox. I haven’t tried it in any other environments. I keep thinking I should put it up at Greasy Fork or such, but haven’t for whatever reason. If you’re really interested, I can put a copy of the source code up where you can download it.
@steve:
Let me guess — this is someone who is completely OK with injecting people full of gadolinium for their contrast MRIs?
Ugh. It makes me so upset that we Democrats just haven’t shaped our message properly. This is So our fault.
@Teve:
In some respects it seems Biden is being quite tough with allies: the message “playtime is over” re. China is being delivered to London and Berlin.
The difference is this administration is not the flailing incoherent, Russia-cringe chaos that Trump’s was.
Rule #1: If you are serious about China, don’t piss down the legs of South Korea and Japan.
Related #2: If concerned about China developing leverage of economic coercion, don’t flounce out of the TPP to throw chum to the boobs. (Also, thanks a lot Bernie. Twit.)
@steve:
I had my second (Astra Zeneca) jab a few weeks ago.
Upper arm is still painful from time to time.
Unfortunately, Magneto superpowers still not activated.
Also, Alexa and Siri keep arguing about which I should be linking to via 5G telepathy.
Modern life, eh?
That’s the Spirit of the Age.
How could we Democrats have changed our messaging to reach the drivers of those cars? Obviously this is a big communications failure on our part.
@CSK: The site, I think, was for Jacket Flap–which appears to be such a clearing house. It provided a link to Moonhak Soochup that showed that they had gotten the rights to produce a Korean translation of Harry Potter books. That was as close as I could get to Moonhak’s website. Still, if Bandi and Luni’s has gone banko, it may be hard times for Korean commercial publishing. There is still Kyobo Books, though. Other than Kyobo and Bandi, though, I don’t recall ever having seen a book store, per se, while I was in Korea. There were bookstores that sold the schoolbooks that students use. and a few used/collector bookshops here and there, but nothing on the scale of independent book sellers here.
More money than the mining companies were offering.
The url pretty much summarizes the article, in Yoda speak…
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9671693/Soldier-swastika-tattooed-testicle-jailed-19-months-breaching-Austrias-Nazi-laws.html