Sunday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Sunday, October 22, 2023
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29 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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Entertain me, dammit!
Woman returns from vacation to find family home mistakenly demolished
Yeah, working hard to resolve the mishap by ignoring the victim.
@OzarkHillbilly: This kind of thing wasn’t unheard of during the foreclosure crisis of a decade back. A company would be hired to trash out a foreclosed home and do the wrong the house.
Man captures ‘weird anomaly’ of Storm Babet lifting forest floor in Scotland (video)
It is more than a little unsettling..
@Bill Jempty: Yeah, I remember reading of a couple such instances.
@OzarkHillbilly:
That IS bizarre. I wonder what caused it.
@OzarkHillbilly: Whoa! That looks like trees with very shallow roots are on the verge of being blown over in the wind – he should have gotten the hell away from them!
It took a few days, but Trump has denied Sidney Powell was ever his attorney.
@MarkedMan:
Yeah, it looks like badly laid turf carpeting.
@CSK:
So the Cheeto just let a stranger sit in on oval office meetings with his top advisors, and then tried to get her appointed special counsel so she’d go away?
@MarkedMan: Yeah, especially since the trees at the top of the frame are tipping appropriately when the turf rises.
@OzarkHillbilly:
@Bill Jempty:
In the same vein as LEO’s raiding the wrong house, terrorizing the children, killing the family dog and maybe any adults around.
@CSK: @Kathy: It isn’t a wholly new claim. During the 2020-1 interim period, the Trump team did start to distance themselves from Powell and claim she wasn’t part of their legal team, though it was reported that she continued to have private meetings with Trump even after she had been supposedly dropped.
What will be fun is if Trump starts to cite attorney-client privilege (which wouldn’t apply in this circumstance anyway) even though it undercuts the claim that she was never his attorney. Internal coherence was never one of his strong points.
@OzarkHillbilly: Think how unsettling this is for MacBeth as Birnham woods move toward Dunsinane.
@Kylopod:
It’s time for whoever owns and leases back the company now, to launch Cheeto-flavored Jell-O.
@Kylopod:
Wasn’t that around the same time Powell started threatening everyone with visions of The Kraken rising?
Ach, that’s what lawyers are for, and boy does he need some new lawyers.
@OzarkHillbilly:
If I were his lawyer I would 1) charge a retainer large enough to buy a small town, 2) not do a lick of work until it was paid, 3) advise him to plead diminished capacity (it is very likely true in any case) to get a good deal, 4) tell him to get another lawyer once he rejects my very sensible advice.
@CSK:
Yeah. And claiming among other things that Hugo Chavez was somehow involved. I think the Trump team realized that her claims were so out there it wasn’t helping them. Earlier this year DeSantis tried to use Powell’s claims as a sort of strawman enabling him to split the difference on election denialism:
When it comes to figures like Powell or Rudy or Lindell, it’s not easy figuring out their true motives. Do they actually believe what they’re saying? Are they really that insane? Or are they simply con artists who are consciously targeting people they see as the most gullible portions of the populace? Powell flipping would suggest she’s ready to admit she lied. But if that’s the case, what was her endgame? Did she really think she was helping Trump’s efforts to overturn the election? Or was she simply using the platform as a means of boosting her flagging career by becoming a right-wing celebrity?
I don’t think we’ll ever know for sure what’s going on in the heads of such people.
@Kylopod: Over at LGM Scott Lemieux quotes NYT quoting Lawrence Tribe taking a shot at explaining Chesebro. Tribe was something of a mentor and they worked together on Bush v Gore.
@gVOR10: I don’t know much about Chesebro, though I know there’s a fairly long list of former Dems in Trumpworld–including Michael Cohen, Michael Flynn, Peter Navarro, Lin Wood, and Kari Lake.
Each of these folks has different stories of the paths they went down. Cohen was Trump’s “fixer” for a long time, even back when Trump himself identified as a Dem, and after Trump’s rise to power he just went along for the ride without ever really changing his political affiliation. Navarro was a Dem during Bill Clinton’s presidency, and he started to shift around the 2010s or so due to going down a protectionist/nationalist rabbit hole.
In a lot of these cases, though, I think a big thing that pushed these people to the right was a love of conspiracy theories.
@Kylopod:
There’s a section Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, by Sagan and Druyan, where they narrate the inner dialogues of chimpanzees, as best they can make them fit observed behavior.
I’ve no idea why I brought this up just now.
@Kathy: Many years ago I saw a Jane Goodall documentary in which she depicted a group of chimps doing a violent coup against their leader. As she filmed the dying chimp king, she went into an extended monologue on what the creature was thinking and feeling at that moment.
I know Goodall is one of the most beloved scientists in the world, and I’m not some hard-nosed “Animals can’t think!” skeptic. That said, I think she was going way beyond the evidence and engaging in some pretty bold anthropomorphism.
It’s an easy trap to fall into.
@OzarkHillbilly:..It’s an easy trap to fall into.
Yeah. Especially when your cat can drive.
My Coffee Cathedral, the local Panera, is closed for the second day in a row. When I arrived there yesterday the parking lot entrance was blocked off and the place was dark inside. Turns out the underground water line that has been leaking in the grass just beyond the parking lot and been visible for at least a week finally turned into a small river. There is now a crater in the center of the parking lot traffic lane the size of a small car where the pipe burst. When I talked to the manager at the door yesterday he said he hoped that they would be open today (Sunday) at 9am. I drove by there at about 11:30 this morning and saw a digging machine sitting on a trailer behind a dump truck. No repairs have been made yet.
Fortunately the Church of St. Panera has a congregation 12 miles east. I can still get my communion mud and worship the universe of the internet for as long as I want with the My Panera card that I carry. It feels good to belong.
Trump wanted Melania to prance around Mar-a-Lago in a bikini so all the males guest would drool over her and be wildly envious of Trump owning such a spectacular piece of ass.
Oh well.
Rugby World Cup semi final yesterday ended England 15-16 South Africa.
But my word, it was close. England played really well, and dominated most of the game.
But, kept getting penalties in the scrums, kicked away possession trying for territory (bad tactics in pouring rain), so that they led only 15-13 at the 75th minute.
Gave away a penalty in a scrum at near the half way line, Handre Pollard kicked an amazing penalty over from that distance at minute 77, and it was South Africa ahead one point with just two and half minutes remaining.
So, the final will be New Zealand versus South Africa.
Prediction: unless the Springboks can up their game, the Kiwis will tear them apart.
OTOH, the South Africans just refuse, ever, to give up.
A match to look forward to.
I don’t ussualy link to Xitter, but this time it’s the lesser evil.
It seems Biden has more followers than El Cheeto in Benito’s own social network.
The numbers for both seem too small.