Sunday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Sunday, February 25, 2024
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39 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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As I suspected, the ridiculous gold sneakers cost far more at auction due to scarcity (and stupidity):
This Man Paid $9,000 for a Pair of Donald Trump Sneakers
I’m not getting a good vibe from humanity lately.
@Jen: “There’s a sucker born every minute.”
See, if Lardass had any business sense, he’d have had his children, associates, flatterers, ass-kissers, and Lindsey Graham, buy all pairs of butt ugly sneakers, turn them over to him, and then sold them at an even higher markup on the secondary market through intermediaries he could stiff (such as his children, associets, etc.)
@Kathy: Hinestly, I assumed that was the grift in the first place
Just got a 400 Error message that OTB server could not recognize my request as it was too large. This happened during multiple attempts to connect over several minutes.
Connection is A-OK now.
@Mister Bluster: I get this regularly on Microsoft Edge after I visit OTB a certain number of times; then I have to wait a period of time (usually a few days) before it allows me back on. I get the same problem on Chrome. Fortunately, this hasn’t happened so far on Firefox (which is where I’m posting from now) or Safari (which is what I use on my iPhone).
Was Jonathon Turley always a complete lunatic? He published a column in The Hill referencing a murder that involved Biden’s great-great-grandfather and implied he got away with it, and it follows a family pattern. A law professor at GW law school published drivel like this! Here’s a link:
https://thehill.com/opinion/criminal-justice/4486580-before-joe-james-and-hunter-there-was-great-great-grandpa-moses/
I heard that the guy who used to cut Biden’s hair once hired a plumber whose second cousin got arrested for not paying his traffic tickets. Think about it.
@SenyorDave: Turley has been on the same path as Dershowitz for a while now, but I have to admit yesterday’s column reaches new heights–I seriously can’t figure out if he’s deliberately trolling at this point.
@Paul L.:
That’s the price we need to pay for having a President with total immunity for his actions while in the Oval Office.
@Paul L.:
Three quick questions, Paul.
1. Where do you find this stuff?
2. How do you get on these search responses?
3. What on earth are you smoking? I suspect your dealer is cutting it with PCP.
And Paul, I personally quit drinking Flav-Or-Aid before Jim Jones. Time to cut back, IMO
@Jen:
They are being bought as collectibles by people who will display them, not wear them.
I live in Mass., and I’ve never heard of this:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13109357/massachusetts-monsterland-leominster-ufos-bigfoot.html
@Kylopod:..400ERROR…
Thank you for the reply.
This is the first time that I recall seeing this message. Todays incident was on my iPhone using Safari. Fortunately the problem vanished in just a few minutes.
@CSK:
Well, it’s the Daily Mail and this all started when a guy walks into a bar…
I’d say music for the weekend, but it’s the animation in Fantasia 2000’s take on The Firebird Suite that’s really worth it.
@CSK:..Massachusetts Mystery…
The biggest Massachusetts Mystery to me is how the Dukakis presidential campaign in 1988 ever thought that this was a good idea.
I just realized (and posted in the moribund Burn it All Down thread) what the unifying principle of Evangelical “Christian” support for Trump is.
They take Trump, and the Bible, seriously but not literally.
“Seriously” as in “what I believe this stands for is important to me”
“Not literally” as in “what I believe this stands for has nothing to do with what it actually stands for”
Trump telling you to inject bleach to fight COVID is no different from Jesus telling you to love your enemies and treat everyone the way you would like to be treated. He didn’t really mean it, like, literally literally…
@Sleeping Dog:
Eastern Mass. is really a separate state from central (where Leominster is) and western Mass. Maybe a separate planet, if you go by what’s allegedly happening in Leominster.
@SenyorDave: Wake up, sheeple! The Biden crime family is still at it!
/yes, that’s sarcasm
@Mister Bluster:
Oh, yeah. I remember it well. Even people who loved Dukakis doubled over with laughter.
@CSK:
I remember it too though I was stationed at Subic Bay Philippines at the time (and often getting news 2-3 days after it happened) and didn’t even vote in 88 because my absentee ballot arrived 2 days after the election. There was a US senate runoff on October 4 just five weeks before that’s why.
For those keeping score at home, I voted for my then Congressman Dan Mica in the primary and would have supported Buddy McKay* in the runoff and general election if I’d gotten a ballot.
*- Voted for McKay when he ran for the Senate in 1980, and for Governor in 1998.
@Kylopod:
Did he spend time on Epstein’s Island too?
I do wonder about the causes and triggers of loathsomeification in general. It’s not just the horseshoe theory, as a lot of these people were never that lefty to begin with.
@Gustopher: I don’t know as much about Turley’s career as I do about Dersh. But Dersh was showing a load of red flags long before the Trump era, just most people weren’t paying attention. I personally think the breaking point for him was the breakdown of peace talks between Israel and Palestine, and the ensuing Second Intifada, something which pushed many Jews rightward.
Even there, though, what made Dersh stand out was the sliminess in how he revealed his shift. If he’d just come out and admitted that his politics had shifted to the right (like Ron Silver, the actor who played him in Reversal of Fortune, and a once-liberal who ended up speaking at the 2004 Republican Convention), that would have been one thing. You could disagree with him, but at least you’d know he was being honest where he stood.
Instead, he has continued to insist to this day that he’s still a liberal Democrat who backed Obama, Hillary, and Biden, and who only defends Trump (and Mike Lindell, and Kari Lake) because his unshakable commitment to civil liberties forces him to. It’s the most nauseatingly phony and self-righteous way he could have chosen to handle his transformation, and people like him (and Elon Musk, Tulsi Gabbard, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, and, yes, Jonathan Turley) are always useful in right-wing propaganda by providing their audience with the delusion that their beliefs are being given an aura of objectivity because “even these liberals” agree with them (and are being “canceled” by the intolerant left as a result of their bravely taking a stance).
@CSK:
Carve off a thin share of the Berkshires, say North Adams to the CT line and it isn’t difficult to imagine that this mystery is one extended, alcohol infused haze.
@Kathy: Wow! My hearing has really gone south on me over the years. Even with the computer’s speaker set at 100, I heard none of the musical score until well into the second or third minute and even then I expect that I heard only about half of the selection. Stravinsky’s music is always gripping. The animated story that the Disney people chose to go with it didn’t resonate for me, though. Glad someone liked it, still in all.
I dont think this has been linked before. A covid lab leak truther offered a $100,000 bet on a debate over the origin of covid. He advised a statistical scoring system. He debated someone who though not a scientist per se was bright and knowledgeable. Using 2 judges both people agreed upon and the system the truther devised, the truther lost badly. I listened briefly to bits of the debate. Like most of this conspiracy stuff the guy had no evidence or science behind his claims. He mostly just ignored the science based claims or said they were false without evidence. His argument amounted to little more than wanting to believe it was a lab leak.
Of note, this debate loss has not been widely publicized. Shows the asymmetry in these arguments.
https://protagonistfuture.substack.com/p/lableak-truther-loses-100000-in-his
Steve
@DrDaveT: Good analysis! A few days back there was an article in USA Today attempting to suss out how evangelicals reconcile what Christianity teaches with what they like about Trump. It only sussed out that evangelicals are schizophrenic–in the popular culture sense rather than the diagnostic one.
I think that feature of evangelicalism stems from the commitment to believing that Christianity/faith/whatever is a product that conforms to basic principals of marketing and advertising. Even back in the 80s, evangelicalism was moving to models that promoted the idea that if you’re losing
businessfollowers because they don’t like the message, the task becomes to adopt a message that they will accept.@Sleeping Dog:
I’ve always thought of the Berkshires as an outpost of New York and New Jersey.
@charontwo: I know. Somehow, that manages to make it even more pathetic.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Try this link
@Kylopod: Back in 1990 I saw the movie, Reversal of Fortune about Dershowitz’ defense of Claus von Bulow. The movie was based on Dershowitz own book about the case. I expect opinions differed, but to me it came across as, “I probably got a guilty man off, but wasn’t I clever.” I’ve thought Dershowitz was an arrogant asshat for thirty plus years. And I’ve never seen him do anything to challenge that opinion.
National media working hard to hide the “asylum” status of suspected killer of UGA nursing student. But local media is working to counter the faked news. Suspect arrested then released by NYC before moving the Georgia.
Old Joe won’t even do anything to protect his most devoted voter demographic, young college women.
An open letter to the people participating in the Las Vegas half-marathon:
Fuck you.
An hour and a half to move a mile and a half, thousands of people spewing cubic miles of greenhouse gasses, EMT’s stuck in ambulances forced to share cigarettes with heart attack victims, strip joints and cannabis dispensaries inaccessible to bros and hippies, respectively. And why all this pain? This – and yes, I will use the word – trauma? Why? So spandex-wearing twats* can prance down the Strip and show off their cute matching head and wrist bands.
Jim Fixx died at age 52. Just saying.
Fuck you people. What if I had not thought to pee at Macy’s before heading home on this Bataan death drive? I’m an old man, goddammit. And you people probably don’t even gamble. Don’t come here and leave nothing but your sweat and a lingering scent of smug, and not even so much as your kid’s college fund.
Tight-ass, traffic-blocking, Millennial cnts.**
*In the British sense. It’s all in the ‘a.’
** In the Australian sense. Pronounced ‘cants.’
@SenyorDave:
Mary Trump has a reply for Turley.
@Kylopod:
Musk has a trans kid and went insane because of that. Plus, he was always a shithead bro, but he was a shithead bro that was going to save the world through technological vision rather than a shithead bro who spends his day posting lame memes for cutturd2.
Taibbi was beginning to get #metoo-ed because of the awful ways he treated Russian prostitutes, and decided that he was more comfortable with people who didn’t think prostitutes were people.
Tulsi Gabbard was always a bit of a bigoted warhawk shithead, so she’s really been pretty ideologically consistent.
I’m going to assume Greenwald and Turley have skeletons in their closet.
Kucinich was a CPAC, and I think that is just plain simple horseshoe theory. The right really has been making inroads with the lefty kooks.
@SenyorDave: I for one welcome an honest and frank discussion about what politicians’ families were doing in the 1860s.
At the risk of committing a Critical Race Theory, an examination of who comes from slaveholding wealth would likely be fascinating. A lot more interesting than Biden’s great-great-grandfather’s brawls.
@JKB: What’s he supposed to do, when the most do nothing Congress EVER is in charge?
Why didn’t Trump “fix it” when he was in charge last time? Surely if he’d fixed it, it would still be fixed, right?
Mr. Reynolds, if this is your reaction to the foot race, how did you ever survive Formula One?
@The Q:
I knew F1 was coming. You couldn’t avoid knowing it. This though, no one warned me that I should under no circumstances drive west of the Strip if I hoped to make it home same day.