Sunday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Sunday, April 28, 2024
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38 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’m going to try an experiment today. I live a ten minute walk from Camden Yards (home of the Baltimore Orioles) and don’t have a ticket to today’s game. So I’m going to wait until ten minutes or so after the game starts and then go on SeatGeek and see if I can get a good seat at a steep discount.
The headline of the day- A CT woman had a hysterectomy. She claims her co-workers harassed her about a ‘sex change’
@MarkedMan:
My father was a NY Giant baseball fan when growing up. I seem to recall him telling a story how the people at the gate would allow non-paying kids into the bleachers/outfield* sitting areas after the first inning was complete. After the 4th or 5th inning was over, they would be allowed into wider areas of park.
*The Polo Grounds Stadium was shaped like a horseshoe. Therefore it had a huge outfield area. In fact it was over 480 feet to center field stands and over 500 feet to the straight away center clubhouse. Usual is 410 or so.
The Florida headline of the day- Florida man charged after 150 pounds of meth seized in largest bust in city’s history
I’m curious about the overlap in readers (and especially commenters) of OTB and other blogs. I frequently see OTB commenters cite the same blogs with some frequency. From memory, these include:
-lawyers, guns, and money
-balloon juice
-kevin drum
-bulwark
I’m sure that I’ve left some out.
I’m not so interested in blog recommendations, but rather in the handful of blogs that unite the readers of OTB.
@Mimai:
I would add Talking Points Memo to the list. I read it daily and find that it does great reporting.
We got some horrendous news this morning from a neighbor.
There are wild cats in our neighborhood. One of whom we nicknamed ‘Tweety Bird*’ because they would sometimes climb a tree to get to the 2nd floor of our condo building.
My wife feeds the cats every morning. The Condo Association President for our building puts out food for for the cats.
Other buildings in our community aren’t so crazy about the cats.
Tweety Bird, who would be here every day for food and would be seen out front of our building during the daytime, wasn’t seen for several days by my wife. Today she was told by a neighbor that TB had been found dead and she may have been poisoned by the Condo Association President of the building next to the one dear wife and I live in.
If true, Leslie Storch is one very sick and twisted old woman. Poisoning friendly animals and approving of people driving the wrong way out of the parking lot and head on into oncoming traffic endangering resident safety is perfectly fine with this living peace of excrement.
*- For a wild cat, TB was very friendly. He’d let people pet or carry them.
@Bill Jempty: Bill, you may want to be careful about calling someone out by name, however angry you may be.
@Bill Jempty:
Link to same article that doesn’t require a subscription to the Hartford Courant: A CT woman had a hysterectomy. She claims her co-workers harassed her about a ‘sex change’
Also, this article does something that drives me nuts:
No, Ms. Varona, Hartford HealthCare clearly is not committed to any of those things. Stop insulting my intelligence by telling an obvious lie to my face.
@Mimai:
People link this occasionally:
https://digbysblog.net/
I sometimes link these, but no one else here does:
https://nomoremister.blogspot.com/
https://yastreblyansky.blogspot.com/
@MarkedMan:..Play Ball!..
One late summer Sunday some 30+ years ago I was passing through Saint Louis ahead of schedule on my way to Monroe City MO where I was to show up at work Monday morning. Since I had time to kill I found a place to park near Busch Stadium (II) where there was a day game in progress between the Cardinals and the Phillies. Might have been the 4th or 5th inning. I walked up to one of the security guards and asked him where I could get a ticket to see the rest of the game. “Go on in.” he said as he motioned me through the gate to the seats.
“Thanks!” I said.
I think it was 1991. The year reliever “Wild Thing” Mitch Williams came to the Phillies from the Mighty Cubs.
There wasn’t much of a crowd and I was able to get a seat behind the Phillies dugout on the third base side. Being a Cub fan I wanted to give the Phillies all the support I could.
The game was tied going in to the bottom of the 9th inning when Mitch Williams took the mound. I was yelling at Mitch to show them what for as the Cardinal fans around me gave me hell. Sometimes I like to live dangerously.
The Cardinals did not score. The game was still tied going into the bottom of the 10th and Mitch Williams was on the mound again. As the inning progressed the Cardinals had a base runner on 3rd. Williams delivered and the batter hit to a Philly infielder for an out. There was some confusion in the infield as all the Philadelphia players were yelling at the guy with ball to throw it to the catcher who was crouched over home plate as the third base runner broke for home. The throw to home beat the runner. The runner plowed into the catcher like a locomotive knocking him off the plate as the ball popped out of his hand.
Run scores! Game over! Cardinals win!
The Phillies catcher was flat on the ground. Two of his teammates had to pick him up and hold him by both arms as he hobbled off the field.
Hell of a finish and I saw the game for free!
@Mimai: I suspect there aren’t any blogs that unite the commentariat here. We have significant differences in our purpose in reading opinion and news sources, and some of those purposes are mutually exclusive.
@Mimai:
Of those four, I read Drum and The Bulwark daily. LGM I skim probably once a week, or when something interesting it linked to it on Memeorandum. Balloon Juice probably every two weeks.
Additionally, daily I follow the Washington Post, Hot Air, OTB, Dreher, Deadline, Memeorandum, and whatever Memeorandum leads me to on a particular day.
I only comment on OTB, Drum, and Dreher, but Drum and Dreher both less than once a month.
@Stormy Dragon:
It’s what they learn in Gaslighting for Dummies (simplified edition).
What else are they going to say? They don’t care about the well being of their staff? they are terrible at management? they hire awful people?
They should say “We can’t comment on pending litigation,” and then follow Lisa Simpson’s advice: better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt.
Biden had a good week.
The interview with Howard Stern will end up being replayed many times over in snippets.
His bit last night at the WHCD was freaking great!!! He crushed it, and went hard after Trump.
Seems like the White House campaign arm has decided to let Joe be Joe.
@Mimai:
So not what you asked, but the blogs I read aside from OTB are: Simple Flying, One Mile at a Time, Cranky Flier, and The Aviation Herald.
But OTB is the only one where I engage in comments.
@Mimai: Bulwark, LGM, some Balloon Juice, LawFare, emptywheel, Memeorandum for a headline aggregator, but I usually only comment here.
Bill Kristol is kinda driving me nuts on the Bulwark.
@MarkedMan:
Yes, it would be surprising indeed if every commenter here read the same blog. I suppose my use of the word “unite” could have given the impression that I was asking about such a thing. I was not. Rather, I am asking about the blogs that seem to have an overlap across the OTB commentariat.
@Mimai: Besides OTB I routinely read Eschaton, Balloon Juice, LGM, Drum, Digby, and Political Wire. I like Crooked Timber but they post infrequently. I read Brad DeLong on Substack and not much else. As part of my {try to understand conservatives, expose myself to other points of view, enemy recognition, point and laugh} effort I read TAC, NRO Corner, Volokh, and Marginal Revolution. (I’m retired.) But I only comment frequently here.
@MarkedMan: I have strategically positioned myself at the optimum position near the ballpark in case the cheap seat works out. In a complete coincidence, my favorite brew pub happens to be here!
@EddieInCA:
!!!! I gave up on him at least a year or two ago. Although I like searching out well written opinions and viewpoints I disagree with, he’s gone full nutter. Exorcisms, fascists and demons, oh my!
I am happily declasse and admit to frequent visits to Daily Kos.
@Mimai:
Just out of curiosity: Why are you interested?
@JohnMc:
Kos is actually useful for a few specific things:
– elections, for example delegate allocation rules and results, various legalities etc.
– update on NYC courtroom, hush money trial
– Ukraine conflict stuff
And I also track TPM, mostly paywalled but I subscribe.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/
@CSK:
Mostly out of curiosity 😉
The regular and semi-regular commenters have both striking similarities and striking differences. I’ve noticed some similarities in the types of blogs and other sources that are frequently referenced around here. I thought this was interesting, if not unexpected, so asked.
@Mimai: FWIW, I frequent a variety of news sources that are blog-like. Bit of those that call themselves blogs, OTB, TPM and Drum
@Mimai: I read the top five mentioned, Balloon Juice (skip the standard daily cheerleading but always read Adam Silverman). Kevin Drum, LGM (I think Erik Loomis is insufferable but the rest are pretty good). TPM and the Bulwark weekly.
@MarkedMan: Should we assume that because you were posting at 3:45 EDT that your plan for getting a cheap seat didn’t work out? Enquiring minds want to know.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: oh, I thought it was obvious from my comment about the game being sold out. The prices never went down. Well, momentarily there was a great seat for $15 but literally by the time I tried to click the page refreshed and the “best” seat was $50, which I could’ve got from the box office. So I stayed at my brew pub and got a hot dog from the food truck. Tragically, we lost in the eighth
Take this for what is worth, I actually don’t know what to think of it myself. We were over for a Seder at a good friend’s house and one of the couple was going on and on about how a particular Baltimore Oriole needed to come out and publicly denounce the high school he attended. It was a segregationist academy high school in the south. He attended it on scholarship as a baseball player not because his parents wanted him to attend a segregationist school but because they gave him scholarship to a school he couldn’t otherwise have afforded. I disagreed as I thought we shouldn’t make demands on people for their parents or their high school. Here’s the thing: a month or so ago my wife and I invited this same couple on a South Baltimore Brewery District Brewpub crawl in a predominantly black neighborhood. Totally normal neighborhood but probably 70-80% black. As we walked from brewpub to brewpub there were kids running around and people hanging on their stoops. Absolutely nothing unusual. But this friend was visibly uncomfortable. She was a suburbanite and had “inner city” welded in her brain despite her political and social leanings.
Life, and people, are much more complicated than we want them to be.
@Mimai: FWIW, I don’t read any other politics blogs regularly. The OTB combination of interesting content and sane commenters is unique in my experience.
@MarkedMan:..oh, I thought it was obvious from my comment about the game being sold out.
I don’t see it.
Drum, Marginal Revolution (c0mment there), EconLib (comment there), Glittering Eye, Incidental economist, Health care economist, Conversable economist, War On the Rocks, Angry Bear, LGM, Econbrowser, Calculated Risk, Mankiw, Noah Smith, Radley Balko. Regularly peek at Breitbart and a few others.
Steve
@MarkedMan: My thread must be defective (or my reading ability). I just checked and still don’t see any other posts from you related to the game other than this one:
Still, thank you for the reply.
@Mister Bluster: Thank you. I was wondering if I’m losing my powers of observation. Or, maybe we both have defective threads.
@MarkedMan: Taking it for what it’s worth, I understand that. I live in BFE Wyoming. I hear all the time about how my local friends proclaim themselves to be the “least racist people anywhere, we’re the EQUALITY STATE!”
It doesn’t really matter what color, sexuality or species you are here, you’re not safe if you stray off the “tourist path”. I’d like to pretend we’re better than that, but most of them are shitty people with shitty values (thanks, @Teve, RIP). Once the tourists (and their money) leave, that “Wyoming nice” attitude leaves.
The wolf incident has blown shit up, around here. People are taking sides.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:..defective threads…
Other than an old pair of pants that I had patched in the seat a while back that just ripped out again I don’t think so.
@Jax: I had a very nice and memorable lunch one time in Moorcroft, WY. We had been to a family reunion/picnic in Custer, SD. We drove up to see Devil’s Tower, and were on our way back to Denver.
I had a very nice french dip sandwich, with some excellent fries. I listened to two cowboys (with spurs on) explain to the Iowa tourist that they weren’t farmers and didn’t know anything about farming in these parts or what crops there were. I was amused.
There were two guys, also tourists at another table, wearing matching motorcycle leathers. Outside we could see their bikes parked, also matching. It made sense in that it was something like a week before Sturgis. My gaydar definitely pinged on these guys.
Everyone was polite, completely polite.
And yet I wondered…