Wednesday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Wednesday, October 19, 2022
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69 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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“What’s the expression – ‘Where’s the beef?’ I need some beef.”
Judge Raymond Dearie to trump’s lawyers
Oops. Stuck in moderation land. 🙁
Wow. Just wow. 😐
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/florida-father-son-shoot-innocent-woman-thought-tried-break-home-sheri-rcna52704
Mangolini brags to Bob Woodward about how no one is tougher than he is.
http://www.rawstory.com/trump-brag-toughness/
Let’s try this riddle again:
What is uglier than trump? The poor have it, the rich need it, and if you eat it you die.
@Kathy:
“Nothing” is uglier than Trump.
@Jax:
Florida Man strikes again.
@CSK:
Yeah, I said the other day it was easy.
So, it looks like the bivalent mix of ancestral COVID strain + Omicron variant is providing even better protection across the board.
Unfortunately there’s no word yet when Mexico will get any of it. Since anual boosters seem to be in order, we may get them next year. But as his majesty is still downplaying it, when he remembers it’s still around, who knows.
The other problem is my US visa expired last March, and wait times for one right now exceed two years. So, going to Houston or San Diego isn’t an option.
One solution is to look to see if someone is importing the boosters here. Another is to go to Canada for one. If I do, I may take some vacation days and spend some time there. I last visited in 82. The cities with nonstop flights I know of are Toronto and Vancouver. Any advice which one to visit? I was in Toronto and saw Niagara Falls last time.
I’ve been to Toronto and think it’s a great city but if you are going in the winter you may want to opt for Vancouver, unless you have really warm clothes. Toronto average daily temps. Vancouver.
@MarkedMan:
It might be in March or April. Work would prevent me from going sooner.
I think, though, that may still qualify as winter in Toronto.
At the blog, American Purpose. Francis Fukuyama has a series of posts entitled: Valuing the Deep State
Since I’ve been mocked, though not here, for positing that the only trustworthy institution in government is the bureaucracy, so the title caught my attention. A short summary of Fukuyama’s position is that a modern state can’t exist without an effective bureaucracy to keep the country running on a day-to-day basis. An example.
The link above is to the most recent entry on the subject, that has links to earlier entries.
@Kathy: I like Vancouver. Stanley Park. Victoria a short ferry ride away. Lots to recommend it.
In Toronto, that is early spring. Anywhere south of Iowa though and that weather would still qualify as winter.
I’m pondering a side of spaghetti primavera carbonara fusion. Pretty much broccoli, onions, soybean sprouts, snow peas*, and lots of garlic tossed with spaghetti, and topped with carbonara sauce (beaten eggs with Parmesan cheese; they cook on contact with the hot pasta and veggies).
This would go to the side of baked beef milanesas with creamy chipotle sauce. I’m thinking a mix of chipotles and cottage cheese in the blender, then mixed with plain tomato sauce and some melty cheese like Oaxaca or Manchego.
Lately soybean sprouts are sold in a package, and they’d be too much for this recipe. So I may try spritzing some with oil and roasting them in the oven.
*Yeah, I’ve been on a long snow pea kick lately.
Wow, I’m only in the UK taking an overnight layover and now, apparently, I am the new Home Secretary. Need to ask @JohnSF if that’s even legal.
@Kathy: March and April are definitely winter in Toronto, especially if you are from warmer climes.
@OzarkHillbilly: Now that I live outside the snow belt I’ve taken to defining “winter” as any month where it might snow. That way I don’t get complaints from the warm-staters who say that I didn’t warn them about how it was the middle of winter in, say, April in Rochester NY. Toronto is even colder, although less snow.
@Michael Reynolds:
They have a visitor as Home Secretary? Maybe you wandered into the wrong dugout.
@Michael Reynolds:
Legal, schmegal.
See if you can get upgraded to Lord Protector.
@Moosebreath:
Current Home Secretary Suella Braverman has resigned (and good riddance)
However, Michael is too late trying for that job; just heard Grant Shapps has got it.
Also, builders currently installing revolving doors in Downing Street. 🙁
@Michael Reynolds:
I think it’s very kind of Britain to reassure Americans that we are not the only nation with hopelessly fucked up politics.
@JohnSF:
This reads to me like Truss told her to cook the books on immigration to make the economic numbers look better and Braverman responded that she promised her people they could machine gun Poles and Lithuanians in the North Sea for sport. Then when Braverman couldn’t actually fire immigrants into space, she resigned in a snit. Or am I missing something?
@Kathy:
Just got home from our first real vacation since Covid began: two weeks in BC, with about four days of that in Vancouver and the rest on Vancouver Island. I can’t recommend it highly enough. Great weather (apparently unseasonably warm and dry–thanks climate change! though bummer about the resulting salmon kills), great food, unbelievably beautiful landscapes, and walkable cities close to hikeable/bikeable trails.
@JohnSF:
I was making a baseball joke. It happens when you visit blogs from across the pond.
@Beth:
Dunno yet; there’s indications that’s what’s behind it.
Treasury had been pushing for liberalisation of non-EU (I think) approved immigration to deal with inflationary labour bottlenecks, but also avoid the rage of Brexiteers that would be caused by an labour movement deal with the EU.
If so, under Treasury plan Poles and Lithuanians still excluded; but more non-Europeans (also helps with plan for trade deal with India).
But Braverman making a play for the populist, rather than libertarian, right, who hate more or less all immigration, digging in her heels.
Also, the separate, but in the minds of the Conservative base, muddled together, question of asylum seekers and unapproved economic migrants from outside the EU, who (for obvious geographic reasons) often come via EU.
Braverman promising all sorts of “crackdowns”, which are in practice not going to work, and tickling the right’s tummies with declarations of her favouring withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights and European Court of Human Rights.
Which, again the headbangers muddle up with their hated EU, even though they’re separate, and actually predate even the EU predecessor, the EEC.
UK politics: it’s such fun. (Not)
@Moosebreath:
Dugout is also used in English football (soccer) so the joke translates (or transatlantics, if you prefer.) 🙂
@Roger:
@MarkedMan:
The other thing is that when I begin to seriously plan a trip for a vaccine/booster, they become available here around the time I could go. It happened with the first does in 2021, and then with the booster around early March this year.
Also, I’m not eager to take a 5-7 hour flight on a narrow body. I’d find one with a stop in Vegas or Chicago, just to break it up, but without a visa one is at best confined to the airport, if they allow visa-less transit anymore.
@Roger:
The bad thing about Vancouver Island is that it’s infested with my English relatives. These are strange people with strange hatreds. Their order of hate is, from lower to ABSOLUTE HIGHEST, 3. English Weather, 2., Living on Islands, and 3. other English People. They absolutely despise English people (also hated are the Scottish and Irish, but not the saintly Welsh). They hate English people like a Klansman hates Black people.
So, my family members did what any sensible English hating people would do, they moved half way around the world to live on an island with similar weather that was absolutely lousy with English people. Both sides of my family have trouble understanding racism and have come up with some pretty wild applications for it.
@Beth:
They think the Welsh are saintly? Why?
@MarkedMan: Yep. I worked at my Aunt and Uncles hunting and fishing camp one season, (Lake of the Woods, Ont) I got there the first week of June, and it snowed. I left the 2nd week of October, and it snowed. We had flurries in September but I don’t count that.
@Kathy: Vancouver is lovely. I have never had a bad time there. Very walkable, good art galleries, good museums, good food… just good.
The aquarium has/had an otter encounter where you could toss fish and mollusks to sea otters, and it was amazing, if that’s your vibe.
I also like to walk about with a box of Tim Horton’s donut holes and feed the natives. I’m so amazed that there are people trusting enough to eat donut holes offered by strangers.
@Kathy: Some Aussie girl got deported for being US Visa less at a stopover (Vegas I think) while flying to Canada. I’ve read 2 articles about her recently but I’m not sure just exactly when that was.
Do inquire.
@Beth:
On the topic of Western BC Man, a very particular variant of homo sapien, perhaps sharing the branch of Sasquatch, I have an interesting example.
About 10 years ago an acquaintance bought a lot on Savary Island, just across the water east of Vancouver Island. The lot was adjacent to several other island cabins, about an acre, heavily forested with old growth fir and cedars, some of which had trunk diameters in excess of six feet and were nearly 200 ft tall.
There are only a few dozen people on that island, nothing happens without everyone knowing.
Six months later my acquaintance went to visit her property to discover it had been clear-cut. She contacted me because she knew I had access to a small plane as a plane can do the trip in an hour and a half, a trip which otherwise requires a couple boat rides plus 8 hours of driving. Estimated worth of well over a hundred grand of old-growth lumber was gone. The logged out area was precisely her lot and nothing more. Since she was an “American” (what the locals call US citizens) nobody saw anything. Not even the local constable. Nope, the lot had always been that way.
Canadian courts said while that was clearly BS, without witnesses there was nothing they could do. Nobody would rat out whoever did it, and she was privately told it might be risky to push too hard and maybe find out. The pirate loggers up there have earned that label. They have killed to protect themselves.
She lost all interest in having a summer cabin there so she sold it for less than half of what she had originally paid. Logged as it was, with stumps and the mess, she told me she considered herself lucky to have gotten even that. What shocked her most is how friendly the islanders had been to her when she was shopping for the lot.
@OzarkHillbilly: Two lessons I’ve learned in life:
First, when visiting never assume that what a local judges hot or cold, winter or summer, or “a little rain” is going to match what you think it is.
Second, never assume that because someone is local they have “good” taste in restaurants. Or rather, that what they consider “good” will correspond to what you consider good.
I guess there’s a third thing, or rather a corollary to the second: Never go to a restaurant someone recommends if their praise contains the phrase, “…and the portions are huge!” YMMV
@Kathy: Both are really nice, but I’d also probably pick Vancouver. I believe there’s more outdoorsy stuff to do there, regardless of the time of year.
@Kathy: Sounds good to me. Then again, at least one recipe I’ve seen for alfredo sauce calls simply for warming cream to the point that cheese will melt in it and then adding cheese until your desired consistency is reached. (Oh, add salt and [white] pepper, I forgot that part.)
If Texas is going to give up, it should issue dog tags to schoolchildren instead.
I recall there was a fad for fingerprinting children during the child abduction panic some decades back. School shootings, in contrast, are all too real.
@Gustopher: Been a long time since I was in Vancouver, I see. Last time I was there, Tim Hortons was an eastern Canada thing. (It’s even possible that there were no Tim Hortons at all.)
@Franklin:
I’ve heard of the outdoors, but I don’t think I’ve been there. Not since my very early teens, at a guess. I may have flown over it. 😀
About my list of things to see boils down to, in no particular order: museums, casinos, historical places, archaeological sites, skyscrapers.
@OzarkHillbilly: I was about to say that I was confused because I traveled to Oz and New Zealand without a visa, but I then remembered that I applied for a visa online and was granted an electronic visa number linked to my US passport number about 10 minutes later. I suspect it’s nowhere near as easy to do this direction because of reasons.
(The granting office DID recommend that I bring my visa receipt with me traveling, though.)
Pobrecito…
Good riddance, to bad rubbish. We should make sure the Hungarians can’t send him back.
@MarkedMan: My 2 big lessons are,
#1 Never check the weather, they’ll be wrong anyway.
#2 Pick good traveling partners and if the weather is shitty you’ll have fun anyway.
The corollary to #2 is, Don’t pick shitty traveling partners, no matter how good the weather is you’re gonna have a lousy time.
One more corollary to #2 and #2a is don’t be afraid to travel alone.
@Kathy:
I live in Southern Ontario between Toronto and Niagara Falls. Late March and April are usually fine here. There are years we get some snow in April but there are also years when I have had the pool open by the end of April.
But don’t count on getting a booster here. It might change but for now bivalent boosters are not even available in drug stores. I have had all 4 shots I have been eligible for so far and whether it has been at a pharmacy or public health clinic we have been checked for our Ontario Health cards first which have photos
@CSK:
It basically boils down to: my grandma was Welsh and she was a saint and my English grandfather was a butthole and all the Welsh people knew it and treated him like the crap he was. So through the powers of racist transmutation ALL Welsh people are saints.
My English family thought of the Welsh as some sort of divinely pure elves and everyone else on those island sucked eggs. I don’t understand.
Edited to clarify my grandfather was English
‘Attempted intimidation’: Missouri AG sent five requests for MSU emails, records
Have I mentioned lately that Eric Schmitt is a gutless weasel and 10 #s of GOP sht in a 5 # sack?
Hey James, let me know if you get any requests from the Misery AG for my personal information, will you?
@OzarkHillbilly:
I’ve been trying to teach myself this. It’s an unpleasant experience.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Well, that was something. I’m not sure what, exactly, but something.
@Pete S:
I kind of assumed vaccines would just be available. Thanks for the warning.
It’s also about the nearest country to go to. I doubt Guatemala or Belize or Cuba or Colombia will have them, and I’m not flying all the way to Europe for one.
@Beth: Yeah. For people more comfortable around others, traveling alone can be a bummer. I don’t find traveling alone to be particularly disconcerting, but then again, I haven’t traveled anyplace where I wouldn’t be visiting people that I know since I was about 25 or 26 except on visa runs while in Korea.
@Kathy:
Yup and think of the great DB that the state will have on citizens when the fascists take over.
In the UK: Parliament descends into sheer farce over a vote moved by Labour on introducing a bill to ban fracking.
The Whips are the MPs responsible for party management and discipline side of handling the Commons.
The name originates in hunting; the “whipper-in”, whose task is to prevent hounds breaking away from the pack. 🙂
Looks like Braverman was openly defying Truss and Hunt, and departed in a half jumped/half pushed sort of way.
By setting it up as a departure over comms security (yes, now misuse of private emails march onto the British political stage, LOL) avoids charges of disloyalty as levelled at Sunak, but enables a leadership bid to start at short notice.
Perhaps meaning the ERG are ready to move against Truss?
Or laying down a marker in case of “events”.
Almost certainly indicates Braverman and some on the ERG Right are determined to prevent a “coronation”.
This means that to exclude her, two other candidates would have to make a pact, and manage it precisely, to ensure they took first and second places.
Then one stands down and “coronation”: no membership vote.
Tricky to manage.
Especially as reports are that front runners Sunak and Mordaunt are unable to seal a deal.
More months of a membership campaign are not what anyone wants.
But might the ERG go so far as to reject any attempted installation avoiding the membership, and insist that third placed (presumably Braverman) is entitled to go forward if number two drops out?
My oh my.
Odds on Truss surviving by default just increased due to this; at the same time as they decreased due to Commons chaos.
I think I might as well throw away my political abacus, just flip coins, and drink more.
@JohnSF:
Dumb question time: Did I read somewhere that Charles could dissolve Parliament if things got bad enough? I understand if that is technically the case that it would be bad in a practical sense. That being said wouldn’t it be better for Tory lunatics to have Chucky punt them into the river instead of jumping themselves?
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
I’m a people person. I like/need to have people I know around me. To the point that when I withdraw (like I am today) it’s usually a sign of self-harm. That being said, the need to be around people is useless if it prevents me from doing things I want to do (also self-harm). I’ve had to work to inoculate myself to the bad part of being alone.
@Kathy: “I recall there was a fad for fingerprinting children during the child abduction panic some decades back. ”
Actually footprinting, I believe, since babies fingerprints were too small (or something).
@Beth:
The rule is the Crown cannot dissolve without a request from a PM, but may (in certain unusual circumstances) refuse that request. And also may advise a PM to do so; privately.
A PM who refused such advice would probably be in imminent peril of a vote of no confidence anyway.
But if there was an alternative PM who could command a majority, it is unclear if the monarch should invite that person to form a government rather than grant a dissolution.
I doubt at this point Charles would so advise; or any PM so request. Yet.
The Conservatives still have an 80-odd majority, and more than two years left of the maximum time to elections.
Basically, it’s up to the Conservative Party in Parliament needs to come to some sort of internal agreement on how to proceed; or for enough Tories to become so discontent as to join forces with Labour and VONC.
Still unlikely, so far. Needs 40 odd rebels.
Not impossible, and becoming less so; but not there yet.
@Gustopher:
One thing I recall about Canada was that the thick paper and cardboard shopping bags for sale at department stores, just hung on racks with a cash box for quarters and a sign indicating 25 cents each. In mexico these would have been behind the counter. In the US, at least in Houston, as I recall they were in vending machines that unlocked so you could get just one per quarter.
@OzarkHillbilly:
I recall reading something about it. As I understand, most countries allow transit passengers to pass through as long as they don’t leave the airport. In some places they may be confined to one part of the airport.
@OzarkHillbilly: What in the heck is Dreher smoking?! That is the whiniest, most narcissistic self-pitying mid-life complaint I have ever read. Running away from kids, ex-wife, and mother to the other side of the world as a way of “solving one’s problems”.
I give him 12 months, tops, and then he’ll be leaving Hungary whining about how horrible it is there and how everything reeks of Hungarian paprika. Dude doesn’t even speak Hungarian, and he’s expecting to “move to Hungary” and have a happy life? Ha! I suspect he’s getting a totally biased view of what Hungary is like because everything is getting filtered through Hungarians who speak English.
Plus, the longer he is away from the US, the less clout he’s going to have in either country. At the moment, he’s probably a Useful Idiot for Orban, but as time goes on (and TAC loses more and more money) they’ll use him less and less as a conduit to push pro-Orban propaganda into the US. Rod’s going to finally disappear down the memory hole as “oh yeah, he was that weird guy who was obsessed with Dante and finally ran away from the the US to live somewhere in Europe.”
@Kathy:
Yeah, we don’t have those bags anymore. I am in my 50s and barely remember them from the same era when you used to dress up to go to the department store restaurant.
We do have casinos and skyscrapers now. And lots and lots of Timbits
@Beth: Well, I’m sure it is different for me, a cis white male (I think that is right) than it is for a trans woman (i think that is right also) (truth is, none of that is important to me, you are a human, I don’t need to know anything else, and I hope you forgive me if I use the wrong pronoun)
I hitch hiked across this country in ’79. I also hitch hiked in Mexico ( got awakened on a bus in Veracruz by a couple of soldiers with AK-47s). I was once hhing thru a mountain range in WY and ended up in a camp at 9,000 ft+ eating a poached elk as it got passed around the fire …
And I listened to a bobcat scream as it walked along a ridge line above me.
It’s a beautiful world. I wish everybody could see and hear the things I have seen and heard, and even more they could see and hear the things I haven’t.
@Pete S:
I haven’t seen one anywhere in years. But these days supermarkets sell fabric bags cheap, since plastic bags were banned.
@JohnSF: The “whip” serves more or less the same function here except I think the title comes from the guy who beat the runaway slaves.
@JohnSF: Maybe I Ching sticks (or whatever)?
@wr: I think both, actually. Some places put footprints on some official documents (birth certificates?), but when I started teaching in the early 90s, schools had events where people would bring their kids to be fingerprinted where I was teaching.
Good for a chuckle: Billionaire preppers.
Anyone want to bet Elon wasn’t one of the billionaires there??
@Kathy: @wr: @Just nutha:…Fingertips Part II…
Way back in the 80’s the local police would set up a table at the Mall and fingerprint kids at the parents request. There was only one copy made and it was given to the parents.
I have heard of foot prints on birth certificates but have never seen this. I know that the copy of my birth certificate that I requested from the Monroe County, New York Courthouse for I don’t know what years ago has no footprint. It doesn’t even have the time of birth just the date.
@OzarkHillbilly:
That’s awesome. I don’t think I would do that, but it’s still awesome. Ironically enough, since my transition, the number of places I’m safe going has gone done down massively, but my will to go places has gone up.
Also, you got it right. Thank you I needed that today.
In Re: footprints on birth certificates, I was offered the opportunity in 2004 to have my newborn child’s footprints stamped on a “purely ceremonial” birth certificate (gotta read the fine print) for $29.99. Right in the hospital after I’d given birth, the “purely ceremonial” certificate would identify my child in the nursery, so my family could find her easily (those certificates were printed much larger, on the ends of the nursery bassinets. (so many eyerolls)
Everybody recognized my kid by her wild-ass hair, for what it’s worth. 😛
Patty melts, round two. 😛
I had to do a bunch of crawling around on my side by side and flying my drone today. I was shocked at how many times I came up on a state highway or county road and thought “Geez, I hope I don’t have to talk to anyone, I didn’t put my teeth in.” and then “Holy shit, my teeth ARE in!” 😛
And then when I got home I couldn’t wait to get my teeth out so I can eat. But I can’t take them out. 😐
@OzarkHillbilly: Part of me thinks that Dreher is the facist version of John Reed, but he’s not that good of a writer. Just a pathetic crank going from one authoritarian system to another and afraid of all the scary brown people and the gays he thinks are coming to get him.
@MarkedMan: Nailed it!!!
🙂