Rov_Scam's profile

Rov_Scam 26d ago

It's worth noting that Kagan, though she agreed on heightened scrutiny, declined to join the Court's low-IQ wing to assert that also the law failed under heightened scrutiny. Once again she shows herself to be, by a wide margin, the most competent jurist on the Court's left wing.

Is this really necessary? Presumably the reason they're low-IQ is because you disagree with their reasoning, and not because you have access to information that hasn't been made public. As much as I'd like to, there's a reason I don't refer to Trump as the moron-in-chief or whatever.

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Rov_Scam 8mo ago

In addition to prognostications, I'd like to voice my disdain for these postmortems. You can't expect to win every election. Kamala Harris was a good candidate who ran a good campaign. She wasn't a great candidate who ran a great campaign, but that's an unrealistic expectation. She won the states she was supposed to win and lost the battlegrounds by a few points each. Obviously not an ideal outcome, but far from cause to hit the panic button and start realigning your policies. The most annoying thing about these postmortems is that the inevitable conclusion is that the losing party needs to adopt more of the policies of the winning party. The second most annoying thing is that they act like one election is a real crisis point for the Democrats/Republicans and that the party is screwed long-term unless they make the necessary changes.

To the first point, I can offer an easy, lazy counterargument. Most of Biden's 2020 votes didn't go to Trump; Democratic turnout was down in general. The problem wasn't that they lost voters to Trump, but that they lost voters, period. Maybe part of the problem was that she didn't give her base enough reason to turn out? Maybe going full woke would have stirred the far lefties to action? Maybe the problem with black turnout could have been remedied by embracing BLM more? There was some discussion here yesterday about how blacks continued to vote 90% Democrat, despite claims that Trump was winning black men, and there was a post on Reddit today suggesting that the Democrats had a problem in that pandering to black voters turns off Latinos. The problem theories like this is that you don't want to alienate your base. Look at NASCAR. In the early 2000s it was gaining popularity at a breakneck pace. Bill France's though he could stoke this emerging market by introducing rule changes that would make it more palatable to the masses. The strategy massively backfired, as these changes didn't particularly appeal to the public, and most long-time fans hated them. The response was to dick with the rules even more. At this point, America's fastest growing sport has become a confusing mess that only total fanboys like my dad can follow. I'm not trying to suggest that making some changes toward moderation isn't a bad idea, but that there's an argument to be made to the contrary.

To the second point, there's no suggestion that the Democrats are screwed long-term because of one election. They ran an unpopular incumbent and were forced to change horses mid stream. Something could easily happen in the first half of the new administration that leads to a Democratic midterm blowout. Trump's stated economic policies put us at serious risk for inflation, and if that happens, people are going to want a change. Any number of things are possible. Following the 2006 midterms and 2008 Obama landslide, pundits were saying that without major changes, the Republican Party was doomed long-term. Two years later they did exactly nothing and got one of the biggest legislative reversals in history. But then they lost the presidency in 2012, and we were told that they were becoming the party of old white men and they needed to appeal more to minorities to have any chance. Then Trump came along and was massively more anti-immigration than any Republican in recent memory and won the presidency. Maybe if the Democrats had done things a little differently this time they would have won, but maybe not. If they keep losing elections by increasing margins I'll concede that it's time for a change, but we're nowhere near that point.

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Rov_Scam 2yr ago

New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu told CNN that he's [considering running for president] (https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/29/politics/chris-sununu-2024-president-cnntv/index.html). Although this isn't an announcement, I'd put Sununu's chances of running at >50% since the usual playbook is for suspected candidates to deny that they have any interest in the job at all right up until they make a formal announcement. For those unfamiliar, Chris Sununu is among a group of moderate Republican governors from liberal northeastern states, which group also includes Phil Scott of Vermont, Charlie Baker of Massachusetts, and Larry Hogan of Maryland. Unlike the others, though, Sununu didn't waffle as much over support of Trump.

Will Sununu win the nomination?

Not a chance. While firmly anti-MAGA sentiment exists within the Republican party, it isn't wide enough or concentrated enough to have the necessary impact. If that sounds contradictory, that's because the unusual nature of our primary system makes it difficult for someone like Sununu to win. If his ideas were more widely popular then he'd be able to run a national campaign where he was competitive in every state, or at least most states. If his appeal were concentrated enough he could make enough of an impact in a few key states to gain an advantage. Sununu's base of support is in the Northeast, and it's hard to see him doing well outside of there and maybe the Upper Midwest or the West Coast, but those are stretches. He also might get some support from Independents and Democrats in states with open primaries if Biden is the nominee and there aren't any interesting downballot races, but I doubt this will have a significant effect. Even in the northeast, support outside of New Hampshire is far from certain. I live in Pennsylvania and I kind of doubt his chances here, even though this is probably one of his better states.

So then why do we care?

Because he's from New Hampshire, and while his lane isn't exactly a large one, it's still a mainstream one (i.e. he's not running as the fringe hippie or the tax protestor or the craziest motherfucker in the room). He also at least has a lane; at least John Hickenlooper and Michael Bennett were going for the sensible moderate at a time when there was no obvious frontrunner there. I'm not sure why people like Nikki Haley and Tom Steyer try to run for president. They aren't beloved enough personally for there to be a groundswell of popular support based on name alone, and they aren't really proposing anything significantly different from more established candidates. They also aren't horning in on a competitive lane. I digress, but my point is that being from New Hampshire wouldn't be enough if Sununu were merely a fringe candidate or a guy stepping into an overcrowded field. Additionally, it should be noted that Sununu isn't merely from New Hampshire but is an extremely popular governor from a political family that includes his father, who was also governor, and his brother, a former Senator.

So why is being from New Hampshire important? For those of you not familiar with the American presidential nomination system, New Hampshire plays an outsized role in the process, by virtue of being first. Okay, technically it's second but it's the first primary and ultimately more important than the Iowa Caucuses. Candidates who are able to win in New Hampshire don't always go on to win the nomination, but they do stick around long enough to make a difference in the primary. Let's look at every competitive primary since 1992 where the winner didn't get the nomination:

1992 Democratic: Paul Tsongas wins but ties Bill Clinton in the delegate count. Tsongas remained competitive until Clinton swept all of the Southern primaries on Super Tuesday, and dropped out of the race on March 19 after losing a couple non-Southern primaries to Clinton by wide margins. Jerry Brown would later rally but Tsongas was the clear second at the time he dropped out of the race.

1996 Republican: Pat Buchanan wins a surprising victory. Buchanan was (and still is) a fairly extreme right-winger who's taken a few unorthodox positions and is widely regarded as anti-semitic. Bob Dole was the expected front-runner but Buchanan and Steve Forbes gave him a run for his money, and made it a three-way race early. Dole eventually bounced back and won every subsequent primary (and Buchanan never won another one after New Hampshire, though he won the Missouri Caucus), but Buchanan was still the number two man, to the extent that a number two existed. This was a weird race in that Dole was a foregone conclusion and it was surprising that he had any real competition at all.

2000 Republican: John McCain was the "maverick" moderate (in places) alternative to George W. Bush's more traditional family values conservatism. Probably the closest analogy to Sununu (though McCain is much more conservative overall). McCain wins his home state of Arizona plus New Hampshire, Michigan, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Vermont. The crux of his campaign came in South Carolina, where he aggressively campaigned in an attempt to show that he win in the heart of Bush Country, and for a while it looked like he could pull it off. He dropped out of the race March 9th after losing California, New York, Ohio, and other states he needed and were realistic for him to win. He was still the only credible challenger to Bush that year.

2008 Democratic: Hillary Clinton won, but she was expected to win the nomination. She obviously didn't, but she hung in and the race was competitive up until the final primary in June.

2016 Democratic: Bernie Sanders actually was a fringe candidate, or at least he would have been if the Democratic Party hadn't cleared the field to ensure her nomination. Instead he wins New Hampshire and is able to stay into the race up until the convention, again making June primaries relevant.

2020 Democratic: Bernie Sanders narrowly wins the vote total, but ties Mayor Pete in the delegate count. Sanders will be the last credible candidate to drop out, exiting on April 8. Pete would leave ahead of Super Tuesday, but this wasn't so much because his campaign was doing poorly but was political gamesmanship in cooperation with Amy Klobuchar; both were running in the moderate lane and Pete was leading there for a while, but it became clear after South Carolina that Joe Biden was the moderate with the best shot of boxing out Sanders and Warren.

So in 30 years of primaries we have yet to see a New Hampshire winner who doesn't play a major role in the nomination. The state has a legitimizing effect that other states don't; Sununu winning New Hampshire won't be like Wesley Clark winning Oklahoma in 2004 or Marco Rubio winning Minnesota in 2016. Additionally, the schedule in 2024 is favorable to whoever wins New Hampshire. The New Hampshire primary is January 30, and there are no further primaries until Super Tuesday on March 5. Even if the media discounts Sununu's win as a fluke of his being the beloved native son, that's still more than a month where he is technically in the lead and can clearly establish himself as the moderate to beat.

The upshot of all of this is that it's bad for DeSantis. If Desantis decides to run, his bases of support are in Florida and other more moderate parts of the South, and in left-leaning states. If Sununu establishes himself as a legitimate candidate, he's going to siphon DeSantis votes from more moderate areas. This doesn't mean that Sununu is going to win these areas, but the vote split might be enough for Trump to come out ahead. And that's important due to the winner take all nature of a lot of the GOP primaries. And this is not merely splitting the moderate vote; Sununu's strategy would revolve around pointing out that while DeSantis isn't exactly Trump, he's far from moderate. Sununu hangs his hat on Republicans getting away from culture warring and back to responsible governance, and DeSantis made a name for himself by waging the culture war. Hence, to Sununu, DeSantis is simply a more refined version of Trump. Culture War without the tweets and incompetence. But if you want to get away from MAGA DeSantis won't do it. Additionally, I wrote a while back about how DeSantisn's real weakness is that at some point he's going to have to comment on the 2020 election and Jan 6—go full MAGA and he's just another Trump, say Biden was legitimately elected and alienate a large part of your electorate, equivocate and look like a coward. He'd already have Trump criticizing him if he doesn't offer anything other than an unequivocal endorsement of MASSIVE FRAUD. Now he could have Sununu on the other side using his equivocations as proof that he was still to beholden to MAGA and the MTGs of the world to be anything other than a Trump clone.

To get back to the calendar, it doesn't look great for DeSantis. On Super Tuesday, Alabama, South Carolina, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Utah are going to be Trump blowouts. DeSantis has a chance in Texas, North Carolina, and Tennessee, but it's going to be a two horse race with Trump that's going to be close. DeSantis would normally have a chance of winning California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Vermont, and Virginia, but he'd have to contend with substantial support for Sununu, and Trump isn't exactly going to have a poor showing. He isn't going to get a blowout win in an important state until Florida votes on March 19, and by that time the momentum advantage of winning early isn't as pronounced. His situation up to that point is Trump getting blowouts in most of the states he wins while he's splitting votes with Trump or Trump and Sununu in states he wins. If Desantis could go into blue and purple states and blow Trump out of the water he could campaign on being able to attract voters outside of MAGA Country who will be necessary to win the

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Rov_Scam 8mo ago

If it were as simple as just ending the Ukraine War then he would have done it already. Every peace proposal I've seen ends with Ukraine ceding massive amounts of territory and agreeing to never engage in any kind of security agreement. In other words, give up a bunch of shit now, and leave the door open for another invasion when Russia gets around to it. These terms wouldn't be acceptable to Ukraine, wouldn't be acceptable to Biden, and wouldn't be acceptable to Trump. If Biden tried to end the war on these terms Trump would immediately excoriate him for being weak, and he'd be right. I think Trump has deluded himself into thinking he can sweet talk Putin into a deal that would be acceptable to Ukraine, or at lease so reasonable that Ukraine would lose international support if they didn't take it. It would be great if it were true, but I think the end result of any peace talks would be Trump coming home in disgust and urging congress to send more military aid to Ukraine, possible including the kind of offensive weapons that Biden has been reluctant to give.

As for the National Parks, all of the ones that have been designated since Clinton have been scraping the bottom of the barrel. Take New River Gorge for example. I go there at least once a year, but there isn't a ton to do unless you're running the river. the park only owns up to the top of the hill in most places, which means that most of the park is a steep mountainside that isn't really suitable for any kind of development. There's an overlook at the main visitor's center, a short hike along the rim, and a couple old mining sites with varying degrees of accessibility and preservation (e.g. Thurmond is accessible by car and has a well-done museum, while Lower Kaymoor requires descending 800 steps to the bottom of the gorge on foot, and is just old mine structures). There's some climbing, and probably a few more things I'm not familiar with, but that's it. It works as a National River or Recreation Area but not so much a park.

The only large tract of Federal land that's an obvious location for a National Park is the White Mountains in New Hampshire. The problem is that this is owned by the Forest Service, and transferring it to the Department of the Interior would result in a bitch fight over timber rights, mining rights, and all the other mixed-use things that aren't allowed in National Parks. Even in New River Gorge, they limited the park to a minority of the available acreage so that hunting would be able to continue. Hence, it's technically New River Gorge National Park and Preserve, with the park itself only being about 8% of the total unit. National Park designations also require the approval of congress, which isn't going to happen. See the ongoing fight over Bears Ears and Grand Staircase/Escalante National Monuments, which can be created by executive order. They keep getting expanded and pared back, but neither area has anywhere near the facilities for congress to just designate a new park and be done with it.

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Rov_Scam 2yr ago

There Are No Machines

Over the past 2 years, I’ve heard a number of election denialists, both online and in the media, that suggest that “machine politics” were somehow involved in rigging the 2020 election. What these theories all have in common is that they simply take for granted the existence of political machines in large cities, mostly in the Northeast and Upper Midwest; indeed, in some cases the city is simply mentioned as if it were understood that a corrupt political machine had its finger on every vote. This post originated as a response to @jkf from the other night, where he said:

I'm not sure why you would think anybody would be able to name people in these machines -- the whole point of these is that the functionaries are faceless and anonymous.

The mechanism is the same as always: sneak some fraudulent ballots into the system via machine aligned poll workers, who simply neglect to perform the usual checks that make this more difficult.

What Is a Machine?

The first part of the quote betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what a machine actually is, so it’s worth exploring that. Political machines maintain their power through a system of patronage. An example of how this could have been done would be that the machine boss makes sure a crony gets appointed to chair the parks department. The crony’s appointment is not based on his qualifications as an administrator as much as it is based in his ability to use his position to obtain votes for machine candidates. So he coordinates with the boss of a ward full of poor Italian immigrants to get them all maintenance jobs. He coordinates with another ward boss to make sure that a prominent and loyal contractor in his ward gets a no-bid contract for facility renovation that will provide a ton of work to the Polish and Hungarian immigrants in his ward. And then when election time rolls around the ward boss makes sure everybody knows who they have to thank for all of this largesse and that if the machine loses control to the reformers the first thing that will happen is that they’ll get cut off. That’s just one example but there are all kinds of favors politicians can do to help normal people, down to anodyne stuff like helping them navigate bureaucracy through a few well-placed phone calls; stuff that’s so anodyne that (good) politicians still do it today. And it goes without saying that if you dare elect an opponent to lead your ward, all those services get cut off, and in the next election the machine pick will point to his inability to get anything done, even though that inability is machine-driven.

Of course, something has to give in a system like this, and it’s that problems never actually get solved. Richard Daley may not have been able to deal with poverty, but he was good enough at helping individual poor people that the machine never paid an electoral price for it. But the Chicago machine was an outlier in terms of longevity; machine politics started to die out in the 1930s, and the decline accelerated after the war. Historically, machines would get voted out of power during times of economic hardship in favor of reformers, as there wasn’t enough largess to distribute to keep the machine going. But the machine would normally make a comeback when things got better. The Depression meant that things didn’t get better for a long time. A lot of people needed help, there wasn’t much to go around, and local government was forced to focus on structural changes rather than individual favors. Some individual machines weren’t directly affected, but reforms at the state and Federal level in areas like the civil service and contract requirements gradually eroded away the machines’ ability to operate.

The upshot of all of this is that machines aren’t “faceless and anonymous” entities. Their very nature prevents them from being so. Handing out anonymous favors may be good as an act of charity, but it’s a terrible way to buy votes for your party. And when somebody sees that the town has gone to shit and wants to challenge the status quo, what do you do? Send them an anonymous threat? No; anyone trying to challenge a political machine must be aware of the fact that the machine runs the town and the machine will crush them if they try to interfere and if they’re smart enough to run the town then they’re smart enough to geta nice sinecure and maybe someday they’ll get the keys to the executive washroom. From Boss Tweed in the early days to Richard Daly at the tail end of the machine era, everyone knew who was in charge, and if they didn’t, the boss wouldn’t hesitate to let them know.

The Pittsburgh Machine

I can’t speak to every city in which fraud was alleged, but I live in SWPA and can provide a pretty detailed picture of how Pittsburgh’s government works. First, unless otherwise stated, everyone named here is a Democrat; the city hasn’t had a Republican mayor since the 1930s and that’s just the way it is. It’s also what gives rise to accusations of machine politics. But hear me out. There are 3 big players in Pittsburgh politics: The mayor, the Allegheny County Executive, and the Allegheny County Democratic Committee. The current mayor is Ed Gainey, a former state rep who beat incumbent Bill Peduto in the 2021 primary. Peduto didn’t seek the committee’s nomination and he accordingly didn’t get it; Gainey won it over Tony Moreno, a MAGA Democrat and former cop who thought Peduto was too soft on the 2020 protestors (of which we had relatively few that became problematic). Peduto also didn’t campaign, but nonetheless managed to win 39% of the vote to Gainey’s 46%, a testament to either the cluelessness of the electorate or the unwillingness of Peduto’s white, upper middle class base to support a black progressive reformer like Gainey or a cretin like Moreno. Gainey’s election was both surprising and not surprising at the same time. Had Peduto done anything to indicate that he actually wanted to be mayor he would have easily won. Before becoming mayor himself, Peduto made a name for himself by mercilessly criticizing the two previous mayors from his position on city council representing the wealthiest part of town.

Peduto was mayor during the 2020 election, but that is of little consequence since the city doesn’t run elections, the county does. The County Executive is (and was) Rich Fitzgerald. He was elected in 2011 after beating Mark Patrick Flaherty in the primary and Republican D. Raja in the general. Flaherty was County Controller, the son of a judge, nephew of a former mayor, and that isn’t the half of it. Fitzgerald was a county councilman. Fitzgerald won by about ten points. Allegheny County operates differently than other counties. Most counties in PA are run by three elected commissioners and there are a slew of row offices like prothonotary, register of wills, etc. Allegheny County’s system was dysfunctional and dominated by city interests so a home rule charter was adopted in 1999 that would put power in the hands of a unified executive and a geographically-based council. Most row offices were eliminated and replaced by civil service employees. The county runs the elections.

Finally, there’s the Democratic Committee. In theory this has over 2600 members (one man and one woman from each precinct), but in reality many of these seats are vacant since not all precincts can find enough people to fill their allotment. Most committee elections involve fewer than 1000 participants, and if you live in a precinct with a vacant spot, they’ll pretty much give it to you. The committee’s main job is (obviously) to get Democrats elected, but they also endorse primary candidates. And it’s currently a mess. Ahead of the 2020 election, there were a number of stories about how the committee had a MAGA problem; some committee members were making Facebook posts supporting right-wing policies, and committee leadership was ambivalent. Then the committee went on to endorse some of these MAGA sympathizers in local races over progressive candidates. With Peduto not seeking their endorsement, nearly 40% of the committee voted to endorse former cop and current asshole Tony Moreno for mayor. With Fitzgerald’s time as executive coming to a close, the committee is endorsing moderate and longtime county Treasurer John Weinstein. Mayor Gainey, however, has endorsed progressive state legislator Sara Innamorato. But the board failed to endorse incumbent DA Stephen Zappala in favor of the more progressive Matt Dugan. And no one has yet endorsed longtime city Controller Michael Lamb for County Executive, even though he’s from a prominent political family that includes his nephew, former US Rep Conor Lamb.

If this is supposed to be some kind of machine, it’s a pretty dysfunctional one. Politicians with long pedigrees can’t get endorsements. Politicians who endorse views antithetical to the party platform do get endorsements. Politicians with endorsements lose primary elections. Prominent figures in the party can’t agree on whom to endorse. Mayors tend to be replaced by their strongest critics. This group was supposed to have participated in the rigging of a presidential election? They couldn’t rig an election for dogcatcher. This isn’t because they’re incompetent, it’s because this is the way the system is supposed to operate.

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Rov_Scam 11mo ago

The Democrats have realized that memory is short, at least in the sense that bringing up what your opponent did three years ago has less relevance than what he's saying now. Trump was unusually restrained while he was leading, and Biden's references to his past behavior didn't stick because they seemed at odds with the Trump of 2024. Now that Harris is the nominee the strategy is for her to run a straight shooter campaign that accentuates the positive and only criticizes Trump in terms of his most recent statements, to the extent that they even pile on rather than letting these statements speak for themselves.

One of Trump's primary weaknesses as a candidate is his tendency to pander to his base in situations where it costs him votes among constituencies he needs to win. If Trump calls Harris a DEI candidate then his audience cheers but ordinary suburban swing voters think "Is he really going there?" She doesn't even have to respond, since him belaboring the point is only digging himself in a deeper hole. Similar thing with Tampon Tim — trans issues get right wingers fired up but aren't going to swing an election. The more time spent attacking a vice presidential candidate on that just makes it look like the Republicans don't have their priorities straight.

The worst thing, though, is that Trump seems to be doing to himself what Biden never could. Trump was able to keep a more or less even keel through all of Biden's Threat to Democracy talk. Now that Biden's out of the race, Trump can't help but make election theft comments about a popular Republican swing state governor. Why should Harris say anything about it when Trump is all too willing to remind people himself? What does bringing this up accomplish for Trump? Are there really that many Biden voters out there who think the election was stolen? Do swing voters need Trump to remind them of all the things they find distasteful about him? As long as Trump keeps making these kind of bonehead moves, the Harris campaign is going to sit tight and talk about positive vibes. Why go after Trump in this situation? It's an attack ad without the downsides of running an actual attack ad. And Trump seems more than willing to oblige. The question isn't only one of how long the shine stays on Harris, but of how much Trump will add to his own stink.

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Rov_Scam 11mo ago · Edited 11mo ago

The AFI 100

Given the tendency of people to post lists this week, it seems like quite the coincidence that after 20 years of making a half-assed attempt at seeing all of the movies on the AFI 100, my journey is finally complete. I’m sharing my thoughts on every film on the list in the hopes that nobody else here will subject themselves to such a pointless exercise. Without further ado:

Citizen Kane (1941)The Great Gatsby has famously never been made into a good film, and this one is no exception. Yes, it’s the same story, trying to figure out who some rich guy really is. Skip this one.
Casablanca (1942) It may be the ultimate date movie of all time, but that’s not saying much. Everyone knows all the famous lines from this movie, including the ones that weren’t actually in it. No one remembers what the plot is actually about, and it wasn’t marketed as a romance until everyone who saw it realized that the international intrigue elements fall flat. Skip this one.
The Godfather (1972) The American Dream given a cynical twist with the realization that the crime business is a business like any other. But never mind that the two “heroes” of the tale—Vito and Michael—are mass murderous gangsters, the rendering of the story on screen is ponderous. The amber lighting, the shadows, the pace, the score, and the entire tone are so serious and pretentious that they verge on parody. This film would be just as good as a comedy if you added a laugh track. They say there is a fine line between comedy and tragedy, but it’s not quite this fine. Skip this one.
Gone with the Wind (1939) A sentimental epic that whitewashes history. It’s not as offensive as Birth of a Nation, but the insensitivity to the real suffering caused by slavery is there and has to be dealt with. I’m not trying to be a politically correct nitpicker; slavery isn’t nitpicking. And anyone who has the slightest bit of false nostalgia for the Old South should remind themselves that the landed, slave-owning aristocracy represented by Rhett and Scarlet was only between 1% and 2% of the population. Everyone else, black and white, endured miserable poverty working in the fields. At least that’s the normal criticism, which is fair enough, but that only describes minor plot points in the first half. The rest of it is just another old tearjerker where a spoiled bitch manages to alienate three(!) husbands because she’s still hung up on a teenage crush. Skip this one.
Lawrence of Arabia (1962) A four hour epic that only exists to impart the sensation of how vast and endless the desert is. This would have been better as a 20 minute IMAX documentary. Skip this one.
The Wizard of Oz (1939) One for the kiddies. But if you’re all grown up you can skip this one.
The Graduate (1967) The back cover of the DVD described this as “love and idealism triumphing over the forces of corruption and conformity”. Nope. Benjamin Braddock is a whiny asshole with no ideals and is himself a force for corruption. If he does indeed represent a rebellion against the conformity of middle-class life—as he breaks up two marriages and a business partnership—he only serves to make us appreciate squareness. Skip this one.
On the Waterfront (1954) This movie does more to reinforce the negative stereotype of unions than any Republican ever could. Skip this one.
Schindler’s List (1993) Speaking of Republicans, Tom Coburn raised a huge stink when NBC aired this film unedited and uninterrupted in prime time in 1999. If you were among the 65 million people watching then you don’t need to see it again. If you weren’t then you’re probably a hopeless Zoomer without the attention span to sit through this. Skip this one.
Singin’ in the Rain (1952) Tapdancing is as much an “art” as throwing a basketball through a hoop, and this crap is very dated. No one born after 1945 has any reason to watch this movie today, unless you’re one of those schlocky lounge/cocktail/swinger ‘40s revivalists who are into this type of thing so you can wear cool clothes. Skip this one.
It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) Frank Capra was an overly sentimental cornball, but beyond that, this movie raises significant concerns about the criminal justice system, making one think it should be routine for a policeman to use deadly force to prevent the escape of someone wanted for disorderly conduct. Skip this one.
Sunset Boulevard (1950) Jack Webb is Joe Friday and Joe Friday only, not “one of the nicest guys you’ll ever meet”. Skip this one.
Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) This movie sends too many mixed messages with regard to its historical inaccuracies. On the one hand, the Japanese are portrayed as incompetent at engineering and construction, which they most certainly were not in real life, giving this somewhat racist undertones. One the other hand, prison camps building the Burma-Siam Railway were much more brutal than this film suggests, given that the real bridge was built using forced labor in conditions that are too appalling for me to describe here. Without either of these inaccuracies, however, there would be no movie. Skip this one.
Some Like It Hot (1959) Neither Tony Curtis not Jack Lemmon pass as women. Skip this one.
Star Wars (1977) This was the first of the big-budget special effects movies in which plot and characterization take a back seat, ushering in the reign of big-budget special effects movies in which plot and characterization take a back seat, to the point that these days every movie is a big-budget special effects movie in which plot and characterization take a back seat. Skip this one.
All About Eve (1950) There’s a good line in this movie about a piano thinking it had composed a concerto—actors ought to keep their egos in check and realize they wouldn’t even have lines to mouth if it wasn’t for writer. Hell, Shakespeare is still read, but does anyone remember the famous thespians of the 16th century? Unfortunately, that one line is the only good thing the writers came up with in this otherwise dull movie. Skip this one.
African Queen (1951) This is a fine romance if you’re one of those crotchety old-timers who think it’s actually sexier when couples don’t take their clothes off and let innuendo and tension do the job for you. The rest of us can skip this one.
Psycho (1960) This isn’t very scary, and there isn’t much suspense. This is better than your average horror film, but that isn’t saying much. Skip this one.
Chinatown (1974) The plot of this is so convoluted it makes Raymond Chandler look like Anton Chekov by comparison. Skip this one.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) Jack Nicholson is at his craziest and hammiest, along with a bunch of other actors who wound up on Taxi. The beginning of his self-parody period (which has yet to end). Skip this one.
The Grapes of Wrath (1940) If you’re a tankie who needs to go back to the Depression so you can find a fictional example to showcase the horrors of capitalism, this is required viewing. Otherwise, skip this one.
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) This movie looked like it would be good after watching the first few scenes with the apes, which mistakenly give the impression of a masterful epic. Instead we’re given 20 minute sequences of spaceships docking and no plot. When the most interesting character is a computer, you know you’re in trouble. Skip this one.
The Maltese Falcon (1941) Dashiell Hammett was a trash writer whom critics adore because he absorbed all of Hemingway and furthered along the development of a distinct American style. Unfortunately, that distinct American toughness is really just nothing more than a high body count. And the book is better than the movie. Skip this one.
Raging Bull (1980) Jake LaMotta just isn’t an interesting character, and two hours with him is pretty wearying. Skip this one. If you really want to watch a Scorsese movie, even Boxcar Bertha is better.
E.T. The Extra Terrestrial (1982) Chalk another one up for the kids. Skip this one.
Dr. Strangelove (1964) “Black Humor” is nothing more than excuse film buffs give themselves to justify watching comedies that aren’t funny. Skip this one.
Bonnie & Clyde (1967) The real Bonnie & Clyde were considerably less sexy than Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty. Skip this one.
Apocalypse Now (1979) A very loose adaptation of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness that bears about the same relation to the reality of Vietnam as Star Wars did to the Roman Empire. Skip this one.
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) With our awareness of the rampant corruption and venality within the Beltway in the post-Watergate era, this film seems hopelessly naïve. Skip this one.
Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) Ah yes, it is not gold that makes men act like animals; filthy lucre is merely one more thing to fight over. This is the kind of dime-store philosophy that practically defines “middlebrow”. Skip this one.
Annie Hall (1977) There are two kinds of Woody Allen movies: The funny ones, and the serious ones. This movie is a transitional work that attempts to fuse the two sides. Unfortunately, it’s hard to tell what’s a joke and what isn’t. His paranoia about anti-Semitism? That lobster scene—he’s not that much of a wimp, is he? Skip this one.
The Godfather Part II (1974) Was responsible for The Godfather Part III. Skip this one.
High Noon (1952) The only notable part is the structure. The action begins at 10:40 a.m. and unfolds in real time until noon, paralleling the length of the film. Other than that, it’s a rather standard Western. Skip this one.
To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) Hollywood changed the plot of the book too much to make it more palatable to moviegoers. Skip this one.
It Happened One Night (1934) Film buffs toss around “pre-Code” like the era was full of racy and disgusting content. It’s really no more shocking than anything in a modern Pixar film. Skip this one.
Midnight Cowboy (1969) Film buffs like to point out that this is the only X-Rated movie to ever win an academy award. They don’t point out that this is only R-Rated by today’s standards and was given an X due to the subject matter more than anything actually pornographic. Skip this one.
The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) This isn’t a movie, it’s a piece of propaganda designed to make returning WWII veterans adjust to home life. It’s alright for a public awareness video, but after serving its admirable purpose, it became obsolete. Heck, nobody’s going to nominate all those “Just Say No” anti-drug movies, are they? So why this? Skip this one.
Double Indemnity (1944) There’s nothing here you won’t find done better on old Perry Mason reruns not to mention your average post-Hill Street Blues cop show. Skip this one.
Doctor Zhivago (1965) Length doesn’t equal quality. Skip this one.
North by Northwest (1959) This movie has all the sophistication of a Timothy Dalton-era James Bond movie. Skip this one.
West Side Story (1961) Theoretically, the marriage of music and narrative ought to take both to new heights, but in practice the narrative suffers because it has to find corny ways to incorporate the songs and the music suffers because individually inspired songs are outnumbered by makeshift hack pieces designed to move the plot along. The world would be a much better place if no one ever penned an opera or musical ever again. Skip this one.
Rear Window (1954) Jimmy Stewart as a Peeping Tom? Skip this one.
King Kong (1933) There’s no need to delve into pre-Civil Rights America’s warped racial/sexual fantasies. Skip this one.
The Birth of a Nation (1915) Ignoring the fact that it completely distorts history and glorifies the KKK, this is just boring. Skip this one.
Streetcar Named Desire (1951) What I said earlier about musicals notwithstanding, Streetcar! was better. Skip this one.
A Clockwork Orange (1971) A great book would have been better if anyone other than Kubrick, the most boring great director of our time, directed this movie. Skip this one.
Taxi Driver (1976) John Hinckley Jr. watched this film over and over. Skip this one.
Jaws (1975) With Sammy Fableman being an overt self-portrait it’s now understandable why all of Spielberg’s characters range from annoying to evil. Suffice it to say, I was rooting for the shark. Skip this one.
Snow White & the Seven Dwarfs (1937) Too bad Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner never made a feature film, or I’d want it here instead. Skip this one.
Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid (1969) A buddy film without homosexual undertones seems a bit quaint in the 21st century. Skip this one.
Philadelphia Story (1940) Katherine Hepburn’s annoying fake British accent (oh, sorry “Mid Atlantic”) just plain grates. Skip this one.
From Here to Eternity (1953) This snoozefest was created entirely so that Frank Sinatra could revive his failing career. Inadvertently, the producers seem to have pioneered the irritating “Oscar bait” genre that clogs up our theaters every winter. Skip this one.
Amadeus (1984) First, it rewrites history. Second, it doesn’t try to give you any insight into one of music’s greatest geniuses and just portrays Mozart as a party animal. Finally, the soundtrack inexplicably left off “Rock Me Amadeus”. Skip this one.
All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) Certain nations gearing up for war have banned this film, which should tell you something about how powerful an anti-war piece this is even today. Unfortunately, some wars are necessary, so see this if you’d like, but don’t go showing it in high schools or anything lest we have a repeat of Vietnam.
The Sound of Music (1965) Speaking of schools, completely against my will my helpless fellow classmates and I were forced to watch this in elementary school. The only time I’ve ever cheered for the Nazis. Skip this one.
MAS*H (1970) Possibly the only time in recorded history that the TV show was actually better than the movie it spun off from. Skip this one.
The Third Man (1949) There are only two good things about this film: The first shot we see of Orson Welles, and the fact that the main character keeps calling Calloway Callahan just to piss him off. Other than that it’s a movie that tries to convince you that the cobblestones and zither of postwar Vienna are enough to make a film about counterfeit penicillin interesting. Skip this one.
Fantasia (1940) A revolutionary film that let Disney animators stretch the boundaries of what could be done with animation. Unfortunately, no one actually watches this, unless they like shadows of people playing musical instruments. Skip this one.
Rebel Without a Cause (1955) James Dean’s legend overshadows his achievement, which actually wasn’t much: Three films, all of which display some talent, but not enough to warrant his current status. If he hadn’t died young, he’d be remembered as a decent but unremarkable ‘50s actor/teen idol. The movie itself is dated and you’d have to be a retro ‘50s obsessed revivalist to get worked up over it. Skip this one.
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) Okay, maybe that wasn't the only time I rooted for the Nazis. Skip this one.
Vertigo (1958) Lonely, unattractive Alfred Hitchcock had a lifelong crush on Grace Kelly, and his psychosexual obsessions are nowhere as obvious as in this twisted film about a man who just can’t get an icy blonde out of his head. Skip this one.
Tootsie (1982) If conservatives want to make a film about how DEI has made it hard for white men to get jobs, then they probably shouldn’t load it up with an obvious trans angle. Unless, of course, they’re trying to tell us something they’re afraid to admit… Skip this one.
Stagecoach (1939) I guess this was good for 1939, but it made a star of John Wayne, who became an American icon by playing an insufferable asshole in every movie he was ever in and acting like even more of an asshole in his public life. Skip this one.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) If they want to include sci-fi, and they want to include kitschy noir like Double Indemnity, then why not include kitschy sci-fi, like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Day the Earth Stood Still, or The Fly? Skip this one.
Silence of the Lambs (1991) If you need to pick out scary trash with lots of sex and murder from the ‘90s, then you get a pretty big playing field. Why not Basic Instinct, or, better yet, Scream? Skip this one.
Network (1976) It’s supposed to tell painful truths about how media manipulates society. Instead, it convinces you that the Tea Part Republican turned MAGA Republican rambling on in a bar is on to something. Skip this one.
The Manchurian Candidate (1962) This movie dates horribly considering what we now know about brainwashing, and if any Republican sees it in the next 6 months it’s going to lead to endless 4Chan conspiracy theories about how Thomas Crooks was compromised in a Democrat-controlled nursing home to give the libs plausible deniability. Skip this one.
An American In Paris (1951) One Gene Kelly tap dancing special was more than enough. Replace with The Decline of Western Civilization II: The Metal Years and give the old fogies who voted for this tinnitus. Skip this one.
Shane (1953) The charming tale of a family who thinks it’s a good idea to take in a drifter with a mysterious past and no last name (or first?) and let him babysit their son. I just realized that for all the movies about men who like other men a whole bunch there aren’t any cute animal movies on this list! Where’s Homeward Bound? Or Milo and Otis? Skip this one.
The French Connection (1971) When Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso made the French Connection bust in 1962, it was the largest narcotics seizure in the country’s history. Strange, then, why they’d participate in this hack job that completely tarnishes their legacy. The real Eddie Egan must have been given a lot of money to berate the fake Eddie Egan relentlessly for being a bad cop. And the image of the detective as a slovenly womanizer doesn’t do his image any favors either. Skip this one.
Forrest Gump (1994) The moral of this apparently is that if you’re living through an era of monumental societal change, it’s best to be the smiling idiot on the sidelines. Skip this one.
Ben-Hur (1959) I understand the desire to include the type of over-the-top production that Hollywood was making in the 1950s to counter the popularity of television, but this is nothing more than a Charlton Heston movie without guns or apes. Skip this one.
Wuthering Heights (1939) This is a movie for housewives who read trashy romance novels, which, in fact, the book it’s based on was (it's only considered a "classic" because it was written in the 19th century, not the vulgar 20th). Emily Bronte was the Danielle Steele of her time. Sure, Laurence Olivier can act, but will Americans please get over their misguided prejudice that English accents somehow automatically denote sophistication and intelligence? Skip this one.
The Gold Rush (1925) The silent era ended for a reason. I don’t want to read a movie. Skip this one.
Dances with Wolves (1990) Kevin Costner takes himself far, far too seriously, and turns every film he stars in into a boring, turgid dirge. He winds up making a far greater fool of himself than Jim Carrey and Pee Wee Herman combined with his grim-faced schtick. Hollywood’s portrayal of Indians as great noble savages is one of those deep-seated traditions that is long overdue to go. How about a movie that takes place in an Indian casino? Skip this one.
City Lights (1931) We definitely don’t need silent films made 4 years into the sound era. Skip this one.
American Graffiti (1973) This movie did for 50s nostalgia what “The Big Chill” did for 60s nostalgia and “Dazed and Confused” did for 70s nostalgia — make films better known for their soundtracks. Skip this one.
Rocky (1978) "My old man told me that I'd have to use my body 'cuz I didn't have much of a brain." Thus, Sylvester Stallone neatly sums up his entire movie career in one line. Skip this one.
The Deer Hunter (1978) As a Pittsburgh native, I feel deeply offended that the only actual deer hunting in this movie was shot in the Cascades and not Tionesta or some other place where people actually have camps. And there’s no reason why they had to shoot the mill town scenes in Steubenville rather than Clairton. This kind of inaccuracy is easy to overlook if you’re more focused on the completely unrelatable plot, but to someone like me it’s like portraying New Yorkers as having southern accents to fit foreign stereotypes of Americans. Skip this one.
The Wild Bunch (1969) When the amount of violence in a movie is the only thing it has going for it, it’s not a good sign. Skip this one.
Modern Times (1934) And we certainly don’t need silent films that were made 7 years into the sound era and a year after the Hayes Code. Skip this one.
Giant (1956) Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor, James Dean. If they wanted to include a teen movie how about Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon in Beach Blanket bingo, or better yet, Ski Party?
Platoon (1986) All Oliver Stone films are just his incoherent political ramblings translated to the screen. Unless you plan on voting for RFK Jr., skip this one.
Fargo (1996) I get it, people in the Upper Midwest have funny accents. And it doesn’t even take place in Fargo. And it inspired an absolutely dreadful television series that featured a scenery-chewing Kirsten Dunst and an unexplained flying saucer. Skip this one.
Duck Soup (1933) Snappy one-liners are not dialogue. Skip this one.
Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) “Battleship Potemkin” was better, but it was made by Soviet commies, so it’s ineligible for this list. A half-assed substitute doesn’t cut it, even at 86. Skip this one.
Frankenstein (1931) See above about lamentably substituting an American snore because the better foreign films are ineligible — the monster movie was always one thing the Japs did better. If you need a stand-in then at least use “Young Frankenstein”, which scared the hell out of me. Skip this one.
Easy Rider (1968) I know they were different times, but the hippie rhetoric is laughable today. Not to mention that there isn’t much of a plot and the ending is hard to believe (sure, the roads are filled with rednecks going around shooting unarmed strangers). Skip this one.
Patton (1970) The movie starts with an incredibly boring monologue where Patton marched in front of an American flag and starts delivering a harangue about warfare. There are better things to do with three hours than spend them stuck with a warmongering lunatic. Skip this one.
The Jazz Singer (1927) The fact that Al Jolson sings for about two minutes doesn’t make up for the fact that you have to read this film. They could have at least included the Neil Diamond version with what should be America’s national anthem. Skip this one.
My Fair Lady (1964) Yeah, whatever. Shouldn't they disqualify this since it was written by Brits, has a British subject, and British actors? George Bernard Shaw is that rare playwright who is great on the page but talky and long-winded on stage or screen. Skip this one.
A Place in the Sun (1951) Theodore Dreiser was one of the clumsiest writers to ever hold a pen, and when he starts expounding on turn-of-the-century ideas about chemicals and glands, he's laughably dated. I guess it’s good that this film is better than spending 800 pages with him, but unless you’re trying to get out of a school assignment, you can skip this one.
The Apartment (1960) A philandering executive bribes an employee with a promotion so he can use his apartment to sexually harass a member of the Psychic Friends Network. Skip this one.
Goodfellas (1990) Martin Scorsese tries to whitewash the fact that Henry Hill was a total fucking moron who hung around with women who were even dumber than he was. And he was a snitch, too. Skip this one.
Pulp Fiction (1994) About ten years ago I was at a casino with a friend of mine who lost his wallet. When he had to tell the kindly old woman at customer service that it said “Bad Ass Motherfucker” on it, well, let’s just say he was no Samuel L. Jackson. Having a slightly out of order plot is not impressive. And, as with “Duck Soup”, zingers aren’t a substitute for dialogue. Skip this one.
The Searchers (1956) John Wayne in full-blown asshole mode, to the point that he wants to murder the girl they’ve spent years looking for. Skip this one.
Bringing Up Baby (1938) For some reason critics love to fellate 30’s screwball comedies (if you're not familiar with that term, it means a movie in which the hero and heroine start off hating each other and wind up falling in love), but don’t take their modern equivalents seriously. If they were going to include this on the 1998 list then they should have added “American Pie” when they updated it ten years later. Skip this one.
Unforgiven (1992) Another western featuring an asshole extraordinaire, but at least the John Wayne movies on this list didn’t subject the audience to the star’s right-wing political views. Skip this one.
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967) If the “Oscars So White” people wanted to pick a more worthy target, this list would be as good of one as any. The exclusion of blacks somewhat understandable since they weren’t really able to make films until the 70s, but making this piece of dated claptrap their sole representative (and No. 99, at that) is simply inexcusable. No Spike Lee Joints? No Sweet Sweetback’s Badass Song? Skip this one.
Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) If you feel the need to see a James Cagney movie, at least make it a James Cagney gangster movie. Skip this one.

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Rov_Scam 2yr ago

From what I've read so far, Neely was walking back and forth yelling at nobody in particular that he was hungry and thirsty and that he didn't care if he went to prison and he was ready to die. He then aggressively threw his jacket onto the floor. I could be mistaken, but I was under the impression that that this is the kind of behavior that is usually reserved for the mentally ill and intoxicated. You can call it ranting, raving, or whatever, but it's certainly not normal and is certainly distinct from going off on tangents in a space specifically dedicated for the purpose. News reports indicated that Neely was schizophrenic and I'm assuming that that influenced his behavior, but I'm no psychiatrist.

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Rov_Scam 5mo ago

I can't take Trump seriously about the deficit when he openly plans on insulting massive tax cuts that will massively outdo whatever nibbling around the edges DOGE manages to accomplish.

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Rov_Scam 3mo ago

The left took over these institutions because the right couldn't be bothered to defend them. 25 years ago, while there was a clear left-wing bias in academia, you could still be a conservative and get tenure and publish papers without too much controversy. And conservatives were still telling my generation that if we pursued a career in academia, or government, or the nonprofit sector, or whatever, we were idiots, because those jobs were for people who couldn't hack it in the private sector. Hell, just look at their paychecks. Hell, I remember us joking after our first semester in law school that we could relax for a few weeks between the end of finals and discovering that we were all destined for the public defender (never mind that a year later working as a PD seemed like a pretty good deal).

Government jobs were for the mediocre, nonprofit jobs were for the bleeding hearts. But academia was the worst. At the age when your peers are all established in their jobs, have mortgages, and are trying to figure out how to coach a little league baseball team, you're living in a shithole apartment in a college town on a stipend, hoping that you'll get to move to rural Nebraska so you can teach history at a small liberal arts college that's not even offering tenure. And even that's such a long shot that it's pretty much your dream job at this point. The GOP at this time was preaching a civic version of the prosperity gospel: Taxes on the rich only serve to penalize the most productive/talented/innovative citizens. If you make a lot of money it's because you deserve it, and if you don't it's because you simply aren't as good. And God help you if you were on welfare or some other kind of public assistance, which was evidence that you were simply lazy and expected a handout.

This wasn't the case among Democrats. The important thing in Democratic families wasn't maximizing your paycheck, but having a job that made full use of your talents. So if a smart kid wanted to be a taxi driver, that was looked down on, but if he wanted to be a teacher, it was okay, even if they both made the same salary. So there was a period, probably beginning in the 1980s, where the number of conservative PhD candidates began dwindling, year by year, and as conservative professors retired, they were replaced by liberals. By 2015 you had a critical mass of leftist professors and new Republican orthodoxy that was repugnant not just to liberals, but to old guard conservatives, and has no intellectual foundation. At this point, it's hard to imagine what a conservative academic would even look like, since the tenants of conservatism are all dependent on the fickle whim of one man. So even the conservatives who have made it through probably aren't conservative in contemporary terms, since up until fairly recently no self-respecting conservative economist, for example, would ever wright an academic treatise on why 30% tariffs are actually good, and no conservative political scientist would write a treatise on why the US needs to invade Canada. As much as the right complains about this, the wound is entirely self-inflicted.

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Rov_Scam 1yr ago

If Musk had simply gone to the DoD and told them that his company couldn't afford to keep providing this service free of charge, he probably could have reached a deal similar to the one he got much earlier. Instead, he started messing around with the service itself, and if that wasn't bad enough, he is alleged to have engaged in a little amateur diplomacy that resulted in his publicly proposing a settlement to the war that he had to have known the people he was ostensibly helping would find unacceptable.

I sit on the board of a nonprofit that relies heavily on volunteers. While I don't expect these volunteers to have the kind of dedication an employee would, nothing irritates me more than when someone volunteers to do something and then doesn't do it. No, you're under no obligation to help me. But keep in mind that if you tell me you're going to come and then don't show up it complicates things because now I have to rearrange my plans on the fly, and your absence may be the difference between finishing the job in one day and having to dedicate more time. If I know this in advance I can work around it, but I don't like surprises. Even worse is when a vendor reneges on a deal. Yes, I'm grateful that you're providing goods or services for free or at a reduced price, but when you change the terms a week before the event I either have to come up with money that's not in the budget or find someone else on short notice. It's probably not the best analogy, but the point is that just because you're doing something nice at your own expense doesn't mean people don't have a legitimate reason to be pissed if they get cut off before they've accomplished the goal you're ostensibly helping them with.

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Rov_Scam 1yr ago

Well, Texas rep Lloyd Doggett just became the first Democratic politician to call for Biden to step down. Call me crazy, but I honestly have a sneaking suspicion that this was all planned out ahead of time. Biden looked awful during the debate. But at the after party he seemed fine, and he was beck to his old self the next day in North Carolina. I think Biden always intended to be a one-term president but that's not the kind of thing you can pull off these days barring death or permanent disability. He would have had to announce he wasn't seeking the nomination some time around last summer, at which point he would have immediately become a lame duck where he lost whatever pull he had with congress and saw half of his administration overshadowed by the other Democrats jockeying for position. There was also the traditional incumbent's advantage to consider. And there was no guarantee that whoever the Democrats ended up nominating would be better than Biden. He had to run again.

At this point, the entire Republican apparatus has had a year to prepare a campaign against Joe Biden. The attacks are pretty standard at this point — he's old, he's demented, he caused inflation, he fucked up the Afghanistan pullout, the "Biden Crime Family", etc. What happens if, at the eleventh hour, Joe Biden is no longer the candidate? Suddenly, a year's worth of planning is down the toilet. Now they'll find themselves likely up against some "Generic Democrat" on whom they will have no opposition research, no idea who his base is, no idea what his policy positions are. Meanwhile, the Democrats could have been planning this for months and have ready solutions to all the problems out there. Plus they can run on the idea "that he knew when to step aside", unlike somebody else. This is a person who didn't have to spend primary season pretending to be further left than they really were and didn't have the misfortune of months of oppo research from members of their own party. A candidate who's optimized for winning a general election.

Then there's the matter of the debates. Trump was eager to debate Biden. Maybe a little too eager. He agreed to an unusually early first debate and to a format that stripped him of the ability to interrupt his opponent and to draw on a supportive studio audience. If a new guy comes in soon, there's the possibility that he pushes for two more debates with the same rules. Trump really isn't in a position to refuse given how adamant he's been about debating. If he wants his mike permanently unmuted then he'll get criticized for being afraid to let the public hear what his opponent has to say — "He agreed to the rules for Biden because he thought he could win against Biden; if he wants to change the rules it must because he doesn't think he can win." Maybe give him his audience back as a token of goodwill. Now he's got to go up against someone who's much younger and more adept at pushing his buttons than Sleepy Joe.

The major downside is that the country collectively goes "Who?" and votes for someone they're familiar with. But this is overrated, both because Joe Biden is massively disliked in some circles and because most of the people who will ultimately decide the election aren't really paying attention until after Labor Day. Trump can and should run his "Who is Lou Lipschitz" routine for a couple months, but after that it starts to wear thin and make people think "Is that all you've got?" I don't actually think this is what will happen but I hope it will. It would make this fall much more interesting than another slow descent into a Trump presidency.

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Rov_Scam 2yr ago

Given that the Reedy Creek matter isn't over yet I'm not sure that's an example you want to be giving. I'd be willing to bet a decent sum that come next July, it's still in existence.

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Rov_Scam 10mo ago

The defense has to be proportional to the threat; deadly force can only be used if the perpetrator has a reasonable threat of death or serious bodily injury (serious usually meaning permanent disability, not a black eye). Based on the information available, if he hadn't been shot and were arrested instead, the charge would have probably been something like misdemeanor battery, which wouldn't usually even merit jail time. If the facts come out that the guy were being wailed on, he may have a good defense, but if it's a mere scuffle as described in the article, it's a long shot that should get pled down. This may seem unfair, but for public policy reasons the state prefers that scuffles don't escalate to shootings.

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Rov_Scam 6mo ago

Before I start, I think we need to make it clear that by "woke" we mean a certain kind of racial and sexual politics rooted in the idea of recognizing oppression. It's a broad definition, but it's important that we distinguish woke politics from typical left-wing politics than have been around for decades, as a lot of right-wing detractors have lumped these policies together in an attempt at discrediting them. So, by my definition, simply arguing for stricter environmental regulations for the normal reasons isn't woke. Arguing for stricter environmental regulations because of the disproportionate impact of air pollution on communities of color is.

That being said, wokeness got a lot of press but it was never able to coalesce into a serious political movement, and while it certainly influenced the "national conversation", it didn't really lead to any concrete changes beyond hand-wavey gestures that in hindsight look more to have been done for purposes of public perception than to make any real changes. One only has to look at the history of the movement to get a feel for how unpopular it really was among Democrats. It started around 2012 in the wake of the Trayvon Martin scandal, but it didn't really have any appreciable influence on Obama's reelection campaign. The late Obama administration made a few changes regarding sexual assault on campus, trans people in the military, and the like, and while woke ideas were gaining greater prominence, the work "woke" wasn't even in the public consciousness yet.

That wouldn't happen until the 2016 primary season got into full swing in the summer of 2015, by which point a number of blacks killed at the hands of police led to riots and other expressions of outrage. But while these things were gaining media prominence, they hadn't coalesced into any real policy proposals. The 2016 Democratic primary was supposed to be a coronation of Hillary Clinton, whose style was straight out of the 1990s, but was met with a challenge by Bernie Sanders, whose ideas were more out of the 1960s. The woke set tried to glom onto Sanders as, being far to the left of Hillary, he seemed to have the most promise, but his ideas centered more around class and economic inequality than identity politics. He would occasionally give a nod to his new compatriots, but it was never a central part of his platform. In any event, he lost the nomination.

After Trump won the presidency, woke politics gained increasing prominence in the media, and would seem to be the future of the Democratic party. Yet the 2020 primary field, despite being the largest in recent memory, failed to produce a single credible woke candidate. The wokest was probably Kirsten Gillebrand, who identified herself as a “white woman of privilege” and promised to reach out to “white women in the suburbs who voted for Trump and explain to them what white privilege actually is.” Yet her campaign never got any traction and she was done by the end of summer, 2019. Beto O'Rourke's woke credentials didn't run as deep as Gillebrand's as he tried to unseat Ted Cruz in 2018 as a pragmatic centrist, but his presidential run saw him embrace wokeness in an attempt to distinguish himself. He too floundered, and dropped out in November. Kamala Harris actually had the best run of the woke candidates, but this is subject to some qualifications. First, her wokeness wasn't explicit; you had to squint to see it. Second, though she did get some momentum—in contrast to the other two, who got none—she couldn't sustain it and had to drop out in December.

What about the candidates who actually made it to the primaries? There was Sanders, who had more concessions to the progressive left but didn't really change who he was. There was Liz Warren, the darling of the woke media types. She was basically running a Sanders-lite campaign that had a few nods to racial and gender politics but was nonetheless centered around inequality and corruption. There was Mike Bloomberg, a former Republican and Independent who was nobody's idea of woke and who nobody voted for anyway. There were Amy Klobuchar and Mayor Pete, clearly vying for the centrist lane. And there was Joe Biden, ultimate winner of the nomination and the election, who was also running as a centrist. He was woke in the sense that he was the only candidate who could get a significant amount of black votes, but in this sense he seemed more like a throwback to Bill Clinton than the vanguard of racial politics. And as woke rhetoric heated up during the summer of 2020, he would take positions explicitly contrary to the worst woke excesses.

So there we were. In 2019, as wokeness was nearing its peak, the Democratic field could not support a single woke candidate. Liz Warren, the wokest candidate in the eventual primary field, did miserably. The eventual nominee didn't embrace it during primary season and didn't turn to it in the general, even as its public prominence was peaking. The most prominent advocates of wokeism in the political arena were The Squad, a group of lefty representatives from safe districts. While they got a lot of media attention, they were essentially freshmen who didn't hold any leadership positions and didn't have any real influence. The most prominent piece of legislation they produced was the Green New Deal draft, a document so widely ridiculed that most Democrats disowned it as an overenthusiastic preliminary draft b some plucky kids that was never meant to see the light of day, let alone become a serious proposal.

The biggest political successes of wokeness were in local governments in heavily left-leaning areas, particularly on the West Coast. But these are local governments, and for all the press their policies got, they never impacted more than a very small percentage of the total population. It's telling that when people are discussing the effects of woke culture it almost always comes down to a few things that don't really mean anything. For instance, I have yet to read a critique of wokeness that doesn't mention pronouns in email signatures. But what does this really mean? As much as conservatives would like to view it as a symbol of capitulation to radical ideology, it's really just the cheapest, lowest-effort thing a company can do to make it look like they're changing the status quo.

Which leads us to the biggest changes corporations made: DEI initiatives. Were these merely symbolic? Yes, in the sense that they aren't anything other than a spinoff of the HR department into something that sounds more impressive.But what did they actually do? Mostly investigate discrimination claims that HR would have to investigate anyway. Wed to this was the implementation of various training programs meant to counter this, which is why companies were spending large sums having people like Robin D'Angelo speak at all-hands meetings on Zoom. But the rise, and subsequent downfall, of these initiatives wasn't merely symbolic, or necessarily borne out of a sincere desire to combat racism, or sexism, or whatever.

No, they were borne out of the belief that there was a growing zeitgeist that would make them subject to additional liability for employment discrimination. So, in order to show juries that you're Taking Discrimination Seriously, you have additional trainings and a dedicated DEI staff and prompt investigation of complaints. But aside from the investigation of complaints, this additional stuff doesn't do much. Employment discrimination suits ended up being based on the same boring grounds they were before wokeness became prominent. Very few attorneys were willing to file suits based on microaggressions or implicit bias or whatever, and those who did couldn't find willing juries. And even if there was a jury willing to entertain these notions, few of them would reconsider because of some bullshit training the supervisor attended a year earlier. Now that it's clear that shit like that isn't going to play they can move the discrimination investigations back to HR where they belong and get rid of all the trainings that don't accomplish anything useful.

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Rov_Scam 8mo ago

On Prognostication

Over the past several weeks, I've become increasingly irritated by discussions, both here and elsewhere, involving election predictions. While I agree that speculation can be fun, I think too many people try to read too much into the day-to-day ups and downs of the election cycle. While I agree with Nate Silver on a lot of things, there's something I find inherently off-putting about his schtick. I read The Signal and the Noise around the time it hit the bestseller lists and had an addendum about the 2012 election. One of the themes of the book is that the so-called experts who make predictions on television don't base their predictions on rational evidence and don't face any consequences when their predictions fail. No in-studio commentator on The NFL Today is losing his job solely because he picked too many losers.

Around this time, I became interested in probabilities, and I was regularly hitting up a friend who had majored in math and was pursuing a doctorate in economics at Ohio State. At one point he told me "Probability is interesting, but when it comes down to it, the only thing it's good for is gambling. We say there's a 50/50 chance of drawing a black ball from an urn when we know that the urn has 50 black balls and 50 white balls. When we talk about probabilities in the real world, it's like talking about the chances of drawing a black ball from an urn we don't know the size of." When discussing cards or dice, we're discussing random events based on repeatable starting conditions. When discussing elections, we're discussing a non-random event that will only happen once.

Beyond that, though, the broader question is: What's the point of all of this? This isn't a football game where scoring points confers an obvious advantage. If Trump is up by 5 points in June or Harris is up by 5 points in July, it has absolutely no effect on the actual election. My irritation with this started a couple weeks ago when someone posted here about Trump having large odds of winning on some betting site. I mean, okay, but who cares? What am I supposed to do with this information? I guess it's marginally useful if I'm thinking of putting a little money on the line, but I'm not much of a gambler, and the poster wasn't sharing this information to spark discussion on good betting opportunities. I pretty much lost it, though, last weekend, when news of the Selzer poll showing Harris winning Iowa hit and had everyone speculating whether Ms. Selzer was a canary in a coal mine or hopelessly off. Again, who cares? Selzer's prediction may be correct, or it may be incorrect, but it has no bearing on the actual election. Harris doesn't get any extra votes because Selzer shows her doing better than ABC or whoever. Trump doesn't get any extra votes because of his odds on PredictIt.

I will admit that polling is useful to campaigns trying to allocate resources and determine what works and what doesn't. But they have their own internal polling for that. But unless you're actively employed by a campaign, there's nothing you can do with this information. As much as arguing about politics in general may be an exercise in futility, there's at least some chance you can influence someone else's position. Arguing about who's going to win the election doesn't even go this far, since no one is arguing that you should vote based on polling averages. The only utility I see in any of this is entertainment for the small subset of people who find politics entertaining. Which brings me back to my original criticism of Silver: The reason these professional prognosticators don't get called out on their inaccuracies is because their employers understand that their predictions are ultimately meaningless. Terry Bradshaw may predict the Browns to beat the Bengals, but at a certain time we'll know the winner and if the Bengals win the sun will rise the next morning and his being wrong about it will have no effect on anything.

For the record, a think Harris will probably win, but my prediction is low-confidence and isn't based on anything that's happened since campaign season started. In 2016, a lot of people in swing states voted for Trump because he was an unknown quantity and they preferred taking a chance with him rather than Clinton. In 2020, a certain percentage of these people regretted their decision and voted for Biden. I haven't seen anything in the past four years that suggests that any of these people are moving back to Trump. Electorally, the Republicans haven't shown anything, despite the fact that the first half of the Biden presidency wasn't exactly a cakewalk. But that's just my opinion. I don't know what you're supposed to do with it. You can disagree with it, and you may have a point, but after tomorrow what I think and what you think won't matter. The votes will be counted, a winner declared, and Dr. Oz's midterm performance won't matter, and my being wrong about it won't have an effect on anything.

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Rov_Scam 1yr ago

This isn't directly on point, but I think the case against male circumcision has been overstated by advocates and adopted by guys who were circumcized as infants and wouldn't know the difference. A friend of mine nixed his foreskin at age 23 and said there was no real difference once he recovered from surgery. Contrast that with the experience of my mother, who spent 30 years as an outpatient surgery nurse and said the number of guys who come in for surgery do to recurring problems (usually UTIs), is enough for her to put the anti-circumcision crowd on the same level as anti-vaxxers.

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Rov_Scam 1yr ago

Joe Biden had been out of office for months at the time that email was sent. You can't bribe a private citizen.

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Rov_Scam 2yr ago

This is the exact kind of "gotcha" politics that I can't stand regardless of which side does it. What's the conservative takeaway supposed to be here? That we should restrict Muslim immigration because it's a threat to the LGBT agenda? Or that we should encourage more Muslims to come because they're natural social conservatives?

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Rov_Scam 2yr ago

You think that in a liberal society it's the proper role of government to threaten legal consequences for exercise of free speech rights?

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Rov_Scam 2yr ago

I have previously discussed Ron DeSantis's prospects of becoming GOP nominee here and probably back on the old sub as well, but events of the past few weeks make me want to revisit the topic. During this period, several op-eds appeared suggesting that DeSantis is already flaming out. The biggest evidence for this is polling, which shows him losing ground to Donald Trump. While I think these reports are a bit premature—after all, polls from a year out aren't exactly the most reliable, especially concerning a candidate who hasn't even announced yet—they seem to underscore a point I had made previously. Ron DeSantis is a great candidate if the goal is to wed the Trump spirit to a candidate that doesn't want to directly invoke Trump. Some call him Trump-lite but that's not really an accurate description. He knows that the Republican party desperately needs to move on from Trump if they want to win national elections, as most Americans find direct MAGA invocations and claims of rigged elections to be distasteful at best and dangerous at worst. There's value in appearing to be the reasonable Republican who might have a shot at winning the general election in the face of an unpopular octogenarian. On the other hand, he knows that Trump has a large base that is now well-integrated in the party and is distrustful of Romney-type moderates who will sell them out to wealthy elites if it puts an extra nickel in their pockets and will play dead in the face of woke excess. RINOs, in other words. The Tea Party and later Trump reinvigorated a Republican party that had been moribund in the wake of Bush's disastrous second term, and the voters who made 2016 possible won't stand for some squish. They need someone who will fight.

DeSantis sought to split this difference. He balanced effective, bland government with culture-war ostentation. He refused to kowtow to Trump but was reluctant to criticize him. He built up plenty of media buzz. The thought among his supporters was that he would have the upper hand on both Trump wannabes and boring moderates in the primary. And then Trump himself announced his candidacy, and started attacking DeSantis directly, even though DeSantis hadn't (and still hasn't) declared. When he finally announces (probably in June), the primary fight will be a bloodbath. And no, DeSantis can't wait until 2028 because his buzz is solely based around his supposed candidacy. If he sits this one out he's a popular governor who no one outside of Florida gives a fuck about, at least not until 2027, when he'll have to compete with whoever the next wunderkind is, assuming Trump isn't running yet again.

The smart money says that DeSantis would have a shot in the general but is hamstrung by the fact that, having to go against Trump directly, he'll have to run further to the right than a general electorate will find acceptable, and will come out of the primary looking like another MAGA extremist. This is the conventional wisdom but I think this wisdom is wrong. First, DeSantis would have a tough row to hoe in the general even if the GOP handed him the nomination on a silver platter. What's the man know for so far? His COVID response put him on the map, but COVID isn't going to be an issue in 2024, and he'll have to do better than pointing out an isolated glory from four years ago. Everything else he's been in the news for has been culture war bait that is of dubious effectiveness, has nearly no national relevance, and is distasteful to moderates in any event. Part of the reason why Republicans were so disappointing in last year's midterms is because they failed to address things voters actually cared about. As much as the GOP would rag on Biden for inflation, they never presented a coherent plan for how to deal with it. No one knows what Ron DeSantis thinks about inflation. No one knows what the thinks about healthcare. No one knows what he thinks about crime, or how he plans to explain how Florida's crime rate is worse than both New York's and California's. When he's on the debate stage with Biden, what's he going to do, talk about the STOP WOKE act and the Don't Say Gay bill?

But then, he had an opening. Earlier this month, "Justice for All", a new single by Donald Trump and the J6 choir, went to No. 1 on iTunes. The single features president Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance over a choir of heavily autotuned January 6th prisoners singing "The Star Spangled Banner" over prison phones. To most people on the left, this was just a hilarious example of how nutty the right is. But it gives DeSantis a chance. This is, for once, proof positive that there's no outflanking Trump on the right. No amount of MAGA-adjacentness is going to cut it here, when Trump represents the platonic ideal of MAGA. DeSantis's culture warring has proven that he's no RINO squish; now he can use this credibility to fight Trump directly. Come out directly and say that Trump's implicit support of the J6 prisoners, most of whom were convicted of assaulting law enforcement, is a disgrace to the idea of law and order and legitimizes left-wing violence. Come out and say that the 2020 election wasn't rigged. Come out and directly attack every MAGA conspiracy theory out there. Run on all the good, boring things he's done in Florida that no one has paid attention to, like environmental legislation, which has greater GOP interest in the wake of the East Palestine debacle. There's little doubt that if he wins Iowa, or New Hampshire, or wherever else, Trump will claim that the election was rigged, so get out ahead of it. He'll lose the Trump faithful but he wasn't winning with them anyway, and the rest of the party will be able to get back to some semblance of normal.

Of course. I wrote all this before I saw the news last night of the latest developments in the Disney scandal. I thought his move against Disney was stupid at the time, and said so here, but all of the DeSantis supporters assured me that this was the right move. It was clear almost immediately that simply ending the special district wasn't going to work, and I wasn't surprised when he said that the legislature would be dealing with the issue at a date that was conveniently after the election. Around this time, Bob Iger came back as Disney CEO, and apparently realized that a drawn-out court battle wasn't in the company's best interests, and it looked like the two sides had reached the kind of compromise that allowed both parties to save face: The state would get a couple token board members and everyone would forget about the whole thing. Then, at some point, DeSantis got greedy and made a deal that looked too good to be true—the entire district would be replaced with a new one whose board would consist entirely of political appointees, including a self-described children's activist and a self-described Christian nationalist, along with some wealthy donors for good measure. Some even went so far as to suggest that the board could monitor the content of Disney's theme park programs. The new board took over last month with relatively little fanfare.

And then, yesterday, weeks after the crucial documents had been signed, it became clear that the whole thing was one big setup, and that Disney had completely outfoxed DeSantis. It turns out that, back in February, the existing RCID board had entered into an agreement with Disney that devolved almost all of its powers. At least the powers that would have given DeSantis any leverage over the company. The board will still oversee infrastructure, but won't have any ability to influence development. Florida officials are obviously livid and the new board is seeking legal redress. I won't comment on the legality of the whole mess because I don't know, but even if the state has a good case against Disney, it doesn't really matter. First, the RCID was a public body and thus subject to sunshine laws. The whole thing was done out in the open—the agreement was posted online so you didn't even need a records request, the meeting adopting the agreement was public, etc.—so the only excuse DeSantis has for getting into this mess was not anticipating some kind of funny business and not noticing that anything was wrong until weeks after the deal was done. Second, it doesn't matter because any litigation won't be resolved until well after the election is over, and I doubt anyone will be issuing preliminary injunctions enabling the board to operate as it desires. One of the centerpieces of DeSantis's culture war has been delayed significantly due almost exclusively to the incompetence of public officials. Who knows, maybe this will blow over, but it significantly damages any attempt by DeSantis to run on competent administration.

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Rov_Scam 2yr ago

I may have mentioned this before, but for those of you don’t know, I’m an unapologetic music junkie. Since 2010 or so, I’ve been making my way through the corpus of music history in a semi-systematic way that makes sense only to me, and rating albums as I go through it using a scale of 0 to 5 stars, half stars included. To date, I have awarded 186 albums the highest ranking the criteria for which are as follows:

The crème de la crème. Albums that have no serious weak moments and many transcendent ones. Any weak spots or less than captivating songs are overshadowed by the splendor of the glorious majority. In any event, these are minor enough that pointing them out is the kind of petty nitpicking that even fans of the work in question will argue over. Nearly all of these records defined either the genre which they belong to or the era in which they were recorded.

I don’t normally rank the albums as I rate them, but I’ve done so for the top tier. As a sort of personal indulgence, I will include capsule reviews for all the albums on this list over the next several Fridays, including as many reviews as character limits allow. Without further ado:

186 Lynyrd Skynyrd – One More from the Road (1977)

Most live albums are superfluous—they include pleasant live renditions of the familiar studio material but rarely offer anything essential. The best live albums are usually the shorter ones that highlight a few key performances rather than attempting to provide the full concert experience. Unfortunately, there was a trend in the 1970s where any artist nearing the end of its contract would release an obligatory double live album that clocked in at over an hour and contained everything a fan could want in a live release. Most of these are decent, but inessential. This record is one of the few exceptions. Lead guitarist Steve Gaines had recently joined the band and would only be present for one studio album, but the performances he gives here are nonpareil, giving the familiar classics a level of sophistication they hadn’t had previously. And the performance of "Freebird" that ends the album makes it abundantly clear why calling for it at the end of unrelated concerts became such a cliché 20 years later.

185 Strawbs – Ghosts (1975)

Strawbs were about as undistinguished a Progressive Rock band as you could get, never having any commercial success, always showing flashes of brilliance but never making a truly great album (though Hero and Heroine came close). Then, in 1975, as Progressive Rock was in its death throes, everything finally came together. There’s nothing particularly noteworthy about the album, just that it combines great songs with enough of the usual progressive elements to keep things interesting.

184 Organized Konfusion – Organized Konfusion (1991)

Most rap albums—even the important ones—suffer from some critical flaw that prevents them from achieving the highest ranking. I’d be remiss if I claimed that this album held any particular degree of importance in the history of rap music, but it manages to run for nearly an hour without a bum track in sight. The liberal Steely Dan samples don’t hurt, either.

183 Thievery Corporation – Sound from the Thievery Hi-Fi (1997)

Downtempo albums can be difficult to judge because they are, at some level, supposed to exist in the background as much as the foreground. Ones that emphasize the former tend to be generic and unmemorable. Ones that emphasize the latter can be good albums, but they aren’t really effective as Downtempo albums. Not only does Thievery Corporation manage to strike this balance perfectly, they also manage to strike a similar balance between Hip-Hop and Easy Listening, making this album equally suited for smoking a joint as it is to being played in a department store. And, of course, the individual cuts are great as well.

182 The Byrds – The Notorious Byrd Brothers (1968)

It seems odd looking back at the catalog of one of the most significant bands in Rock history that this was the only album they released that makes this list. There are at least five other Byrds albums that probably have better critical reputations than this, and they are very good albums, but all suffered from pretty significant flaws. What makes it all the more unusual is that this album was recorded at an uncertain point in the band’s history; personnel changes were rampant, with the only constants being Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman, and session musicians were used to complete the songs. Nonetheless, this album manages to encapsulate everything that was great about the Byrds: “Goin’ Back” echoes back to their early Folk-Rock period, “Wasn’t Born to Follow” looks ahead to their Country-Rock future, and there’s plenty of psychedelic weirdness thrown in for good measure.

181 Bob Seger – Night Moves (1976)

While Bruce Springsteen has always fashioned himself as the working-class Heartland Rocker par excellence, Bob Seger is a much better choice for that distinction. He’d spent the past decade as a true working musician, putting out albums regularly, touring constantly, and getting little recognition outside of Michigan for it. His breakthrough album was the typical double-live Live Bullet, but this was his first real studio success, containing great songs that encapsulate the heartland approach without resorting to the theatrical bombast of Bruce Springsteen or the overearnestness of John Mellencamp.

180 Roy Harper – Stormcock (1971)

Roy Harper’s claim to fame among most Rock fans is as the namesake of the Led Zeppelin song “Hats Off to (Roy) Harper” and as the lead vocalist on Pink Floyd’s “Have a Cigar”. He was always bound to be the kind of guy that was more popular among musicians than among the general public. This is certainly an unusual album in the Rock canon—only four tracks, two per side, just acoustic guitar and vocals. But the length of the songs works to their advantage, as Harper is talented enough to make them seem epic rather than overlong, and his guitar playing is intricate enough that the spare instrumentation never seems inadequate.

179 Boards of Canada – The Campfire Headphase (2005)

The critical consensus may be that Music Has the Right to Children is the best Boards of Canada album, and while that record was more influential, it had to much weirdness for the sake of weirdness to make it into the top tier. By the time The Campfire Headphase was released, the band was no longer on the cutting edge, but the more deliberate composition and integration of acoustic instruments made this the better album.

178 Donovan – A Gift from a Flower to a Garden (1967)

Donovan was by far the dippiest member of the British Folk-Rock scene (he went to India with the Beatles and actually took the whole trip seriously), so it’s no surprise that he recorded a children’s album that was more than a lazy cash-in. While the individual songs are relatively short, the album is a double, and it’s clear that he was contributing A material. The dippiness actually works to this album’s advantage, as Donovan can parlay that into a sense of whimsy rather than simply dumbing-down the music, as so many other musicians are wont to do when playing for children. The end result is a kid’s album that you wouldn’t even know is a kid’s album unless someone told you.

177 Fleetwood Mac – Tusk (1979)

Lindsey Buckingham abandons the tight pop songs that made Fleetwood Mac icons in favor of his own eccentric weirdness, which isn’t merely limited to his contributions but to the arrangements he provides to the Stevie Nicks and Christine McVie songs. And it works! The counterbalance the rest of the band provides makes this more palatable than his solo material (where he simply runs wild). The rest of the band would tell him to cut it out after this and release more conventional pop albums, but they’d never reach these heights again.

176 Big Star – No. 1 Record (1972)

This is one of those overrated critical darlings whose reputation precedes it. As much as I want to resist fellating this album the way so many critics do, I have to admit that this is a pretty near perfect collection of Power Pop songs, and there ain’t nothing wrong with that.

175 Heart – Dreamboat Annie (1976)

Heart has developed a reputation as a sort of female-fronted Zeppelin, and while that characterization isn’t entirely fair, what makes their early career is their Zeppelin-like ability to blend Hard Rock riffage with more contemplative acoustic material. By the time the ‘80s rolled around, commercial pressures forced them into a generic power ballad arena band, but at the beginning, they were able to craft thoughtful albums with a cohesive artistic vision.

174 Rush – Hemispheres (1978)

Most people would rate their next two albums as better than this, but for me, this is as good as Rush ever got. The title cut might be the last great sidelong suite, “Circumstances” is a solid Hard Rock cut, and the Harrison Bergeron-inspired “The Trees” doesn’t disappoint either. But the real standout here is “La Villa Strangiato”, which is the best instrumental of Rush’s career and is in the running for best Rock instrumental of all time. Rush would find a more distinctive voice in the ‘80s, but they never really topped this.

173 Bad Company – Bad Company (1974)

Bad Company’s reputation isn’t the best since they’re viewed as responsible for all the generic arena bands of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s like Journey, Foreigner, Loverboy, and, well, all the other Bad Company albums. But this is still a killer collection of songs that remains unparalleled in the genre, and that won’t change regardless of how much crap it inspired.

That's it for now. Let me know what you think!

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Rov_Scam 1mo ago

Newsome is a clown whose chances of winning the presidential nomination are approximately zero. Ironically, he's generally making the same mistake you are wherein moderation is confused with accommodating and/or praising the Trump administration. While I believe that a moderate is going to win the nomination in 2028, it's going to be a real moderate like Shapiro or Beshear who has show that they can govern moderately and give pointed criticism toward the administration when it does something bad for the state, as opposed to governing like a lefty and trying to compensate for it by schmoozing with Republicans. That, and Newsome has no record of outperforming Biden/Harris is red districts.

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Rov_Scam 2yr ago

The invasion makes more sense if you consider the underlying assumptions at the start of the conflict. Everyone expected the Russian army to roll up the entire country in a matter of weeks if not days. Furthermore, America hadn't sanctioned Russia in any meaningful way after the 2008 invasion of Georgia or the 2014 annexation of Crimea, and it was unclear whether Europe, let alone the world, would go along with anything more sweeping in the event the US tried to do something. It was assumed that Germany's dependence on Russian gas, not just for energy but for the feedstock of its chemical industry would leat to a split in NATO that could potentially be exploited later. All of these assumptions turned out to be wrong, and Putin didn't seem to have had a contingency for the possibility that he wouldn't be able to take Kiev.

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Rov_Scam 5mo ago

This is a total myth that was fabricated by the Right to excuse the absolutely inexcusable behavior of Trump supporters. If you spent the summer of 2020 watching Fox News point to a few high-profile incidences of police cowardice or listening to NPR's defund the police nonsense then it's understandable how you would get that impression. But if you watched local news or actually paid attention to what was happening you'd have seen that there was no shortage of people who were arrested and charged. Hell, here in Pittsburgh there were news reports on an almost weekly basis that consisted of a grainy photograph of people the police were looking for in connection to spray painting buildings, or throwing rocks at police, or some other minor crime that wouldn't even merit a mention in the newspaper let alone a media-assisted manhunt. I can't speak to this happening in every city, but I know the same was true for Los Angeles and Atlanta, and the Feds were looking for a ton of people as well, which is interesting considering that they only had jurisdiction over a small percentage of the total rioters.

The reason you didn't see many high-profile convictions is because the BLM protestors were at least smart enough to commit their crimes at night and make some attempt at concealing their identities. For all the effort police put into tracking these people down, if there's no evidence there's no evidence. To the contrary, the Capitol rioters decided to commit their crimes during the day, in one large group, in an area surrounded by video cameras. Then they posed for pictures and videos and posted it on social media. Were these people trying to get caught? Which brings me to the dismissals. Yes, a lot of the George Floyd riot cases were dismissed, and conservatives like to point to this as evidence of them being treated with kid gloves. But the prosecutors often had no choice. The tactics of the Pittsburgh Police (under the administration of Bill Peduto, no one's idea of a conservative) were to simply arrest everyone in the immediate vicinity the moment a demonstration started to get out of hand. Never mind that they didn't have any evidence that most of these people committed a crime. If a crowd throws water bottles at the police and they arrest everyone they can get their hands on, good like proving that a particular person threw something. Unless you have video or a cop who is able to testify, you're entirely out of luck. So they'd arrest a bunch of people and ten the DA "(Steven Zappala, no one's idea of a progressive) would drop the charges against the 90% against which they had no evidence. In any event, I didn't hear about Biden or any liberal governor offering to pardon any of these people.

Seriously. The Capitol rioters were morons operating under the assumption that their sugar daddy Trump would bail them out because he agreed with their politics. If he wanted to give clemency to people who got swept up in the crowd and trespasses where they shouldn't have, I could understand that. But by pardoning people who assaulted police officers, broke windows, and the like, he shows a complete disrespect for law enforcement and the rule of law. And all of it coming from a guy who is supposedly about law and order. It's absolutely disgraceful.

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