Friday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Friday, June 3, 2022
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74 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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Don’t be put off by the title:
http://www.thebulwark.com/my-friend-donald-trump/
“Everything is gone”: Russian business hit hard by tech sanctions
More at the link. Vlad’s Folly deepens.
@CSK: I was put off by the basis of it. trump and his moronic children and their moronic words. I can hear their voices just thru the simple act of reading them.
shudder
Brian Hernandez, a 21-year-old Texan, was angry at his girlfriend, so he broke into the Dallas Museum of Art and did 5.2 million dollars worth of damage.
The artifacts he destroyed, including an amphora and a pot dating from 450 B.C., were one-of-a-kind.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Trump’s Chumps.
@CSK:
Must be nice to be able to spin political junk mail into an opinion column, without even adding an opinion.
Great tale.
@Kathy:
I think it was intended as humor. And his opinion seemed pretty obvious.
@CSK:
At least no one died…
@Sleeping Dog:
I think a museum representative made the exact same observation.
From FBI sets sights on crypto economy with arrest of former OpenSea staffer, I read this:
If you look around the poker table and you can’t spot the mark…
It’s you.
WAPO has a column by an editor of Texas Monthly saying primary turnout is so low a Texas GOP can get nominated with the votes of 4% of the electorate. Which is why Abbott, Paxton, et al are what’s they are They’re playing to a far right fringe and no one else. Sounds like something Dr. T might say.
@gVOR08: Whoops, NYT not WAPO.
@gVOR08:
Eh, all paywalls look alike to me.
@CSK: I thought it did a great job of underscoring what a grift all of this is for them.
@gVOR08: Indeed.
@Steven L. Taylor:
It did, didn’t it? I also found it funny.
Market and electorate manipulation.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/fink-dimon-and-musk-have-the-blues-and-one-forecaster-says-theyre-not-gloomy-enough-11654253440?rss=1&siteid=rss
When the very rich decide they don’t like policies where they may need to pay more… we get to watch the stock market stagger like a drunk on Saturday night.
OK. I get it. Class warfare. But if you displace the Dems… then what? The GOP that would be elected in are mad as hatters due to MAGA mythological adversary mindset. The Q stuff has become their reality.
How can they govern if they think that they need to revolt against the government? Will they overthrow themselves?
Or is all of this shit just a way to take focus off the upcoming Jan 6th public hearings?
I could just spit.
@Kathy: FWIW, the NYT and WaPo have a “share” or “gift” this article link. Now that I know this, when I provide a link to one of them I make sure I go through that. Here’s the article gVOR08 mentioned.
@Liberal Capitalist: Things are looking decidedly awful from a few perspectives, which might be playing into things. Top of the list are energy markets. There has been a stream of troubling news that could make this summer a literal hot mess. Several of the independent system operators are reporting that they won’t be able to meet peak demand this summer if temperatures get too high–drought is reducing power production from hydroelectric sources in the west, and in the Midwest, early retirement of coal plants before renewable projects have been brought online is leading to a potential shortage there. If there are power outages, this will reverberate across everything, from industrial production to food. Add in high gas prices, low savings rates, etc. and it’s a recipe for a recession. Now add in an active hurricane season. Then add in higher electric rates going through the end of the year and into next.
I don’t feel comfortable at all that there’s a clear way out of this.
@MarkedMan:
Thanks!
Matt Gaetz says that voters should carry firearms to polling places so they don’t have to fear intimidation.
Le sigh
My thoughts on this one are unprintable, even here amongst (mostly) friends. Honest to horse-puckey, I don’t understand this need to toy with people who aren’t as blessed as you are, De Useless and company.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/03/florida-supreme-court-map-unconstitutional?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other
@CSK:
Dammit, now you’ve made me choke on my coffee. What’s with these idjits?
@Flat Earth Luddite:
More guns…the answer to everything.
How dare Joe Biden adhere to an agreement negotiated by his Republican predecessor!
Make what you will out of this, personally it sounds a little too chicken little to me. In other words, something to keep an eye on but no more.
@CSK: That’s because Matt Gaetz is an easily intimidated pansy mf’er.
I’m sorry to inform you of this, Kathy, but… you’re obscure.
[emphasis added]
Since I forgot a couple days ago:
Happy Pride! Be Gay! Do Crime!
Or at least allow me to Trans your gender…
https://apple.news/Au-opSuh8SUGldyeKZ7XwOA
P.S. that’s not how it works.
@Mu Yixiao:
I ran across that yesterday.
I do’t think it’s possible to learn a whole language with only a dictionary. I do think, know, it’s perfectly possible for two or more people to come up with a made up code, either using existing words or what may seem gibberish.
@gVOR08:
But it’s so unfair that the “good” conservatives (and Democrats) have to show up for every election to keep these guys out. It should be easier than that. 🙁
@Flat Earth Luddite: It DeSantis and company don’t fuck (notice the change in verb) with “who aren’t as blessed,” they may not get elected to office.
@Mu Yixiao:
@Kathy:
I guess that just leaves pig latin…
@Drew:
“Dumb, impaired and a liar. Not a good combination.”
True, but since this site doesn’t have a filter, we have to read your posts anyway. /s/
@Drew: From Putin’s lips to your ears, apparently.
I wish the troll would stop describing trump. They add no new information.
Navarro’s been indicted by DOJ for Contempt of Congress. Here’s to hoping there’s more indictments coming down!
@MarkedMan: Thanks. I never paid attention to the “gift” button. I’ll try it.
@Drew: You DO know that Zerohedge is nothing more than the method by which Russian propaganda gets trickled into the brains of useful idiot Americans like you, don’t you?
Drew Drew Drew….yes indeed, you ARE that gullible….
@Drew: There’s a left-wing version of the sort of propaganda you are presenting to us. I try to pay it no attention, because that stuff reduces the amount I know about the world. The right-wing propaganda machine tried to convince us that Barack Obama was the dumbest person ever to hold the Oval Office. This is laughable. You don’t get degrees with honors from Harvard via affirmative action. That’s not how it works.
The LW people tried to convince us that GWB was dumb. He was not dumb. He had issues, but intelligence was not among them.
I have been actively pushing back on this forum against the formulation that Putin was “dumb” or “irrational”. He made a mistake, for sure. Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone.
Thus, no weight to this stuff you are presenting us with.
Also, I have to wonder what your purpose is in posting it. Do you hope to convince us? Or is this some kind of monkey dance?
Anyway, there’s a distinct possibility that if you showed up for real with real opinions based on facts, you’d get a different reception. We’ve seen it happen before. You may have burned that bridge here, though.
@Drew:
Don’t be so hard on yourself.
@Drew: Also, as has already been pointed out many times, Zerohedge is a verified Russian propaganda outlet.
Every time you link to them, you are aiding an enemy of America. What’s the word for that, again? I think it starts with a “T…”
@Mu Yixiao:
That reminded me of G Gordon Liddy’s comments on serving time, which his association with Nixon caused him to do. Paraphrased from memory:
“What became immediately clear to me was the prevailing room-temperature IQ of the staff. Shouldn’t have been a surprise, like, what sort of person puts themselves in prison for 40 years? Yet the depth and breadth of it came as a shock. In no small way the prisoners run the place.”
@Drew:
Do you also read The Farmer’s Almanac for weather reports?
@CSK:
Well, no, not if people like me get them. Trust me on that one. Been there, done that, got the hat and t-shirt.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Well, yes. I was going for “charming understatement” when I should have used plain English. He’s effing with them poor *clang* in the same way that a cat toys with the moth it caught in the house, or lifers toy with the pedos who wander out of PC.
@Beth: Given that young men with guns are a problem, and that we aren’t going to do anything about the guns, maybe transing the gender of young men is a good idea.
@dazedandconfused:
Unless things have changed dramatically in 45 years, yes, they do. The things that I witnessed and heard were monumentally, numbingly, stupid. On both sides of the line.
The guards were, for the most part, uneducated, and almost all were failed law enforcement candidates. Many were brutal bullies, who took delight in setting up inmates for beatings or worse. Bribery and drug/weapon running were rampant. OTOH, most of my fellow inmates were hardly Mensa candidates.
As I’ve noted repeatedly over the years, the REAL problem with being a criminal is the class of people you have to associate with.
Liddy survived as well as he did because, frankly, he was a scary psychopath, and the monsters recognize each other. Professional courtesy, as it were.
@Flat Earth Luddite:
I wonder how long it is until “clang” becomes a racial epithet that we’re not allowed to speak? 🙂
(I believe it was Niven who had “censored” as a swear word. e.g., “My censored car wouldn’t start this morning so I was late to work”.)
@Mu Yixiao:
And bleeping, too.
@Flat Earth Luddite:
That and he was a celebrity. He was aware the staff had sent out the word to the general pop: “Mess with this guy at peril of death” but as you suggest he didn’t think that was key, he found a lot of inmates who were genuinely friendly because he was viewed as having powerful friends on the outside, which he certainly did.
The wardens know what a celebrity getting messed on thier watch brings from the press. I suspect the only exceptions are guys like Jeff Dahmer.
I wonder whether if a dangerous pandemic hits years from now, some people will say things like “Oh, they said the same about COVID, and nothing happened!”
You’d think millions dead would be hard to ignore, but the flu pandemic early last century may have happened in some inner page of a small newspaper for all the histories of the time say about it. And that one killed tens of millions of people.
You’d think, too, many millions more who dealt with COVID, including everything from mild cases, to days on a ventilator, and losing loved ones as well, would be even harder to ignore. But see the paragraph above.
What about long COVID? Some physicians say it does not exist, because they can’t find anything specifically wrong with patients and therefore can’t treat them. There are other such “contested conditions,” though none as widespread. Still, an insistence that there is no physical cause for it, will tend to drive it down the memory hole.
@Kathy: Yeah, Pig Latin would be just as incomprehensible.
This is why we can’t have nice things (like even moderate, common-sense gun legislation).
His purpose in posting it is to once and for all prove how superior his intellect is to all of us lieberal proles, but it always turns into a monkey dance as he gets repeatedly dunked on with the most basic google search. Than he returns to his basement to seethe and plot his revenge.
@Mikey: Nah, not a “T” but a “U” as in “Useful Idiot”.
@Jen: Growing up in a very rural area on a farm I was steeped in gun culture. I have many friends who are also gun owners. I’ve engaged in many activities with them from hunting to 3 gun practice. I know left leaning gun owners and I know right leaning gun owners. I also know some REALLY hard right gun owners but those are the minority for me. I’m left leaning with a hard belief in life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. So the hardcore righties get fed up with me fact checking their bullshit.
If you talked to the people I mentioned above most of them would be fine with licensing and insurance requirements as part of gun ownership. That’s why generically named “common sense” gun laws generally poll quite well. The problem is when theory meets reality. Who watches the watchers and all that stuff. Which is really important to gun owners as we’re already dealing with an ATF that can be quite hostile to gun owners. Right or wrong a lot of the stuff that the GOP has done to hamper/ban gun ownership is blamed on the Democratic party. Which is easy to do when you’ve got people like Beto yelling about “coming for your guns” and people like Micheal who see licensing as a first step to confiscation. A significant portion of the democratic party is seen as eager to use “common sense” laws to begin banning and confiscating. Remember the Assault Weapons Ban? Yeah it straight up banned some pump shotguns and other traditional hunting long guns. Oh BTW notice how the AWB expiration had no noticeable effect on crime including murder? Meanwhile you’re talking about “high capacity” magazine bans when you’re actually talking about banning normal capacity magazines. You call hunting rifles “assault weapons” and then wonder why gun owners don’t take you seriously. From the gun owner’s perspective you can’t even be bothered to learn the proper terms or anything about guns beyond simple buzz words and talking points. Giving you the power to ban any gun would be a fools errand in their view. After all you don’t appoint someone who has no understanding of transportation of any type to lead the department of transportation..
TLDR : Significant amount of gun owners want registration/training and insurance requirements among other things. The problem from their view is that the Democratic party is full of people who rarely use the proper names/terms in relations to guns while a very vocal chunk of the party advocates outright banning/confiscation.
The irony here is that the GOP has done more for banning/regulating guns then the Democratic party…
A new Latino media group is buying up — and shaking up — Spanish-language radio
Finally, a group on the progressive side has finally stopped wringing their hands about the conservative media complex and is investing in the space.
@dazedandconfused:
Dahlmer? Guys like that usually die in the showers before 30 days in. The fact that he lasted 10 months was a tribute to the security in the protective custody unit, and, IMO, a sure sign that the fix was in, and that he was meant to suffer.
One of the more memorable deaths during my time was a smart-mouthed young rapist who really, really liked prepubescent children. He threw himself off the 4th tier in A Block to his death when the cells opened in the morning for the kitchen staff to go to work. Problem is, he was assigned a cell in D Block. No way would he be in A. No way he’d have been there overnight. His body was found to have multiple shallow cuts along his arms and legs, rope burns on his wrists, ligature marks on his neck. Also, the cell he came out of was a 2-man cell occupied by (IIRC) the president and sgt-at-arms of the lifer’s club. Lockdown for “inquest” lasted less than 1/2 hour and was ruled a suicide.
Of course, at that time, our warden was suffering from terminal cancer, and was known to use inmates to control the population. They finally calmed the place down by bringing in a busload of lifers from Walla Walla, who sat everyone down and explained that they liked a “quiet house” and if the punks didn’t settle down, they’d be settled down.
@Matt: “From the gun owner’s perspective you can’t even be bothered to learn the proper terms or anything about guns beyond simple buzz words and talking points.”
Yes, only people who have mastered the vocabulary of gun lovers are allowed to have opinions on the mass slaughter of children. We all know this song.
@Matt: “After all you don’t appoint someone who has no understanding of transportation of any type to lead the department of transportation..”
Did you have a nice nap from 2017-2021?
@Flat Earth Luddite: My apologies. I’ve been to too many 9th and 10th grader classes this year and was working from a jaundiced perception of the audience.
@Kathy: I think part of the mystique is the whole one “death [particularly mine or that of a loved one] is a tragedy whereas a million deaths is a statistic” thing. No one is ever particularly horrified at the death counts from the War Between the States, WWI, WWII, Viet Nam, the Plague–lots of different mega death events. It’s one of the arguments I hear kids make about not needing to study history because “it’s all a bunch of factoids.” They may have a point.
The two gas stations on the south side of town that held their price at $4.999/gal. for 48 hours as five others went to $5.099/gal. have leapfrogged to $5.299/gal. This is getting ugly.
@Flat Earth Luddite: Once again, the lesson seems to be that violence IS a tool that CAN be used to solve SOME societal problems. I find my reaction to this realization mixed. Maybe I AM getting healthier mentally.
@Matt: I live in a rural area right now, in fact I spent a fair amount of the afternoon being serenaded by the neighbor’s target practice. It’s a large gun, my husband’s best guess is that it’s using 40 caliber ammunition. I lived in a red state for a while, and have plenty of friends, Democrats and Republicans, who own guns.
I’d like to see the slaughter stop.
It’s disingenuous to say “Oh BTW notice how the AWB expiration had no noticeable effect on crime including murder?” when what is concerning to most people is the possibility of going out for groceries and ending up dead. What DID increase after the AWB expired were MASS SHOOTINGS. This is unarguable. They did. There’s plenty of evidence of this.
An 18 year old shouldn’t be able to walk in and buy a high-powered weapon with no evidence of training, no real background check, and no insurance. We don’t let 16 year-old kids drive semis as soon as they get their licenses–you have to pass a CDL for that. It’s not too much to ask that there be a waiting period, so that a post-op person in pain doesn’t put a permanent end to his surgeon.
And no, people don’t need to learn a specialized lexicon to have an opinion on weapons. Just no.
@Mister Bluster:
5.89 for diesel down the street. IIRC, every drop of petroleum product in WA & OR comes from the refinery complex up Anacortes way. Yet somehow everyone blames Biden, and not the owners (or even their own usage habits). But for sure, the ugly has started.
@Mister Bluster:
In California, it’s $6.29.
@CSK:..$6.299…
That’s the price per GasBuddy in Phelan CA where my brother lives.
I see a Price of $6.999/gal. in Altadena.
@Matt:
Mass shootings fell and rose in direct correlation to the AWB.
From the perspective of someone with morals and ethics, saving lives is more important than gun terminology gotcha games. I don’t need to know esoteric medical jargon to support universal healthcare, and I don’t need to know super special ammosexual lingo to support reforms that will prevent crazies from using schoolkids as target practice.
The usual conservative fearmongering BS.
– Republicans lied when insisting gay marriage would end civilization.
– Republicans lied when promising gays serving openly would destroy the military.
– Republicans lied when declaring Obamacare would lead to death panels and communism.
– Republicans lied when howling that COVID vaccines would kill people.
Republicans are lying when they claim gun reform will prompt mass gun confiscation.
Today’s Republicans are amoral, selfish, full of crap corporate gun lobby slaves who want mass shootings to continue. Americans must ignore right wing fearmongering.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/jun/02/rare-sight-for-amateur-astronomers-as-five-planets-align
So of course, I was up and out of the house at 4 am this am to get to my preferred spot 20 minutes from the house. Gear, both cameras, tripod, etc. 5.30 sunrise. Ten minutes from the house, rain started.
It’s a standing joke in this part of the world that if there’s a once in a lifetime event in the sky, you won’t be able to see it because of the rain, clouds, or smoke from the from the forest fires
@Flat Earth Luddite:
Got excited about getting up to see that as well, then I looked at the weather forecast and decided to sleep in.
Unfortunately, yes. That’s too much to ask. Especially considering that it’s only a trap to trick us into enabling the confiscation of all guns–as an earlier comment pointed out.
@Flat Earth Luddite: “It’s a standing joke in this part of the world that if there’s a once in a lifetime event in the sky, you won’t be able to see it because of the rain, clouds, or smoke from the from the forest fires.”
I know that’s been MY experience. 🙁