Friday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Friday, March 4, 2022
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31 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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Per ABC: No radioactive material was released from the Ukrainian nuclear power plant shelled by the Russians yesterday, said Rafael Mariano Grossi, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency. “The safety systems at the six reactors were not affected.”
Two security guards were injured.
Fascinating thread:
https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1499377671855292423
How Russia uses its “elite” paratroops.
678,000 jobs added in February.
That’s more than 3 times the average month with the Former Guy.
December and January job numbers revised up a bit.
Wages little changed, but over the last 12 months up over 5%.
I wonder how the press will make this into a bad thing for Biden?
@Daryl and his brother Darryl:
Seek, and you shall find.
http://immasmartypants.blogspot.com/2022/03/trumps-attempt-to-extort-ukraine.html
Assorted excerpts:
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Kevin Drum has a surprising title today,
He concludes GOPs haven’t been neglecting the IRS, it’s been “muder with malice aforethought”. He footnotes a comment about the wealthy GOP base,
When talking of Republicans it’s always necessary to distinguish between the pros, the pols and funders and their minions, and the voters. They are not a MAGAt populist party, they are a plutocratic party masquerading as a blood and soil populist part. And even their voters are not so much MAGAt as hereditary.
(And as I commented yesterday, I can’t believe we’re losing to these guys.)
Last November Harvey Weinstein was nabbed smuggling a box of Milk Duds into the L.A. County jail. I don’t know why this is coming to light just now.
@charon: Zelenskyy seems to have been doing pretty well throughout his presidency. Al Franken seemed to be a pretty good senator, until he got caught in #metoo. More, I think, by bad timing and spun evidence than any real bad behavior. Maybe we should quit electing B list actors and “reality” show stars and look to comedians to run the country.
@gVOR08:
I could have gone for George Carlin.
@gVOR08:
The 2006 movie Man of the Year stars Robin Williams as a comedy talk-show host who decides to run for president. The movie was a critical and commercial failure (and rightly so, as about midway through it promptly forgets the politics and devolves into an uninteresting conspiracy thriller), so it’s been mostly forgotten. But a few elements caught my attention. Virtually all the commentary on the film suggests the Williams character is an expy for Jon Stewart. Reading these reviews, I felt like I was going insane, as the character reminded me a heckuva lot more of Bill Maher, yet I did not see one person make that connection. The movie itself seems to point in either direction, as both Maher’s and Stewart’s names are mentioned at various points, and Daily Show correspondent Lewis Black has a supporting role in the film.
Maher has always been a much more controversial figure than Stewart, and a lot of people have never been sure what to make of him, as he seems left-leaning overall but has always had reactionary tendencies. (I haven’t watched his show in years, but a lot of his fans have told me he’s grown particularly awful in the past year or so and they’ve finally at long last given up on him.) The Williams character in the film runs as an independent, blasts both parties, and seems more vaguely antiestablishment than clearly left-wing or right-wing (at one point he rants about illegal aliens at the border).
It’s easier to picture someone like Jon Stewart or Al Franken as presidential candidates in part because they project likability, something very much not the case with Maher. After Trump, it’s hard to totally write off the idea of a guy who comes off as an asshole (plenty of politicians are assholes, just most do a fair job of hiding it at least some of the time), but I’d be surprised to see the Democratic Party in its present form embracing such a figure.
In a win for the left, the (conservative) WI Supreme Court decided on electoral maps. They chose the ones drawn by Democratic Governor Tony Evers over the highly gerrymandered ones drawn up by the Republican-dominated state assembly.
The new maps still favor Republicans, but that’s not entirely unexpected given the state demographics*. But… they’re “fair maps”, and they’re locked in for the next 10 years.
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*There’s a wonderful little exchange in the movie Irresistible (paraphrasing)
Wisconsinite: Ever been to Wisconsin before?
DC Guy: I spent a couple months in Madison.
Wisconsinite: So… you’ve never been to Wisconsin.
@CSK:
In the same spirit as monitoring lucianne.com, I came across these, look like these are mainlining the hard stuff from Russian or QAnon or whatever trolling:
https://www.unz.com/author/pepe-escobar/
https://www.unz.com/pescobar/how-russia-will-counterpunch-the-u-s-eu-declaration-of-war/
@charon:
Another sample to give the flavor:
https://www.unz.com/jfreud/appeasement-doesnt-work-russia-as-metaphor-and-why-patriots-need-to-stand-with-russia-against-virulent-judeo-nazism/
So no accident Putin calling Jewish people Nazis.
@charon:
If Putin is getting high on his own supply, perhaps these links are indicative of his thinking.
@charon:
“…craven cuck-collaborators of Jewish Exceptionalism…”
These aren’t dog whistles; they’re dog shrieks.
@charon:
@charon:
@CSK:
My word.
I took a brief look at those kinks and now I feel like I need a stiff drink and a hot shower.
What a bunch of a*holes.
And agressively stupid with it.
Is that Escobar some sort of alt-right guru?
@charon:
It’s worth noting the Russians have deployed their elite troopers in the south and young conscripts in the north.
@gVOR08: I think it would have been fascinating to see Franken debate Trump. I recall Justice candidate Gorsuch (?) assert to Franken that the court is not political, to which Franken perfectly deadpanned, “Really? Then what was that whole Garland thing about?”
@Daryl and his brother Darryl:
They won’t. The media will just ignore the jobs numbers and keep reporting their preferred narrative of endless malaise, Biden is failure, the economy sucks, only Trump voters matter etc.
Anything to avoid being called “liberal” by Republicans.
Russia has banned Facebook and Twitter.
@JohnSF:
Yeesh.
For “kinks” read “links”.
Then again…
@JohnSF:
I thought “kinks” was intentional on your part.
@CSK:
So how are they going to help Republicans elections?
@CSK:
That’s only because those platforms practice cancel culture.
@DK:
They may have lost their taste for that, post-Trump.
@Kylopod:
Of course. Nice to see you back. You were gone for a while.
@DK:
The cyberwarfare divisions will keep bugging tech support to restore their unrestricted access to social media.
@CSK:
“Last November Harvey Weinstein was nabbed smuggling a box of Milk Duds”
I heard a story a week or so ago about Milk Duds. The candy maker, Mars, I think, was trying to come up with a new candy, a milk chocolate caramel thingy. So the guys in the kitchen came up with this milk chocolate caramel thingy and presented it to upper management. It didn’t go over too well at first. “This thing won’t work,” somebody said. “It’s a dud.” Upper, upper management said, “We like it. We’ll sell it and call it ‘Milk Duds'”.
@sam:
Great story. It may even be true.
@gVOR08: I’ve been watching the GOP dismantle the IRS for decades. It’s the classic Grover tactic — if you want to prove that government is incompetent, cut their funding until the sad remnant can’t actually do its job, then point and say “See, government is inherently inept!”.
Over the past 2 decades, the mission of the IRS had expanded severalfold (in part because the GOP disguises all of its welfare programs as tax programs and makes the IRS administer them) while the workforce has been shrunk. Even that noted bastion of left-wing rhetoric, the Government Accountability Office, has opined that investing in IRS tax enforcement would repay the public at something between 8:1 and 20:1. But of course that’s the last thing the GOP wants; they are if nothing else the party of transferring wealth from the general public to the already-rich.
@JohnSF: @CSK: Yeah. I understood it just fine, too.
@sam: “This candy was made by Hoffman and Company, located in the Chicago area. While they originated here, they actually didn’t remain with that company for long. M.J. Holloway & Company took over Hoffman and Company in 1928 and at that time, they also took over the production of Milk Duds.”
https://www.snackhistory.com/milk-duds/