Monday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Monday, April 4, 2022
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50 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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It’s a slow news day. Nothing is catching my eye.
Via Digby.
Sununu just wrote himself permanently out of the cult
More at ABC News
At DC roast, NH’s GOP governor skewers Trump as ‘crazy’
GOP Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire said Donald Trump is “crazy” and joked that if the former Republican president was admitted to a mental hospital, he’s not getting out
Oh Chris, we hardly knew you! It’s been apparent that Sununu didn’t think much of TFG even when he was prez, but he was quiet about it and did the minimum when TFG came to the state. But this is wonderful! Obviously he feels pretty comfortable about reelection, or at least beating back a primary challenge. Given New Hampster-ites love them some cantankerous contrarians this likely will benefit him.
Hopefully this will free other R’s who have been quiet on TFG it reveal their true feelings.
Brutality on TFG and Ted Cruz in the same evening! 🙂
@Sleeping Dog: They revealed their true feelings the minute trump won the nomination in 2016. Absolute cowardice grasping for power in the service of greed at any cost. They never actually believed in any of those things they always professed to.
Pro-Life? My ass.
Trickle down? My ass.
Law and order? My ass.
Freedom of speech? My ass.
Well, there’s one bit of good news: the SC Lady Gamecocks won their second NCAA title. Kudos both to Dawn Staley and to Geno Auriemma (11 straight title game victories is nothing to sneer at).
Orban wins re-election in Hungary.
Drat.
@Sleeping Dog:
You beat me to it! I saw that earlier this morning and was a little taken aback, not by Sununu’s bluntness by the crudity. Not that Trump doesn’t deserve it.
To give him credit, Sununu has always been fairly obvious about his distaste for Trump, just not as blatantly upfront about it as Charlie Baker.
@CSK:
Sununu has said he voted for TFG, unlike Baker who was clear that he voted for someone other than TFG-Clinton/Biden. Though you need to wonder, that in the privacy of the voting booth, Sununu found another to vote for.
Yeah, the crudity was a bit surprising, and I liked Raskin’s line that he hadn’t heard so many F-bombs from an R since Nixon. I wonder how much Sununu had to drink before taking the dais.
I never would have made it in a corporate environment.
@Sleeping Dog: He’s the only governor in New England to have publicly backed Trump (he referred to himself as a “Trump guy through and through” in 2019), but that isn’t so surprising given NH’s status as the swingiest (albeit still Dem-leaning) state in New England. Vermont and Mass. would probably never put up with a governor who backed Trump.
@Sleeping Dog: @Kylopod:
Yes, Sununu did indeed see the light far later than Baker or Scott, although, like Sleeping Dog, I wonder how much of his initial enthusiasm for Trump was faked.
I have to admit I found it funny when Sununu declined to participate in Trump’s rally on the NH seacoast sometime in 2020, using a patently feeble excuse.
Taliban ban poppy cultivation in Afghanistan in drug crackdown
The overthrow of the Taliban in 2001 broke open (again) the opium trade, another unintended consequence of the Afghan War.
I wonder if this will stick this time.
Two of Trump’s executives at TruthSocial.com have bailed, one Josh Adams, chief of technology, and the enchantingly named Billy Boozer, have bailed on the enterprise.
They quit sometime after February 20, when the site attempted to launch and instead made a giant mess of itself.
TruthSocial still doesn’t have an app for Android.
@Kylopod:
He certainly mouthed the words, but seldom walked the walk. Early in TFG’s term, Sununu was more
enthusiasticpositive, but the crazier things got, the more distant he was. When Covid hit, the relationship between them went ice cold. When TFG came to town, Sununu would greet him at the airport and then disappear. Any pretense of respecting TFG probably ended when Lewandowski claimed Trump had assigned him to deny Sununu re-nomination. That’s not going well, BTW.An example of what can happen with hot takes.
Revelation: 7 1/2 hour gap in Trumps call log during the coup attempt. Criminal!
2-3 days later: It turns out it’s not unusual for presidents to use someone else’s cell phone to make a call, given the clunky nature of the White House phone system. Much ado about nothing!
2-3 days after that: It turns out that this is a known thing and there are people in charge of keeping the diary. It is their job to find out what all the calls were and to whom, regardless of how they were made. The presidents staff assists in this. The Trump diarists are saying that the staff stopped communicating with them the day before the coup attempt, and completely shut them out on the day of. This had not happened before, in Trump’s presidency or in any other recent presidency. Criminal! And probably Trump’s staff were in on the crimes.
There’s some early buzz about a new COVID variant thus far named XE. It seems to combine traits from Omicron and Delta. It may be more transmissible than Omicron.
The good news is that it was detected in January, and meantime Omicron wreaked havoc. ergo XE may not be much of a worry, and is only now gaining dominance where the virus still spreads.
The bad news is that Omicron had a similar slow start vs Delta.
Check your mask supplies and get boosted if you haven’t already. Think hard about a fourth dose,
@MarkedMan: I get it. It was irregular then and still is now. It should be illegal and FG should be prosecuted. Still, there’s no way Garland is going down that road to open that Pandora’s Box. Learn to adjust. Lower your stress levels. Chill.
At the rally (God, I’m beginning to hate that word because of its associations) in Michigan, Rep. Lisa McClain claimed that Trump killed Osama bin Laden.
Apparently no one corrected her.
@CSK: Remember SNL’s version of the first Obama-Romney debate in 2012?
@Kylopod:
I missed that, but memory tells me that Romney made some inconsistent statements about bin Laden.
@Scott: I suspect that it will to the degree that the “strict prohibition across the country” doesn’t impede the activities of powerful foes of which ever Taliban leader is most in charge at the moment. I would suggest a rotating administration that gives each poppy growing region approximately equal access to markets in sequence, but that’s up to the Taliban to decide.
@CSK: See? There ARE reasons to not own an i-Phone.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Indeed. Apparently Trump’s reason for not using TruthSocial.com is that he wants it to be a hit first. Given that he’s supposed to be the main draw, however, I’m not sure how it will be a hit without him.
Being a New Mexican, I don’t really know much about Sununu. I’ve read some things here and in other places that made me think he might be one of the “decent” ones. But I just saw the tail-end of an interview with him on MSNBC, and I was not at all impressed. He smiled and laughed too much, which just made him seem un-serious. But worse, he dodged every question about his opinion of Trump, the GOP today, or even specific policies. Yeah, maybe all politicians do it, but he doesn’t seem to be any better than that. Perhaps I’m wrong.
@CSK:
I don’t remember Romney ever claiming credit for capturing Bin Laden. The SNL skit was focusing on Obama tanking the first debate, based on the theory (first proposed by Al Gore) that he wasn’t himself due to the high altitude in Denver.
@reid: You’re not wrong. Every so often, he’ll do something outside the typical Republican nuttery, like requiring masks at the height of the pandemic before vaccines were available, or make placating noises about vetoing some anti-choice legislation. Recently, he threatened to veto some truly egregious redistricting maps that would have locked us into a 1 Republican/1 Democrat for our House seats, rather than the 1 slightly Dem/1 slightly Republican seat that we have now. Why? Well, the “slightly R” seat is currently held by a pro-business Democrat because Republicans keep running loons for that seat. They want the loons to be guaranteed a win.
It’s sort of like McCain’s “maverick” designation. Here in New Hampshire, that allows one to be thought of as “independent!” Eh. I guess.
@Kylopod:
Oh, okay. That makes sense. I was aware that Romney never took credit for killing bin Laden, so the excerpt you provided from the skit didn’t make a lot of sense to me.
Trump did say in 2021 that bin Laden wasn’t nearly as bad as al-Baghdadi and Soleimani. So he wants props for taking out the two worst bad guys.
Trump actually said that all bin Laden did was strike once.
@CSK: I just brought it up because it provided yet another example of how today’s Republicans are increasingly resembling parodies of them in the past.
@Kylopod:
Romney strikes me as the same person he always was. Actually, so do most of the non-Trump Republicans.
@CSK: I wasn’t saying Romney has changed, just that the parody of him resembles how actual Republicans are behaving now.
@CSK: ” Rep. Lisa McClain claimed that Trump killed Osama bin Laden.”
She also said that unemployment, currently at 3.4%, is at a forty year high. And that there was a labor shortage.
Sometimes I think all of Trumpworld functions like the typos in a Nigerian prince letter, put there to chase away anyone smart enough to see through the scam…
@wr:
I think they live in their own self-created reality. Trump’s the greatest president ever, Trump’s a devout Christian, Trump’s a faithful husband, Trump’s a devoted father, Trump’s a business genius…bla, bla, bla.
@wr:
And then there’s this take from Amanda Marcotte at Salon, via Raw Story:
http://www.rawstory.com/here-s-why-maga-loves-lies-too-big-to-be-believed/
Cracker, here’s a reason not to move to Hattiesburg… it’s a lot closer to Florida:
ffs.
And I thought the boys at the Home for Wayward Boys were stupid.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/04/rep-matt-gaetz-votes-against-capping-insulin-prices-says-people-should-just-lose-weight/?utm_source=mj-newsletters&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=daily-newsletter-04-04-2022
How bad are supply issues for Russian soldiers in Ukraine? So bad they have resorted to using MacBooks for their body armor.
Just in case, /s/
@CSK:
In 1984, there’s a scene of a big rally during Hate Week, where they change the enemy they all hate so much. Of course, all the banners, posters, and whatever other paraphernalia one needs for Hate Week now carry the wrong enemy’s name. So naturally it was Goldstein and his agents who tricked us all!
When I first read this, I figured this wasn’t a real change in policy, but rather an exercise of power. In particular because the speaker currently ranting about the hated enemy has to change course mid-speech, as he’s given a note by a messenger running to the stage.
I felt validated in this when O’Brien later asks Winston how one exerts power on a man, and Winston replies “You make him suffer,” to O’Brien’s approval.
So this is what’s become of the Party of Lincoln.
@Kathy:
The remains of the party of Lincoln appear to be pretty hapless and helpless in the face of creatures such as Trump, Greene, Gosar, Gaetz, Boebert, and now, maybe Palin.
The interesting thing about the bizarre labor shortage/unemployment claims that McClain made is that she has a background in finance, so she should know what she’s saying is untrue.
There’s a lot to what wr and Amanda Marcotte say about Trumpkins, but I also think a fair number of them are simply committed to saying the exact opposite of what Democrats say, because what Democrats say by definition is either evil or wrong.
Just about anything can devolve into a shouty-fest on the internet:
Hm. Where does it go from here?
Ha. Well, legitimate ‘beef.’ IMHO.
Um, what?
@CSK: I don’t even see how it can become a hit with him, so maybe that’s why he’s backpedaling.
Madison Cawthorn defines what a woman is: “XX chromosomes, no tallywhacker.”
@Flat Earth Luddite: The way that your friend was describing it, I was under the impression that it was significantly farther north in Mizippi than it is. Also, I already live in a college town that has a similar population size and is probably just as red politically, so I don’t need to move to be (metaphysically) close to Florida.
@CSK:
the problem with these very simplistic definitions is not only that they confuse sex and gender, but that they very casually assume the human brain is neither part of the human body nor a constituent of human anatomy.
@CSK: Why are you assuming that lying to people should be a disqualification for running for office? Republicans don’t think that way. Steely pragmatists all the way. Only the objective matters.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Yeah. My bad.
@Jen: Certainly, one CAN cook any cut of meat whatsoever in an instant pot. The thing I’m wondering is if these people are so stupid that they think they can get the SAME EFFECT from (essentially) boiling a piece of meat that they get from roasting it, or are they just trolling the other people on the site?
@CSK: @Kathy: I was sure I remembered reading about cases of people with XX and a penis, and a quick search brought me to this Wikipedia page, which I was initially skeptical was real. I wondered if it was Wiki-vandal-trolling. You’ll see why in a moment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XX_male_syndrome
It’s named after Finnish scientist Albert de la Chapelle.
@Kylopod:
This is what I mean when I say biology is messy.
There are also cases of XXY and XYY males, and XY females. Not to mention defective genes of all sorts that can affect development in the womb, nor factors in the womb’s internal environment which can affect different organs.
Reducing something as complex as gender to chromosomes is not only simplistic, but way, way wrong.
@Kathy:
It also implies gender couldn’t be known until the 20th century.
Another stray thought: The old credo “Be a man”–which is exactly the sort of thing conservatives traditionally embrace–shows that even they haven’t always reduced concepts like “man” and “woman” to sex chromosomes or reproductive anatomy.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Yes. I sometimes wonder who his 88 million Twitter followers were. Bots?
Very late reply to @gVOR08:
Sorry, I tend to miss posts alter on Sunday.
A second half-built AN-225 has languished for years, hoping for the funding to finish it. Some has materialized sporadically, but the plane still lies there unfinished.
IMO, it may not be cost effective, even if it’s rather unique in what cargoes it can move. The first one was paid for by the Soviet government, so Antonov didn’t have to finance it. Having the plane on hand, it was cost effective to run it and pay for fuel and maintenance (otherwise it would never have flown), but not if one has to finish a half-built plane or build one from scratch.
It’s too bad they couldn’t move it out of harm’s way in time. But, as you note, among the greater losses of the Ukrainian people, ti is a footnote.