Thursday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Thursday, August 25, 2022
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65 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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That’s one way to find out who the abusers are.
Follow up to student loan forgiveness…
By all accounts former Republican President Trump filed for bankruptcy 6 seperate times.
The party of so-called “personal accountability” has an image and hypocrisy problem.
So we now know Bill Barr lied and misconstrued the Mueller report about Trump and Russian 2016 election chicanery. Who could have possibly foreseen that?
Law firm sues Ghislaine Maxwell, saying it’s owed $878,000 for defense
I am shocked, shocked I tell you…
@OzarkHillbilly:
That’s disgusting. What is wrong with people.
Uvalde police chief fired for fumbled response to school shooting
No comment.
@Beth: “I got beaten plenty of times. It didn’t turn me into a violent sociopath. Not at all. Besides, kids got it too easy these days anyway.”
@Beth:
Nineteen states allow this. With the exception of Colorado and Wyoming, they’re all in the south and southwest.
@OzarkHillbilly:
I’ve had some of the most closed off checked out men tell me that spanking did nothing to them. I’m always like “yeah, that’s why your an emotionless wreck with a hair trigger.”
@CSK:
Like, objectively I know this, but I’m still shocked. And so many of the the people supporting this would be freaked out if someone showed their kid the wrong book, but it’s totally ok for someone else to hit their kids.
Most of the abuse I endured as a child was of the emotional variety and as a result I don’t remember much. What I do remember with a terrifying clarity are the couple of times my dad beat me. Oh, sorry, polite society calls it “spanking”. Those times stand out like screamy stars on a field of black.
This is child abuse.
@OzarkHillbilly: He is right about being a scapegoat. Arredondo certainly needs to lose his job for starters. But there’s a lot of blame to go around and Abbott, the state cops, and everyone else involved will try to dump it all on Arredondo.
@Beth: I had an extremely abusive nun 2 years in a row. Those scars have never fully healed.
@gVOR08: You are right of course. Somehow or other I don’t feel sorry for him tho. Angry that others who should face consequences won’t? Yes, but not sorry for him.
@OzarkHillbilly: I’ll comment. At some level, he is a scapegoat for all the sins committed. However, he is not blameless and should accept the fate given. His screed does nothing positive and everything negative, reinforcing his complete lack of judgement. I have no sympathy.
I’m only a few ‘graphs in, but I already see the next hit True Crime podcast in the making.
Ousted [Bratwurst] Queen Issues Statement
@OzarkHillbilly: 50 years ago, the small City where I live decided to go to council districts although it had successfully put two black men on the Council over the course of the prior decade. Each Council member was asked to propose districts. My father, a Councilman, brought the project to my high school aged sister and her friend with a map of the City and the populations and boundaries of each precinct. The map they drew was very similar to the map ultimately selected. My favorite proposal, however, was the Council member who marked on the map where each of the current Council members lived and drew big circles around each. (He was not being serious.)
@OzarkHillbilly:
I may be missing some nuance from the one sentence version of the argument, but it’s not clear to me how running candidates city-wide in a majority black city would advantage white voters. I would think districting would actually make that easier as the black voters could then be “packed and cracked” in a way that’s not possible with at-large races.
@Neil Hudelson:
An immediate follow up (no edit ability): The Queen’s got a lawyer. (Warning: It’s a 1,500 word article on…on why the entire Bratwurst Festival board anonymously deposed it’s Queen a week before the Bratwurst festival. I may have posted the original story as a joke but hot damn I’m interested now. )
@OzarkHillbilly: @Stormy Dragon: I’m confused by this too. It seems like this is exactly the type of multi member district that so often gets discussed here as a way to improve congressional representation. Is it because it is still FPTP and not proportional representation?
@Stormy Dragon: I can’t speak to the particulars here but southern white society has a long history of erecting roadblocks to black voting.
eta: the results tell the tale.
@OzarkHillbilly:
I was spanked by my parents – Dad if it was serious, Mom if it was just her freaking out. Also, in French school the teachers slapped the shit out of us. Whap, whap, whap across the face. Sting-y! Then, in schools in Florida there was a more judicial procedure involving going to the assistant principal to be whacked.
And it’s not like I went on to. . . oh, wait, I did go on to drop out of school and commit crimes. OK, so not a great example.
I learned useful lessons, though. How to laugh at punishment. Literally. It unnerves them. And about the limits of what they (parents, teachers) were willing to do. Also about the prestige of being sent to the principal’s office. This all might have turned me into the kind of person who is pathologically anti-authority, defiant, contemptuous of norms. . .
OK, so still not a great example.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Oh, I’m sure there were multiple efforts to suppress the black vote going on. I just wasn’t sure what the lack of districts specifically had to do with it, so I’m actually curious to know how a lack of districting could be abused.
I’ve generally been in favor of at-large races as a way of eliminating gerrymandering, and if there’s a way at-large districts can be abused too, I would like to know because it may mean I need to change my opinion =)
@Neil Hudelson:
Me too. The board’s explanation seem very “constructive dismissal”, like they wanted to get rid of her for some other reason they can’t say out loud, so they went looking for any technical violation that could be used as the “official” excuse.
@Stormy Dragon: I dug down the links for this story a little more and I’m still not sure why this was producing an all white council, but I suspect that it was because whites were concentrating on running and electing fewer candidates than Blacks. By having more Black candidates to vote for the votes were being spread over more candidates so they weren’t coming in ahead of the white candidates. It sounds like there was a pretty tight group of whites involved in the political process that literally held pre meetings to decide on issues before the official public council meetings, so I can see how they could pull something like that off. Small town politics.
The new system gave everyone as many votes as there were seats, and you could vote more than once for a given candidate. So 3 seats=3 votes and you can vote once for A, B and C, or twice for A and once for C, or 3 times for A. So as long as the whites spread their votes out and the Blacks didn’t they could elect at least one Black representative. I’m not sure why they couldn’t coordinate like that with just one vote before though.
@Stormy Dragon:
e.g. if there are five districts and 61% of the city is black, you could make two districts that are all black voters and three that are two-thirds white, one-third black and assure white voters control the majority on the council all the time.
I can’t think of any similar scenario with at-large races that structurally enforces white domination (although I’m not an expert so this may just be my lack of imagination rather than an actual aspect of at-large races)
@Erik:
I’m reminded of several things I read asking whether the VRA favoring “majority-minority” districts actually benefits minority voters, or just minority politicians
@OzarkHillbilly: “The complaints that we have heard from some of our parents is that they don’t want their students suspended.”
Heh, I don’t think you all are seeing what this is really about. The parents don’t want their damn troublemakers at *home*, ferchrissake.
/slightly sympathetic
Do you think he’s cracking up? Breaking down? Going irrevocably nuts? This seems a little over-the-top even for Trump.
http://www.rawstory.com/trump-truth-social-posts/
I was born in 1948 and went to grade school in the ’50s. My brother b.’53 and sister b.’55. Our parents never spanked, hit, beat or used any form of violent physical punishment on any of us. There was yelling. And the fits of rage my mother displayed were due to her schizophrenia that was diagnosed when I was about 8 years old. Not that my siblings or I fully understood that at the time. None of us ever ended up in the slammer or in trouble with the law.* I remember talking to my folks about discipline years later. They said that when I was very young they had talked to our minister (Missouri Synod Lutheran) and he convinced them that it was not a good idea to spank children.
*Well there was the time when my brother was driving home from a Halloween party and stopped for DUI back in the ’80s. He spent the night in a Southern California County Jail wearing only the baby outfit his wife had made him for a costume party. Complete with oversized diapers. I’m not sure if he got any sleep in the cell that night.
@de stijl:
We knew then. We been knew.
@CSK: I started laughing at “Even though I am as innocent as a person can be,” and was guffawing by the time I reached “Trump then followed up this post with an all-caps message that simply read, “PRESIDENTIAL RECORDS ACT!”
He does seem a wee bit wound up. “PRESIDENTIAL RECORDS ACT!,” indeed.
@Beth: @OzarkHillbilly: Can’t offer an answer for “what’s wrong with people” that will satisfy a predominantly secular audience, but I can address that the only “tools” available in the discipline kits at many school districts are in-school and out-of-school suspension. It can be demonstrated–but I doubt that the question gets studied much–that OSS and ISS link to substandard performance. Students fall behind because questions they might ask if they were in class go unanswered and because students who do suspension tend to get identified as “not worth the trouble of teaching” by the teachers who teach them also ignore them in class as much as possible. Additionally, some teachers decline to send work for the student to do while on suspension (or, in the case of being a “guest” teacher such as myself, have no materials to send). So, parents looking for alternatives to suspension may be concerned about policy interfering with the success of their children.
Additionally, a study by The Oregonian newspaper that stuck in my mind (dont’ have a link, sorry 🙁 ) found that [CRT TRIGGER WARNING] black, Hispanic, and Pacific Island students received out-of-school suspensions far more often than white students in more prosperous neighborhoods and often AS THE FIRST DISCIPLINE STEP, particularly if they were in elementary grades. (Given that Oregon Territory’s reaction to being declared a free state was to bar blacks from residence, this data doesn’t strike me as surprising, none the less, I’ll still include my shocked face– 😐 )
In fairness to schools–I do so like beating up the system 🙁 –I will note that lots of discipline problems start with parents going overboard with the whole “in loco parentis” concept by relying on the school system to provide guidance that is really outside the boundaries of the “hired hand who does not love the sheep” sort of caretaking schools can provide. Additionally, I will relate an incident that happened while I was teaching in Spokane. I was substituting for the choral teacher that day and had been asked to attend the teachers’ meeting after school. One of the topics for the day was discipline and the failure of the systems involved with managing it. (I will interrupt the story briefly to say that the school had a reputation for being a tough place to teach–and right on the edge of a wealthier enclave, hmmm…–and this was the only time I ever taught there, not ever being invited back and not wanting to return anyway.) When comments were asked for, I apologized for speaking as an outsider but suggested that I had an observation to make. Being granted permission, I observed that in three periods, I had collected a couple dozen after school detention notices with only 2 or three granting parental permission to hold the student after school. I surmised that it was possible that one of the “legs of their discipline tripod” wasn’t a leg at all.
TL/DR: I dunno what to do to fix the problems. Storing kids in schools is essential to the working of our economy, so kids suffering from “don’t want to be here” and other issues that make them bad fits will be an ongoing problem. Still, when your only tool is a wrench, every problem will look like a loose bolt (considering the question, the hammer/nail analogy seemed inappropriate).
@Jen:
So you agree that all this foaming at the mouth is a bit extreme even for Trump. 😀
@Erik: “It sounds like there was a pretty tight group of whites involved in the political process that literally held pre meetings to decide on issues before the official public council meetings, so I can see how they could pull something like that off. Small town politics.”
I’ve been back in the small town I moved to back in the 90s for 7 years now since I returned from Korea. The same half dozen or so people who were running for city council, county council, and so on are still the only half dozen or so who appear on the ballot. (And f**k they’re OLD, too. 🙁 )
@Franklin: Yeah. That’s certainly a thing. Another thing is what I call a “culture of hostility” environment that some communities I’ve lived in have. After I left, Clatskanie, OR had two recall petitions for the mayor. The first charging him with having fired the police chief without due process and in a show of extreme prejudice. The second charged him with having protected the police chief from termination by dragging out the process. Both petitions were about the same incident. The school district was the same way. The students fought with the teachers and the teachers with the students, the parents fought with the administration, and the district personnel–teachers and administrators–fought with everyone!
I re-watched Babylon 5 but not in chronological order. It was an odd experience.
I noticed two odd things.
1) in an ep where an epidemic affects one of the alien races, and is shown to be able to infect a few others (not humans or the other plot-relevant races, though), and is known to be airborne, and 100% lethal, not a single person wears a mask in the whole episode, not even the medical staff.
2) this is more a fan issue. In the eps where they find the “great machine” in the planet the station orbits, shouldn’t the Zathrases have been there? Later when the machine gets featured again, the new caretaker says there are other living there, tending to the machine. That’s Zathras and his brethren.
@CSK: Something has him wound up. Not sure I’d go as far as to say it’s completely out of character, though.
I heard an interview yesterday where the guest mentioned that this group:
https://ballotpedia.org/American_Bridge_21st_Century
deployed the strategy Ive advocated– throughout Wisconsin for the 2020 election which blunted Trump’s rural strategy there. They targeted 70 counties for 5-7 percent gain which is feasible in a R+40 area. Some countries they targeted realized 10% gains at the ballot box.
More and more, my theory of the case is being validated. There is only one voice behind a single bullhorn in “why does anyone live here” County. A 2nd voice behind a 2nd bullhorn WILL make a difference. Even if the difference is it keeps the yokels out of a 1776 mindset but they keep voting R.
The uni-voice that now permeates these areas have made confrontation pretty much unavoidable–which is bad for everyone.
Further evidence of DNC malpractice is the NYT podcast about the striking mine workers…a 1st heard for me. A golden opportunity to bludgeon Kay Ivey, Tuberville, and the rest of the R image of being for common rural workers. But alas, being vile non-green workers who picked, no doubt, one of the only ladders to lower middle class available in Central Alabama. They were too dirty for Democrats, who must defeat the existential threat to Democracy only as much as it fits a certain narrative and preserves their virtue. To be fair, Bernie Sanders has weighed in for the mine workers…but he’s about it.
@Jen:
Oh, no. It’s completely in character for Trump, just more so.
@Stormy Dragon: If it’s city wide voting, the 40% white vote can overwhelm the black vote if black voter suppression* is successful enough to keep 2 out 5 black voters out of the polls. If that 40% white vote is concentrated in 2 of the 5 districts, than no matter how much black voter suppression they engage in, they are still most likely going to end up with black council members from the other 3 districts.
*one of my “favorite” voter suppression tactics is not having enough voting machines for folks in certain precincts. Sure, you can vote if you don’t have a job you need to go to. Might take you 4 or 6 hours to do it but hey, Democracy takes sacrifice. Another one I’ve heard of is to move the polling place at the last minute for whatever excuse but don’t advertise the new location. There are other “legal” ways to suppress the vote.
@Kathy:
There are quite a few dangling plot lines and (usually minor) inconsistencies in B5 if you pay close attention.
The Jason Ironheart/ Talia Winters thing for instance: a godlike psychic, and he completely misses that his former lover has been implanted with an “override personality”?
The Vorlon/Minbari relationship.
etc.
(Oh, and universal foodstuffs. Except that’s just my little joke 🙂 )
I think though Straczynski had an overall storyline in mind, it got a bit confused by the writing of individual episodes, some actors leaving, and a tendency to make some things up “on the hoof”, and retcon others.
Still the best ever SF series though. 🙂
Project Veritas is the “Organization” named here, and I think they will be finding that they are in some deep doo-doo, soon.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/florida-residents-plead-guilty-conspiracy-commit-interstate-transportation-stolen
A remarkable man from a remarkable family
@Jen:
@CSK:
I came across a note yesterday on Rolling Stone, that El Cheeto Benito wants his classified documents back, and has instructed his team of Kraken lawyers to get them.
No clue whether that’s true. If it is, there’s no way he ever gets any of it “back,” or ever sees the documents he pilfered again. But having “his property” stolen, and a bunch of know-nothing lawyers telling him it’s a fool’s errand to file a motion for their return, might get him more unhinged than usual.
@Kathy:
One if the interesting bits about the epidemic episode in question is that the alien race in question are often portrayed as one of the more prominent races in the League of Non-aligned Worlds up until that episode, but are never seen again I’m the show after that episode
@JohnSF:
Back in the days when I assiduously read the Lurker’s Guide to Babylon 5, I came across outlines claimed to be JMS’s original intent. So:
It would have been Takashima who was the Psi Corps mole, not Talia. It was switched to the latter because the actor wanted to leave the show, and because Takashima was replaced by Ivanova. There’s a competing explanation, stating that Ironheart left her with superpowers (see Lyta in season 5), but her personality would have been restored by a backup Kosh made in season 1.
As to the Zathras issue, I’ve no explanation. But I’m reminded that B5 was supposed to be destroyed by the Shadows in season 3, and then Sinclair and Delenn would have led a raid across time to steal Babylon 4 to replace it as a base of operations.
There’s a great deal more. The big change was switching Sinclair with Sheridan.
@gVOR08:
I would be perfectly content seeing him turn into a rabid, biting, kicking scapegoat that takes out everyone around him as well.
I have nothing but ill will for the man, but if he can spread the damage around, more power to him.
@DK:
We didn’t actually know. We assumed.
Now we have proof. Legitimate, contemporaneous, “these are things I saw with my own eyes” testimony.
Bill Barr is a piece of shit and fuck his come-back tour and his self-serving book. Fuck him.
@JohnSF:
It was more a case of reality forcing plot changes.
The plans for Sinclair were forced to change by Michael O’Hares mental health issues forcing him to retire from acting. The plans for Talia Winters were foiled by Andrea Thompson quitting to pursue a movie career. etc.
Basically most of the stuff that happened to Lyta Alexander was originally supposed to happen to either Talia Winters or Susan Ivanovo (she was never supposed to come back after the pilot)
This is rich. Luke Bowen, the director of the anti-abortion group Texas Right to Life, has been caught in a sting operation that involved him soliciting a minor online.
Guess he wants there to be more children for him to prey on.
@Stormy Dragon: In addition to those personnel problems, it was never clear whether the show was going to be renewed for a 5th and final season. So a final episode was filmed to be shown at the end of season 4. But the season was renewed. However, Claudia Christian didn’t come back for a 5th season for contract dispute reasons except for the final episode which was filmed at the end of season 4. Got it?
@Stormy Dragon:
Whoa! I did not know that. How sad for Michael. The replacement was clearly unplanned, as you could tell how it was supposed to go fairly easily. But I liked Sheridan, I think he worked just fine. Maybe better.
@Jay L Gischer:
It wasn’t revealed until after ohare died, but he started developing schizophrenia during the shooting of the first season and ended in being institutionalized for a while
@Jay L Gischer:
@Stormy Dragon:
It was really sad for Mr. O’Hare.
I think Sheridan made better logical sense, but I missed Sinclair. The good thing is the character was given a close to his story arch, involving one of the best B5 eps (War Without End). Some of it is also told in the novel “To Dream in the City of Sorrows,” by Kathryn Drennan. It’s mostly about Sinclair’s time on Minbar, first as ambassador and then as head of the Rangers.
As to Lyta vs Talia, I like Lyta a lot better, both the character and actor.
@Scott:
My understanding is that the original plans was for season 4 to end with the completion of shadow war and season 5 would be the liberation of earth and the founding of the Interstellar Alliance. When it looked like the show was going to end after season 4, they sped up the liberation of earth plot to fit it into season 4, but then season 5 did happen and they suddenly had to stretch material to fill it. Lyta also got very disjointed as a character since she was basically flopping back and forth between two different character arcs now (Talia and Susan).
@CSK:
Forget it, he’s rolling..
@de stijl:
We knew. We knew Trump colluded because we already knew he publicly called for Russia to steal emails, that his scampaign met with Russian spies in Trump Tower to exchange election meddling for ending sanctions, and that Manafort and Baannon helped data the Kremlin target propaganda.
We knew Trump fired Comey to obstruct the investigation.
So we knew Barr was lying all along with his NO COLLUSION NO OBSTRUCTION nonsense fed to Trump and the press. And right after Barr lied, Mueller — who documented multiple instances of collusion even while deciding it wasn’t clear Trump broke any actual laws –confirmed way back then that Barr misrepresented his findings.
We knew Mueller has integrity and Barr does not. We been knew Trump and Barr are lying liars who lie.
@Stormy Dragon:
I recall JMS said at the time that he might have used up two or three more eps to end the Shadow War, including a two part ep for the actual end. I don’t recall whether he said anything about how the civil war against Clark would have developed differently. IMO, he’d have ended season four on a cliff-hanger, with the victory concluded at the start of season 5.
Season 5 was partly aftermath of two wars, and the start of the famous “Third Age.” But also part setup for the telepath war, which some speculate would have been what the spin off series, Crusade, would actually be about.
One thing is that if Sinclair had remained, Katherine Sakai would have gone missing early on in season 2. Sinclair would learn from Kosh and Delenn she had died on Zahadum, only to have her come back at the end of season 3.
That might have had a bigger dramatic impact that what eventually was done. We’d barely seen Sheridan’s dead wife (and they changed the actor).
@Franklin: That’s the first thing I thought of. But “Hey, a beating or 17 never harmed me.” isn’t a better look.
I don’t know what’s in the water, but the White House official twitter account is dragging members of Congress who have had PPP loans forgiven if they are speaking out against the student loan proposal.
Wow.
@Jen: Maybe they’re secretly reading OTB and hearing about how they should “fight back”? I’ve about had it with these Republicans who vote AGAINST shit, then oh so happily record local videos about how they brought home the pork to their districts. We should do that with every single thing.
Hardly ever see Seinfeld reruns. Just happened on one from 1997 and Saul Goodman is Elaine’s boyfriend but he’s not a lawyer, he’s a doctor. Sort of.
@Jen: Finally.
It’s long past time to bury these semi-fascist MAGA conservatives and save America (and the Republican Party).
Let’s go Dark Brandon!
@Mister Bluster:
Ever see Mr. Show with Bob and David?
A 90s comedy sketch show on HBO. Bob was Bob Oedenkirk and David was David Cross before they were famous.
Weird improv style comedy sketches and skits. Featuring a very young Sarah Silverman and Mary Lynn Rajskub.
Very inventive and deeply funny.
@de stijl:..HBO…
Did not see that show. Also missed Odenkirk when he was a DJ on the campus radio station WIDB at my Alma Mater Slepytown U. I think that WIDB reception was limited to on campus dorms at one time. May still be. I always lived off campus.