Thursday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Thursday, July 29, 2021
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45 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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Headline from Yahoo news:
GOP lawmaker Mo Brooks admits he wore body armor at Jan. 6 Trump rally, and says he was tipped off to ‘risks’
Aside from the fact that his colleagues must hate his guts since he decided not to share this knowledge with them, he should be subpoenaed and forced to divulge the source of his information.
I can’t imagine how he can look other members of Congress in the eye after this.
Why So Many Millennials Are Obsessed With Dogs
I’m going to use this forum to indulge my disdain for Ted Cruz:
Ted Cruz shows up to vote on Capitol Hill in gym clothes
TIL Laura Ingraham has a brother who fact-checks and talks shit about her on a daily basis on Twitter 😀
Curtis Ingraham
@Teve: I remember reading about Laura Ingraham’s brother Curtis some years ago. He’s gay and a liberal, but despite that the two were once close and they had a falling out. He calls her a monster and says that their father was a Nazi sympathizer whose views rubbed off on Laura.
@senyordave:
There goes the “it was spontaneous! It’s not our fault” GOP argument… not that it held any water. For God’s sake, there were groups of people wandering around in preprinted shirts stating Revolution and the date. Gallows don’t come pre-built and they’re kinda obvious when you lug them around.
They knew. There was a plan. A stupid, half-assed, probably figured out on meth and QAnon plan but a damn plan nevertheless. They were going to riot, be violent and attack something and that something was likely Congress itself. All those people went there to “Stop the Steal” and they knew it meant more than waving signs.
@KM:
Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t we see proof on Facebook and Twitter that the insurrection was being planned?
I just found out something new today that I did not know before: Mitch McConnell was on the ballot in Arizona and Georgia.
@Kylopod:
Actually, Trump lost Georgia, or at least the senate election, when he and Sidney Powell and Lin Wood urged Georgians not to vote in it because it was rigged.
A Texas GOP Bill Would Make It Harder For Nonprofits To Bail People Out Of Jail
I’m becoming increasingly pro-secession.
She risked everything to expose Facebook. Now she’s telling her story.
@CSK:
Yep – there’s tons of evidence scattered all over social media that this was never going to be a peaceful protest.
It’s one of the things that pisses me off the most about 1/6 denial. It wasn’t like these folks were going two streets over to the local food trucks or fair; almost everyone drove or flew quite some distance to get to DC for this thing. That requires planning and info – you need to know where it is, where you’re going and how to get there. They talked and they planned and consequently there’s no way every single attendees didn’t hear some flavor of seditious or violent BS that was gonna go down. They knew – they either didn’t care, didn’t take it seriously or were absolutely down for the insurrection.
@KM: Exactly, investigation should peel back all the layers even down to trivial stuff like the posters and signs. Who designed them, who ordered them, who paid for them, who picked them up from the printers and distributed them. Takes work to get that all accomplished. And someone organized and accomplished that work.
@Teve:
To coin a word, I would prefer sejection. I don’t want Texas to leave; I want them kicked out
Adding human gene increases crop yields by 50%.
Time to buy stock in pitchfork futures!
@senyordave:
This news about Brooks wearing body armor on Jan. 6 is all over the place now.
My question: Did he go to the Capitol building after his and Trump’s speeches, or was he hiding somewhere safe?
CDC should have promoted the vaccine as The Ronco Rejuvinator and hired Popiel to pimp it.
I’m sure everyone in Missouri would buy it.
Full diclosure. I finally bought a Veg-O-Matic at a flea market some 25 years after they first came out. I used it once. It’s still in the kitchen cupboard. Might even have the box.
Rod, Todd, this is God!
@Teve:
I’m thinking more in terms of eviction.
@Teve:
Ingraham dated convicted felon Dinesh D’Souza in college. Dartmouth of course. No foolin’. True fact.
It is reported but not confirmed that after their breakup she stuck the yard hose through his mail slot and turned the spigot on.
@de stijl:
In fairness, he wasn’t yet a convicted felon at the time she dated him. But I’m sure he was just as insufferable a jerk, and self-hating brown person. Real-life villains don’t have origin stories; they were always shitheads.
I watched Raising Arizona earlier on a whim. Been a long time since I watched it last.
Holly Hunter was absolutely phenomenal. It’s a broad comedy (sophisticated broad comedy with distinct acts), but she plays Ed as if it were a tragedy. She has perfect control of her face and her voice. Oscar worthy.
I cried twice watching her performance.
@Kylopod:
If both people are shitheals you root for both to lose.
@de stijl: Few filmmakers do pathos in comedy better than the Coens.
@de stijl:
If you haven’t seen her in “Always”, I highly recommend it. She plays off of Richard Dreyfus and John Goodman exceptionally well–and with an amazing emotional range for a (arguably) comedy movie.
Plus… Audrey Hepburn. {sigh}
@Mu Yixiao:
Don’t worry, I’ve stocked up on torches!
@Mister Bluster: My personal favorite was GLH. It was basically spray on hair, and GLH stood for Great Looking Hair.
Here is the real ad:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlbuUiWnlJc
here he is on Conan O’Brien’s show:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlbuUiWnlJc
Funny thing is that it actually looks like it might work.
@Teve:
R’s knew they politicizing Benghazi. It was baked in. They had something like 35 “investigations” that found zero malfeasance but presented incendiary accusations seemingly weekly.
I said this a week or so back, but I think it bears repeating:
Imagine a 9/11 commission where half the panel is basically supportive of Osama Bin Laden’s actions.
The unimaginable has become reality in 2021.
And they are seemingly proud of it. Makes me nauseous.
@Mu Yixiao:
Broadcast News where hypercompetent Hunter ran the shebang and scheduled daily crying breakdowns.
@de stijl: I’m still not convinced the GOP politicization of Benghazi hurt Democrats at all. Now, that wasn’t the case with emailgate, which did do serious damage to Hillary Clinton, enabling Trump’s victory. I don’t think it’s fair, but it’s undeniable that’s what happened. But Benghazi never really penetrated the right-wing bubble. It was never given favorable coverage in mainstream media and it was never a focus of the Russian-backed smear campaign against her on social media–quite unlike the email stuff.
The right is brutal and relentless in its attacks on Democrats, but the left often makes the mistake of thinking all the attacks are equally effective. The right often gets lost in its own obsessions in a way that ends up looking simply perplexing to anyone outside that world. It’s why the Hunter Biden stuff has never landed, yet the right has never figured this out and still won’t shut up about it.
@flat earth luddite: Yeah, but we’re still short of rope and lampposts. 🙁
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
To the hardware store, Cracker! We must stock up on genuine manila hemp rope!
@Mu Yixiao:
Broadcast News
@Kylopod:
No effect on Clinton in the 2016 election? Really?
In PA, MI, WI?
“Lock her up!” at every Trump rally?
I enjoy theories but yours needs evidence.
@Kylopod:
Like de stijl, I’d question your assumption that Benghazi wasn’t a factor in the death of Hillary Clinton’s presidential hopes. It was a very, very big in the right-wing media and blogosphere.
Many factors contributed to her defeat: the emails were certainly a big factor. But ever since Bill Clinton was elected in 1992, she’s been portrayed as a shrew and a harridan. She could never overcome that; I know very liberal Democrats who couldn’t stand her personally. I should note that they voted for her nonetheless.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/forgotten-oil-gas-wells-linger-leaking-toxic-chemicals-79142639
@de stijl: Start with the point when Benghazi actually happened, in 2012. Romney’s attempt to make an issue of it totally backfired (“Please proceed, Governor”), and Hillary throughout the following year enjoyed the highest favorability ratings of her career.
It’s true that the Benghazi hearings of 2015 were soon followed by a collapse in Hillary’s popularity, but that doesn’t necessarily imply a causal connection. Polls suggested most Americans weren’t even paying attention.
The crash in Hillary’s popularity was mostly driven by other controversies, the biggest of which was emailgate. That was the “scandal” that dominated the Russian-backed disinformation campaign on social media (as well as various other “scandals”), and it was also the one that got massive coverage over the following year in the mainstream press, which almost completely ignored Benghazi. When Comey concluded his investigation into the email matter in the summer of 2016, even though he cleared her of the charges, her poll numbers took an immediate dip. And that was basically what happened again with the Comey letter a week before the election–even though there was nothing there, just reminding Americans why they disliked her in the first place was enough to sink her at exactly the wrong moment.
None of that had to do with Benghazi. Benghazi was irrelevant. Maybe arguably it had a marginal effect by being seen as one more “scandal” proving her corruption, but it was never at the center of the scandal narrative outside the right-wing media or even really in the Trump campaign itself which focused more on other controversies, and it didn’t appear to have any negative impact on her popularity at the time it actually occurred despite the Republicans screaming about it incessantly, which suggests it lacked resonance.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/07/29/1021197432/cyclists-olympic-dream-becomes-200-000-medical-bill-nightmare
He had two insurance policies, crashed on his bike, and is now being billed $200,000. How much longer are Americans going to put up with this shit?
@Kylopod:
Rs sowed the seeds of distrust, disdain, and hate for Clinton for years.
Emailgate in the waning hours of the election built upon previous attempts at vilification. It was not stand-alone. There was a narrative.
@Teve:
Our current model of for-profit healthcare is an abhorrent outlier.
Developed nations have routinely foregone this model to good effect as to public health.
We are stuck in a morass of a private system that is incentivized by public policy to treat insured people at exorbitant cost. Uninsured can fuck off as you don’t have an insurance we can bill $1200 for a chest x-ray.
It is a circular failure. Those of us who can pay for medical insurance pay premiums into a pool that subsidizes a predatory medical health delivery system incentivized on maximizing cost per patient regardless of outcome.
Our original sin was accepting slavery.
Our continuing sin is our incredibly fucked up medical / health care delivery system.
And how we police the poor, but that’s a different rant.
Today was 97F in the shade. Felt like 108.
Totally brutal.
The new normal.
All around me I see systems collapsing.
Random shit from Twitter that made me laugh/cry. https://twitter.com/historyfalls/status/1363602791000911874?s=21