Tuesday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
·
Tuesday, January 10, 2023
·
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).
Follow Steven on
Twitter
Kari Lake proposes new way to get Katie Hobbs out of office: impeach her for mandating pronoun usage in classrooms, which Lake says is unconstitutional.
Except…. Hobbs has not called for mandating pronoun use in classrooms. But Republicans in the legislature are trying to pass a bill prohibiting teachers from addressing students by their preferred pronouns without parental consent, and Hobbs will probably veto such a bill if it ever reaches her desk.
Just like at the federal level, removing a sitting governor requires a two-thirds vote in the Arizona Senate. Republicans only control the chamber by two seats.
And if they did somehow remove Hobbs, the governorship would simply pass to the Sec. of State, who’s also a Democrat.
@Kylopod: There are innumerable things for which to curse Trump, but one thing is at the top of the list: enabling and empowering lunatics like Kari Lake who will inflict themselves upon the body politic like boils for many years after Trump himself has descended into the flames of Hell.
@Kylopod: As a co-worker in my work group 47 years ago was fond of saying, “the mind has left the body, never to return.”
@Kylopod:
One would think it would be easier to simply win elections.
@Mikey: This has clearly helped Democrats in Arizona, where John McCain is still a beloved figure. Indeed, Sinema’s seat would likely still be held by Jeff Flake if not for Trump.
I admit I did not anticipate that Lake would be practically the sole candidate challenging her defeat in this cycle. Most of the defeated Republicans conceded, including some truly certifiable figures like Doug Mastriano (hardcore Christian theocrat with close ties to Gab, the social media platform that bequeathed the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooter) and John Gibbs (House candidate in Michigan who’s on record arguing that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote and that Hillary’s 2016 campaign chair engaged in Satanic rituals), both of whom also happen to be 2020 election deniers. Yet they both quickly conceded. Lake, a former TV news anchor who once supported John Kerry and Barack Obama, didn’t appreciably stand out to me as the most unhinged figure from the pack. Of course, her defeat was a lot narrower than those other two, but that hasn’t necessarily stopped Republicans in the past: early in 2022 there was a Republican who challenged a 59-point rout in a strongly Democratic district.
The Teenage Prank That’s Lasted 60 Years
It’s a good yarn about a yarn that got out of hand. Well worth the reading.
You mean he lost after telling 50+% of the electorate that they shouldn’t be allowed to vote? Who’da thunk it!
@OzarkHillbilly: Pretty much. Gibbs unseated an incumbent Republican in the primary, Peter Meijer, and it was initially a Republican-leaning district, though apparently under its new boundaries that’s no longer the case. Still, Gibbs seriously underperformed. According to Ballotpedia, Biden would have won the district under its new boundaries by about 8 points. Gibbs lost by around 14 points.
Yay. More snow. This is my excited face. 😐
One of the Diamond & Silk team dies, in what was probably Covid, though they aren’t admitting it. She was 51.
@Kylopod:
The history of judicial review suggests that if every chief of an executive branch were removed for signing an unconstitutional law, or a law with unconstitutional elements in it, just about all of them would be removed in short order.
@Kathy: But that isn’t even what Lake is proposing. She’s saying Hobbs should be impeached for vetoing a bill (which hasn’t even happened yet—I don’t know if Hobbs has even taken a public stance on the bill). Has that ever happened, anywhere?
Sure has. In Republican heads everywhere.
@Kylopod:
Dying from Covid to own the libs. That’s commitment to the brand.
@Jax: Safe to say you aren’t dreaming of a White Xmas anymore?
We are looking at a high of 60 today, 62 tomorrow. The horror, the horror…
I am probably missing the fine print somewhere but, yesterday, the House passed “H.R. 23 – To rescind certain balances made available to the Internal Revenue Service”.
It was introduced yesterday and passed yesterday.
However, I thought the new House rules included a 72 hour reading period, unlimited amendment opportunity, free debate, etc.
What am I missing?
@OzarkHillbilly: OMG, I just got back from dropping the kid off at school….the plows haven’t been out, it’s snowing hard with little visibility and 5-6 inches on the ground, there was a truck and snowmobile trailer off the road, people stuck all over town, it was chaos, pure chaos! 😛
@Kylopod:
@daryl and his brother darryl:
Silk, the other half of this MAGA token twosome, is already fundraising off Diamond’s death.
The conservative commitment to the grift is strong.
@Scott:
As the House doesn’t publish its rules, we can only guess if those made it, or if they only apply to certain types of bill, or what.
@Jax: Heh, sounds like Texas after a blue norther.
I will kind fo miss them. If memory serves, they were part of the group pushing the conspiracy theory that the vaccines would magnetize you. Several of my staff taped spoons to their shirts and made it a point to hover around the anti vaxxers complaining that metal objects were sticking to them for no good reason.
Steve
Another tale of out of control boredom:
The punchline:
If you want to know the joke, you’ll have to read the piece. Don’t worry, it’s not very long.
@daryl and his brother darryl:
They were sisters. Imagine you just lost your 51-year-old sibling to a sudden illness and your immediate thought was, “How can I make a few extra bucks now?”
Maybe they secretly hated each other. That’s actually the less cynical take.
According to Wikipedia:
@Kylopod:
Like putting a tip jar on top of the casket at the funeral.
From the same WIKIpedia entry;
Holy gawd. NYT reports that my beloved Governor DeUseless has appointed Chris Rufo, who basically invented belief in CRT in K-12, to the Board of the New School of Florida. I was unaware of the New School, which turns out to be just up the road from me. Apparently they have a sterling reputation. Up til now. There’s a WIKI page.
Conservatives will see this, if they see it at all, as a necessary counter to imposed wokeism, like the Oberlin College students objecting to pulled pork and cole slaw being called a bahn mi. On the one hand we have the power of the state attempting to change the subject matter taught at a state school and on the other college students complaining about cafeteria food. Allee samee. Conservatives is weird.
Elsewhere in NYT (I won’t link. I only get so many gift links and it’s a long, long, boring, boring article) the chief economist for the AFL-CIO is quoted as saying in their polling they found white members were very concerned about inflation and Black members were largely indifferent. He attributed this to Blacks not watching FOX “News”. The big scares over “woke”, CRT, and many other mostly imaginary concerns can be laid largely at FOX’s doorstep.
There are news and/or analysis sources that try to get at the truth. And then there are sources that try to use truthiness to con you, to serve their patrons by tricking you into believing false things and, as importantly, to get outraged by them. It’s why I think that reading “Reason” or a white paper from the Heritage Foundation will actually make you stupider than if you haven’t read it. Here’s a classic example from that perennial fountain of ink for the billionaire boys club, the Wall Street Journal Editorial side, via Kevin Drum: A US soldier is sentenced to a long jail term in Japan because he caused a death, the WSJ publishes his defense as if it were fact and generates outrage, while completely neglecting to publish the reasons the prosecutor and court didn’t believe the defendant. What utility is there in reading such tripe? You know these people lie by omission, at the very least. Why does anyone think that exposing yourself to a con is in any way searching for the truth?
I have nothing against an analysis with a point of view. But if it doesn’t tackle the BEST arguments against that point of view they are either incompetent, lazy or conning.
Wanna feel old…Pat Benatar turned 70 today.
Criminy…
Take a listen to her album, “True Love.”
@MarkedMan:
FWIW – I don’t believe the WSJ Editorial Page, OR Kevin Drum.
@Jax:
Good day to bake bread.
@MarkedMan: I am not so happy to report that I have found left-leaning media to do similar things: leaving out details that change the story. I have a good friend to whom I once said: “You are filling in all the blanks in the most unfavorable way possible in this tale” This is a human thing, I accept that. But it doesn’t help me understand the world better.
@Jay L Gischer: Watched Rachel Maddow last night. I forget the story but I thought she was leaving out some moderating detail and over dramatizing some points. But as with most “bothsides” a couple orders of magnitude difference from FOX et al.
@daryl and his brother darryl: Why Kevin Drum?
@Jay L Gischer:
Absolutely. I have no truck with any such analysis. In fact I’ll give you an example that is happening in Baltimore right now: there is a push to improve public transportation to an under served middle to upper class section of the city, possibly with light rail or subway service. There is opposition amongst locals because they fear it will increase crime. Those in favor of this service imply that it is simply due to racism. Our two primary papers (the Sun and the Banner) “just report the debate”. No one involved is addressing the concerns raised by the residents: when new light rail or subway service is provided to a middle class community, does crime go up? To me, unless this is answered and put on the table the entire discussion is useless.
Dateline Sleepytown, January 10, 2023-
Starting today the local daily rag (5 times a week), The Southern Illinoisan, will abandon home delivery via carrier and begin same day delivery via U. S. Postal Service. The logistics are to get the paper from the printer in Saint Louis to the local Post Office, about 100 miles, early enough to be delivered by the Letter Carrier.
Good Luck!
@MarkedMan:
I think he is guilty of the very thing he criticizes the WSJ Editoral Page of.
Harry singles out Rupert Murdoch’s media empire for blame
“I couldn’t think of a single human being in the 300,000-year history of the species who’d done more damage to our collective sense of reality,” he writes. But those hired to shoot photographs for British tabloids are targets of his anger, too.
“The paps had always been grotesque people, but as I reached maturity they were worse,” he says. “They were more emboldened, more radicalized, just as young men in Iraq had been radicalized. Their mullahs were editors, the same ones who’d vowed to do better after Mummy died.”
@daryl and his brother darryl: Fck me….
@daryl and his brother darryl:
Nothing quite like the intro for Shadows of the Night, or the acoustic version of We Belong.
@Skookum: Honestly, I’ve never been able to figure out why tabloid content is so popular. It all falls under the “Batboy found in cave” and celebrity gossip that has me thinking WHO CARES ENOUGH ABOUT THIS TO PAY FOR IT?
I genuinely don’t care. About any of it. But there’s apparently tons of money to be made off of harassing royalty and celebrities for photos.
@Kathy: Shadows of the Night is a great song. I realized I’d never watched the video…it’s very odd.
@Jen: Serious Q: Have you ever met a real, honest-to-God, in-the-flesh Adam Sandler fan? I’m not talking about someone who likes the occasional acclaimed drama he does like Uncut Gems. I mean someone who can’t get enough of all those scores of dumb comedies he’s put out by the assembly line for decades.
Honestly, I don’t know if I’ve ever run across such an individual. Online or off. Yet the millions his films make have to be coming from somewhere. At least someone’s being mum about their tastes.
Just a thought.
@MarkedMan:
Back in my callow youth, when I was (the shame of it still burns) libertarian adjacent, I brandished John Stuart Mill’s line from On Liberty like a weapon: “He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion.” I outgrew libertarianism, but I still like the quote.
@daryl and his brother darryl:
Saw her last month when she and her husband, Neil Geraldo, we’re inducted into the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame. She still looks and sounds great!
@Kylopod: Don’t forget the possibility of using said movies as a mechanism to launder dirty money….or tax shenanigans.
(One of my friends is convinced that the bulk of Hollywood movies are used to generate “losses” for tax purposes only.)
Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg is going to jail for 5 months.
He’s 75 yrs old. That’s gonna be rough.
@Kylopod:
I like some of his comedies? The Wedding Singer, The Water Boy, Anger Management, and Funny People, so I guess I’m one of the mystery people with terrible taste.
Hotel Transylvania, as well, if that counts as a comedy (although oddly never had the urge to watch the sequels).
Annnnd the front wheel of the feed tractor fell off. Glad it wasn’t me that let 4 bolts fall out of the hub, I might’ve gotten run off for not maintaining my equipment properly. Nope, that’s allllll on Boss Man. 😛 😛
@Kylopod: Slowly raises hand…..Me. And my kids. Some days we have Adam Sandler binge days, we have all his stuff recorded or on DVD.
@Kylopod:
Sandler makes movies at a certain price point that are almost always profitable. His 34 films in which he was the leading man have a combined box office of over 3 billion dollars. Someone out there, many someones, like Adam Sandler movies.
Recently, “Uncut Gems” and “Hustle”, were both very good.
Oh, and he’s personally worth over $400 million. He’s done well for himself. He doesn’t give a shit what the critics think of his films.
@Kylopod: I have enjoyed a few of his films (The Wedding Singer and 50 First Dates — he and Drew Barrymore are enjoyable to watch together), but I don’t think that stretches as far as calling myself a “fan.”
Point taken, though, about the hidden preferences. I just find tabloids so dumb and distasteful that I just don’t get how they make money, much less carry the kind of power they do. The insatiable desire to digest pages and pages of nonsense about the Royal Family is just bizarre to the extreme.
@Jen:
I kinda liked “50 First Dates” but have trouble getting over how creepy the premise is if you start to think about it.
@Jen:
They’re entertainment. Like soap operas.
When I was working at the supermarket, I would love to read the front-page headlines every week–exactly because they’re so amazingly silly.
(But King Charles is a Silurian wearing a human skin.)
@Kylopod:
“Just Go With It”
Aniston and Upton are worth the price of admission.
And seriously…Sandler and Bob Barker fighting in Happy Gilmore is hilarious.
@Roger: That’s a great quote
@Kylopod: FG said it was heart failure (well, more or less) yesterday. Everyone knows that Covid doesn’t cause heart failure–it’s vaccines that cause heart failure. 🙁
@Kylopod:
I liked Adam Sandler when he was in SNL. Especially as Opera Man.
@Jax:..the front wheel of the feed tractor fell off.
Reminds me of the time in the early ’80s when I was traveling east on Illinois State Route 16 just outside of Pana in my 1966 Chevy pickup on Christmas Day when I heard a noise and felt a light bump. All of a sudden I saw the front driver side wheel rolling ahead of me at an angle across to the other side of the highway. I was able to maneuver the truck on to the shoulder of the road before it dropped down and landed on the brake drum. I retrieved the errant wheel and threw it in the bed of the truck. Had to hitchhkike back to where I started that day. Next morning I was able to return to the truck, round up new lug nuts and bolts, make the repair and get back on the road again.
@Mister Bluster: “Good Luck!”
Easy peasy. Check to see if it doesn’t turn out that the paper is mostly printing info on stuff that happened 2+ days ago rather than yesterday and earlier.
@Mister Bluster: I don’t think we’re gonna get that lucky. It cracked the rim and twisted the star that bolts it onto the hub. We’ll be lucky if we can limp it back to the house. I’m betting we’re gonna have to order a new rim and a new star. BUT….Boss Man is pretty clever at fabricating, so we’ll see!
@Jen: I didn’t see anything odd at all. Then again, I worked repetitious assembly line/order selection jobs that allow your mind to run wild because you don’t need it for your task for many years. The stuff the tomato room people talk about during a day while they’re working is amazing–and not banal at all a lot of the time.
@Arnold Stang: Indeed! She’s aged well and still has great pipes. But her voice is “going dark”–she sang “Heartbreaker” a step or two lower at the HOF performance. Then again, that happens to everyone. Most of us aren’t smart enough to realize it and crash on the high notes.
@Kathy:
Did you catch “The Return of Opera Man” segment when he hosted SNL in 2019?
@Stormy Dragon:
I’d no idea. I’ll have to look it up.
@Skookum:
I never expected to ever read anything Harry wrote, much less something I agree with.
About the Kevin’s Owner’s House, I had a thought:
If it takes 1 moron 4 years to damage a country, how long will it take 21* morons to inflict as much damage?
Four years.
Hopefully they’ll leave the job half finished.
*1 Kevin + 20 owners.
@gVOR08:
If this is the only thing on which you agree with Harry, I’d skip the book.
@Jen: Interestingly, I was waiting at a doctor’s office today (for quite some time). 50 First Dates was on the TV. I couldn’t really see it, but I forgot how really good its soundtrack is.
I didn’t realize my comment on Adam Sandler would get so many responses. I didn’t mean it as a dig at him. I just find it baffling what I see as a big discrepancy between his level of success and how few (if any) people I’ve run across who admit to being fans. They must be out there somewhere. It makes it seem like he’s both overrated and underrated–overrated because a lot of his films are (in my view) more popular they deserve to be, underrated because it seems like the people who absolutely loathe his work are the most vocal, by far, while his defenders stay carefully hidden.
I did genuinely like Uncut Gems. But I’m uncomfortable with the idea that I only appreciate his dramatic roles, because it perpetuates the notion that I view comedy as lesser than drama, which is not the case. There have been many actors over the years–Jim Carrey, Eddie Murphy, Bill Murray–where I feel they’re given short shrift whenever they do a serious performance and it’s treated like they’ve ascended to a higher plane, as if their comedy was just a warmup to “real” acting. I hate that attitude.
The problem with Sandler is that I often feel like he’s a hack comedian. It’s not so much a question of his potential talent as what he sets out to do; it’s like he tries to distill everything down to a formula. Even that scene with Bob Barker in Happy Gilmore–which I agree was funny–is based principally on a gimmick. He always seems to go for the easy gag. I also think he often mishandles playing an unlikable character. When comedy centers on a character who’s a dick, traditionally the way you do it is that you set it up so that the victims are goofballs who are asking for it. Yet in Sandler’s films, a lot of the time he’s a dick to innocent bystanders, and the film ignores his dickishness and expects us to view him as the hero.
@gVOR08:
New College is a really cool school. In no particular order:
Their dorms were designed by I.M. Pei. IIRC, the admin building is the Ringling Mansion.
They are known for not assigned traditional grades. Instead, each student receives a narrative evaluation of their work in each course.
Independent courses of study are fairly common, but they seem to emphasize the possibilities a bit more.
They have notorious on campus parties that are apparently quite… Uh… Fun.
Bonus IIRC: Derek Black, son of white supremacist Don Black and godson of David Duke, shared the same beliefs. That is, until he went to New College and his fellow students slowly chipped away at the views instilled in him from childhood. He eventually wrote an open letter to SPLC renouncing his views, but failed to persuade his father who seems to now have little use for his son.
@Kurtz: This may be simply and “equal time/trolling the existing board” thing, but it may be a more serious attempt to shape the image of the school. It may turn out to be interesting to see which ideology wins out.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:..Easy peasy.
Last time I bought the Southern on a regular basis the newstand price was 50¢ daily and $1 Sunday. And there was a real newsstand in town where I could buy it. That was years ago. Today the Tuesday through Friday daily edition (no Monday paper) is $2.50/copy and the Weekend Saturday-Sunday edition is $4.00. Every now and then I can find a copy that someone has left in a rack by the door at the Panera. Between the internet on my MacBook Air and now my new iPhone, my old beat up AM-FM transistor radio (no TV at home) and the free weekly Carbondale Times that I deliver I have access to all the news sources I want for the monthly cost of the Verizon Cellphone service.
As a former Southern Illinoisan employee (I ran bundles of papers to Quick Shops and other outlets at 5am.) I hope the paper survives. However I can’t predict the future so I won’t even try.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
I don’t think it is just trolling. Desantis did not merely add Rufo. There are a total of six new incoming members.
One other interesting thing about NCF. One of the requirements for graduation is a thesis. Each these is bound and placed in a section of the library that holds every past student’s project.
What I find particularly revealing about this move is that the central principle of NCF seemed to be giving self-motivated students the keys to maximize their academic freedom while holding them to a rigorous standard of scholarship.
I prefer not overuse this word, but this move seems downright Orwellian in multiple ways.
@Kylopod: Serious Q:
Not me. But then, I ask the same question about Will Farrell. Seriously, I do not understand why anyone ever thought he was funny, apart from maybe 10% of his SNL sketches.
@Kylopod: Jack Black has done some absolutely awful movies, but I still watch every damn one of them, because he cracks me up. There’s really no rhyme or reason to it, same with Adam Sandler…..their movies make me laugh and forget about shit.