Wednesday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
·
Wednesday, February 22, 2023
·
62 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
This from a Washington Post article (no subscription needed) on why the American South has such uniformly bad credit scores:
This makes no sense. Why would trump states enact rules that resulted in so many of their citizens to be burdened under crushing debt?
Unless of course, the purpose of governance in Southern states is not to benefit the citizens as a whole but rather to keep them stressed and angry and set against each other, in which case medical indentured servitude makes perfect sense.
@MarkedMan: It’s part of a pattern of immiseration. Why it’s almost as if their voters would gladly live in a packing crate cooking a pigeon on a curtain rod over an open fire as long as they knew the black guy down the road didn’t even have a curtain rod.
I have a multi year crusade to not suck so bad at drumming. I’m never going to be good, but I would prefer not to totally suck. I can’t even tell you why, it’s not for bragging rights or anything. It will never serve any practice purpose. Just to not totally suck for whatever reason. Just because.
Last night I was tapping along to Bizarre Love Triangle by New Order and my brain just froze up for several seconds. Froze up is the wrong word – it fritzed out. BZZZT! About four minutes in.
I kept flailing away way off beat for several seconds until my sense of rhythm kicked back in again. My brain stopped being able to cope.
I was ticking along doing pretty okay for me and then BZZT! and I went off-line for a second or two and spazzed out. Soft reset. I overloaded my brain!
It’s a tricky song and the extended mix is entensely complex, but I was just trying to keep the basic beat, nothing fancy. And my brain hiccuped.
It was kinda fun, actually.
Republicans in the US ‘battery belt’ embrace Biden’s climate spending
Yeah, Brandon did that. Not that the GOP will ever say, “Thank you.”
Boss of Wagner mercenary group accuses Russian army chiefs of ‘treason’
The whole piece can be summed up with a single word. “Wah.”
Never mind that pesky 1st Amendment.
@MarkedMan:
Because it makes the libtards cry.
Jon Tester just announced he’s running for reelection.
Mitt Romney is not a big fan of Marge’s “Articles of Secession” that she published to Twitter, yesterday.
Wyoming is closed. My kid’s getting a snow day, I can hardly see our barn it’s snowing so hard.
It’s State Wrestling this week in Casper. The buses all left early to try and beat the storm, and they all got stranded in Riverton, so WYDOT dispatched plows to escort them the rest of the way to Casper. Then they closed the road again right behind them.
@daryl and his brother darryl: I was going to say that she probably thinks Lincoln was a tyrant who stole the South’s valor, but then I realized it’s just as likely she doesn’t know who Lincoln was.
Concrete in Life photo competition – in pictures
Some pretty cool stuff here, hard for me to pick a favorite.
@MarkedMan:
Those states haven’t expanded Medicaid, with the result being that medical debt is concentrated in income groups that earn too much for traditional Medicaid, but are in jobs that don’t provide health insurance or the insurance is of poor quality.
@Sleeping Dog: Misery recently expanded Medicaid via voter initiative. (the state GOP would never have done it) I think it was just this last election so we may soon drop out of the Dirty Dozen list.
First hurdle cleared. I submitted the vacation request to the boss, and he signed it without comment.
Next, book a flight and hotel.
Niki Haley is trying to be cool.
@MarkedMan: @gVOR08:
States’ rights.
@daryl and his brother darryl:
I don’t think Romney’s a big fan of MTG period.
I like to think I’m a pretty rational thinker, using facts and logic to remain grounded in the real world. So I just don’t know how to communicate or relate to those who are not rational. I listened/watched in the last couple of days to people who, let me just say, I cannot relate to:
Will Sommer: The Power of QAnon
Less disturbing but still on the edge:
Red & Blue Special Edition: Focus Group about Election Integrity
The four folks who had to keep straight faces listening politely to this focus group was Major Garrett, David Becker, Brad Raffensperger, and Bill Gates (Maricopa County Board of Supervisors)
If you’re in the mood for despair and depression, have a listen.
@Kylopod: After seeing the Montana Republicans in action, he probably thinks that he has it in the bag or he needs to defend his state from the whackjobs.
@Scott: I definitely don’t think he has it in the bag. Barring a big surprise, Montana will vote for the Republican presidential nominee in 2024. If that happens, and Tester manages to win reelection as Senator, it will be the first time since 2012 that a state has voted simultaneously for a Republican presidential candidate and a Democratic Senate candidate. The extreme nationalization of Senate and congressional races we’ve seen in the Trump era is going to have to decline at least a little, in order for Tester (and Sherrod Brown, and Joe Manchin) to have a chance. Steve Bullock wasn’t able to break that trend in 2020. Granted, he was running against an incumbent Senator whereas Tester is the incumbent this time. But it’s striking how badly he did despite being the sitting governor.
There are always conflicting incentives in situations like this. Tester obviously isn’t eager to go into a race he has a high chance of losing. But the Democratic Party knows he’s their only chance of keeping the seat. So his running is less risky for the party but more risky (in terms of his reputation and dignity) for Tester.
@Sleeping Dog: I know I harp on what I perceive as a fundamental difference in governance between the trump states (the old South plus some others) and the more progressive states. I believe that the trump states act as if the purpose of governance is to preserve a feudal type of society (which I call Jim Crow governance) and does that by keeping as many people as possible living hand to mouth and setting them against each other by race, class, educational level and religion. The other states act as if the purpose of governance is to provide essential goods and services to the populace. People from these areas may resent that I make these claims. But am I correct? Well, even in trump states “correct” is a hard thing to define given the different interest groups, population centers etc. But whether or not I’m absolutely correct I don’t think you can deny the predictive value of my theory. You can take just about any social issue for the past two centuries and judge how the trump states will fall out based on it. Will the trump states feel that the duty of governance is for the state to use its power to oppose unionization at all costs? My theory clearly says yes. Opposing theories (trump states believe in smaller governance, trump states believe in ruling by religious values, etc) do not predict the outcome. Same for efforts to bring health care, child mortality or education up to national standards. Try as I might I have been very hard pressed to come up with guiding principles that result in the two plus centuries of backwardness the trump states have endured, other than the one I outlined above.
@Scott:
Here’s a companion piece to the Qanon article to which you linked:
http://www.thebulwark.com/a-catalogue-of-the-gops-paranoid-preoccupations/
@MarkedMan:
I don’t have any disagreement with your extended statement and would add that the failure of the trump states to expand Medicaid is evidence of that. My point is that failure to expand Medicaid is a significant driver of medical debt. Why Medicaid hasn’t been expanded is a different question.
@MarkedMan: there’s some good evidence for this. I’m at work so do t have time to dig too far, but Teri Kanefield talks about this regularly and has references. Try this one link or search on her website for hierarchy
@Mu Yixiao: Definitely past her “sell by” date.
@Mu Yixiao: @OzarkHillbilly: What I find amusing is that I know it won’t be long before Trump makes a sexist remark about Haley. And she just totally lets it slide.
It reminds me of the flap when Rahm Emanuel was quoted in a private conversation referring to liberal critics of the Obama Admin as “retarded.” Sarah Palin, as the mother of a Down’s Syndrome kid, called for him to be fired. Then Limbaugh said he agreed with Rahm that liberals were “retards.” Palin was asked about Limbaugh’s remarks, and she said he was just being “politically incorrect.”
These people need to learn to insert Jim Wright’s emergency “Not all” whenever one makes a generalized statement about certain populations. Such as, “Not all rural Missourians are miserable ignorant backwards rednecks, but if you have the misfortune of coming across one in the wild you should be pleasantly surprised to find one that wasn’t.”
People have a tendency to take things said on the Internets too personal. And yes, I made the above overly insulting on purpose.
Yesterday, there was some discussion about employees and organizational policies, in the context of staff complaints about the NYT Bazelon piece.
For comparison, here is Fox:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/02/fox-news-dominion-voting-lawsuit-2020-election-conspiracy/673111/
@OzarkHillbilly:
Reading the comments to that tweet, Nikki not so popular.
Dmitry Medvedev said today that Russia will be “torn apart” and “disappear” if it loses the Ukraine war.
@charon: Well, she’s certainly not popular on my side of street and I suspect her side of the street is jeering her just as loudly for attempting to steal the throne from it’s rightful owner, the chosen one.
@CSK: We should be so lucky.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Yeah, I know.
@CSK:
He maybe right, in as much as he means the greater Russian Federation. A Russian loss in Ukraine or even extended losing could result in an attempt to overthrow Vlad. If that occurs all bets are off about how it unfolds. Unlike the Soviet days, there is not a Politburo that can manage the transition to the next leader. A future Russian leadership fight is likely to more closely resemble 1917, than Khrushchev replacing Stalin.
The various Federation members are participants in part out of coercion and a Moscow in turmoil would give the Stans and the eastern provinces the opportunity to escape the yoke.
@Sleeping Dog:
Indeed. A Ukrainian victory would inspire a lot of the provinces.
@Sleeping Dog:
Mad Vlad could pull off a classic 91 Saddam. After his army is done getting their ass kicked, he can turn them on to under-armed, inexperienced internal opponents trying to make trouble for him.
The Reverend Robert E. Lee IV, a collateral descendant of General Robert E. Lee, has accused MTG of treason.
@CSK:
There’s a risk Putin would opt for making Ukraine as messed up as he can prior to leaving it in order to discourage that. And that could be accomplished by simply staging a bloody-minded defense of the large cities in the Donbas break-away republics.
Hopefully there will be some sort of negotiated settlement to this.
Words fail me.
@charon: And she doesn’t seem to understand the “hold muh beer” meme, either. 🙁
Regarding the “hidden fees” discussion from a few days back:
I was just copying into my notes app the booking information for the two trips I’m doing this year, and I notice this for my trip to Croatia…
Fare $62.80
Taxes & Fees* $491.65
That’s got to be a mix-up in the order, right? Taxes and fees can’t possibly be 780% more than the actual fare, could it?
It is possible that 88.7% of my fare is taxes and fees? And only 11.3% is the actual ticket?
======
* I selected no upgrades or premium seats. I have no checked bags. This is a bare-bones ticket.
@OzarkHillbilly: I actually get what he’s saying here. He’s admitting that Alaska doesn’t have the resources and services available to undo the damage child abuse does and is not likely to be able to provide them in the future. He’s essentially acknowledging that living in Alaska is the equivalent of living in the Peruvian rainforest except with the social problems we ascribe to living in Bedford-Stuyvesant.
Why Republicans are willing to embrace this view as a goal to strive for is another question, but I can admire his candor… I guess… 🙁
@CSK: I’m not so sure. For certain of the
‘Stans it seems more like what happened when Yugoslavia broke up. The central authority turned out to be the only thing keeping them from killing each other.
@MarkedMan:
In the history of the world, there has only ever been one “Yugoslavian”– Josip Broz Tito. Everyone else is Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, Dalmatian, Slovenian, etc.
As I understand it, most of the people in Russia consider themselves to be Russian.
The situations are not analogous.
@Mu Yixiao:
It’s hard to tell without the details, but it’s quite likely.
Ryanair’s CEO has said a few times he’d like to set all fares at $0, and get income solely from fees. To do that, fees would have to be charged with the fare. Otherwise customer may book multiple flights and take just one or none, who cares if you aren’t refunded for $0, right?
Taxes, BTW, often includes excise fees, either fixed or dependent on fare price or type of travel (domestic, international, transoceanic, etc.). Stuff like airport fees, 9/11 fee, etc.
If you can get the “fees and taxes” itemized, you should.
Trump vs. DeSantis:
https://thetriad.thebulwark.com/p/the-desantis-soft-bois-can-dish-it?itm_source=parsely-api
Trump:
DeSantis:
Odd question of the day: Is Paxlovid still distributed free all over the US?
The reason I ask is that I’ve caught a number of ads for Paxlovid on CNN lately. The gist is to go on Paxlovid at the first sign of COVID, be it by a test or just symptoms. That’s good advice, as the treatment works best right after infection
This has been known for months, but it wasn’t that widely advertised, certainly not on cable news. So I’m wondering whether now it has to be bought, and Pfizer is advertising it to sell it.
@Kathy:
It will cease being free in the middle of this year.
@Mu Yixiao:
Just a few years ago, more than 27% of Ukrainians considered themselves at least part ethnically Russian, a number that is now less than 8%
Identity can change quickly and unexpectedly.
@CSK:
Thanks.
I wonder if some enterprising neighborhood clinics can stockpile a few thousands while they’re free, for later use when it no longer is. I recall a price quoted around $700 soon after the first studies on efficacy came out.
@Mu Yixiao: I’m not talking about interna Russia but rather the ‘Stans. This is from the wiki article on the Kyrgyzstan–Tajikistan border. Moscow was always reading them the riot act but with Putin distracted they have been taking advantage to kill each other.
@Kathy:
Based on what I’ve seen, it will be $120 per dose. Who knows?
Medicaid will cover the cost in some areas.
@CSK: My health insurer is sending me messages to reassure me that it will still pay for Paxlovid treatments, but I’m on Medicare, so they may not have a choice. I suspect that the pitches are part of a “don’t think this is over” campaign to juice demand for vaccinations just in case there are people who still want them. (Which reminds me, should I be taking a 5th shot for the spring season?)
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Beats me. I’m vaxxed, boosted, and I STILL ended up in the hospital with Covid.
I’ve done some odd mixtures in my time, and have no qualms about fusion in cooking, but, seriously, olive oil in coffee?
It’s Starbucks, so maybe uncongealed vegetable fats will improve the burnt taste of their beans.
@MarkedMan: Armenia and Azerbaijan with their usual referee, Russia, otherwise occupied have been going at it as well.
@Kathy:
I love coffee, and I love olive oil, but this combo sounds ghastly.
@Kathy: @CSK: My great grandma who came over from North Carolina on a wagon train always put butter in her black coffee. I remember being 8 or 9 and asking why, she said it cut the bitterness, and she didn’t like milk.
Winter Storm Olive has fucked us. I’ve got 6 foot drifts between me and my chickens. I’m not even sure where my cattle are. I fed them extra this morning. I fared better than my neighbors, they had zero visibility and couldn’t feed their cattle at all. The only way I could tell where my road was trying to get out to the feedground and back was the 4 ft drifts scraping on my tractor steps.
If you pray, please pray for my animals. If you don’t pray, I’ll happily take your good vibes.
@MarkedMan:
Back about 20 years ago (gag!), I was teaching bankruptcy and collections practices. IIRC, 70-80% of all consumer bankruptcies in the country were a direct result of medical debt, and that most of these people were on the bottom or middle of the economic ladder. An inadvertent benefit of the then-current system was that it kept the poor and downtrodden in their proper place (same as it ever was).
ETA I stumbled into this “career” over 40 years ago (I’m Luddite, and I’m your Kelly Girl™) and this has only gotten worse in that time.
@Sleeping Dog:
I’m presuming that this was a rhetorical question. Medicaid (and Medicare, for that matter) hasn’t been expanded because it serves the purpose of keeping the poor and downtrodden in their Dawg-appointed places, dad-gummit!
@Jax:
When I’m listening to the news crews up here going nutso, I’m thinking about you and the critters. Lighting joss sticks on the alter for you, Jax, and all the critters.