Wednesday’s Forum
All of these questions.
Steven L. Taylor
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Wednesday, June 10, 2020
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83 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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The headline of the day-
North Korea says it has severed all communication with South Korea
A few days ago I pointed out about a dozen states whose case numbers were trending up and someone pointed out that it could be just an increase in testing. That seemed possible and I was starting to be a little hopeful that something had changed, since deaths were trending up in fewer of them. Unfortunately, that’s looking less likely. The Washington Post took a look at hospitalizations, a harder number to get a handle on, and found that in most of the states I listed, they were up significantly from Memorial Day.
As I side note, this is why I’m such a proponent of traditional newspapers. They have the boots on the ground to do this kind of reporting. Television news certainly does not, and places such as The American Conservative or The Daily Kos just comment on what others actually investigate.
@Bill: I understand this is serious but nonetheless I still can’t help imagining the NK communications system.
@MarkedMan: Agreed with the value of reporters and reporting. What’s not clear to me, though, is the degree to which the numbers are up because the disease is spreading more quickly or because we’re simply testing more people with symptoms?
Shallow thought for the day as a Forum poll.
Is Ivanka Trump the spiritual successor to Marie Antoinette or Leona Helmsley.
@Bill:
The foreign policy crisis shoe dropping??
@Sleeping Dog:
No she isn’t.
Maybe. I think if one comes, it will be elsewhere.
@James Joyner: Testing wouldn’t lead to an increase in hospitalizations.
From MarkedMan’s linked article
From my experience of living in Mpls for 25 years, much of what this writer has to say rings true.
Having seen the Black Lives Matter signs next to the Don’t Bulldoze our Neighborhood Signs accusing white Minneapolitans of latte liberalism is accurate. Racism is horrible, income inequality is terrible, but you know what’s worse? Threatening property values.
@James Joyner: You’re correct that for states with a significant ramp up in testing, the number of cases won’t be an accurate leading indicator of number of deaths. That was the reason the WaPo went beyond the cases versus deaths and gathered data on hospitalizations. The protocols for hospitalization haven’t changed and are pretty conservative, so their hypothesis is that hospitalizations will be a good leading indicator. And not just for deaths but for all the conditions survivors have been suffering from.
@Sleeping Dog:
¿Por que no los dos?
@MarkedMan:
I’m sure they’re quite advanced at stringing optic fiber cable between cans, and they can train pigeons to fly around the world non-stop.
@Sleeping Dog:
For quite a while I’ve had a different historical association in mind: Leni Riefenstahl. Take her speech at the 2016 convention. (I didn’t actually watch it–or anything else at the convention–but I did read the transcript.) In the middle of a convention filled with right-wing apocalyptic themes there wasn’t a word in her speech about illegal immigrants, black street hoodlums, Asian countries laughing at us, or anything else along those lines. It even sounded a bit liberal, talking about a proposal to promote greater equality in women’s pay (which turned out to be yet another scam, but put that aside). It was like stepping into an alternate universe, since nothing she said sounded unreasonable apart from the fact that it bore no resemblance whatsoever to the Orangefuhrer she was promoting. It was like listening to a mental patient who seems sane in all ways except for their insistence that the elephant in the room is a mouse.
And that’s been her role ever since–to provide the Trump team with a veneer of respectability it doesn’t remotely deserve, and which she frankly doesn’t either. It’s a narrative that’s been catnip to the media in their attempts to normalize Trump. I remember early on a reporter speculating that Ivanka differed from her father on climate change, immigration, gay rights, and a range of other issues despite there being absolutely zero evidence for this proposition. Basically they were projecting onto her whatever they wanted to see to support a narrative that she was a moderating force in the campaign and administration. Like Leni Riefenstahl, she’s a propagandist who avoids the more overtly ugly elements of what she’s promoting, focusing on laudatory imagery in a way that makes her subject seem more acceptable to the bourgeoisie.
From yesterday’s thread, where @CSK said: “Stephen Miller–yes, that Stephen Miller–has reportedly written Trump’s speech on race relations. ”
I just thought: perhaps he intends to pull a Costanza and do The Opposite.
So Banner, the big hospital chain in Phoenix say the ICU’s getting near capacity. The local Baptist church has resumed in-person services. Big decline how many people masked at the local Albertson’s supermarket in the last couple of weeks.
Spike in cases (as observed) not surprising to me.
@Kathy:
Nice thought, but no such luck, I fear. It’s hard to imagine Miller writing anything conciliatory, let alone healing.
Trump’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame has been painted black, and a bag of feces placed on it. Of course, it’s been vandalized a lot since 2016.
@Kylopod:
You have made a good case for adding Leni Riefenstahl to the list of comparable. I’ll accept that nomination.
Frankly, I hadn’t even considered Riefenstahl, but it is an apt comparison
@CSK:
It would be the one alternative that wouldn’t be tone deaf and/or alienating to the majority.
The Florida headline of the day-
Police: Florida man lets 12-year-old drive Jeep 85 mph
@CSK:
Back in the day, there was a photographer’s studio on Comm Ave in Boston (just on the other side of the Garden). The photographer had done a portrait of Nixon, and had big blowup of it in a display case in front of the store. This was in the winter. Some poor employee of the store had to go out a couple of times a day and scrape off the frozen spittle.
@Kylopod:
The Lenj Riefenstahl comparison is very, very apt.
@sam:
I can visualize quite vividly what would happen to a blow-up of a Trump portrait.
Barr Contradicts trump’s claim that he was inspecting bunker
Evangelical group wants gays removed from anti-lynching bill
Stupid people with shitty values.
@Teve:
President Lardass will not be pleased at being contradicted.
Sweden has closed the investigation into the assassination of Prime Minister Olaf Palme in 1986, given that the chief suspect, Stig Engstrom, has died. The individual who was originally convicted, Christer Pettersson, was freed in 1989.
Over time, 134 people confessed to Palme’s murder, 29 of them to the police.
@Teve:
So this bunch thinks it’s okay to string up LGBTQs? Do I have that right?
@Teve: Homophobic trash…I’m sick of people using their religion to justify their bigotry…
@Teve:
@CSK:
RELIGIOUS FREEDOM!! Those evil Democrats are attempting to infringe on their religious freedom.
According to Gallup, President Lardass’s job approval rating has plummeted to 39%.
It seems a certain Flynn has more legal expenses on the way.
The judge presiding the case still has to make his own decision before moving to the sentencing phase. But I’d argue this sets also what the Biden DOJ should busy themselves with after the inauguration.
I have been watching the limited series Mrs. America, about second wave feminism and the struggle for women’s rights in the 1970s, on Fx and HULU. While watching, I was struck by how many of the characters have counterparts in groups and individuals today. Warning: some spoilers ahead.
– Bella Abzug represents the institutional Democratic party: however progressive her views were, she had been stung by backlash in the past, and thus was reluctant to take strong stances and often too willing to compromise.
– Gloria Steinem represents youth voters: idealistic but not realistic, and often too quick to give up on politics when it doesn’t match her ideals.
– Betty Friedan represents Bernie Sanders: someone who had been passionate and outspoken about the cause for a long time, but has blind spots about other types of injustices, such as racial inequality and LGBTQ rights.
– Shirley Chisholm represents black voters: taken for granted, but often doing the heavy lifting to bring about progress.
– Jill Ruckelshaus represents never-Trumpers: someone who slowly starts realizing that the Republican party doesn’t really stand for the values she thought they stood for, and that she no longer has a home there.
– Phyllis Shlafly represents the religious right: someone who is ruthless in her quest for power, and blind to her own hypocrisy.
– Alice McCray represents the subjects of all the media stories about “Trump voters”: a fictional character created to prove that they’re not really racist, just anxious about a changing world.
More on Alice: In a series that has taken great pains to accurately portray real people, they devoted an entire episode to a fictional character in order to give her a redemption arc. She grows more and more disturbed by the racism of the anti-ERA movement, with its wink-winking toward Klan members and Birchers, and starts to realize that the feminists aren’t really the evil people she thought they were, and aren’t really trying to destroy her life.
I repeat: this is a fictional character. By devoting an entire episode to her, the showrunners neglected the opportunity to focus on some less prominent – but real – characters of color such as Flo Kennedy, who they could have spent more time portraying. Think about how often the media has done that.
@Monala:
I suspect the neglect of Florynce Kennedy was based on someone’s decision that her name wouldn’t mean anything to current viewers. That’s awful, but it’s the way a lot of movie/t.v. people think. I recall Gore Vidal saying that some studio, in the early 1990s, canceled a project about Bette Davis on the grounds that “no one knows who she is any more.” As Vidal pointed out, at any given moment, at least one of Davis’s films was playing somewhere in the world.
And, in the case of Kennedy, there might have been some additional anti-black feeling, which is even worse.
@Bill: Thanks for the update. But it’s worse than Ms. Kim is letting on because the groups that send propaganda messages across the border weigh the balloons down with socks! It turns out that socks are fairly expensive in NK, so many people don’t have them. (In SK, socks can be had for a little as $o.50 a pair at the 1000 Won Store) When I was there, some people thought that the socks were a more potent anti-government message than the messages themselves.
@CSK: yeah, but I know I had never heard of Jill Ruckelshaus or Brenda Feigen before watching this, and they got full episodes. How well known are they?
@CSK: to add to my point: even if she was relatively unknown to begin with, by episode 8, the one that focuses on Alice, Flo Kennedy had appeared in enough previous episodes, and was a colorful enough character, to make the audience want to know more about her. I know that was true for me.
So why waste an entire episode on a fictional character, rather than a real one like Flo? Especially because the two interacted in episode 8, when Alice says she loves the song, “This land is your land,” and Flo tells her that Woody Guthrie was a socialist. Alice exclaims, “But the song is so patriotic!” and Flo replies, “Exactly.”
That scene could still have taken place, with the look on Alice’s face as she realizes that some of her prior beliefs were incorrect, in an episode focused on Flo rather than Alice.
IMO, it may less be the blatant racism of not wanting to focus on another character of color (since Shirley Chisholm had her episode), than the milder racism of wanting to show that “everyone on the right isn’t a bad person or a racist!” even if you have to make up a character to do so.
@Monala:
Well, they’re white women, aren’t they? I was/am quite familiar with Ruckelshaus and Feigen-Fasteau, although that’s no reason to assume other people would be.
Feigen-Fasteau and Ruckelshaus did occupy positions of national prominence, which you would know about from the series (additionally, Ruckelshaus was married to William Ruckelshaus, who was head of the EPA, then Acting Director of the FBI, and finally Deputy A.G).
Florynce Kennedy was certainly famous in her time–and lauded by Gloria Steinem, among others–but she’s been dead for 20 years. And, as I said, she was African American, so perhaps the showrunners considered her dispensable. Terrible, but, sadly, it happens.
ETA: I have not seen the show, so I didn’t realize till I read your second post that Ms. Kennedy was actually a character in it. But I think my explanation still stands.
@CSK:
He’s got a raft of bad polls today. Under water by 11, 13, 18 and 19.
Nate has it 54.9 to 41.1, an almost 14 point gap. But it’s less about Culties changing and more about Dems deciding Joe is good enough. Trump still clocks in at: 39, 39, 43 and 44 approval.
I got no words….
Trump campaign demands CNN apologize for poll that shows Biden leading
@Michael Reynolds:
I wonder if he’ll fire Parscale. Trump appears to blame him for all the bad news. And he thinks Parscale is spending too much of “his” money.
@SKI:
How hard would it be to say “We are sorry you are losing so badly, Mr. President.” ? Maybe directly followed up with a Project Lincoln ad?
@SKI:
I can see how a lair would be bothered when confronted with reasonably accurate information.
@CSK:
What? the money raised isn’t for the candidate to keep? If not, why bother running for no purpose?
@Kathy:
Trump keeps referring to it as “his” money. Parscale is spending too much of it. I’m surprised Trump can bear to have the campaign pay Kimberley Guilfoyle and Lara Trump $180,000 apiece.
Speaking of Ivanka
Credit: The video was produced by Meidas Touch, a progressive PAC founded in April by attorney Ben Meiselas and his two brothers. Mr Meiselas was the lead attorney for Mr Kaepernick when he settled with the National Football League (NFL) last year.
@Kathy:
That was delightful. I could almost–I say almost–pity Ivanka. Imagine growing up knowing that your father not only slobbers over you but brags about your assets in the crudest possible terms in public.
@Pete S: CNN’s response
William Ruckelshaus was one of the victims of the Saturday Night Massacre, choosing to resign rather than fire Archibald Cox. Of course, that was when the GOP had men and women of honor serving in government. Not like the craven bunch now in place.
@SKI:
I know right…President Trump is doing The Onion’s job for them, too funny.
Also, the GOP is the group that went on about “skewed” polls several years back, yes? I find it funny that the President basically hired a guy to manipulate data to put something in front of his eyes that made him happy. When the President complained to CNN that his guy has proof that the polling data from CNN is wrong what he does not realize is the guy he hired deliberately massaged the data to make a toddler like President Trump happy. Too funny and sad at the same time.
ETA: Just read the CNN reply and yup, it confirms that the guy President Trump hired is a hack. There is a point at which McConnell has to see the writing on the wall and work to save himself and his colleagues from getting booted out of office and spend less time kissing President Trump’s rear. Kissing the President’s derriere might have helped the GOP in the past but now the action only offers up diminishing returns.
If McConnell is as wise as folks claim he is then behind the scenes he has to be figuring out a way to shake free of the grip Trump has on the GOP, because Trump is a lame horse not worth betting on anymore. Basically, a useful idiot that is no longer useful and needs to be marginalized.
The GOP got their tax cut and plenty of judges on the bench, they should be happy with what they have achieved and start to slowly withdraw from providing cover for everything President Trump does and says.
@inhumans99:
It relates to an ongoing question, which is how much of Trump’s behavior is lying and how much of it is delusion. It’s often hard to tell, because he’s got a huge dose of both. Personally, I don’t think even he’s dumb enough to believe that attacking legitimate pollsters and promoting fake ones is going to erase the underlying reality of what the pollsters are telling him and cause him to win the election. He’s just so obsessed with his public image that he perceives bad poll numbers as a personal insult–and that’s in some ways a separate concern from his fear of actually losing. Of course, the two go hand in hand because when and if he does lose, that’ll be the ultimate insult in his way of looking at things.
@inhumans99:
I think everyone who works for Trump has realized that you either never tell him anything he doesn’t want to hear, or you quit. Tell him something he doesn’t want to hear, and he’ll make your life so miserable you’re forced to leave.
Trump says he “will not consider” renaming those military bases named after Confederate generals. This should go over well in a few southern red states.
Some more news via Talking Points Memo on masks. It’s important to note that the studies mentioned concern only N95 and surgical style filter masks, because no other advanced country has had a shortage of such masks for any length of time.
@CSK:
Well, it’s not like the Trump spawn are the first people to stay in a family for the money.
@CSK:
I had read somewhere yesterday that he is getting impatient with Kushner as well? That seems awfully perceptive so if true I would suspect Trump is blaming him because hating a son-in-law is what older guys do. I cannot imagine Trump really understands how bad Kushner is at everything.
@SKI:
That is well written. I could never be a lawyer, I don’t have the patience to call someone stupid with such eloquence.
@Pete S:
Kushner joke of the day:
One dreadful day Ivanka tells Jared something really odd is happening. Whenever she sips coffee, she gets a stabbing pain in her eye.
Oh,” Kushner replies, “the same thing happens to me.”
Well, Jared mobilizes amid the lock down and calls dad-in-law’s personal military doctor to fix the problem.
The doctor comes in, eventually, and after listening to the couple’s tales of despair, he asks “Have you tried removing the teaspoon from the cup before you drink?”
Trump will hold a MAGA rally in Tulsa on June 19. That rally will be followed by rallies in North Carolina, Florida, and Arizona.
I wonder how these will be arranged. Maximum potential for transmission of the coronavirus to the attendees, I assume.
@Kathy:
Love it.
@Pete S:
I think Trump tolerates Kushner because he only trusts family (even in-laws) but mostly because it’s the only way he can retain proximity to Ivanka.
@CSK:
Except for Oklahoma, which is still a lock for him, those are states that he should be winning, rather than ones he needs to spend resources in.
@Sleeping Dog:
I suppose he thinks, to the extent he thinks, that if he rallies in those places, he can win those places.
But…it’s been so long since he was able to hold a rally that I think he’s really doing this for the attention. He’s desperate for it.
@CSK:
I expect the Army will find it’s time to change, but take well into next year to work the process.
But I’m OK with retaining the name of Fort Bragg. General Braxton Bragg, CSA, was a tremendous asset to the United States. He won one battle, Chickamauga, and that was due to the loan of Longstreet’s Corps from the Army of Northern Virginia and an incredibly ill timed screw up in the Union line. Otherwise he was responsible for a great deal of Union success.
I see Jacksonville has stepped up to host the Republican convention in August as they are fine with the no masks no distancing aspects of Trumpian adulation. And cruise ships will be used to accommodate convention goers as Jacksonville does not have enough hotel rooms. Combined with the restarting rallies in states where Covid is increasing it seems Trump really is trying to kill off his supporters?
@CSK:
The notifications from the NYT app on my phone:
“Trump shut down the idea of removing Confederate names from Army bases […]”
Next to…
“NASCAR said it would ban the Confederate flag from its events and properties […]”
When you’re on NASCAR’s right flank… Yeesh.
@CSK: Dan Rather wrote this on Twitter today:
@Monala:
Very St. Ronnie-esque.
@Monala:
I doubt he did this deliberately, because he’s such an ignoramus when it comes to history–or anything–that he wouldn’t know about the Tulsa Massacre or Juneteenth. Apparently no one on his staff knew, either. I wonder if someone had tried to dissuade him if it would have made a difference. Doubt it.
@CSK:
But there’s Stephen Miller….
@Kurtz:
Yeah, and the culties aren’t happy about Nascar. What the hell is wrong with them? They claim to be the only patriotic Americans–but they fetishize a goddamned flag of treason waved by a bunch of goddamned traitors and slave-keepers.
@Kylopod:
Miller wouldn’t try to talk Trump out of this. On the contrary; he’d be jumping for joy.
@CSK:
Who said anything about Miller trying to Torquemada it?
@Kylopod:
Let’s face it, ya can’t Torquemada anything.
@CSK: Dan Rather wrote this on Twitter today:
@CSK:
The Union may have won the war, but white supremacy won Reconstruction.
Daniel Radcliffe responds to J.K. Rowling’s tweets about trans people.
Best part:
(my emphasis added)
@Monala: Your criticism of Mrs. America is spot-on, but I still think it’s an excellent series…
@Teve:
Reading their “rationale”, one wonders how they would feel about a bill forbidding lynching of child molesters, or torturers? To be consistent, they would have to argue that forbidding lynching of such people is just a short slippery step from condoning their behavior. Somehow, I can’t see them making that argument…
@An Interested Party: so do I – overall, I think the series was excellent. I was just frustrated by the Alice storyline. I didn’t think a fictional character deserved so much airtime, when real characters who made important contributions got less. As I told CSK, they could still have had Alice reaching her epiphany in an episode focused on an actual person like Flo Kennedy.
@Kathy:..The doctor comes in, eventually, and after listening to the couple’s tales of despair, he asks “Have you tried removing the teaspoon from the cup before you drink?”
It’s not about the nail.
@An Interested Party: I’ll add that a big part of my frustration is that this is so similar to all the “rural diner safari” stories that have been so popular since Trump was elected. To me, such stories so often seem to be attempts to redeem (justify, explain, excuse) people who made a truly awful decision, by denying that their awful reasons were what they actually were. And meanwhile, the media has tended to ignore (until recently) important stories about so many other Americans who don’t support Trump (often people of color), and have important stories to tell.
So the showrunners of an otherwise great series decided that it was so important to redeem a fictional anti-ERA supporter of Schlafly, and ignore the stories of some great actual African-American feminists with important stories to tell? This, after identifying that tokenism was a problem in the feminist movement (as Margaret Sloan-Hunter pointed out), and that white feminists often didn’t have the backs of black feminists (as Shirley Chisholm pointed out)? After all that, the showrunners decided to have a token black person episode (“Shirley”), and then devote an entire episode to a imaginary conservative white woman? Heck, the brief appearance by Andrea Navedo (Xo from “Jane the Virgin”), made me curious about Latina women’s involvement in 1970s feminism, which is another avenue they could have explored.
But nope, let’s make up a story in our historical dramatization to redeem a fictional white conservative woman!
So now there’s a COVID-19 fee in Vegas.
Ok, it’s at a restaurant, not a hotel, but still…
I like Vegas. I’ve vacationed there a number of times. But first the resort fees, then the venue fees, and so on, are killing the fun. The last few times I’ve stayed at the 4 Queens in downtown in part because they charge no resort fees (the other parts are the 6/9 video poker machines, complimentary coffee-maker in the room, and a very good coffee shop).
@Kathy: You can probably get Covid-19 for free elsewhere.
@SKI: “Your allegations and demands are rejected in their entirety.” Hahahahaha!
@MarkedMan: You are absolutely correct. Fortunately, we learned from the first wave that the virus can be controlled without shutting the country down. Face coverings have proven to be effective at dramatically cutting the rate of transmission to a level that allows reasonable control with testing and tracking only. So, all we need is a national “Must wear masks in public” order, one that is enforceable and enforced. Since masks have become a political statement, we need just one thing to assure MAGA cultists comply; to protect us from a second wave all we need is for Donald Trump to start wearing a MASK