Wednesday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Wednesday, August 9, 2023
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49 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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https://nitter.net/MuellerSheWrote/status/1689125842193117184
Ohio #1:
Map showing cities heavily no, boonies yes.
(This map is bigger)
https://twitter.com/MuellerSheWrote/status/1689125842193117184
https://nitter.net/atrupar/status/1689101930801328128
Tweet with gift link to NYT piece:
https://twitter.com/TomJChicago/status/1689100227892932608
https://nitter.net/TomJChicago/status/1689100227892932608
snip
Much more stuff at the link, it’s a long read.
@charontwo:
I posted this on the other thread also since I’m not sure where the conversation will pick up.
If Democrats are smart (a sometimes questionable proposition), they would run on a Freedom rights agenda: Freedom of marriage; Freedom of family planning; Freedom to vote. Etc. And wave the flag as they do it.
@charontwo: Typical. Ohio urban areas for, rural against. That one anomaly in SE Ohio looks to be Ohio University in Athens.
@charontwo:
This is long read which I skimmed (at justsecurity.org):
“Laurence_Tribe”
The final paragraphs:
@Scott:
I think this is good advice and fits something I have been thinking about, but have not written about: they need to connect to some core patriotic themes (e.g., “We the People”) and link them to core democracy themes.
@charontwo: What, no stories about HRC’s e-mails?
GOP rising star. moving up in the primary polling:
https://nitter.net/VivekGRamaswamy/status/1687861954591817728
https://nitter.net/AWeissmann_/status/1689015991248855040
For years now I’ve been saying that the Republican Party is the Party of Lies. It’s not just hyperbole, I truly believe that reflects reality, and that means it has great consequence. The Ohio amendment is just another example, one of many. Remember, in unison the Ohio Repubs initially insisted that this amendment was only about the constitution and had no other issues. It was, of course, “100% about abortion” as one of the the party leaders got caught saying to a group of friendlies. When they realized that lie wasn’t working, they shifted to ‘it’s about the girly-men and manly-girls barging into your bathrooms and filling them with cooties’ and brought Mike Pence in to repeat that lie. I could point to a thousand other Republican lies about a hundred different subjects, but the bottom line is that a Republican being upfront about what they want to do is so rare I assume it is an accident. Whenever they engage on a political effort their default is lies and deceit.
There are some here that feel it is a virtue to listen to what professional liars have to say so as to “get all sides”. But lying isn’t a side, it’s a con. And once someone has shown themselves to be a professional con artist you are not engaging in a debate, you are pitting yourself (an amateur, I assume) against a professional trying to fool you in any way they feel will work. The only sensible thing to do is ignore them and point out their lies to everyone else at every opportunity.
That graph is rather stunning..
@Steven L. Taylor:
Try to keep up…”Hunter Biden” is the new “but her E-mails”
@charontwo: Ramaswamy has one significant point of vulnerability in the primaries, and I’m not talking about his skin color. I’m talking about his religion. He is, apparently, still an open and professed Hindu.
He was on an evangelical program recently (Flashpoint), and his appearance got significant blowback from viewers, to the point the host was forced to address it on air following the appearance. There are also some prominent evangelicals who have been taking this position:
Ramaswamy is trying real hard to appeal to these folks. He calls America a Christian nation and says the real enemy is secularism. He hasn’t just called the Ukraine cause a “religion,” but also what he calls “Covidism,” “wokeism,” and “climateism.”
Is his Hindu faith going to be a deal-breaker in the primaries in the unlikely event that Trump isn’t the nominee, or in the somewhat likelier event that he comes under consideration to be Trump’s running mate? My hunch is yes.
Yes, Idolatry is always a deal breaker for Evangelicals.
@Kylopod:
“Welcome to class Mr Ramaswamy. Please sit down, and we’ll get this lesson started…”
@OzarkHillbilly:
He identifies as a monotheistic Hindu. But I doubt that’s going to do much to quell the reservations of a crowd who think Sikhs are Muslims and who almost certainly assume all Hindus are people who pray to statues of a lady with many arms.
In the end, the real problem is that he’s not a Christian, period. Maybe they’d be willing to tolerate a right-wing Jew (though I have my doubts), but anything beyond that is unacceptable heresy, regardless of how closely their politics align.
@Kylopod: I’ll admit I did not know he claims to be “a monotheistic Hindu” (whatever that is, I am largely ignorant of Hinduism in any of it’s forms) but anything that isn’t Jesus is idolatry.
@MarkedMan: As it was in the 1880s, is now, and ever shall be (or maybe another few decades), the Republican Party is the party of wealth and corporate interests. As with the Ohio GOPs on abortion, they can’t openly say what they want. Their real platform is low taxes for me, subsidies for me, no regulation for me, full throttle fossil fuel extraction until it runs out, and nothing for thee. For the most part they can’t openly advocate for any of that. So they lie. They push trickle down econ, climate denial, and an astroturfed populism. They have nothing to offer the median voter so they run on Obama is a Muslim, Hillary’s emails, and now CRT in grade school, grooming, immigration, and something about Bud Light. Ron DeSantis is running on anti-elite populism, but that’s a front for his real campaign which is based on money from lobbyists and wealthy donors. GOP pols don’t have a governing philosophy, they have a business plan, deliver for their corporate masters and get enough money in return to buy reelection.
The lying is built into the contradictions in the Party. But the contradictions have been building up and the populist Frankenstein monster they’ve built may turn on them.
@OzarkHillbilly:
So did he think that by yelling “we are Muslim; get that gay shit out of here” the prosecutor would go easy on him?
@charontwo:
I suspect Judge Cannon is 1. Not a very good attorney, 2. Not particularly bright, and 3. A RAGING partisan.
1 and 2 is pretty common with State Court judges, frustratingly so, but less common with Federal Judges. But with the push the FedSoc loonies to stock the bench with 3’s I’m sure they didn’t give a rats patootie about 1&2.
Ok, having perused her Wikipedia page I’m convinced she’s a mediocrity who knows who’s ass to kiss and is a raging partisan. I can guarantee whatever she does it’s going to make the situation worse. Oh, and she has a history of being pro prosecutor except in the Trump cases or if she gets a bug up her ass about something.
@charontwo: I’ve been trying to remember. One of the GOP SCOTUS justices bragged he didn’t follow main stream news, getting his news from FOX et al, but I can’t remember which. Anybody remember?
Cannon sounds like she’s also a true believer. We like to think the detachment from reality is a low education MAGA thing, but it isn’t. The biggest Trump supporters are the petite noblesse car dealers and ready-mix operators who show up for boat parades. And a fair number of well educated elites are also delusional. Survey after survey shows it takes a certain level of intelligence to be able to delude oneself. Somebody a few days ago was pointing out the news pages at WSJ are also GOP propaganda and were long before Murdoch bought the rag. The hoary “republic not a democracy” thing is code for government of the best people, by the best people, and for the best people, people like me. Which, if you come down to it, was the vision of the Founders.
@gVOR10: I definitely think the GOP commitment to lying long predates the rise of Trump. One prominent example for me is their response to Obamacare.
There are a ton of legitimate criticisms that can be leveled against the law. It doesn’t come close to the goal of universal coverage as it was marketed, the exchanges often provide substandard insurance, it keeps most of the perverse employment-based system, millions of people are still without insurance, millions are still in serious medical debt or one emergency away from entering it–and so on.
However, the law was absolutely an improvement over the state of health care in this country prior to the passage of the ACA. It provided greater access to health care, increased the amount of people who are insured, and curbed the rising costs. None of this is a matter of opinion. It’s simply an objective fact, every bit as much of an objective fact as the fact that Joe Biden won the 2020 election. The claim that the ACA caused harm to people’s access to health care and drove up costs is not a legitimate opinion; it is simply a lie. Yet that lie essentially became the GOP’s official position following the law’s passage.
The prime difference with the GOP’s current lies about election fraud and so on is that the lies about Obamacare were usually more indirect, less explicit. There were a few outright lies such as the death panels, but the GOP’s central critiques of the law were more subtle. They usually didn’t state outright that the passage of the law caused harm to the access and cost of health care, but they heavily implied it. What they would do instead was utter a string of criticisms, some of which may have even been individually valid, but with rare exceptions, most Republican politicians and pundits never acknowledged the objective fact that the law improved access to health care in this country, and they certainly never acknowledged the objective fact that the policies being pushed to replace the law would have greatly reduced people’s access. What has changed in the Trump era isn’t the fact that the GOP lies, it’s how overt they are willing to be.
And I’m not suggesting it began in the Obama years, either. It goes back a long way. It’s reflected in their tax policies, the purpose of which is put more money in the hands of the rich while misleading the public in believing the middle class are the main beneficiaries. Just like with health care, when it comes to complicated economic policies it’s easy to mislead people without stating outright falsehoods.
Jonathan Chait hit the nail on the head in his 2007 book The Big Con:
When did this really start? I agree with you that the GOP has been the party of wealth and corporate interests since at least as far back as the end of Reconstruction. But I think the fundamental dishonesty–and the level of disparity with the Democrats’ record on this (because, let’s face it, lying has always been part of politics)–took a while to arrive. Chait traces it to the rise of Reaganomics. I tend to think it started with the rise of Buckley conservatism in the 1950s as well as the concurrent Bircher movement, which were really two sides of the same coin.
And that has its own history to explain it: the way Republicans in the 1920s moved away from the Progressive movement they had flirted with a decade earlier, and embraced a more laissez-faire outlook; the Depression and the rise of the New Deal which made corporate conservatives extremely unpopular; the right-wing backlash against Eisenhower’s accommodationism to the modern welfare state; and, last but not least, the civil rights movement and the end of Jim Crow, leading ultimately to the Southern strategy and the defection of white racists to the GOP–really the first culture war.
Update on Florida and AP Psychology: apparently the state didn’t walk the ban back far enough, and no one is sure what to do, so districts are still dropping it.
Clever plan to appear more moderate while still getting their way, or just plain incompetence? I have no idea.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/08/09/florida-schools-drop-ap-psychology-class/
@Beth:
4. Very inexperienced.
https://twitter.com/BarbMcQuade/status/1689269379693678592
From Salon:
@Kylopod:
You might want to check “The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market,” by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway. It’s more about how business, and the various libertarian and affiliated or similar groups, have been spreading propaganda to favor business and sow distrust of government.
Per ABC: The FBI shot and killed a man in Provo, Utah while trying to arrest him. The man had been making credible threats against Biden and other administration official for months.
@Kathy: Thanks. I saw something about that a week or two ago, had it on my . Just bought it for Kindle.
@Kylopod: Obamacare clearly was an improvement. But it’s not an improvement from the point of view of the Koch fueled anti-tax glibertarian billionaires. But they can’t say that in public, hence all the lying. And it’s definitely gotten worse. I tend to date the acceleration to Gingrich and his win at any cost politics. Hacker and Pierson in Winner Take All Politics date it to the mid 70s when, in reaction to the Clean Air Act and OSHA corporations started to put more money into politics.
We could list a hundred inflection points. Maybe it’s just that the money at stake got bigger.
Robbie Robertson has died. 80
RIP
Up on Cripple Creek
Encore
@Mister Bluster:
Robbie Robertson & 80.
Hardly makes sense, why it was only a few years ago…
Oh.
Going to have to dig out Robbie Robertson.
Such a great record.
RIP
https://nitter.net/BVanGrack/status/1689383848415789059
Who would bet on Cannon not approving this request? Act first, discover consequences later seems to work for her.
From the replies:
And, obviously –
@charontwo:
This is the document, BTW. As long and tedious as you would expect.
“PDF“
@Beth: I see from her wiki page that in her twelve years as an assistant U.S. Attorney she “participated” in only four jury trials. Even for Federal Court where there are typically fewer trials than in State court, that is an absurdly low number of trials. Also “participating” indicates that she was not even lead counsel, but second chair. I would have expected that in her first year alone she should have tried eight or ten cases. By the end of my first dozen years I had more than a hundred trials to verdict, and my case is hardly unique. Her lack of trial experience shows in her rulings.
@JohnSF:..Robbie Robertson
Variety has an extensive tribute. I knew about some of his work but there is so much more.
Looking for edit key.
ETA. Here it is on my Google Chrome. Seems to have vanished from Safari.
test
It doesn’t look like the Outside the Beltway endorsed tactic of just ignoring Joe Biden is working all that well when it comes to the public overall.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/
War in Ukraine, problems on the southern border, inflation, Hunter, out of control deficit and debt, and a host of other major issues out there. And the guys running this place just can’t quite bring themselves to say much of anything about the guy who is actually supposed to be in charge of dealing with it all.
This post is made on my Safari. I have been getting prompts to update my Safari browser for a while now. Since I can use the Chrome as back up I haven’t bothered. Unfortunately I have been getting prompts to update Chrome too.
My biggest fear is that I may not have everything backed up and/or that I may just smoke the entire machine. As long as I can get to my bank account and credit card accounts…
I guess I gotta do something.
@Mister Bluster:..Plan B…
My “new” (10 months old) iPhone SE (iOS 16.1) says that it has 7 Applications. Damned if I know what they are. I have not attempted to download any apps. I guess I could install the Bank and Credit Card and other bill paying apps that I use so I don’t have to worry about the lap top. Basically none of this has been done as I am just too lazy and don’t want to bother. I think I’ll sleep on it.
DeSantis dismisses an elected county prosecutor for reasons you will probably guess before reading the article:
https://www.tallahassee.com/story/news/politics/2023/08/09/desantis-suspends-central-florida-prosecutor/70557094007/
Unclear how constitutionally this works.
@Kathy: Kylopod and I were kicking around just when the descent of the GOPs began. I’ve seen statements that it was Goldwater’s campaign that first explicitly said we’re business men, we’ve been manipulating public opinion for years to sell our products, we’ll use the same mass marketing techniques to sell our candidate.
iPhone test
ETA
Here’s the Edit Key on my iPhone. Looks like no Edit Key on my Safari browser on my MacBook Air means that the Safari browser is one step closer to digital hell.
For the love of god, someone please get Dianne Feinstein to retire.
@Paine:
She can’t. Because of Senate rules and GOP behavior, no replacement on judiciary committee, so no more judge appointments confirmed if she does.
@Mister Bluster: I had a prompt to update my system on my Windows today. It came in the form of a little yellow dot on the start button in my open-Windows-to-see-all-the-things-I-can-connect-to box. I’d probably have never noticed except that Windows now has some sort of feature the prevents you from going online if you need to update. 45 minutes and a restart later, I was (more or less) back in bidnezz.
ETA: My three year old Android phone has about 40 applications, most of which I have never used.
@Itsamemario: There are 1603 posts at OTB tagged “Joe Biden.”