About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science and former 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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Trump must be thinking about one of these places Top 10 Best memphis bbq Near Chicago, Illinois
unless he has chickened out again.
@Gregory Lawrence Brown: “suggested the city was too “hostile” with “professional agitators.””
So Trump is saying that even with the National Guard, the army and the marines behind him, he’s still too scared of “professional agitators” to go into Chicago?
What a he-man!
James will know this better than I but I had thought that while military people cannot criticize civilian leaders even in their social media, that otherwise free speech was the norm for officers outside of official communications.
Steve
@Gregory Lawrence Brown: Yep, that looks like TACO. I wonder, though, what specifically scared him off. Or maybe he never intended to, but just wanted to posture?
I’m puzzled (not really) by far right calls for retribution for the Kirk killing. Who is the object of this retribution? After all, the killer appears to have been a crazy kid from Utah. I’m sure that no one is talking about vengeance attacks on mentally ill young men in Utah. I suspect that this is a pretext for shooting fantasies; there are t-shirts saying “Liberal Hunting Season” out there. Radical Leftist lunatics have not killed many people in America. Like Michael I remember 1968 with the murders of MLK and RFK within a few weeks. Not done by liberals. I remember other murders of the 1960s like JFK and Malcolm X which were also not done by liberals. Liberals have not done many murders. These calls for vengeance are public revelations of the masturbatory fantasies of the right wing commentators.
@Slugger: From the WIKI page on Horst Wessel,
@Jay L. Gischer:
Pritzker is a billionaire. Billionaire privilege.
You know what would be cool? If media outlets and politicians would gather facts before publishing or speaking about an event.
But the incentive structure for both groups is to do the opposite. Well, for politicians, it depends on the nature of the event, because one side may be incentivized to muddy the waters immediately. In that case, there seems to be a lack of shame.
@Michael Reynolds:
Welp, this might have been a factor: Ice Officer Fatally Shoots Man During Traffic Stop In Chicago Suburb
Good piece from ProPublica on doge storming Social Security, much of it around and from the perspective of the SSA mid-level employee who became the acting SSA Director for several months earlier this year. It’s clear that the damage done and damage continuing to be done will take a toll as the inertia of the pretty-well functioning Social Security Administration of eight month ago is lost to doge and administration incompetence, and hollowing out of core SSA functions in search magical short-term wins.
Had a lot of thoughts as I read the piece, but won’t get into them, except on this sentence near the end:
I think it’s clear that there are a couple of reasons for people to apply to receive Social Security benefits early; which I take to mean statistically earlier than people historically have. The old conventional wisdom of deciding when to start receiving benefits goes out the window, or at least is considerably altered, when the SSA is seen as being inadequately funded to provide full (by today’s standards) benefits in some future year. The damage done by the administration/doge to SSA’s operations provides further incentive to get one’s benefit application processed, approved, and benefits starting to flow while the SSA processes still work.