Tag Archives: hiltzik

Here’s What Vladimir Putin Really Said About Donald Trump Today

by FatimaZavala Posted on December 17, 2015

Mother Jones

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LA Times reporter Michael Hiltzik has spent time reporting from Russia and speaks the language well. Via email, he offers this explanation of what Vladimir Putin really said about Donald Trump today:

From what I can hear from the video you posted, he calls Trump a “yarkom chelovekom.” In my dictionary, “yarkii” can be “clear, bright, dazzling.” You sometimes hear Russians using the term to denote the bright sky of a bracing, clear morning.

Brilliant I think would be wrong to the extent it connotes intelligence—that’s not what Putin’s driving at. Outstanding is a pretty lazy translation. Bright personality captures the meaning, but not the idiomatic tone, of the word. Very colorful is downplaying the real meaning.

I’d go with something like vivid. The word also could mean garish, but I think Putin was trying to be complimentary, and garish would be criticism.

I’d guess that the reason all the translations agree on “talented” is that —though I can’t hear it in the clip—Putin probably used “talantlivii,” which is a common Russian adjective, stolen from the French.

So Putin was probably just trying to say that Trump is a big personality. Hiltzik says—and I agree—that Putin wasn’t especially trying to say anything either good or bad about Trump—though knowing Putin, it’s a good guess that he approves of big personalities. Basically, he was just trying to state the obvious about Trump. In any case, there you have it.

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Here’s What Vladimir Putin Really Said About Donald Trump Today

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The Kansas Economy Sucks, So Let’s Do a Little Gay Bashing to Distract Everyone

by KellieBagot Posted on February 12, 2015

Mother Jones

Michael Hiltzik reports on Kansas governor Sam Brownback’s move this week to revive the culture wars:

Brownback’s latest stunt is to abolish state employees’ protections against job discrimination based on sexual orientation. In an executive order Tuesday, Brownback reversed a 2007 order by his Democratic predecessor, Kathleen Sebelius, that had brought state anti-discrimination policies in line with most of corporate America and 31 other states.

….Possibly, Brownback is hoping to deflect attention from the disastrous condition of the Kansas state budget, which has been hollowed out by Brownback’s extremely aggressive tax-cutting. Income tax receipts continue to fall below Brownback’s rolling projections — the latest estimates show them coming in 2% below forecast made just last November.

….The economic suffering that Brownback’s policies have imposed on Kansans is bad enough; to add to the pain by removing protections against workplace harassment over sexual orientation is a new low.

As Hiltzik points out, there’s no special reason for Brownback to do this now. The anti-discrimination policy has been in place for eight years, and Brownback apparently felt no particular angst about it during his entire first term.

But things are different now. When he was first elected, Brownback promised that his planned tax cuts on the rich would supercharge the Kansas economy and bring about prosperity for all. That turned out to be disastrously wrong, and now he’s slashing spending on education and the poor to make up for the catastrophe he unleashed. This is understandably unpopular, so what better way to distract the rubes than to engage in a bit of gay bashing? That’ll get everyone riled up, and maybe they won’t even notice just how much worse off they are than they used to be. It’s a time-honored strategy.

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The Kansas Economy Sucks, So Let’s Do a Little Gay Bashing to Distract Everyone

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Conservative Pro-Growth Policies Don’t Actually Produce Any Growth

by KatrinGascoigne Posted on May 7, 2014

Mother Jones

Michael Hiltzik draws my attention to something I missed when it first appeared a few weeks ago. Menzie Chinn decided to check out whether conservative pro-growth policies actually led to high growth, and the chart on the right shows the results. Chinn compared scores on the ALEC-Laffer “Economic Outlook” ranking to actual growth in 2013-14 and looked for a trend. There wasn’t one. “If there is any evidence,” he concludes after a more detailed look at the data, “it suggests that a higher ALEC-Laffer Economic Outlook score is associated with a worse economic performance.”

However, although a high ALEC-Laffer ranking may not stimulate any actual growth, Hiltzik points out that it does correspond to reduced taxes on the wealthy and slashed spending on state services that benefit the poor and working class. In other words, it may not affect growth, but it sure is a good deal for the rich. And that’s what counts, isn’t it?

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Conservative Pro-Growth Policies Don’t Actually Produce Any Growth

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