Friday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
·
Friday, January 9, 2026
·
39 comments
OTB relies on its readers to support it. Please consider helping by becoming a monthly contributor through Patreon or making a one-time contribution via PayPal. Thanks for your consideration.
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).
Follow Steven on
Twitter and/or
BlueSky.
********************@
Finally got around to start watching on PBS Ken Burn’s American Revolution documentary. Standard Ken Burns fare, i.e., quite good. However, like everything else these days, I can’t watch anything substantial without analogizing to today’s events. Kind of depressing in its own way.
Anyway, my analogy of the day happened when Gen Gage decided to march to Lexington and Concord to arrest capture John Adams and Samuel Adams who were holed up in Lexington. Out manned, minimally armed Colonialists stopped the 1000 man Redcoats at Concord and then proceeded to chase them back to Boston, harassing them the whole way, with an ever increasing gang of riflemen sniping at them.
My simplistic analogy was Red Coats=ICE, Colonialists=regular Americans fighting oppression.
As Trump deteriorates he becomes disengaged from the details, which increasingly devolve to the courtiers, of whom Stephen Miller is plainly primo.
An account of Miller’s interview with Jake Tapper:
“Joyce Vance”
Nice little country you have there. It would be a real shame if something were to happen to it.
Which seem, somehow, to include enriching Trump and his helpers.
You all have probably already seen the part I bolded.
Waiting for one of the seized oil tankers (like the one off of Galveston) to open up its spigots and dumped its load out of spite.
I just cannot with this man-baby:
This timeline is the WORST. The leader of the opposition (who, hopefully understands that he’ll snatch up the medallion and dump her back outside) is attempting to placate the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES with a re-gifted Nobel.
J.F.C.
Maybe we have a low intensity civil war now. By analogy Trump=Jefferson Davis, red states vs. blue states.
“Civil war” (WaPo gift link)
…
…
…
@Jen: The more Trump says he doesn’t care about the Nobel Peace Prize the more obvious it is that he is obsessed with it because, reasoning like a toddler, someone else (i.e., Barack Obama) has one and HE WANTS ONE TOO! Like everything else in Trump’s orbit, the NPP has been degraded. And another foreign leader has acknowledged the need to stroke this insufferable clown’s ego.
@Jen:
How stupid is it to think possession of the physical medal equates to being the prize recipient?
Our genius leader with the good genes.
While we are distracted…
Chinese drill near Taiwan seen as test run for blockade, message to US
A happy article for once:
These dogs can learn new words just by eavesdropping
Early birds can begin filing their taxes on Jan. 26 this year
Now I have always done my own taxes, going back to when I was 16 in 1970. I use TurboTax now and my methodology is to enter a document as soon as I receive it. I received (actually downloaded) my 1099-R and attempted to enter it. TurboTax promptly informed me that their systems have not yet finished their reprogramming to support the 1099-R. First time I’ve encountered that. We shall see.
@Scott:
I never thought about naming the dog’s toys. Not even calling them ball, dog, dolphin, etc.
Emm, I’m sure, understood certain words. Mostly locations. She knew well what outside or upstairs meant. Abut half the time she understood when I said “stay here. I’ll be back shortly.” the other half she followed me out of the room.
@Charley in Cleveland: I wonder how he’d react if Obama just went “Here! Have mine!”
BTW, I thought at the time Obama shouldn’t have accepted the Peace Prize.
A piddling 50,000 jobs added in December.
It’s political malpractice to NOT tattoo Trump with the “worst jobs President ever” label.
Food services, health care and social assistance are the leading job sectors. Not retail, not manufacturing. SAD!!!
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm
So, chief nazi Adolf Muxk has solved the problem of the chatbot producing child porn images, by making it a premium service.
Fear not, ye poor misogynists and pedophiles of limited means. there is an app that will still do it for free.
@Scott:
Thanks for the info. Just discovered the IRS downloadable/fillable forms for 2025 are already online, have begun filling them out. (Waiting for most of the actual numbers, though, obviously, although I already know the numbers for one minor form).
I don’t even use TurboTax, I just download the forms and fill them out, always have.
@Kathy: You have an extra HTTP in your link 🙁
Link to Grok article
@Matt:
Thanks.
It’s odd. I copied and pasted the address bar link same as always. Maybe all my links to The Guardian are bad.
The degeneracy is promoting an ice body cam, claiming it absolves the shooter.
Nope.
On a lighter note… What’s the difference between Trump and Greenland? Greenland’s not for sale.
h/t Senator Amy Klobuchar
@becca: I…what? If anything, that video is WORSE for the officer.
I feel like Alice through the looking glass with this sh!t.
@Jen:
Agreed. here’s a link to The Guardian which has a link to the video on Xitter
Not to mention, what kid of idiot gets in front of a moving car?
@becca:
I’m totally stealing that.
@Kathy:
Someone who wants to create an excuse to shoot.
@Mikey:
This.
Astonishing level of stupidity. “We had lots of boats go there also.” People still support this vacuous windbag.
Well, looks like nothing brings the Left and Right together like hating Mr. Kier “I shit my pants, again” Starmer.
On the Right:
On the Left:
I would rather eat hot broken glass than vote for Labour.
When you get right down to it, he truly is just a stupid shit:
U.S. President Donald Trump posted a chart on his social media account late on Thursday that included job-market data that was not publicly released until Friday morning, a break with long-standing practice the White House said was inadvertent.
If he was just Don Trump, retired average guy, he would be your crazy uncle who might be tolerated once a year at Thanksgiving. Unfortunately, half the country elected this stupid shit president.
@charontwo:
Miller might like to look up what happened to some previous adherents of that worldview.
It did not end well for them.
@Lucys Football:
A bit less than half of those who voted. Which, in a way, is god news.
El Taco’s election answers the Kenobi Conundrum: Who’s more foolish? The fool? Or the fool who follows him?
Indubitably, it’s the fool who follows him.
What this means is that half the country if probably less foolish than El Taco.
Unless the same answer applies to Kathy’s Conundrum: Who’s more foolish? The fool? Or the fool who fails to oppose him?
@Kathy:
Donald Trump: “I love the poorly educated.”
@Kathy:
I have more anger against the gullible dupes who elected Trump a second time than I do against Trump, Miller, Noem and the rest of the sadists.
@JohnSF:
He’s not all wrong though. I think a lot of people are mistaken about Machiavelli. He wasn’t (IMO) advocating, he was merely reporting how things really are. He simply got sick and tired of people like Erasmus, who pretended the world was a place where Good always triumphed over Evil, and he knew that to be utter horseshit. He also knew he was doing something very risky so he handed the manuscript to his priest, making it a “matter of confession” in order to protect himself. It was the church who allowed it to become public.
Empires have always been or became SOBs .
Bluesky post:
https://bsky.app/profile/cingraham.bsky.social/post/3mbynsglvd22m
@dazedandconfused:
Even Machiavelli had doubts about Machiavelli. 😉
See the Discourses vs The Prince
Though I was thinking more of Mussolini and the Nazis, tbh.
Erasmus was perhaps not as naive as some have thought.
He viewed sensible monarchs as a basis of order, and feared the consequences of religous strife.
Arguably, the history of c 1550 to 1650 proved him right.
While the attempts of most would-be “Princes” ended in disaster.
Empires that are unwilling to temper their s.o.b. tendencies often come to a sticky end.
Starting with the Athenian: Thucydides seems to me in the Melian dialogues to be pointing to a basic reason why the Athenians ended up getting shagged by Sparta.
They converted a league of allies into a protection racket, alienated every other Power (Sparta, Thebes, Corinth, Persia, Macedon, Syracuse, etc) and then ended up with no allies when the Spartans wrecked their fleet and rocked up outside the Long Walls.
It’s a pity Thucydides never completed his hisstory.
But even unfinished, it might be worth the Trumpkins considering its core message:
“Don’t get cocky, kid.”
(Incidentally, none of this is meant as a snark at you. Just my inveterate tendency to speculate upon historiography 😉 )
@charontwo:
Same here. It’s what ended the considerable goodwill I had for America. I still hold some for blue areas, but even that comes with a big grain of salt.
Hot take: The Nixon administration began the enshitification of the country.
It has been kept going since, despite opposition from Democratic administrations.
Fvck a Duck!
Indiana 35
Oregon 7
Halftime
@Kathy:
I still have a reservoir of goodwill for America.
In part bolstered by the evident decency of Americans here at OTB, and others I know and talk to.
(The university inter-library network is full of lovely people 🙂 )
And the entire legacy of growing up rather admiring the US.
Then even after I discovered the less attractive aspects of its history and politics, the US always seemed (and still does) capable of transcending its failings and flaws, and being a expression of some of the best aspects of humanity.
But sometimes now what is happening in the US makes me so sad, and angry, and worried.
Could a Europe that adheres to lawful rule, and human rights, and rational humanism, end up being an adversary of a fascistic America?
It breaks my heart to think of it.
@JohnSF: Discourses is exhibit A in my argument actually, that The Prince wasn’t advocacy, just analysis. A lot of people have a very hard time separating those things in their minds, which has killed a lot of messengers.
@dazedandconfused:
Looking at the context, imho The Prince was both analysis (and rather acute, if limited: it missed some of the basics of how early modern monarchies functioned imho) and advocacy.
Machiavelli was rather desperate for a solid Italian state that could resist the conflicting interests of the Papacy, French, Swiss, German Imperials, Spanish, and self-serving condottiere that were wrecking Italy.
It turned out to be unachievable.
Machaivelli was, imho, an idealist driven by despair to cynical “realism”.
But “realism” is often unrealistic.
Machiavelli was a genius at explictating power politics; but his concepts fail to be useful about many key drivers of history in post-Roman Europe regarding both ideology and economics.
Very insightful; but also limited by his historical situation and assumptions.