Friday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Friday, October 10, 2025
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57 comments
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.
A good friend, Allison Keir, is the producer/director of an upcoming documentary about wildland firefighters, “Hotshots.” Like many such projects it is a labor of love and they are seeking support to finish the project.
This link, https//islandpathstudios.com#projects takes you to the trailer and information on the film. And if you’d like to support the project, there is a link for your convenience.
Live Updates: María Corina Machado Is Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
Let me guess. Most of the news from our idiot press will be about how Trump did not win the Peace Prize.
About time.
US Senate unanimously endorses repeal of 2002 Iraq war resolution
@Scott:
I really thought the pastor getting shot in the head would seal the Peace Prize for Trump.
@Daryl: I assumed it would be last night’s announcement that Hegseth is putting boots on the ground in Israel for…reasons.
@DK:
Is that the same Pomade Petey that Trump warned about Bin Laden back when he was a college student?
The felon’s administration, always classy. From the NYT.
Maybe the Chicks are next.
Texas country singer calls for renaming ‘New England’ after Gulf debacle
Trump administration clashes with country superstar Zach Bryan over song lyrics
Pondering this:
How is the identity of the principle being accused of mortgage fraud (or for that matter any other alleged crime) relevant to the grand jury deliberations?
True, that at some point the identity of the accused has to be disclosed, but “Justice being Blind” the identity is only pertinent after the GJ has determined that a case should go to trial.
@Sleeping Dog: Trump administration members not only have to drink the Kool Aid, they have to proclaim how good it tastes.
Why wait for huge increase in health insurance premiums? This is happening now.
Why chocolate prices will spook you this Halloween
@Scott:
I bought dark chocolate chips just yesterday, and they are indeed much more expensive — about 1/3 more than last year. Being at a “nearly 2-year high” understates it, in my experience, as it’s noticeably more expensive than at any other time including the pandemic.
@Sleeping Dog: When does “ending wars” include President Trumpflation’s unnecessary, job-killing global trade war and military attack on US cities? They should also maybe consider not bombing Venezuelan civilian boats, not disappearing migrants to torture camps without due process, and not threatening to annex Canadian, Danish, and Panamanian territory.
Not mocking a violent assault on Paul Pelosi, not calling for “2nd Amendment people” to take care of Hillary Clinton, not firing US attorneys who won’t illegally prosecute political opponents, not hiding the Epstein files to coverup your child abuse, and not inciting a deadly terror attack on Congress when you lose an election (by millions of votes) would help the case too.
@Scott:
“America First” to the right is sending a $20 billion bailout to Argentina while refusing to fund healthcare for your own citizens.
@Scott:
I think I see a problem with trump’s nomination for this particular award.
A personal and entirely trivial kvetch. I just read someone using “break” when they were talking about a car brake. This is like the tenth instance I’ve seen of this in the last few weeks. I think I’ve seen it wrong more often than right lately. Even from auto journalists. I also see a lot of “reign” in lately. Is this because everyone’s trusting spell check? Do AIs not know the difference?
@Scott: I am a fairly prolific baker (had a home-based baking business supplying pastries to a local coffee shop for a while) and I buy couverture chocolate in 5.5 pound bags. The prices for good chocolate are insane, and rising. I’ve also noticed shortages in some of the products I purchase, mostly cocoa.
One of the local bakeries I follow has been moving away from chocolate-based baked goods. She can’t price them competitively enough to still make a profit. Too high and the stuff doesn’t sell. Keep the prices level and she’ll soon be losing money.
@gVOR10: Neither people nor AI have a clue, and speech-to-text compounds the problem. Homophones are one of my bugbears. I once returned a book to the library after reading “she was ringing her hands” and “they poured over the maps” within two pages of one another. If the editor can’t be assed to fix these things, I won’t bother reading the book.
@DK:
Wait now. That bailout is not for Argentina. It’s for hedge fund billionaires with investments in Argentina who are friends of Besssent.
@gVOR10:
I tend to confuse break and brake, steak and stake, and bear and bare.
The problem is the English language.
@Jen:
I can’t help but to visualize the literal thing or act being described, so “poured over the maps” conjures tea being poured from a pot into cups being held above the table upon which the maps are spread. As for “ringing her hands,” that’s a peculiar talent that I can’t quite get a fix on.
I turned off the word predictor thingamabob on my iPad. I didn’t like the way it drew my eyes away from the keyboard. Interrupted thoughts and unnecessary distraction. Seems like something like that could mess with one’s neural pathways over time. Then again, I would probably have had a mighty distrust of electrication back in the day.
My trivial language peeve is when people misuse jealous and envious.
And I miss editors of all stripes. So much less pride in production, I guess.
@Eusebio:
Just to clarify… An incorrect homophone may have me hitting the breaks as a read, but it’s not too much to bare in a low steaks environment such as this.
@Kathy:
As Karoline Leavitt and Steven Cheung will happily tell you, it isn’t corrupt because it is done openly.
Dateline: October 10, 1973
Spiro T. Agnew resigns as the 39th Vice-President of the United States.
Somewhere there is a list of the allegations against him by prosecutors. Part of his plea deal was for these charges be made public. I know that they were. I saw them on a TV newscast at the time. It was a long list and it scrolled down the screen far too fast for me to read it. I suspect this was also published in newspapers. I just spent an hour searching and can not find the list of specific charges.
So now add circumcision to the list of autism causes.
Oy vey.
@Charley in Cleveland:
In the interest of actual transparency, someone should ask Leavitt when Bessent will disclose a list of fund managers and individuals (e.g., hedge fund billionaire Rob Citrone) with whom he has communicated this year regarding their recent investments in Argentine assets. Or, preferably, Bessent should be asked directly while under oath, such as during a congressional committee hearing.
Why are we building facilities in Idaho for the Qatari military?
@becca: But what if giving the child Tylenol after the circumcision is the real cause? Oh, the curse of confounding variables!!
Does it seem to you that Stephen Cheung learned his craft listening to Baghdad Bob, but decided he could top that?
@Scott:
Matia Corina Machado’s Nobel Prize win as a refutation of Trump, may not warrant celebration:
We are in this moment of time, when two options confronting us may not offer more than superficial dissimilarities. In other words, our choice may not have released us from the gravitational pull we seek to escape.
To paraphrase Paul Revere: The Recession is coming! The Recession is coming!
The piece reads like an implicit indictment of late stage unregulated capitalism. TL;DR, troubles in the auto parts sector, featuring my favorite culprit consolidation.
The Repubb had multiple investigations and put Lois Lerner on indefinite limbo because her unit was supposedly differentiating in how they treated conservatives vs liberals. They, of course, eventually dropped charges since there wasn’t anything to the claims. Nixon used the IRS to go after his opponents. Now Trump has somebody going through mortgage applications. How is this remotely legal? To make it worse there doesnt appear to be anything illegal in those applications.
Steve
@gVOR10:
The reign in Spain is mainly in the planes.
@Kathy: Language is an evolving, living thing that adapts to the culture around it.
If we can add a singular they personal pronoun*, then we can get rid of the homophones. In fact, we should. It will streamline the language.
And drop the silent letters (or pronounce them, either would work).
*: my real only objection is that it’s a little boring. That said, it’s been used as an impersonal pronoun for a few hundred years, so I guess it makes sense…
I think there’s a real danger in the administrations focus on “Antifa.” They’re going to use this imaginary organization for an excuse to do a bunch of consequential things. Designated something that is not an organization as a terrorist organization will allow them to do all kinds of shit. And no on can fight it because there is no organization.
You’re Antifa, and you’re Antifa…
I hope this means that higher education may be stiffening their spines. Too soon to tell for sure.
MIT rebuffs Trump’s federal funding proposal that comes with new limits
@Daryl:
Yes, a non existent organization is banned under a non existent law. It won’t stop them from arresting and harrassing people and organizations.
El Taco had a physical today at Walter Reed.
I’m hoping for the best, and very much not defining “the best”.
@Gustopher:
Were it not for the “ch” sound the letter C kould (should!) be taken behind a barn and (sound of shotgun rakking).
@Gregory Lawrence Brown:
OK, we’ve had inflation, but a hundred K in ’70s dollars is still an amateur by modern Republican standards.
@dazedandconfused:
@Gustopher:
@Kathy:
The English language is odd, given its multiple derivations (Anglo-Saxon, Danish, Norman-French, a bit of Welsh, a fair bit of medieval Latin) and all with a Latin alphabet not designed to cope with such.
(If you want real fun, look at the monastic based Latin alphabet transliterations of Gaelic.)
An amusing footnote to Tolkein’s LoTR: his “elvish letters” are in fact are a systematic symbolic version of the “phonetic alphabet”.
In which the letters were sensibly defined, and their shapes and relations logical.
Let us all learn to use the Feanorian tengwar: you know it makes sense.
@dazedandconfused:
Ah, but “ch” in Gaelic and Cymric is not remotely the same as ch = “tsh” in English.
It’s more like “kh”.
As it is in German, iirc.
@Gustopher:
@gVOR10:
Also “tow the line”
No, it’s toe, ftlog!
Just had that moment when you have a great idea for a book and discover MT Anderson already wrote it.
If dogs didn’t exist, we’d have had to invent them.
@becca:
@Steven L. Taylor:
Or if Orthodox Jewish hereditary factors relate to autism?
Not so absurd as it might seem: it’s often speculated that genius and mild autism might have a certain correlation.
And we have a lot of examples of mitteleuropa heritage Jewish persons of exceptional capability, and indications of a tendency to mild autism.
Though that may as much be to do with cultural as hereditary factors in both cases.
We won’t really begin know until we have a fully operational developmental proteome model, and some way of mapping that against cultural conditioning and calculating the likely proportional effects.
And some means of determining the hereditary vs environmental triggers of mild autism
(Extreme autism is a rather diffrent thing)
@Gustopher:
“The reign of Spain is mainly on the plains” would actually have a bit of ironic historic accuracy.
lol
@Kathy:
Arguably, we did.
@Sleeping Dog:
lol
Next up, Trump pivots to Maduro?
Seriously, his Nobel obesseion has already caused a breakdown of US-India relations, because Trump called for both Pakistan and India to celebbrate his role in settling their recent confrontation.
Pakistan decided to humour him (and bribe those connected); India, having more self-respect, told him to stop being silly.
Cue US tariffs on India.
Cue India seeking accomodations with China.
Trump has all the geopolical nous of a rather dim mollusc.
Maybe he can try for the Nobel prize for fiction?
@JohnSF:
Not to be pedantic, but it was something our ancestors did, more or less unintentionally.
Had we moderns done it, there’d be patents for every breed.
@JohnSF:
Maybe someone can set up a prize associated with the Nobel Foundation but not formally a Nobel Prize, like that for economics. Call it the Joseph Goebbels Memorial Prize for Fallacious and Obsessive Nobel Peace Prize Campaigning.
I’m sure if Besoz, Elleeson, Thile, the chief nazi of Texla, etc., chip in and fundraise a little among the MAGAts, they can set up a one time Prize of $100 billion, along with a 48 karat* gold medal two feet wide.
*I know. But someone as deluded as El Taco deserves 200% pure gold.
@Kathy:
Though knowing some collies, I sometimes wonder if they did not domestiscateus.
Dogs seem to go back a long way: there are footprints in a paleolithic cave that seem to indicate a young human and a very big dog visiting said caves some 26,000 years ago,
Likely 10,000 years after the cave paintings were made.
The timespan of the pre-historic is VAST.
Cats, otoh,walk by themselves. 😉
@Kathy:
The Josef Stalin Prize for strategic fuckwittery, perhaps?
An unexpected disclosure about trump’s visit to Walter Reed today, from the President’s physician:
Recall that four years ago, his first Covid-19 vaccination was not publicly revealed for several months after he got it.
@JohnSF:
There were lots of articles about dog domestication a few years back. Lots of contradictory info and opinions. Overall I was left with the impression that it happened a very long time ago, and it might have happened in several places at different times.
Given our ancestors were hunter gatherers, IMO it’s possible the dog was humanity’s first domesticate. They’re a great deal of help when hunting.
@Kathy:
It seems pretty certain, on the basis of both canine genetics and achaeolgy that dogs and humans go back at least 15,000 years.
Possibly much more.
So way before any other domestication, much of which (in the “Old World”) seems to have begun c 1o,o0o years ago.
@JohnSF:
Indications are commensal dogs are about 30,000 years ago. iirc