Monday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Monday, October 6, 2025
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23 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).
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BlueSky.
I’m reading more from Heather Cox Richardson.
Here is a good summary of yesterday’s events. I won’t excerpt it here. Just read it. Not that long.
October 5, 2025
Experts react to Hegseth’s Quantico summit: ‘Wrong message, wrong time, wrong audience’
A lot of valid points. Too many unnamed quotes and sources. Which is a big part of the problem today. No one willing to stand up and be counted.
@Scott: When they first started talking about sending troops to Portland I was worried because everyone seemed to be saying “troops”, not “National Guard”. I was worried Hegseth’s Quantico meeting might announce sending regular Army troops into Portland. Then they finally said Oregon Guard, so I thought I had been a bit paranoid. Now we see they were talking about the 82nd. A bit of paranoia about these people is just being realistic.
@Scott: This about says it all, IMHO:
@gVOR10: For what it’s worth, I fired off to my two Senators and Representative this morning another letter concerning deploying the military against American citizens . I would call but it is just goes to voice mail.
Some people say that they listen but I’ve seen very little evidence that it does.
@gVOR10: I always just assume the worst, with these guys. Time and time again, they’ve chosen the worst possible response to anything.
A Yale law professor has a good piece at NYT (gift link) pointing out parallels between our current situation and the 1920s. I was surprised by how similar things were. Possibly both eras the product of extreme income/wealth inequality.
The author doesn’t gloss over that what enabled a turn to democracy and the New Deal was the Great Depression.
He does note one action from the 20s that could work well now as practical advice to Dems – strengthen unions. Eventually that requires legislation, but in the 20s it started at the grassroots, with support from foundation money.
Right up Kathy’s alley, NYT.
One would assume the RAT deployed as it should on power loss, but the trigger for the article is that another Air India Boeing 787 experienced a RAT deploying in flight automatically with electrical and hydraulic power normal. The Indian pilot’s association is demanding grounding and investigation.
@gVOR10: Robert Reich says that he thinks a more progressive era is coming soon for us. Precedents like the one you mention is part of the reason.
@gVOR10:
I caught the recent RAT incident yesterday on Aviation Herald. Complete with mention of the earlier Air India crash.
I don’t want to speculate. But reports about the cockpit voice recorder from the crash, indicate neither pilot moved the engine switches to cut-off. Nor does it seem this latest incident caused loss of thrust or electrical power.
So, again, we’ll have to wait and see what the investigations come up with.
But if I manage to make my trip to Europe for the 2027 eclipse, I’ll travel with Iberia or Air France, as they fly the A350, whereas Aeromexico and KLM use the B787.
Good morning. In the news:
The President of the United States has de facto declared war against his political opponents. Thus far, the only bulwark against him using the National Guard or the regular military against cities like Portland are the federal courts. And we cannot count on the Supreme Court to rule against him.
The government is shut down, the latest episode in decades of government shutdowns, a chronic ailment of American governance.
Republicans continue to obstruct the release of the Epstein files, which document the operations of a criminal conspiracy to traffic underage girls.
The Secretary of Defense continues his campaign, on the behest of the White House, to turn the regular military into a politicized instrument of domination within America’s borders.
Masked, unidentified agents continue their warrantless campaign to seize people off the streets, dump them into inhumane, overcrowded jails, and evict them from the country without due process. As the AP describes their escalations in Chicago, “ Storming an apartment complex by helicopter as families slept. Deploying chemical agents near a public school. Handcuffing a Chicago City Council member at a hospital.”
While the Nobel committee awarded the latest prize in medicine to two Americans (along with a Japanese researcher), the United States is lobotomizing scientific research. The federal agency that decides on federal support for the kind of research that wins Nobel Prizes and, more importantly, helps everyone in countless ways through the enterprise of science, is run by anti-science kooks eagerly dismantling HHS, turning it into a platform for dangerous quackery.
According to the Gun Violence Archive, there have been 331 mass shootings so far this year.
The top 10% of Americans added $5 trillion to their net wealth in the second quarter this year. A Forbes article in early September estimated that Trump’s wealth had increased $3 billion since taking office.
The lies coming from the White House (e.g., Portland is in flames), its allies, and both traditional and social media outlets are outstripping the ability to rebut them, even if the rebuttals could reach the audiences that most need to hear them.
Whether you look at the list of problems enumerated above as causes or effects, most are systemic. They’re not the sort of things that go away, just by winning the majority of midterm elections. In truly normal political times — say, twenty or thirty years ago — any one of these issues would be a major challenge. (See, for example, the concentration of wealth, or mass shootings.) And, as recent history shows, voting MAGA politicians out of office doesn’t make extremism, authoritarianism, fascism, or other poisonous “isms” go away.
@Jay L. Gischer:
I think first we should shovel more welfare money into the hungry maws of Bezos, the chief nazi, Ellison, etc., because maybe once each of them is worth multiple trillions of dollars, some cents may finally trickle down to the middle class.
On related news, I’m done with Amazon.
I got a gift card last December from my employer. I’ve been using it to get stuff I need, like cookware, clothes, masks, and last weekend I finished it off with a garlic press and other things. I have like $1 left, which I may apply towards a prime video subscription when the latest Invincible and Hazbin Hotel both drop.
Since the shutdown is related to health care I think it would be helpful for people to have access to the KFF piece at the link. There are a lot of people writing about health care costs now due to the shutdown and a lot of them are using cherry picked info, wrong numbers or leaving out important data.
For example, Cowen claims the ACA is unstable due to costs when in fact our health care spending as a percent of GDP has been the most stable we have seen since the 60s. It was 17.2% of GDP in 2010 and in 2023 it was 17.6%. The reasons for this stabilization are not all clear but it is clearly associated in time with the ACA and we did not see the huge increase in spending predicted by its critics.
Next, another critic pointed out that insurance costs have increased by 80% per enrollee, much more than inflation. This is actually true. If you look at the numbers at the KFF link private insurance costs rose about 80% from 2008-2023. However, they rose about 50% for Medicare and 30% for Medicaid. General inflation rose about 50%. So, inasmuch as we have a problem, it lies with private insurance costs.
Some people have claimed that the real decrease in rate change started in the 90s. There is in fact a drop in the 90s but note that it increases again in the 2000s. The 90s was the temporary rise of the HMOs and they went out of fad. As an aside note that it was the periods when Dems were in power that health care costs were most stable.
https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-spending-healthcare-changed-time/#Cumulative%20growth%20in%20per%20enrollee%20spending,%20by%20private%20insurance,%20Medicare,%20and%20Medicaid,%202008-2023
Steve
Erasure — the flip side of “building facts” is erasing them.
Before and after videos show much of Gaza reduced to ruins by Israel [AP News]
@steve222:
Thanks for posting. The onslaught of propaganda is killing our capacity for discernment. To hack a democracy, hack the informstion streams. Altered perception = altered votes.
I caught this piece about Amazon by Cory Doctorow on the Guardian yesterday. It’s worth reading, but what struck me was this:
That’s all the more reason to shop elsewhere. Of course, prices will be the same…
The other week when I bought vegetable glycerin, on Amazon it was at 95 pesos (about $5.20). On the manufacturers website it was 35 pesos (about $2). Big markup! I still ordered it from Amazon because shipping from the latter site was 100 pesos (about $5.50)
One other thing I’ve heard from people who order from Chinese e-commerce sites like Temu and such, is that lots of what you find on Amazon is purchased from such Chinese sites, then resold on Amazon. Naturally they buy larger quantities and get volume discounts. And given tariffs, they may be shipped through one or more other countries to make them look like the come from elsewhere.
But overall, it’s time to reign Amazon in.
Doctorow also says this:
He’s right, later he suggests policy solutions. But it might make you feel better to shop elsewhere and try to find better prices.
I’m willing to pay for prime video, because there are some shows I like and want to see. But otherwise, Amazon is dead to me.
The ai thing is starting to remind me of Theranos and tulips.
It’s a welcome rainy day, finally cooling off, and I ‘m thinking of making a pot of Senate bean soup.
Campbell’s bean with bacon soup was a childhood favorite and the recipe is based on a soup that originally was served in the Senate dining room. Navy beans, bacon and some minced onion, celery and carrots, a tablespoon or so tomato paste and chicken or vegetable broth. Nice pumpernickel bread and butter for dunking.
@becca: I am fine with acknowledging what I don’t know, but over the years I’ve started to trust my “wait that doesn’t make sense” barometer more.
In 2000, I didn’t understand the numbers that some websites were being valued at.
In 2006, some of the ways people were financing homes with no discernible income made no sense.
In 2015, I couldn’t see how housing was going to keep up with demand, since no one around here was building.
Right now, I’m concerned about the cost of insurance (all of it, from homeowners to cars to health), and AI seems like vaporware to me. The stock market’s stable and rising–that too, makes no sense to me.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I’ll be the first to admit that with the exception of the insurance piece (that’s something I’ve written a lot about), my concerns are all vibe-based. But something in all of the above doesn’t seem to add up.
@becca:
@Jen:
I’m reminded of the Nifty Fifty crash in the early 1970s.
Of course, this time it’s different*. Now we have the Magnificent Seven: Apple, Microsoft, Meta (nee Fakebook, Alphabet (nee Google), Amazon, Nvidia, and Texla. They’re all valued at ridiculous levels of price to earnings ratio. Most are pouring money into LLMs.
I can claim to make very light use of LLMs. I used them a lot more when they were new and I wanted to see what the fuzz was. I cannot, alas, claim not to have spent a penny on them, as the Microsoft Office subscription has gone up, largely because of the inclusion of Copilot in all software. I am seriously thinking I should dump it, provided I can make Word compatible files some other way.
*In investment circles, this phrase is a stand-in for “famous last words.”
@Kathy: @Jen: The voracious energy needs are at extreme tension with roi.
Reminds me of the talk of colonizing Mars within the next decade before overcoming the radiation issue.
@becca:
I can picture this as the chief nazi’s solution to the radiation issue:
Those more susceptible to radiation will die first. Use their corpses to shield the rest.
More seriously, seeing how Earth’s magnetic field works, the solution might lie in a big magnetic field rather than a particularly strong one. Earth’s field is rather weak, but it extends hundreds of kilometers past the surface.
@Scott:
Prediction: If Trump continues to give Stephan Miller a free hand Stephan will do something both really bad and really, really stupid…and Trump will regret it. Just a matter of time.