Monday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Monday, November 3, 2025
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39 comments
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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.
The ghost of Tweety Bird returns
Tweety Bird was one of the feral cats my wife would feed every morning since we moved here in 2019. He died last year.
Why was he called Tweety Bird by us? Tweety Bird would climb a palm tree at least one time a month in order to beg for food. We live on the 2nd floor and climbing that tree I’m sure is no easy so we named the cat what we did because they had to fly getting up and down.
Tweety Bird was also a black and white cat like Sylvester in the cartoons.
When DW went to feed the cats this morning, a B&W cat was outside our door. We call this one Yasim*. DW fed Yasim but this cat now has a problem. How to get back to ground level. Unlike Tweety Bird, Yasim doesn’t trust humans enough to touch or carry them.
Another woman on our floor puts food out for the cats. Usually around 9. Hopefully Yasim fill follow them downstairs.
I am going to a medicare Lunch and Learn today. It is happening at our community’s West clubhouse. January 12 2026 is my 65th birthday.
Bingo begins again tonight. I should be learning today or tomorrow whether my book signing tour is still on or not. DW and I are supposed to be flying to Atlanta Friday morning.
I still haven’t gotten my Cat scan results. As it was done almost a week ago, I think the results have to been ok.
Our condo elevator** is in need of replacement. Cost? About 200 grand. Owners (The ghost of Tweety Bird returns
Tweety Bird was one of the feral cats my wife would feed every morning since we moved here in 2019. He died last year.
Why was he called Tweety Bird by us? Tweety Bird would climb a palm tree at least one time a month in order to beg for food. We live on the 2nd floor and climbing that tree I’m sure is no easy so we named the cat what we did because they had to fly getting up and down.
Tweety Bird was also a black and white cat like Sylvester in the cartoons.
When DW went to feed the cats this morning, a B&W cat was outside our door. We call this one Yasim*. DW fed Yasim but this cat now has a problem. How to get back to ground level. Unlike Tweety Bird, Yasim doesn’t trust humans enough to touch or carry them.
Another woman on our floor puts food out for the cats. Usually around 9. Hopefully Yasim fill follow them downstairs.
I am going to a medicare Lunch and Learn today. It is happening at our community’s West clubhouse. January 12 2026 is my 65th birthday.
Bingo begins again tonight. I should be learning today or tomorrow whether my book signing tour is still on or not. DW and I are supposed to be flying to Atlanta Friday morning.
I still haven’t gotten my Cat scan results. As it was done almost a week ago, I think the results have to been ok.
Our condo elevator** is in need of replacement. Cost? About 200 grand. Owners aren’t happy because that will mean a major assessment but what else can be done? We are a 4 story building.
DW is feeling very anxious at the moment because there is a strong typhoon bearing down on her hometown in the Phillipines. It was November 2013 when Super typhoon Yolanda struck Tacloban head on.
*-If you spell Yasim in reverse you get Misay. Misay is the waray word for cat. Waray is the Filipino dialect spoken by DW.
**- Current elevator is the one our building has always had. Condo was built in 1974. Owners*** aren’t happy because that will mean a major assessment but what else can be done? We are a 4 story building.
***- There are 72 of us
Go f**k yourself George Clooney.
At that point Harris was the only possible replacement for Biden.
Being in Texas I shouldn’t care a lick about the NYC mayoral race. I agree it has zero national implications except for everyone else in the nation making a big deal of it. Having said that, this article caught my eye:
Why some Satmar Hasidic leaders endorsed Zohran Mamdani as mayor, stunning many Jewish voters
I have no other comment other than, if I remember right, the New York Hasidic community were not traditionally Zionist. I don’t know whether that has changed over the last 60 or 70 years.
@Kathy:
Biden was unfit to be President and Harris had limitations which were regularly acknowledged around here before Biden’s debate debacle. Forum regular Jen pointed out not long after Biden stepped aside that Harris was problematical with segments of Democratic voters. Proof of that- Heavily democratic Palm Beach County where I live saw Harris win by about 6,000 votes. Biden in 2020 and Hilary Clinton in 2016 carried the county by around 100,000 votes.
IMHO whomever would have been the Democratic candidate they would have lost.
@Bill Jempty:
Whatever Harris’ limitations, she was the only possible replacement because there was no process that could have produced another candidate having anything close to broad consensus among democrats at that late date.
@Scott:
Most Hasidim don’t consider themselves Zionist, but in practice tend to support Israel politically. Satmar are an exception and have been for a long time.
I remember a story some years back about a Satmar cop in Israel. He was asked why he decided to become part of a government he considers illegitimate. He answered that he was serving the Israeli people, not the Israel government.
This article in NYT about the tariff case before the Supreme Court just pisses me off.
First, where in statute, the Constitution, “Originalism”, or precedent does it say the president’s fee fees carry any legal weight? Second, it’s FTFNYT dumbing down the situation to a matter of personal feelings. The real concern is that the prez, being a bull-headed idiot, will blow off a ruling against him and impose tariffs in defiance of the Court.
U.S. family moved to Russia to escape liberal culture and got drawn into the war with Ukraine
————————
I’m at a loss for words.
@Kathy: And Clooney’s entire point was that Biden was too old.
Of course, no such message was widely communicated about Trump, who is basically the same age, and in worse health.
@Kathy: @Tony W: Is Clooney expressing a version of Murc’s Law? No matter what stupid thing I demanded of them, the Democratic Party should have found some way to make it work.
@gVOR10:
Originalism is the doctrine that the constitution says what the wingnut majority in the Fixer Court wants it or needs it to mean. But by invoking the founders, they think this gives it legitimacy.
Related, I’ve been mulling over the notion that the famously enumerated rights in the constitution, particularly those in the bill of rights, are very clearly not granted to the people but rather assumed to be rights the people already posses. What their inclusion does is regulate what the government cannot do concerning such rights.
I think this is glaringly obvious, as is the fact it gets misstated all the time. Free speech is not a first amendment right.
So why is this relevant in any way? Isn’t a prohibition on the government for regulating speech the same thing? IMO, it matters because of the ninth amendment, which states “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”
This means the people retain a lot more rights than those mentioned in the bill of rights, and this means therefore the constitution does implicitly contain a right to privacy. Which, BTW, is recognized in the fourth amendment. That is, if no privacy right existed, then there would be no need to prevent the government from carrying out unreasonable searches and seizures, as none would be in any way unreasonable.
Indeed I did. And, to @Eusebio‘s point, I also noted that she was the only candidate that could legally assert any claim on the funds the Biden-Harris reelection effort had raised thus far, along with the campaign apparatus, existing media buys, staff, and more.
Clooney is wish-casting. It is not useful, it is not helpful, and he’s waving away the astronomical effort it took to stand up a national campaign for PRESIDENT in three and a half MONTHS.
@Bill Jempty:
Unfit relative to whom? Trump? RFKJr? JD Vance? Ted Cruz? Tulsi Gabert? Presidential “fitness” is a relative thing as we can all see.
@Kathy:
Bingo.
Trump-Cruz call to “holy war” full of holes
Trump threatens Nigeria with potential military action and escalates claim of Christian persecution
___
A US senator claims ‘Christian mass murder’ is occurring in Nigeria. The data disagrees
Somehow, I highly doubt this. It is the NY Post after all, the National Enquirer of NYC.
Nearly a million New Yorkers ready to flee NYC if Mamdani becomes mayor — possibly igniting mass exodus: poll
@Scott:
Wouldn’t that solve the traffic problems?
@Kathy: Traffic problems? Haven’t you been to Mexico City?
@Scott:
Traffic doesn’t have a problem in Mexico City, it just does whatever the hell it wants.
Texas freezes program to help minority-owned businesses
However, wait until this hits the fan.
There will be some unhappy people.
@Eusebio:
I wonder, and did at the time, whether there was any time to select any other candidate. Get 50 states to hold primaries right now? Besides, what @Jen said. try fundraising from scratch for something as expensive as a presidential general election campaign. And setting up a campaign organization from scratch, too.
@gVOR10:
This ties in with the above.
A lot of things have never been done, because they’ve never been done before. That is, there’s no precedent or experience on how to do them, or how they’ll work. Plus a lot of apprehension about something new, especially when it’s radically new.
Maybe a nationwide primary could be conducted in record time shortly before the convention, and maybe the winner could get the money from Biden’s donors after his campaign returned the donations, and maybe the organization would just transfer over in a couple of hours. And maybe I can hit every lottery jackpot in the world in the same week. It’s just not likely.
Hindsight and all, Biden should have announced early enough in 2023 he wouldn’t seek a second term. He had plenty of excuses not to, without even bringing up his age (though doing so would allow the Democrats to attack El Taco on his advanced age and declining faculties).
So, the time to panic that Biden was running was when he announced he was running. To be honest, I thought he’d do ok, and didn’t even bring up the matter myself, until the debate.
The priority now is to save the country from the fascists trying to take it down. after that, it should be to learn the lessons of the 2024 campaign.
@Kathy:
There was not, at least not through any selection process that would have survived the inevitable legal challenges that would have been filed, presumably by Democrats and Republicans. It would also have been VERY hard to arrive at a consensus candidate, because anointing someone other than Harris also posed very real risks.
Many states had already had their presidential primaries by that point, and there was no pathway to re-doing those. One, it’s expensive and time-consuming to hold an election (any election). Two, I cannot imagine that there are provisions in any state law that would allow for a do-over. Three, the only other alternative, once you take away primary voting, would be a brokered convention. That would have involved a free-for-all that would put “Dems in Disarray” into the record books.
Could the Democrats have pulled a Hail Mary and tried something really out of the box? Sure. But that would run the risk of a court challenge which would end up…where? (Supreme Court.) How do we feel that would have come out?
Harris was the only plausible choice for the time, place, and situation.
@Jen:
What is the party’s convention? I know. So thousands of people can party! I am sure they aren’t there to hear a bunch of sleep inducing speeches.
@Rob1:
You and the 4 people who upvoted your post are still in a state of denial. Why am I not surprised.
@Bill Jempty:
Yes, just like the electoral college is there to, um, get an electoral degree? (It would have to be a B.S.)
@Bill Jempty: I included a brokered convention in my list.
It would have been a mess, and if Harris didn’t get the nod, Democrats would have faced angering one of their most loyal and important voting blocs, Black women.
PS–and a reminder that my other points still stand. IF the Dems had miraculously settled on another candidate in August at the convention, the money and organization from the Biden-Harris campaign would not have magically transferred over. The new campaign would start largely from scratch.
Arguing that selecting a new candidate at the convention would have been preferable is bonkers. The Biden-Harris team would have had to unwind allllll of the donations made, and return them to donors. There is no legal pathway to bequeathing those funds to a completely different campaign.
So, now we’re saying that instead of three months, the new candidate would stand up a national campaign from scratch, in 2 months? That’s less time than a special election for state representative in the state I worked in.
@Scott: Well, hey, NYC can then go into the same category as California where everybody has left because it’s such a hellhole. I mean, the freeways are deserted at commute time, right?
Right?
@Jen: I’m going to get a bit pedantic, and I’m not implying you don’t know any of this, but…. Strictly speaking, a brokered convention means one that doesn’t get decided on the first ballot, something which hasn’t happened since 1956. “Contested convention” has a looser meaning, and it’s up for debate when the last one was. Here’s how I’d break it down:
1956: Last time the convention went to a second ballot (on the Dem side, as Eisenhower was easily renominated).
1968: Last election under the old system in which only a handful of states held primaries and the convention was viewed as the place where a nominee was selected as opposed to a mere coronation ceremony; also the last time until 2024 that a nominee was selected (Humphrey) who had not directly participated in any of the primaries.
1976: The GOP convention that year, where Ford battled with Reagan, was arguably the last truly competitive convention.
1980: When the Dem convention opened Carter had acquired enough delegates to be considered the presumptive nominee, but there was still a big push by many in the party to get someone else selected (and many of those people had also soured on Ted Kennedy).
Even though a contested convention–or even a brokered one–remains a theoretical possibility, the system has evolved to the point of making it extremely unlikely. One point that I think a lot of people overlook is that this type of convention was in many ways a relic of the pre-TV era. Indeed, part of what made the 1968 convention such a political disaster for the Dems–inspiring the shift to the modern system–was that people were seeing the drama unfold on television.
Just what the world’s been crying out for, ChatGPT after dark.
The piece mentions an erotica-enabled GPT would attract more paying customers. This feels like the 1990s, but not in a good way. Back then, tech savvy porn stars and porn companies were among the first to monetize the web. We had to wait a bit longer for eBay, Amazon, et al to siphon our money.
I’ve not seen AI porn yet, but I’ve also not been looking for it. Still, in some early experiments I did with image generation, the way Copilot* did women was not exactly neutral. Big breasts and tight outfits were rather common (I suppose still are, but I haven’t looked recently).
Remember, the LLMs were trained on available human interactions online, plus every book and periodical in existence. They are our reflection.
@Jen:
Oh, absolutely. We did talk it over here at OTB, and I remember you made the point rather well and very clear.
Humans are odd. a new situation, unprecedented, is scary to the point it will be avoided at about all costs. An unnamed, unknown, to-be-determined candidate is perceived as the great hope, sure-fire winner. Almost enough to tray that very scary situation no one wants to try and are avoiding at all costs.
I wonder what would an LLM make of the above paragraph.
@Scott: What a crock of shit. Still, if all of Staten Island emptied out, it would be nothing but good news. You could build tons of affordable housing there, and probably relocate Rikers Island there as well.
@Kylopod: Brokered is an older term that specifically referred to a time in which party bosses huddled in back rooms and made deals. I used the term because if we’d arrived at that point, in this day and age, that well might have been the way things finally got sorted out.
I agree, in normal times it would be extremely unlikely. But if, somehow, Democrats had decided to wait until the convention rather than going with Kamala at the outset, I have no idea how things would have shaken out. Would the fact that the campaign war chest that had been amassed was hers, and not conveyable to another candidate been enough of a factor? Bruised egos, a general flailing about…I honestly don’t know. (Nobody does.) 🙂
Well, a bit of good news, imho, albeit rather parochial, from my corner of the UK.
Bromsgrove South Division by-election for the County Council
Result:
Sam Ammar, Liberal Democrats – 1416 votes
Philip Hingle, Reform – 911
Matt Dormer, Conservatives – 309
Laura Rollins, Labour Party – 92 votes
Reform are still the largest single party on the Council, but do not have an overall majority
(26 seats out of 57)
The interseting thing seems to be that many non Reform voters were willing to rally to the LibDems to keep Reform out.
And the LibDems and Sam Ammar ran a very effective “ground game” campaign.
(I voted LibDem, in case you were wondering)
@Jen:
I agree with you on this.
I also believe that – on such short notice, with 90 days to go – she was running as a de-facto incumbent, and therefore saddled with the all the baggage of the immigration issue, which Republicans used to mock Harris as Biden’s Immigration and Border Czar. I’m not sure any of the usual Democratic Party suspects would heve defeated Trump.
and finally … I still believe that Biden should have stepped aside and let the Democratric Party know that he was going to be a one-term president, let the Party open it up for the 2024 primary season.
@Bill Jempty:
Denial? That the reality for American voters came down to a choice between two candidates who would serve in office as octogenarians; and one (Biden) exihibited some cognitive decline but who could assemble a functional Cabinet and manage policy with his eyes closed, with one hand tied behind his back; and the other (Trump) who has a chronicaled history of malignant behavior now compounded by cognitive decline, and who surrounds himself will similarly malignant personalities for consult ???? And you talk about denial?
Biden beat Trump in 2020. He suggested he would run only one term, but, that was under the assumption that Trump was done, finished. He could see the threat a resurrected Trump presented to this nation, and the limited options for Democrats. I’m quite certain Biden would have willingly died in office to serve (and save) this country, had the “flesh been willing” and the voters more savvy to the dangers MAGA presents.
Don’t blame Biden, Harris, or their supporters for Trump. That’s real denial.
Odd factoid of the day: liquids cannot exist in a vacuum. They either boil or sublimate and become gaseous, or they freeze and become solid.
Some may last longer than others, though. Mercury can even remain liquid under a range of temperatures in a vacuum. In fact, it does so in barometers.
During a press conference last month, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins asked Trump why he chose to pardon the founder of Binance (Changpeng Zhao). His answer included “I don’t know,” “it was recommended by a lot of people, “he served four months in jail,” and “they say that he was not guilty of anything,” to which Collins responded “he admitted to his crimes.” Trump then attacked Collins, saying she doesn’t know that much about crypto, and she’s fake news.
The 60-Minutes interview was eight days later. Norah O’Donnell asked him,
His answer began, “Okay, are you ready? I don’t know who he is. I know he got a four-month sentence or something like that. And I heard it was a Biden witch hunt.” He continued to say some things about crypto and repeat himself until O’Donnell followed up with,
His answer included, “Well, here’s the thing, I know nothing about it because I’m too busy doing the other,” and “I can only tell you this. My sons are into it. I’m glad they are, because it’s probably a great industry, crypto…”
Recall that World Liberty Financial is the Trump family’s cryptocurrency venture that was launched in September 2024.
@Kathy:
Thank you! We have the right to freedom of speech because we are human beings, not because we’re Americans or because of Thomas Jefferson.
Principle, or just oppositional defiant disorder? The producer who tried to buy our compliance on Anlmorphs, and who we told to go fuck himself, is now bragging that he’s working closely with MBS. Thank god we bailed when we did.
Thinking back over my long, long life, I can’t think of a single case where I quit, walked away, or told someone to fuck off and later regretted it.