Monday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
·
Monday, November 17, 2025
·
23 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.
Andrew Sullivan has an interesting Dish piece
Are The Wheels Finally Falling Off MAGA?
Overreach, incoherence, and mass disinhibition may be triggering political gravity.
https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/are-the-wheels-finally-falling-off-7f8?r=7bjvz
I’ve actually talked to Sully a few times in DC ~2004 – we both went to a non-smoking hipster bar (um, 90% of the places in DC then allowed smoking, how times have changed), an establishment who’s name I can’t remember and drank overpriced VOS water.
Stupid Texas tricks.
Lubbock will remove Buddy Holly crosswalk under Greg Abbott directive
By way of background, our idiot governor, gleefully obeying the Sec of Transportation, ordered Pride crosswalks to be painted over. Now we have this nonsense.
A Conservative Cure for Trumpism
Interesting interview that touches on several themes that are discussed here, the failure of political parties, the abdication of congress power to the presidency, etc.
Netherlands WWII cemetery removes displays honoring Black soldiers
The cemetery was built by black soldiers:
@Sleeping Dog: That interview with Isgur is interesting, but more as a symptom than for it’s content. I fear she comes off as pretty light-weight. As Leonhardt says, her book is her “dream” for the future after Trump, not a plan. She says she’s “libertarian-ish”. Which seems to mean she can see problems with government, but can’t compromise with reality to propose any credible solution. She says government failed under both Trump and Biden. I was pissed at Biden over Ukraine and Gaza, but domestically, the Biden administration seemed to me to be working quite well. Also, too, I’m not very happy with Merrick Garland, but I don’t expect perfection.
For me, the line of hers that stands out is, “I am heartened by the fact that America survived the Buchanan presidency.” Yes we did, but with horrific damage from a civil war. Germany survived Hitler. Yes, we’ll survive Trump, but at what cost?
The almost in my backyard headline of the day- Family dog dies after brazen Boynton Beach coyote attack caught on camera
This didn’t happen in far western Palm Beach County on your way to Lion Country Safari, but in the neighborhood of the Publix Dear Wife and I get our prescriptions from or approximately 3 miles from our condo. Way back in 1998 when DW and I were house hunting, we looked at one home in Boynton Lakes.
From the item noted by @Scott:
More evidence that Trump and his toadies are slimy white racists.
The Good Old Days™
November 17, 1973
…I’m not a crook.
Richard M. Nixon
@Scott: Florida will see your pride crosswalk removal. Florida ordered pride crosswalks repainted a couple months ago, starting with one outside the Pulse Nightclub where 49 people were shot. Like TX with Buddy Holly, they ban all decorative crosswalks, pretending to be content neutral. And FL will raise. The state Board of Education just adopted the Phoenix Declaration. It was developed by the Heritage Foundation, the same lovely people who generated Project 2025.
Most of the Declaration is artfully worded to sound anodyne. The bullet that really stands out is
Which translates from BS as, “Destroy public education by giving the tax money to charter schools.” The rest of it amounts to “parental rights”, traditional values, and avoiding anything deemed contentious, like, say, slavery or AGW.
* The state allows private charter schools to claim any classroom space in public schools they say is unused, rent free, plus free maintenance, security, and student lunches. The schools can dispute the claim, but the rules seem to favor the charters.
@Gregory Lawrence Brown: @gVOR10:
Heritage Foundation pops up a lot.
From the same Military Times article:
Yes, they are racist as hell.
The Heritage Foundation, Groypers, and the Narcissism of Small Differences
@Scott:
The Heritage Foundation, and other think tanks like them are about as close as we will get to resembling the right wing paramilitary group called the Pentangle from the “classic” 1986 Michael Dudikoff film Avenging Force. The leader of this group is played by John P. Ryan (great character actor with a unique look/voice).
Got an email this morning re Amazon’s settlement with the FTC saying I was getting a refund, attributing this found money (about $42) to “President Trump’s FTC.” The shameless politicization of EVERYTHING by Trump’s lackeys continues apace. By the way, the lawsuit that induced the Prime refunds was brought in 2023, by “President Biden’s FTC.”
@Scott:
Can this be twisted to force renaming all streets named after Presidents, confederate traitors and other political figures? Or better yet, leaving their names but simply removing all the signs?
Let chaos reign, burn it all to the ground, etc.
“Dozens of former US Department of Justice attorneys have now gone on record to describe the unprecedented corruption of federal law enforcement taking place during President Donald Trump’s second term.“ NYT’s today.
These are the brave ones, a few good men.
@gVOR10:
Germany was very lucky (for arbitrary values of “lucky”).
If the war in Europe had continued into 1946, for one reason or another, the Hanford piles would have been producing plutonium at a rate sufficient for at least one Pu-bomb core every 12 days.
Likely considerably more, as more piles could have been built.
Germany would have been obliterated.
@JohnSF:
Speaking with military/science history hat on, people often mistake the significance of the TRINITY test at Alamogordo.
It was not to verify a workable atomic bomb: the U-235 bomb was known to work, and was never tested at all, and the Hiroshima “Little Boy” uranium bomb was scheduled for use even before TRINITY, and would have gone ahead even it it had failed.
What was not known until tested was if the Pu-239 implosion plus initiator design would work.
The significance being, U-235 could only be produced by isotopic separation, and could yield about 6 bombs per year.
Once U-238 to Pu-239 production began in the Hanford piles, the plutonium could be separated by simple (for arbitrary values of “simple”) chemical element separation.
So the weaponisable fissionables output increased by an order of magnitude.
Planning began after TRINITY for use of multiple atomic strikes to secure an invasion lodgement in the Operation DOWNFALL/OLYMPIC invasion of Japan, as well as additional atomic bombing of Japanese cities.
As I indicated: WW2 could easily have ended even more horribly.
See also UK plans for mass-scale use of chemical and biotoxin weapons against Germany. Operation VEGETARIAN etc.
(British war planners often had a nasty sense of humour)
An Embraer E-145 crashed on landing at Kolwezi, Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The link contains video of the approach and bad landing, and some of the evacuation. Early reports indicate no fatalities and no major injuries.
On the second video, take note that the back of the jet was already on fire, and you see people running away from the accident carrying luggage. If you watch to the end, you can see how fast the flames spread.
@JohnSF:
Some contend the development and deployment of the V2 helped Germany lose the war faster. Arthur C. Clarke, writing on the V2 as it relates to space launch history, notes that Berlin might owe its continued existence to the V2, given that if the war had dragged on, the US would have nuked German cities.
That would be an interesting counterfactual, given all the controversy on whether the nukes used on Japan were the decisive factor that ended the war.
The V2 was not much of a war weapon, and it produced little benefit for the Elon hitler regime. That said, there was much more wasted effort, personnel, and materiel in other of Elon’s endeavors, like the extermination camps.
@Richard Gardner:
He’s so full of crap. At the start of the year he was praising the pedophile for getting us back to cultural normalcy or something. Racist rat, jumping off a sinking ship.
For those who like to be frightened about air travel… Captain ‘Shroomboy’ Emerson got sentenced today.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/17/us/horizon-air-cockpit-emergency
This was and to some degree still is the deal for pilots: Seeking treatment for mental illness = Your ass grounded. Haven’t made captain yet? High probability of that being forever. Career suicide.
The one good thing about the current shortage of pilots is it’s forcing the airlines to finally address this issue.
@Kathy:
V-2 inflicted considerable damage on London; which is why the UK was considering use of chemical weapons in response.
Roosevelt pressed hard to prevent it; but had it continued I suspect Churchill might have reached the point of telling FDR to f@ck off.
That became moot after the Allied advance overran the main launch sites in 1944.
Though some V-2 strikes on the UK continued into spring 1945.
V-2 contributed to a drain on German war production capacity for more effective weapons; but was it decisive?
Arguable.
Imho, looking at at Japanese politics, the atomic bombings were decisive: they gave Hirohito and the remaining sane members of the government reason to face down the military “ultras”.
And it was a close run thing at that: bven after Hiroshima the “ultras” continues to advocate defiance, and came close to a sucessful coup.
It was objectively obvious that Japan had lost, given the blockade and conventional bombing, and the Soviet invasion ending the hope of Manchuria and north-east China as a “bastion”.
But the military hardliners still seem to have fantasised that bleeding the US could achieve a “peace on terms” of their continued rule in Japan, and retention of at least Korea.
@DK:
It calls to mind the Sunday Times columnist Irwin Stelzer of late.
(my sarky summary)
“Sure Trump is outraging norms, breaching constitutional limits, umpending free markets, weponizing prosecutions, issuing egregius pardons, violating rules of law and enabling corruption.
But transgender athletes! Campus antisemitism horror! Open borders! Affirmative action! DEI! BLM/antifa riots! China! Horrid rotten Europeans! Hillary and Obama and Harris and Biden! Woke! WOKE! And what about the fossil fuels and corporate rights and, and, and …
What’s a conservative gonna do, eh? EH?!!?”
A whole litany of largely imagined “liberal” sins that, even if real, could have been adressed by normal politics, not by handing over “conservatism” to an obviously corrupt and power mad a@@hole and his acolytes.
It really does call to mind the idiocy of the italian and German conservatives and liberals and monarchists who thought the fascists could simply be used as a tool against the “left” and then safely put back in the box.
Oopsie.
@JohnSF:
You know how humans like the one simple explanation for all great events.
So, in this case it’s obvious Japan surrendered because Elon was obsessed with rockets 😛
So, there are a lot of factors. from Japan might have stopped fighting sooner had the allies not demanded unconditional surrender. To it was the threat of Soviet troops moving east. To it was the nuke(s).
The latter were probably decisive. There’s no defense against them.