Saturday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Saturday, August 23, 2025
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34 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).
Follow Steven on
Twitter and/or
BlueSky.
Finally got to rehab at nine last night. Thank you so much for all your good wishes!
Lawfare/The Situation on the Bolton search.
https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-situation–about-that-john-bolton-search-warrant
The lesson of Trump’s MO from the Zelensky bribe…it’s not about the investigation, it’s about the smear.
@CSK:
Hope you’re feeling better!!!
I know it shouldn’t, but it’s still stunning how breathtakingly gullible Trump knows his supporters are.
Releasing that Maxwell interview made me laugh out loud. Lordy, what a fool will believe
@becca:
Yup, an unrepentant pimp, angling for a pardon from one of the suspects, is going to be oh, so truthful. Also, I’d love to know her definition of “inappropriate” is.
@becca: @Sleeping Dog:
Maxwell is claiming Jeffrey Epstein dated….Princess Di.
This whole thing just gets sillier and sillier.
@CSK:
Make claims about the dead, they can’t deny it and sue you.
If the felon believes that this interview will help rid him of the Epstein saga, he has lost the clue.
From Charlie Sykes’ Substack:
None of the Musk/DOGE people will pay a price:
DOGE Targeted Him on Social Media.
Then the Taliban Took His Family.
@CSK: Man, what an ordeal that sounds like! Best wishes for your recovery. (I think the “speedy” ship has already sailed.)
Socialism for corporate me, not for lowly thee.
Precedence only goes back to 2008 during the economic crisis of that moment, with the establishment of TARP (GM, AIG, Fannie Mae etc.) But the nation is not now in widespread economic crisis, and the previous administration had already made grants to computer chip manufacturers, including Intel. The CHIPS Act of 2022 provided $55 billion dollars to the US semiconductor industry, including $11 billion to Intel.
Typical first response of the MAGA faithful to their cognitive dissonance, hating Trump’s moves before they absolutely love them and hail his great genius. It takes a moment or two before MAGA filtering kicks in, and perhaps receive a “phone call” or become subject of a late night tweet.
Steve Witkoff-Scheisskopf delivered a Russian medal to an American family whose son died fighting fir Russia. Which, as Anne Applebaum pointed out, is like an American official delivering a Nazi medal to a family whose son died fighting for Hitler.
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/08/20/politics/witkoff-delivered-medal-from-putin-family-american-killed
Previously —-
MAGA likens Trump’s gyrations as “chess moves” but they have the heft of pure thuggery.
@Kingdaddy:
RE: Sykes full comment posted
Sadly, far too many Americans are far too disconnected to the larger context that governs their own fragile existence to connect these dots. As long as they can buy stuff and sate their cravings for stimulus, they have no concern about how the current regime deals with members of “out groups.”
@Kingdaddy: Despicable.
This may not be an example of the many failures of AI, but it feels related.
I bought a desk chair at Amazon yesterday*. Shipping options were :
1) free delivery, arrives tomorrow.
2) get Amazon Prime for 7 days for $2 and free delivery that arrives tomorrow.
Naturally the second option then will charge you more to keep Amazon Prime. to be fair, this was stated clearly on screen.
But what’s the incentive to pay $2 for free delivery that’s already free? Unless you’re planning more purchases over the next 7 days, or want to see a movie or show that’s on Prime video, essentially you’re being offered the opportunity to fulfill a Futurama prophecy**: Free shipping that you pay for.
Yes, all “free” shipping is included in the prize anyway. Option 2 still requires spending more money.
*I still have some credit left on the gift card I got last December.
** In the match four mobile game “Futurama: Game Of Drones.” The feature was offered by one of Mom’s companies.
The University of Colorado is now in the crosshairs:
https://apnews.com/article/colorado-trump-higher-education-crackdown-transgender-b40a3f3dfe77d3cb969bcc8a5ab4a61e
No university is safe, perhaps faux organizations like PraegerU and Bari Weiss’ counterrevolutionary education camp.
@Rob1: Kudlow can’t bring himself to say “nationalization”of Intel. “Privatization in reverse” is cute.
Didn’t all cornservatives get their panties in a wad about that Hugo Chávez fellow down in Venezuela?
@Rob1:
Wild to see Republicans embrace Trump’s open communism (the real kind, not the fake version attributed to Democrats) with such tepid dissent from all those principled, objective, balls-and-strikes conservatives. But when you’ve already sold out to Epstein’s best friend’s pedophilia, anything goes.
Doubt the right’s commie/fascist takeovers will lower prices or end wars, like Trump promised to do on day one. Jobs market tanking, worst since COVID with layoffs rising. Electricity and power skyrocketing as MAGA guts cheaper clean energy. Eggs still costly, coffee and beef prices up thanks to Trumpflation tariffs that are also killing small business. Gaza conflict worse than ever, with starvation and war expanded to the West Bank. Putin bombing Ukraine harder than ever. Iran bombed. Black history erased. National parks and other govt agencies in chaos. Latinos kidnapped by masked Nazis, sent to torture prisons without due process.
While Kamala would be trying to pass affordable housing and healthcare, cancel student debt, and build bullet trains.
Had enough yet, America?
@Kingdaddy:
One of the aspects of war is everybody thinks they are the good guys.
Seriously though, a serial pedophile sex trafficker can hardly be expected to determine what is “appropriate,” the whole Presidential coercion aspect aside .
@dazedandconfused:
And quite a few think God is on their side.
Now it’s being reported Abrego Garcia may be deported to Uganda.
Doing everything they can to provoke.
The Nightmare Years are upon us.
@Rob1:
The kid earned his medal and all it entails, good and bad. Just another dumb kid sacrificed to the gods of war. Pearl-clutching over who passed him the medal? Give me a break, Annie.
@dazedandconfused:
https://youtu.be/h242eDB84zY?si=ha-9W1WSxlh67-dZ
@dazedandconfused: I think that once you take the agency to travel halfway around the world to voluntarily fight in a war, you’re no longer a kid and you have a responsibility to figure out whether the side you are fighting for is attacking its neighbor because of goals of a greater empire.
And maybe even whether they are using their troops well, or just throwing them into a meat grinder.
So, fuck this “kid.” And if his parents supported his actions, I hope they look upon the medal and weep, knowing that they encouraged their son to throw away his life to help hurt innocent people, kidnap children, etc.
ETA: I hope he was an only child. If there is any genetic predisposition to going off and fighting someone else’s war of expansion, I’d like to gently trim the gene pool.
@DK:
That’s not communism. It’s not even socialism. It’s pretty bog standard oligarchy, kleptocracy and fascist adjacent.
@Gustopher:
I’m calling it national socialism.
30 minute video on a cheap way to send microchip probes to Alpha Centauri.
I’ve some thoughts on that, but what really intrigued me was the notion that the featured propulsion system can create a magnetic field if opposite sides are electrically charged (I did check on that). The author mentions using them to generate magnetic fields in Mars orbit to protect future bases or cities there.
Sure, but how about surrounding a ship with them to protect the crews on the way to Mars? Or for that matter elsewhere in the Solar System.
@Gustopher: One of the reasons I want his fam to get that medal myself, actually.
My objection is her pretty much damning the person who was asked to deliver it (and did) as a Nazi. That’s messed up, IMO.
@dazedandconfused:
The person delivering it was not perforce a “Nazi”.
Just a fool.
Consider a, highly hypothetical, US official in 1940 delivering a medal to the parents of an American volunteer fighting for Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan.
@dazedandconfused:
Just as did volunteers aiding the Confederacy?
Or the Fascist Legion volunteers in Spain?
People make choices; sometimes those choices are very bad ones.
He chose to sacrifice himself to the “gods of war”, and in an extremely shitty cause.
@Rob1:
Oh okay. I guess that settles it then. It was all a hoax.
It’s pretty likely that there was no Epstein Island. /s