Sunday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Sunday, January 25, 2026
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30 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.
How many of you are in the path of the storm? Everybody except Beth?
Serious snow just kicked in about an hour ago here in NYC.
@CSK:
In a few days Beth might be caught in the storms remnants when it’s caught in the North Atlantic Drift.
@CSK: Not me. It was a little cold yesterday, but nothing like a normal January in Wyoming. No snow.
This is the sort of storm that doesn’t get to us, tucked up against the east side of the Rockies like we are. We got an inch of light fluffy snow. Low temp tonight is supposed to be -8F, but we get that cold every winter. We’re supposed to get another inch of snow tonight as warmer air starts to overrun the frigid layer close to the ground.
Kickoff forecast for the AFC Championship game down the road in Denver is 20F and snow flurries, light wind, no dome. That’s cold enough that the number of injuries will probably be higher than usual.
@Sleeping Dog:
Yes, that’s true.
@Jax: @Michael Cain:
You’re both getting a break.
NYT headline:
Videos Appear to Contradict Federal Accounts of Fatal Shooting
WSJ headline:
Videos Contradict U.S. Account of Minneapolis Shooting
Remind me, which is the liberal paper?
The penguin took care of it.
@Sleeping Dog:
I laughed out loud.
We already have about 5 inches (Philly suburbs). Looking at National Weather Service predictions, we should get about another 3-4 inches today and tonight, plus about a tenth of an inch of ice tonight.
Here in Memphis we are about to experience extreme cold, dropping into sub-zero temps for a week. Our lake is freezing over, covered in snow and crunchy sleet. Very little ice, thankfully.
We are lucky. Memphis hasn’t suffered any widespread power outages, but just east of us there are county wide outages. Just south, in Mississippi*, major damage. They got ice that downed trees and power lines. With the extreme cold I fear a lot of people will freeze to death. Trump’s downsized and degraded FEMA has its work cut out it.
The gods smiled on blue Memphis, not so much for the surrounding red counties.
* Mississippi is also known as Missing Hippies. Think Mississippi Burning.
Here in SW FL it’s a seasonal 81 degrees. 71 and a fair chance of rain tomorrow. Tuesday a high of 59, very strange by local standards. Despite the appalling political climate, I’ve not regretted retiring to FL from Cincinnati, where the political climate has gotten almost as bad anyway.
The big advantage of living in Upper Manhattan is that we never get the extremes of big weather events. Since moving here in 2011, I have never experienced a power outage, not even during Hurricane Sandy. But I am still keeping my iPhone plugged in. There’s always a first time.
My parents moved to their current home in Baltimore County in 2001, and for the first decade living there it was incredibly susceptible to outages—at least one I remember lasted weeks. But then the infrastructure was improved, and it happens much less frequently.
No danger of snow here. Up in the balmy Northwest, it was a delightful 28° when I went out looking for a sunrise shoot. Got a couple of decent shots of Mount Hood with the steam rising from Willamette Falls.
Godspeed to those of you in the path of the storms.
ETA
On my way to meet Cracker for coffee and a muffin. Time to warm up from sunrise shooting (I shoot things with a Canon).
ETA 2. Seeing the car campers and the homeless trying to keep warm in doorways is triggering definite societal rage in me. Not at the homeless, but at the society that condones this.
@becca:
Below 0C, or below 0F? I’ve lived through four or five days in a row where the high was below 0F. Plus wind chill. Going outside at all was dangerous.
@CSK:
I don’t think it will turn south.
@Michael Reynolds: The Murdochs learned that the WSJ subscribers won’t pay unless the news sections are factually accurate. The editorial pages are a completely different thing.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/LqfbREDJG8RwPqVY9
Brrrrr
@Michael Cain: Farenheit. Normal temps for January are around 42 degrees.
Southerners are not particularly good at winter. Heat waves and drought, sure, but not this.
@Michael Cain:
The editorial pages were nutty right long before the Murdochs, while the hard news pages have always played it straight.
We have snow on Mauna Kea and the most kinetic eruptions of Kilauea of my lifetime. But I’m on a different island so I’m planning to weed the garden today.
@Kylopod: “The big advantage of living in Upper Manhattan is that we never get the extremes of big weather events.”
And the streets get plowed right away!
I live 100 miles southeast of Saint Louis in Makanda Township, Jackson County, Illinois. AccuWeather shows snow ending later today with total accumulation at 12″ for two days. No ice here so far. Current temp is 18deg f. Today’s high will be 19deg f. Low tonight forecast -2deg f. Since I can’t be sure when the township will get my road plowed I am at the local Super 8. I don’t have any TV at home. Animal House, a Columbo Marathon and two football games is a real treat!
Go Bears!
@Sleeping Dog:
Oh joy, more rain.
However, I can see that the absolutely wretched weather is slowly starting to taper back. Just gotta make it to March.
Helen McCaw, a former senior financial analyst, has urged the Bank of England to make preparations for the chaos that will ensue when Earth is visited/invaded by space aliens.
@Beth:
Do you mean that the real estate agent misled you about England and rain? Buck up girl, put on that waxed cotton and slide into those Wellies.
@CSK:
At least she’s “former.”
@Sleeping Dog:
I had an idea, but I was not prepared for this.
@CSK:
Having a plan for chaos is not a terrible idea.
As regards causes, alien visits lag well behind a supervolcano, a coronal mass ejection (which I believe also kill all satellites and a lot of the world’s electronics), or even a nearby super nova.
@CSK: I was lost power before dawn on sunday and got it back in the afternoon. Ice on everything and some branches down. Nothing too crazy so far.