Thursday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Thursday, October 16, 2025
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25 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
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BlueSky.
Daily I receive the Early Bird Brief from Defense News. It is a compilation of articles from organizations and reporters on the Pentagon and defense news from the US and around the world. It will be interesting to see how it is impacted now that all but one news organization (One America News) has decided not to bow the Hegseth’s attempt to have only approved news be public.
Journalists leave Pentagon rather than agree to new reporting rules
So a $1T taxpayer funded organization is allowed to go unchecked.
There is a lot of defense industry news to cover but defense spending doesn’t happen without the Pentagon.
@Scott: The Daily Show has agreed to the Pentagon’s terms because they felt badly for Pete Hegseth. In a snarky way, of course.
The Daily Show is consistently smart and funny. The precipitous drop off I expected after Trevor Noah’s departure didn’t happen, and of course Jon Stewart’s Monday night hosting is huge. TDS knows how to stick it to imbeciles like Hegseth. When the branding moved from Department of Defense to WAR! the Daily Show created a graphic with Defense crossed out, the word WAR superimposed, and included a heavy metal guitar riff. It was pitch perfect, especially considering Trump and his ilk are most bothered by being laughed at.
Out in the cruel world this morning Sadie and I found an abandoned pit bull puppy, probably about a year old, tethered to a nylon line wrapped around a tree, and tangled in thorny briars.
He was deep down in the woods, barking his head off. It took me about 15 minutes to get him free. Happy as a clam to see us, he was remarkably cooperative with the ordeal of disengaging him. Sadie was brilliant. She just stayed out of the way, but always near me. Just the best,
Anyway, he came back with us and now what to do. He’s not neutered, but that’s par for the course with most abandoned males. (Southern men hate fixing male dogs. Balls are to be seen, not snipped.) He has some training, he is very smart and alert and not into chasing cats. Sadie seems to like him. He’s very slim of hip and massive chest, small but powerful. His coat is brindle with a white collar and forelegs. He’s so friendly… aargh.. I am such a sucker.
@becca:
Decades ago when I was working at a residential, mental health home, a resident brought a pup home with him. Of course he couldn’t keep him, but he was worried about the dog, I told. him I’d find it a good home and that satisfied him. I did take the pup home and despite my efforts, she lived her life with us. She became my wife’s dog.
@becca:
The two best dogs I’ve ever owned were brindle pits. Sounds like you might have just gotten a new dog…
Wow, is this bad news: Protein Powders and Shakes Contain High Levels of Lead
This stuff isn’t even regulated as much as ordinary foods. Seems like a bad idea.
@Jay L. Gischer: I been sayin’.
@becca: One of my best canine friends ever was a friends pit bull. I would go to their door, and I would hear her warning bark. “Hey, watch out! I know you’re there! This is my family!” It seemed to say.
But I would answer, “HI Doughnut!” (That was her name.) The barking didn’t stop. But it changed. She knew my voice. It changed to greeting and celebration. “It’s Jay! It’s Jay! Hi, Jay! So good to see you again!” The door would open (by a human) and we would do our human/dog greeting. Maybe she would sit by me when we had a sitdown for a talk with the humans. I love being greeted by dogs. So earnest.
Such a sweetheart. I now ever and always want to represent for pit bulls.
In contrast, my friend has a Rotweiler mix female that likes me but is SO SO reserved. Just yesterday as I joined them for a walk, she was very busy investigating smells in the grass and ignored me (as usual) when I came up. The smells led closer and closer and then she sniffed my foot and quickly looked up at me, surprised to find me there. She consented to an ear rub (such a burden!) and off we went. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen such a reserved standoffish dog.
Every once in a while, though, she slips and shows that she actually likes me. Because Dad likes me, so she guesses that’s good. Right?
I volunteer at the local animal shelter, spending time with lost and found dogs. There are a lot of pit bulls in the mix. They’ve run the gamut from “Hi, I’m so happy to see you!” to “How great is it to be outside!” to “You have treats?!?” In other words, they’re dogs, like any others.
@Jay L. Gischer:
@becca:
What are these used for anyway? I vaguely recall they’re big among body builders, and I think I’ve read they’re prescribed to dela with some kinds of protein deficiency. But as with other supplements, most such things can be obtained in sufficiency from a balanced diet.
Today’s history lesson.
October 16, 1968.
Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the Summer Olympics in Mexico City.
@Kathy: the protein thing is everywhere. Mostly it’s about building muscle, but also an anti-aging skin, hair, etc. Chasing the Fountain of Youth.
As I have pointed out many annoying times, a lot of right wing influencers push a lot of these unregulated supplement potpourris. Man pills and muscle builders have been all over RW media for decades now, ever since Orrin Hatch and his buddy donor Kirk Jowers opened the unregulated grift market in Utah back in 1994.
@becca:
I suspected something like that.
At least they should list the amount of lead per serving, and warn what the lethal dose is.
@Kathy: 14,000 times the US RDA of Lead!
Susan Stamberg 87
RIP
Coolio Samples Mama Stamberg’s Cranberry Relish
Today I began Jill Lepore’s latest book, “We The People: A History of the U.S. Constitution.”
Part of me added another sub-title: How it became dead letter law…
Anyway, Dr. Lepore begins with the difficulty in amending the constitution. Not the reasons why it’s hard to amend, past the need for dual supermajorities, but how decades go by without a single amendment, and when several were first proposed and when they finally passed in some form.
This has me pondering how easy or hard it should be to amend a constitution. Some people see the very few amendments in America as a sign of stability, and of great foresight by the framers who set it down (it is neither, IMO). Dr. Lepore claims being either too easy or too hard to amend leads to chaos and unrest (and I hope she’ll substantiate this further in the book).
to contrast the US amendment process, which I assume everyone here is familiar with, consider Mexico’s process. It takes a supermajority of 2/3 in both chambers of Congress, and then a simple majority of all states (this would be 17 right now). And they’re not even called amendments, but rather reforms.
I need to look into how many reforms have been made (a lot!) Part of the problem in counting them is they are not added sequentially to the main body of the text, but rather the text itself is changed or an additional article (or several) is written. Also, some reforms require rewriting a bunch of articles (as of now, it has 136 articles).
Oh, and it does mention political parties.
Ex-Trump national security adviser Bolton charged in probe of mishandling of classified information
As I wrote a couple of months ago after Bolton got raided, anybody who worked with classified while in high office and didn’t scrub their homes and offices after Pence and Biden found classified stored in boxes at their homes deserves everything that gets thrown at them.
I see on YouTube that President Trump had yet another wonderful call with Putin.
Over the last few months we have learned that Ukraine has degraded Russia’s ability to be the world’s gas station by at least 15-20%, everyone pretty much knows this is why Putin is meeting with Trump in person again in a week or two.
The need to ration gas in parts of Russia and charge unusually high prices for gas in Russia, I am sure that this has caused rumblings of discontent that were able to penetrate the bubble that Putin has placed himself in.
@inhumans99:
Mad Vlad seems not to have practiced his Taco playing skills. Everyone knows the key to virtuosity is to practice daily. He should have called El Taco after Zelensky met with him. You know, El Taco follows the last person to talk to him and all.
@Scott:
On the one hand, after letting El Taco off the hook without even a slap on the wrist for much the same thing, prosecuting anyone for retaining classified documents is worthy of the Nobel Prize in Aggravated Chutzpah.
On the other hand, Bolton did not provide any testimony for the first impeachment back in 2019, preferring to keep the malfeasance under wraps to use in his book about how dangerous El Taco is.
I maintain my first point. But screw Bolton.
@Scott: This is inevitable. It didn’t take much time for Stalin to have OG bolsheviks arrested. If you do a good job for the ruler, the ruler will soon fear that you are interested in the work and might do a good job for another guy. The maximum leader only trusts incompetent men. This explains Hegseth.
Unleaded Regular pump price $2.999/gal no discounts applied in Sleepytown today. I can’t remember the last time it was below $3/gal here.
@Gregory Lawrence Brown:
It’s the same price today at a nearby station here in the eastern U.S. The price has been fairly close to $3/gallon for more than a year, and a bit under at times, including around $2.90/gallon for a while last fall.
Here’s a conundrum.
If I leave work now, Waze tells me it take me between 55 and 71 minutes to drive home. I’ve no desire to be stuck in traffic that long, not even with a new audiobook playing, so I’ll delay departure a bit.
Now, back when I carpooled, long long ago, and I insisted on leaving at, say 7 pm, the other two people in the carpool would insist that “If we leave at 7:30 we’ll get home at the same time than if we left now.”
This never made any sense to me. Perhaps traffic will ease somewhat in 30 minutes, but then it would ease as you drive from 7 pm, too. I get having less traffic, but is it possible to leave half an hour alter and get to the destination at the same time as if you’d left half an hour earlier?
I think that would involve some serious reverse time dilation.