Thursday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Thursday, May 28, 2026
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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).
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BlueSky.
CNN: Justice Department launches a criminal investigation into Trump accuser E. Jean Carroll
When this shit ends, people WILL need to go to jail.
@drj:
Lawyers will need to be disbarred.
Hilarious that we are now going to argue about whether an all-knowing, infinitely old, infinitely powerful, magic being in the sky has a gender.
It truly is the dumbest period of time to live in.
Every penny of research money should be diverted into finding the contagion that’s making “us” so fucking stupid.
Rates of engineering graduates, USA, Russia, China and Iran:
“Link 1”
“Link 2”
ETA: Back when I was working for Big Engineering Company, the last big project I worked on we subcontracted much of the work to South Korea.
@Daryl:
Is there a Mrs. God?
If not, is God gay by definition? Rambling about in the sky like a much smarter version of Lindsey Graham?
@charontwo:
That’s not enough, IMO. I really think criminal prosecutions are in order for the people who signed off on this.
@drj:
IANAL but I suspect disbarment is a much easier lift than criminal prosecution, probably a lot more lawyers vulnerable too.
@charontwo:
I have maintained (for decades now) that the policy people have reversed the necessary supply-and-demand question. The working assumption is always that if we create more engineering graduates, jobs for them will somehow follow. That’s backwards. Create large numbers of stable, well-paying engineering careers and fairly quickly the graduates to fill them will appear. At least as I understand it, engineering graduates in China don’t have trouble finding careers as engineers.
I intentionally say careers rather than jobs. For the most part, engineering isn’t gig work.
“PNG”
So no uptrend visible as of 5-27-2026, although 4 tankers is possibly 8 MMBBL, most of the current shortfall considering the pipeline bypasses to the Red Sea and Fujairah.
“AVDD“
@Michael Cain:
Depends on the field. If your work is largely linked to the oil industry, it can be pretty boom/bust. I suspect aerospace engineering is a bit unstable also.
Inside the Waco child sex abuse case Ken Paxton’s office agreed to settle for one day in jail (HPM)
James Talarico slams Ken Paxton for giving “Epstein-style sweetheart deals to pedophiles” (CBS)
I feel bad for the victim’s family, given they’re gonna hear the perp’s name often for the rest of the year.
Good to have a Dem speak plainly about the pedo protection and child abuse in conservative/evangelical circles, including Epstein’s rapist-in-chief bestie Trump.
Mullin ‘drawing up plans’ to halt international flight processing in ‘sanctuary cities’
A couple of weeks ago, there were other reports that DHS was developing plans to do this, but at the time, appeared to be dissuaded. Well, maybe not and in the spirit of not stopping your enemy when he’s in the process of making a mistake, let the administration implement this.
edit: And just in time for the World Cup!
Excuse me while I check on the supply of beer and popcorn.
@Sleeping Dog: I believe he’s already said that this won’t go into effect until after the World Cup, which means there’s at least some glimmer of understanding that they know this will be utterly disastrous.
It would likely also violate a whole bunch of agreements countries have with one another about landing standards, etc. Kathy might have some insight into that contractual aspect.
@charontwo: Re disbarring these Trump sycophants with JD degrees, bar complaints ARE being filed. Todd Blanche’s role in the Abrego-Garcia case is the subject of a complaint in NY, where he is licensed:
And a complaint has been filed in Florida against Pam Bondi:
What will come of these actions? Perhaps nothing, but watchdog groups are taking steps to let the public know that there IS a Code of Professional Conduct that all lawyers have to abide by, including lawyers working for Donald Trump under the cover of the Justice Department.
ETA – source re Blanche is the Law & Crime website
@Jen:
Not that much. a lot is covered by ICAO and IATA and the UN. countries can and do make specific bilateral or multilateral civil aviation treaties. Cities and/or airports may lure carriers with new terminals, subsidies, lower fees, etc.
I’ve no idea if treaties between countries specify international access to specific destinations.
But removing international arrivals from LAX, JFK, Newark, Seattle, SFO, and others, would be a disaster. JFK in particular is a good case in point. A lot of airlines from smaller or more remote countries have one route to the US, and that is New York. Besides that, just the traffic between London and NYC is HUGE. Can you see busy London City bankers and others flying to DC or Philadelphia and taking the train to Manhattan? Or catching a Delta connection at Atlanta? LAX, SFO, and Seattle are major transpacific hubs. Think of all the traffic from Japan and China.
This would literally be cutting off your nose to spite your face.
My newest idea (I’m not claiming it’s original): gravy cheese sauce.
The potatoes au gratin I made were good, but I thought they should perhaps be more savory. Adding chicken or beef bouillon to milk didn’t seem like a good idea (which I considered when tasting the sauce), though that was the direction my palate kept leading me to. So, I thought, a roux added to chicken broth, gravy, with melted cheese to boot should work better.
Call it a bastard version of poutine, as it won’t even use fries. the idea is to parboil the potatoes, mix them with gravy cheese sauce, and pop them in the oven for a much shorter time (I wish I could get the broiler to work, too).
IMO chorizo would not be needed in this recipe, just caramelized onions (no raw onions, as they won’t have time to cook enough in the oven).
This is a side dish. I thought of making breaded beef patties to put to the side of. We used to have them often at home in the 80s for some reason, and I haven’t had any since. It’s a counterintuitive dish.
@Kathy: Thank you. I figured there were likely existing agreements that this…”idea” violates.
On a completely different note, the President’s “annual” trips to Walter Reed are now happening about 2-3x a year, as he just made his third visit in 13 months.
Brad Pitt is being sued by a Malibu penis cream company for trademark violation.
Treasury Department confirms it has taken limited steps toward a $250 bill featuring Donald Trump
There has to be much more to this story, looks to be based only on the charging documents
Feds seize $40M in gold bars from ex-CIA official’s house in Virginia (covered many places)
Senior Executive Service, fake resume. Apparently like some companies have a petty cash drawer, the CIA has a petty gold drawer.
@Mu Yixiao:
I think the illustration on the bill is Trump’s mugshot from his arrest and booking in Georgia in 2023.
@Richard Gardner: My read on that is those were operational resources that he…relocated to his house. It’s a little bit disturbing there aren’t more established protocols on that, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I’m still thinking about this piece on NPR. The gist is that wages aren’t keeping up with inflation, and this causes a lot of people to be in a precarious economic state.
This has been the story of the past 45 years.
What I’m still thinking about was the brief period under Biden when wages outpaced inflation, even with very elevated rates of inflation. Partly it’s the COVID subsidies as noted in the piece another part, maybe related, was that people looking for work as the trump pandemic eased were in a better bargaining position than before COVID. But this does not seem to have lasted long.
BTW, a lot of the firings in the tech sector involve post pandemic hiring. The claim is they’re being replaced by AI. the reality is more like they over hired personnel, and fire them while claiming they’ll be replaced by AI.
I’ve also a lot more to say about AI use in white collar jobs. There’s a chance it won’t take all the jobs, and a bigger chance for severe economic disruption like that seen in the early industrial revolution (the disruption that gave birth to communism as a reasonable alternative).
I’ve been coming across Jevons Paradox lately in several longform Youtube videos on AI. the gist is that as efficiency in the use of a a resource increases, consumption of said resource grows. The paradox is that one would expect it to shrink. If your care needs less gas to go distance A, you’d use less gas. On the other hand, you might drive more, or go to places farther away.
As regards AI, the application of the paradox is that if coding gets cheaper when AI tools are used, there will be more coding done. Assuming, and this is a big assumption, that human programmers are still needed, as the AI reduces the time a task takes but does not take over the whole task, then more programmers would be needed to take advantage of the increase in efficiency enabled by AI tools.
Maybe.
After al, there’s a limit to how much coding needs to be done, even in a software based world like ours. I suppose apps could be improved faster, but do you want your bank app, or any other you use frequently, to change how it works on a monthly basis? It took me months to get used to the tool ribbon on MS Office*.
And right now tech companies have been laying people off, not hiring more.
And there’s the behind the scenes work, too. An app doesn’t need to change its interface in every upgrade, after all. It can correct bugs. But correcting one bug may give rise to another. and so it goes.
Maybe.
What I know is if given half a chance, people like Zucks, Adolf, Lex, et. al. would rather invest in machines than pay people wages.
*Partly it’s because I use keyboard commands a lot. I could type ALT-f and get the file menu, then see what letter to type for what I wanted. Like S for save or A for save as (letters and commands are given as examples). Besides, they changed how various functions were grouped. Now I need to find the function in the ribbon and click on it. I’m used to it now, but it still feels like an imposition.
Hahahahahahaha…..I actually know her.
https://www.facebook.com/reel/914609184966729