Tuesday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Tuesday, September 23, 2025
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31 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.
MAGA Civil War as Carlson and Owens start blaming the Jooooooos. So predictable.
Conservatives Condemn Tucker Carlson for Seemingly Blaming Jews for Killing Both Jesus and Charlie Kirk (The Algemeiner)
Welp. Rather strong Berlin 1935 vibes in Amerikkka rn, fr fr.
Grifters Desecrating Charlie Kirk’s Memory Could Implode MAGA | Opinion (Newsweek)
Speechless I am. The “cable news has-beens” here are Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, who’ve kept defending Owens.
I keep up with the Real Housewives of Mar-a-Lago drama so you don’t need to.
Dear lord. Another embarrassing day on the world stage:
@DK: I wonder how Nick Fuentes is feeling about being called a “leftist”. I am way too lazy to find out.
Watching Trump trying to pronounce “acetaminophen” clearly shows an old man with declining mental capacity. I think that the press should not cover up this problem. A blooper reel should be shown to the American public.
Health agencies around the world are telling their peeps to pay no attention to Trump or BobbyK.
Like Jen said, embarrassing. Actually, I’d go a step further and say humiliating for America.
Reason isn’t sleeping here in the US. It’s in a coma.
@becca: “Health agencies around the world are telling their peeps to pay no attention to Trump or BobbyK”
Which is the best course of action.
AND, I read a paper by a Yale Public Health prof that says they have found a weak statistical link between acetaminophen and autism. A link that merits further investigation.
AND, pain and swelling can have very serious adverse effects on both a mother and a fetus. So, continuing to use Tylenol during pregnancy really seems the best course.
I’m sure this is the link that Trump and Kennedy are hanging their hats on. And also grifting off of. I’m sure there’s some one neat trick with purple salt that they don’t want you to know about that makes pain vanish overnight and never return.
Science is messy and medicine is really messy. Which is why it’s so ripe for grifting. Also, there can be a whole lot at stake.
For instance, I have a bad gene. My liver makes way too much LDL and not nearly enough HDL cholesterol. For twenty years, I took 3000mg of niacin every night. This boosted my HDL levels on the test scores. Then one day my doctor told me that the long-term studies were in now, and the niacin didn’t actually do anything to reduce the likelihood of actual bad outcomes. “So it produces the wrong kind of HDL” he said.
I was a little bit mad about that. But I calmed down. This is how science works, after all. It can be very messy. But that’s what progress is like.
Hmmm…
Will Dr Oz Benefit From Trump’s FDA Approving Leucovorin? What To Know
Except the value of those shares have probably skyrocketed after this announcement.
As an aside, I got a Medicare.gov email (with link to video: Stay Healthy with Dr Oz!) the other day from Dr Oz providing healthy recipes. So there is that!
On the latest tomato soup attempt, using canned tomatoes worked well enough. The twist is that it may even be cheaper than using fresh tomatoes. So , less work and less money, that’s big.
On the other hand, I mixed the rice in it, and then I realized it was too much rice. I made a whole cup rather than half (pre cooked). So the thing is thick. Too thick to be worth putting the black bread croutons in it…
Long ago for some reason I bet either my older brother or a sibling I could eat a whole bowl of soup with a fork. I then proceeded to put like 20 crackers in it, turning it into a thick paste. No trouble consuming that with a fork. It was terrible, like salty wheat paste, but I won the bet. I think I was around 9 or ten at the time.
I haven’t checked whether the vegetable glycerin worked with the sugar free sorbet. I’ve enough coconut water and pineapple juice left over to try it again next week with a larger dose of glycerin if it didn’t. The amount advised in online recipes varied from very little to too much. I tried around 10 ml.
@Scott: The “crunchy con” got invented to sell snake oil supplements. It is truly remarkable how many alt-right influencers sell supplements of one sort or another. The GOP makes sure that market stays unregulated. Ka$h Patel does, Rogan, Kirk, Jones… the list goes on. Oz has benefited as well. Who knows what goes in them.
I saw a guy who was hawking mescaline and other psychedelics to trump types. He said they were cool with it because their fellow republicans were selling it now, not those dirty demoncratic hippies.
@DK: This is a paragraph from the opinion piece by Josh Hammer, a supposedly sane conservative:
he body of my friend Charlie Kirk, who was tragically assassinated last week during a campus event in Utah by a leftist transgender-adjacent “furry” fetishist, had barely returned home to Arizona before some grifters on the ostensible “Right” started trying to capitalize on his memory. Instead of focusing on the metastasizing evil of a distinctly leftist political violence or the fact that transgenderism had yet again found itself implicated in a horrific shooting,
WHAT a disgusting piece of writing. What the fuck is transgender-adjacent? This piece of shit, Josh Hammer, sounds like he was a Nazi in the 30’s writing about Jews. So the fact that Kirk’s killer had involvement with trans person is an entry for him to imply that trans people are a threat?
Dan McClellan responding to the Secretary of War.
@Kathy:
Is your older brother your only sibling that you can’t eat?
What makes him special? Is this just a cultural taboo?
With the autism press conference and his burblings at the UN, the Trump has publicly shit his pants, and then wiped his feces on the walls of the world.
@Gregory Lawrence Brown: Dan McClellan is great. Thanks for sharing.
@Lucys Football:
Whole thing is bonkers. Shows how far right Republicans’ Overton has shifted. Just not being a Jew-hating Nazi like Fuentes, Carlson, and Owens puts you in the center of the modern GQP, even if you’re a far right nut like Hammer. Key takeaway is white Christian nationalism is now the beating heart of the Republican Party, not just marks for their square-jawed, pro-business, strong-national-defense nominees (Reagan/Bushes/Dole/Romney/McCain) to play footsie with for votes. The crazies now run the asylum. And the even crazier Nazis just to their right are the second-most integral part of the coalition. President Tariff Trumpflation shared a stage with Carlson this weekend, nobody batted an eye.
How are the atheist-agnostic/libertarian podcast bro crowd gonna convince their minions to vote for this, without Old Man Trump around?
Anyway, they were warned by their founding father long ago: “Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the party, and they’re sure trying to do so, it’s going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can’t and won’t compromise. I know, I’ve tried to deal with them.” – Barry Goldwater, 1994
Goldwater Raps ‘Political Preachers’ (Phoenix Gazette, 1981)
I guess woke liberal elitist Goldwater would’ve been aghast at the spectacle in his state this weekend.
I’ve been having problems with this site on my small iPad since upgrading to iOS 26. Specifically on Safari (using Brave right now, which I usually reserve for YouTube, as google’s ad-blocker-blocking is less effective with a novelty browser).
I don’t know if other people will have problems, or if I’m just a special snowflake*, but I’m seeing the whole of Safari freeze up if I try to fill in name and email after typing into the comment box.
It may well be my aggressive ad blockers causing problems. I’ll probably play around with settings to see if I can rule things out, but if anyone else has problems, using the Brave browser seems to get around them. (Free from Apple App Store, this is not an ad, etc)
Also, it’s generally a good idea to not upgrade to big iOS changes until they release a few patches. I just like to hurt myself.
“Hurt” by Johnny Cash
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*: decades of experience as a software engineer have taught me that computers take it personally, and that they stick together to frustrate specific people for both real and perceived slights.
What did I do? I think it was when I implemented Duck-Typing for Java back in the mid-2000s (the decade, not the millennia), subverting the entire type system. I tried to be respectful, but clearly I was not.
@DK:
Sounds to me like Richard Spencer is the line, not Carlson. Unless Spencer was on stage at some point. (Was Fuentes? Quick google suggests not, so maybe that’s the line)
Fun Fact: Erika Kirk spells her first name with a k!
More Fun Fact: if you capitalize all the k’s, you get EriKa KirK, emphasizing the Christian White Nationalism.
(How do you write more than one k? Both look wrong: “ks” and “k’s”… “k”s is cumbersome, and presents a challenge when being quoted — “‘k’s” is an abomination unto the lord, like shrimp wearing mixed fibers.)
@Jay L. Gischer:
If nothing else, we need to know how much Tylenol pregnant women should take to get the slightly quirky computer programmer autism for their kids rather than the obsessed with model trains and has trouble holding down a job autism or the nonverbal autism.
As we screw over H1Bs, we’re going to need a lot more software engineers.
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My nephew is more of the nonverbal autism, which is bad news in a country sliding towards fascism, as fascism goes hand in hand with eugenics, skipping through the fields of flowers and corpses.
MAHA is a fun mix of desperate crunchy parents and eugenicists, coming together to hate vaccines. One group think they or their loved ones have been harmed or at least are angry that evidence-based medicine hasn’t cured them yet. The other group wants to let measles run wild to cull the weak (namely the people in the first group).
In addition to the usual reporting on the world falling apart around us, Trump saying NATO should shoot down Russian planes, Tylenol, bags of cash, global warming and the like*, The Guardian has a lovely article about the breakout star of Alien: Earth
The reporting does misgender the eyeball monster — who is explicitly referred to as “she” and “her” in the show, and who is affectionately referred to as Iris or Eye-lean by the fans.
I also expect that Alien: Earth’s eyeball monster in a sheep has nothing to do with the Wooly Rebellion mentioned in Doctor Who — a bloody period that completely redefined human-sheep relations.
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*: holy fuck it’s only Tuesday.
@Gustopher:
Shaun the Sheep got there first. lol
@Kingdaddy:..Dan McClellan…
Not sure if this is on everyones calendar today.
Responding to rapture claims
Today’s musical offering…
Today Trump said that Ukraine, with a little help from its European friends, can win back all its territories from Russia.
@CSK: I bet Weird Stephen makes sure potus is never alone with minority leadership.
@Gustopher:
A distinction without difference. A swatiska in one hand, a sieg heil in the other.
And it’s Ks, no? Capitalized?
@Lucys Football: Every other issue they have been pushing and relying on politically is failing them, so they are resorting to queer bashing. And normal homosexuals just aren’t weird enough. And too numerous.
Hammer isn’t the only one though: Republican lawmakers Nancy Mace and Ronny Jackson call for transgender people to be institutionalized
@Gustopher:
I see that Ridley Scott is the main guy behind it, and he has the person most responsible for the series “Fargo” working for him. Has to be some quality in there somewhere. I had thought the main effort was to entice a new generation into the Alien franchise, what with the kiddie brains in superpowered cyborgs, but they are going for much more by the look of it.
A prediction:
He’s Popeye the alien
He’s Popeye the alien
When he’s speaking English
Season One will finish
He’s Popeye the alien!
@JohnSF: I haven’t seen the alien episodes of Shawn the Sheep, but just from the tone of the episodes I did see, I’m reasonably confident that the aliens did not hollow out a sheep’s head and then use their body like a puppet.
(Iris is an intelligent and sensitive eyeball monster, and she’s been unjustly imprisoned — of course she’s going to lash out. She’s a freedom fighter, not a terrorist)
@dazedandconfused: It’s so much better than it really should be. The kid-bots are so creepy and innocent at the same time (“Mr. Strawberry says ‘Fuck Off!’”).
The season finale is this week — tonight? — and entitled “The Real Monsters.” I’m hoping for an inversion of expectations, where the real monsters will be revealed to be the actual literal monsters — xenomorph, eyeball monster, etc. — and not some cliche metaphor about how the humans are the real monsters.
If you were hoping to make it through a daily forum without seeing the names Epstein or Kimmel, then I’m here to upset your applecart. You see, I think it’s outrageous that two large owners of TV stations have taken it upon themselves to censor network content by refusing to air shows, in this case Jimmy Kimmel Live, in the localities where they happen to own ABC stations.
Yes, these companies are trying to receive favorable regulatory treatment from the snowflaky anti-Kimmel administration, but it still seems like a bad business decision to piss off a chunk of your viewership this way. I think they’ve been emboldened by their ability to air corporate editorial content during news broadcasts, but denying their viewership entire network shows, like the babysitter with the remote, is not going to sit well with a lot of people. I am not personally in a Sinclair station market, but I see that Nexstar owns CW stations including one that we actually watch fairly often, but is replaceable (local news, reruns of Modern Family, some late night stuff). This isn’t one of those situations where I go back to their station after the company resumes airing Kimmel. In this case I plan to stay away for good, especially since there are alternatives to all of their programs.
@Eusebio:
Cotdammit, we almost made it!
@CSK: If President Trumpflation actually follows through and makes sure Ukraine has what it needs to bring Putin to heel, I’ll bite my tongue and not criticize him again in polIte company for the duration of his presidency.
He won’t tho. In typical Trump fashion, this is just him agreeing with the last person he spoke to. Zelenskyy must’ve really buttered him up in their UN meeting: “Sir, can you believe that low energy spectacle with Putin, Xi, and Modi in Beijing? After all you’ve done for them? Backstabbers! Gurl, you deserve so much better…”
No doubt Stephen Miller will bring Donald back in proper Putin-puppet line, soon enough.