Tuesday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Tuesday, October 7, 2025
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21 comments
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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The Government is shut down over a CR for FY2026. Because bills have not been passed.
A few basic facts for those that pay attention.
Of the 12 standard Appropropriations bills passed each year to fund the Government,
House Committee — 12 passed House: 3 passed
Senate Committee — 8 Passed Senate: 2
Congress is not doing its basic job.
The French Connection
Released October 7, 1971
Three professors at the University of California have been awarded the Nobel in Physics for experiments demonstrating quantum Tunneling, or the ability at the subatomic level for particles to penetrate barriers which according to classical physics should be impenetrable.
This year’s award continues the trend favoring experimental over theoretical physics.
A tiny sliver of light from “thick as a brick” MTG.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene breaks with the GOP on Obamacare, calling to avoid premium hikes
But then this:
— so then, Marjorie, how about Universal Health Care and subsidies for medical degrees? Because basic economics means that doctors and nurses have to get paid. Money for their services has to come from somewhere.
The choices are thus:
a) some kind of funding “pool” through commerial insurance with profit margin tacked on (like a tax) OR through a government administered program funded by taxpayers, but without addition of a middleman’s profit.
b) massive reduction of medical services that working class Americans can afford as their healthcare is thrown completely into the commercial marketplace. Say goodbye to joint replacement surgeries, advanced cancer care, and home ownership. Say hello to bankrupcies, declining life expectancy, and rising infant mortality.
And by the way, Marjorie a knock-on effect of your support for Trump policy is the politicized defunding of universities which produce medical personnel and research, and the defunding of national agencies whose missions dovetail into our entire national healthcare process. But sure, you put your trust in a brain-worm infected, roadkill eating, gadfly without a lick of good sense, to oversee healthcare policy for your loved ones.
Also there is this:
— but Marjorie, again nary a peep from you over Trump’s funding Argentina’s bailout or his security guarantee to Qatar. Your inconsistancy undermines your credibility.
—
All asides aside, perhaps this sliver of englightenment from Ms. Greene, as she ponders the fate of her children’s healthcare left to the whim of her cruel party, might be an opportunity to guide her towards reality informed viewpoints, out of personal self interest if nothing else. The gaspacho police need affordable heathcare too.
Two years since Hamas launched the Gaza war. Two years of our progressive troops obsessing over Gaza when they might have been useful defending their own rights. And what did they accomplish? Well, they gave a nice boost to anti-Semites. They helped elect Trump. They helped to divide and weaken the Democratic party. And they did nothing at all to lessen the violence, in fact by encouraging Hamas they may well have postponed a ceasefire.
I realize this post will bring on the usual torrent of abuse. But does anyone deny any of the conclusions above? I’m sure the intentions were of the purest, but I am really done with people doing the morally right thing without a thought to the consequences. We are in a desperate battle to save our Constitution, and our front line troops abandoned the real war to fight a futile and irrelevant battle.
Everything we accomplished on women’s rights, trans rights, climate change and consumer protections, all of it, has been set back at least a decade. Probably more. The most important of those issues, climate change, is dead. Period. Dead. There is now zero chance that the world will achieve even the more modest goals. We are so thoroughly fucked on climate change, as well as trans rights and women’s and consumer rights, that in the coming election cycle you won’t even hear Democrats talking about those issues.
Had the campus demonstrators put their energy into issues that actually matter to the American people, had they not harassed Kamala Harris at every opportunity, had they not monopolized the news cycle, would we have won? Maybe, maybe not? But it might have been just enough to turn a state or two. Now, predictably, the college crowd has lost interest in Gaza for the excellent reason that Gaza has fuck-all to do with their lives.
It is not enough to be right. Being right is easy. We have to be smart and strategic and disciplined. There was never, ever, a ‘solution’ for Gaza, as I kept pointing out. At least not a decent solution. It was always going to end this way – either Hamas would surrender or be annihilated. There was never a chance of a different outcome. But there might have been a different outcome to the most dangerous election in American history.
I thought about dumping my microsoft office subscription, because they increased prices largely on the addition of AI to the apps. This is not something I think I will use.
Yesterday I checked out Libre Office (which I had looked at in 2012 as well). it seems ok, and is compatible with most MS office file types. But then I thought, what about cloud storage? To get enough, would cost me more than the MD office sub, be it with Google or Proton. Proton also offers a VPN, but I don’t really have much use for that…
So overpriced MS office it is 🙁
But I’ll keep looking. There may be some better priced cloud storage service out there…
Good for them…
https://www.nycbar.org/press-releases/unlawful-attacks-on-venezuelan-vessels/
This Dutertesque barbarism is going to come back and bite us hard.
@Michael Reynolds: The real issues that hurt Dems were inflation, immigration and trans issues. That’s what the GOP advertised against. The Gaza issue was maybe bad as it took some energy away from other efforts, but it was actually a tough issue. I think Dem leaders should have immediately jumped in and condemned and aided in prosecuting and actions deemed as violent. However, otherwise you run into free speech issues.
Comparisons were made about how schools handled free speech when it concerned women, blacks or other minorities. My sense is that it really wasn’t much different but have not seen it quantified or evaluated. It was also confusing as many of the protestors were Jewish students. It would have been to our benefit if they had not used slogans that had multiple meanings, but were also routinely used by Hamas. Still, I think inflation was the big issue. I also think Biden not dropping out sooner was a factor. Remember how poorly Harris performed in the primary that Biden won? if we had a real primary I think we might have gotten a better campaigner. To be fair, she far outperformed my expectations.
Steve
@Kathy:
For as little as $3/mo (plus domain registration), you can host your own domain and install NextCloud (most hosts have “one-click” installs for it).
NextCloud works on all platforms–including mobile.
@steve222:
Absolutely economic issues were at the top. Pity we couldn’t get a tenth of the coverage for that we got for Gaza. In a close election, everything matters.
I’m sitting here swiping through the dozens and dozens of appeals from every single candidate with a D after their name. I’m mostly keeping the proverbial checkbook closed til I see whether I am going to have another 60 grand pissed away. I’m not contributing to another suicide mission.
If if if we can get on and stay on economic issues, and some of the blowback on ICE, we have a chance. If we have to talk about Gaza and trans athletes we are going to lose. We have to be disciplined enough not to take whatever bait we’re offered, and I’m just not sure enough Democrats are ready for that kind of discipline.
I am terribly disappointed in comedians like Bill Burr who took the Saudi blood money and performed for the benefit of Saudi propaganda. It’s contemptible and it will be hard for me to see some of these guys whose work I love, in the same light.
It really is possible to turn down blood money. We’ve been invited twice to do paid appearances in the UAE and twice told them to fuck off. And we don’t have Bill Burr’s or Chapelle’s money. I also told the Chinese to go jump. For the record we would also reject an appearance to aid the Netanyahu regime, the Castro regime and others too numerous to list. And our price for appearing at a Trump rally is one billion dollars.
How are comedians as philosophically disparate as Shane Gillis and Marc Maron right on this issue when so many were such whores? How does a man allow himself to be bought by MBS?
@Mu Yixiao:
Thanks. I’ll check it out.
Thus far, for some reason the website won’t load at work…
@Michael Reynolds: Two years of your whining and what have you accomplished? Nothing.
The rise in antisemitism is Israel’s fault, for pursuing genocide in Gaza while enough of the world can see what is going on. There’s long been a conflation of Israel and Jews in American culture, and the increase in overt antisemitism is a fully foreseeable consequence.
(Not that Israel gives a shit about antisemitism in the US)
I’d say that AIPAC and the ADL should get a whole lot of credit for pushing the claims that anti-Zionism is antisemitism, and that any criticism of Israel is antisemitism. And so many of our elected officials for going along with it. They did great work in tying Israel and Jews together for most Americans.
I would hope that once the ADL said that Elon Musk’s Nazi salute was not a Nazi salute, it became pretty clear that they had lost the plot for a few years, and were pro-Israel rather than anti-antisemitic.
Sure, you have the usual antisemites recruiting, and marching and saying that “Jews will not replace us,” but that’s been a constant for the past 30 years (I’d say they came out of the woodwork and got more vocal around the Pat Buchanan campaign). The change that really drives the rise in antisemitism is video from Gaza and the AIPAC/ADL conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism.
As for the rest, it was really obvious that the Democrats were losing a lot of the younger voters’ enthusiasm (it’s basically a generational divide at this point in the party) and the Arab-American’s support over Israel, and that Biden/Harris needed to do something to shore that up.
They did nothing. That’s on them.
It’s a tough needle to thread with older Democrats not being willing to go against Israel, and AIPAC lobbying the congressional Democrats at every turn. But threading that needle and pulling the party together is the job of a campaign. Instead of reaching out at all to that younger, lefter flank, Harris was touring with Cheney,
I think trans rights, inflation, the economy in general, and whether a vagina is presidential enough were all bigger issues, but the election was close enough that Israel may have made a difference.
Further, the Biden administration and the Democrats in Congress did nothing to strengthen our democracy after the damage Trump did the first time he was in power. We can quibble over what they could do, and how Manchin and Sinema fucked everything up, and whether the Justice Department could have moved faster to hold more people accountable. But roughly nothing got done.
They did hold the line for 4 years, but at some point Republicans would win the elections and we would have been right here. Might not have been as bad in 2028, since there’s every chance Trump will be dead by then, but the collapse of our institutions would have continued.
Here I tend to blame the fucking Nazis more than the Democrats, as the Republicans have agency too, and they’ve embraced the Nazis. And a lot of the “liberal” media for holding Republicans to a far lower standard.
Also, 40% of American Jews think Israel is committing genocide, by the way. 60% for war crimes. So you can preemptively fuck off with your claim that correctly calling it genocide is antisemitism, unless 40% of American Jews are antisemites.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/10/06/jewish-americans-israel-poll-gaza/
It meets the UN definition of genocide. It’s not Holocaust level, but it’s genocide. Petty genocide, compared to grand genocide, to borrow an analogy from larceny.
Anyway, congratulations on your two year anniversary of whining and throwing your hands up to say nothing can be done and that it’s not even a genocide anyway and that if it weren’t for antisemitism no one would care if Israel was committing a “it’s not genocide” anyway.
You must be very pleased with yourself. You should celebrate with some cake.
[expletive and ad hominem omitted, anticipating our hosts’ disapproval]
@Michael Reynolds:
In the zero sum political calculus of the authoritarian MAGA GOP, climate change was always going to be a point of attack, regardless of Gaza. Dems could have remained silent on Gaza, and would have still faced the massive rightwing money-media behemoth on every single other policy. Everything that liberals support has to be razed to ground. Scorched earth.
Currently, FOX is characterizing Portland as “in a state of violent anarchy” to justify Trump’s insertion of military troops. Lies, distortion, selective reportage, truly fake video — it’s all on the table for their unrestrained guilt free use.
So as with you, I’m horrified at all the ground being lost to the authoritarians, but the focus on why this happens lies within the GOP threshing machinery itself. If it wasn’t Gaza, it would have been everything else.
Look, MAGA GOP has created a “monoculture” political party top to bottom. There are few divisions, few cracks to exploit. Liberals are at a severe disadvantage, inherently allowing and even encouraging multiple viewpoints on issues with many shades of grey inbetween. Messaging becomes even more complex.
Monolothic authoritarianism has a strategic and operational advantage. But if liberals adopt that kind of rigid uniformity, they have lost their core expression of plurality.
@a country lawyer:
I learned far too recently that quantum tunneling is responsible for the fusion energy produced by the Sun and other stars, as well as for their long lives. Although the sun’s core is not nearly hot enough for classical nuclear fusion, there is an extremely small probability that a given proton will interact with another proton via quantum tunneling. But the extremely large number of hydrogen protons fuel the fusion events over the life of the sun. The result is that the power (heat) output of one cubic meter of the sun’s core is roughly equal to that of an equal volume of a compost pile.
@Gustopher:
The republicans’ anti-trans ads in my swing state saturated the media. And trump jumped on everything he could label trans, such as the women boxers from Algeria and Taipei who won Olympic gold medals in August–not actually trans, but they entered the spotlight just in time to be used as exhibits in maga campaigns.
@Eusebio: More than a hundred years ago, Earnest Rutherford working at his laboratory at Cambridge, discovered that in radioactive decay, alpha particles, which are basically helium nuclei, are emitted. The mystery was how could the alpha particles escape the strong force field of the atom’s nucleus, and the answer, at least in part is quantum tunneling
Tragedy: fiddling while Rome burns
Farce: Rocking while Argentina collapses
@Kathy: I’ve used sync.com for years. Depending on how much storage you need it isn’t terribly expensive. Canadian company. End to end encrypted
This will likely be the only time I link to Richard Hanania. In this piece he laments the loss of gatekeepers on the internet and how conspiracy theory and misinformation (lies) dominate media on the right. He points out that when the left has gone too far on issues, they have largely self-corrected. The right has not done this and shows no inclination to do so. He even suggests that Trump is as much of a symptom as a cause in this decline. He notes that the most popular internet media sources are dominated by the crazies, including Rogan of whom he notes…
“Here’s a partial list of ideas that are rejected by mainstream academics and journalists, but have been promoted or gotten respectable hearings on the Joe Rogan Experience, the most popular podcast in the country, over the last few years: there is an ancient city beneath the Giza pyramids; HIV does not cause AIDS; there were ancient human civilizations that predated recorded history; 9/11 may have been a government operation; mind reading is real; covid vaccines are more dangerous than the disease itself; and humans became more susceptible to polio due to vaccination.
It’s hard to exaggerate how bad this is. Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan every week say dozens of things that are insane enough to have justifiably destroyed the credibility and influence of any journalist or public intellectual fifteen years ago.”
He takes some gratuities shots at the left but this is really aimed at the right and from my POV all too accurate.
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/bring-back-the-internet-gatekeepers
Steve
@Erik:
Thanks. It looks good, and reasonably priced.