Tuesday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Tuesday, November 25, 2025
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56 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.
I’m going to repost something I posted last Tuesday regarding SOUTHCOM’s retirement as the last post of the day (West Coast late) so most didn’t see it, with some more comments regarding Congressional pay restrictions. OMG, my Congressman is massively overpaid at $174K (about what my city’s Public Works Director makes, Utility Manager about $300K). um, new Seattle School Superintendent is $425K.
A Congress Member has to maintain 2 homes and in my area a studio apartment is $2K (in the low end area), and DC isn’t cheap. So only the independently rich need apply to run for Congress? A Trader Joes 1st Captain (Manager) makes more.
We now have a situation were there is ZERO difference in base pay paid out between a Colonel and a 4-star Admiral (OK, allowances). Absurd.
—–
For those that do not know, most federal employees can’t make more than a Congress-critter, unless a MD like Fauci. All the 4-Star Generals, make less than the High School Principals in my District (Superintendent way more). Maxed out at $174k/year (not including allowances).
I’ve seen some memes about Admiral Holsey, who is STILL on active duty and in charge of Southern Command (near Miami) for the next month (Dec 12) = he is about to retire (likely on terminal leave – 2 years early – should have been at Southern Command until Nov 2027). He can’t just give 2-weeks notice. . He likely will retire as a Vice Admiral (one step down, 3-star) as he hasn’t served long enough as a 4-star (in retirement he can only call himself a 3-star, still pretty impressive). He’ll make more in retirement than on Active Duty due to the restriction that no General/Admiral can make more in salary (not including allowances) than a Congressman (~$174K), with retirement pay based on what he should have been making (he’s making less than my local high school principal, really – urban district in WA). His Deputy will take over until a replacement is nominated and confirmed by the US Senate (um, they just back to work). This Deputy is a 3-star who will be showing up at a table of 4-stars, joy (actually the 4-stars will understand). Today every senior officer O-6 to O-9 (all flag officers plus senior O-6) are making the same wage. Except for patriotism, why stay? You get promoted, zero salary increase. ZERO, over the entire General/Admiral world. A Colonel (O-6) makes the same money as the Chairman (CJCS). Really (not including allowances).
[Sorry for the redundancies, combining posts, too tough to edit out]
Ola!
I am in Portugal. And still don’t have a long-stay visa. So that’s not at all stressful, as I outfit this absurdly large house. There’s a whole downstairs with 3 bedrooms, 2 baths and a kitchen with private entrances and no furniture at all. The main level is mostly in shape with sofas and chairs just sort of plopped almost randomly. The kitchen is fantastically big with more storage than we can ever, possibly need. Two flaws: a weak-ass microwave and an induction stovetop.
Why the big fukkin house? Dogs. Katherine wanted our two condo dogs (Astrid and Boss) to have grass in an actual yard. The dogs? They DGAF. Doors wide open and they have zero interest. We’re not shitting in the yard, wake the fuck up old man and walk us.
Driving is like racing around inside The Shining’s maze. Neither Apple maps nor Google maps understands that the only street signs are decorative tiles, so telling me to turn on Bacalau Street isn’t much help. The drivers are fine, all European drivers are better-trained than Americans – they have to be. But there are things that are just odd to an American eye: the entrance to massive mall is narrower than a suburban American driveway. And I spent 30 minutes the other day trying to find my rental in the multistory parking lot before realizing that the levels are not 0,1,2,3, 4. But 0, 0+,1,2,3,4. I was on 0+, not 0. And all cars are either small gray hatchbacks, or small gray SUVs. Nothing white, red, yellow, blue or green. Not even black.
My wife is arriving today. She flew over with me and the dogs but had to turn around 12 hours later and fly to Denver to give a speech. Flight coming at our expense and she can’t really bitch about it – everyone at her publisher knows what she’s earning.
So far the single biggest issue is the loss of Amazon. There is no Amazon Portugal, but Amazon Spain will deliver. . . when they get damn good and ready. Overnight? Fuck off, Yankee. Even for an American I am impatient, but I’ll get used to it, eventually.
Moving is always hard but we have more experience moving house than any ten normal couples combined. I figure we’ll get it all down around the time our 90 days of Schengen are up and we still haven’t gotten our visas.
Nothing like terrorizing a High School student for being brown in Oregon
In a message to families, McMinnville High School Superintendent Dr. Kourtney Ferrua confirmed the incident, saying that the student, a high school senior, had been off campus for lunch period when detained by ICE. The student was later recognized as a U.S. citizen and returned home to their family, Ferrua said.
On Saturday, hundreds lined Adams Street in McMinnville, waving signs, to protest the ICE arrests, with Abraham Mejia telling KGW that this was his first time coming out to a protest.
“A 17-year-old minor being abducted in broad daylight — whether people agree with that or not, it’s just unacceptable,” he said. “It hits home and it makes you feel almost fueled that you need to do something about it and that’s why I’m here today.”
Current count is 4 US Citizens were falsely detained just south of Portland OR.
Standby for lawsuits. So much winning. (BTW, I think this is just outside the 100 mile border rule, so USG is going to loose on that point)
The headline of the day- 3D-printed guns that FBI boss Kash Patel gifted to New Zealand officials were toy-inspired revolvers
U.S. ready to cut support to Scouts, accusing them of attacking ‘boy-friendly spaces’
When I was a Boy Scout we made up our own motto.
“On my honor I will do my best to help a Girl Scout get undressed!”
(You could say that we were girl friendly.)
Last week we suddenly felt what seemed a very light tremor. It felt almost as though someone on the floor below were hammering hard on the ceiling. We evacuated, as per quake protocols.
Since the seismic alert hadn’t gone off, and the quake was barely perceptible, the security guard downstairs hadn’t opened the entrance doors. So we gathered in the tiny parking lot. eventually we went back up.
A short time later the same thing happened. We began to evacuate again, then we stopped.
Later the news said there had been three micro quakes nearby, two of which were felt in our area. the magnitude was reported as 2.1 or so.
Typing this took longer than both the tremors we felt.
When I was in the Cub Scouts in the 1950s there were women in the organization. They were called Den Mothers.
Why do I think that Hegseth doesn’t know what he is talking about?
@Michael Reynolds:
Emm got used to going in the back yard, before going on a walk.
She also liked going there with me to play fetch. I never quite decided whether she enjoyed chasing the ball, or she just chased it in order to chew on it.
See, I’d throw the ball and she’d run after it, pick it up, and run back. Then she’d lay on the ground and chew the hell out of it. But if I produced a second ball, she kind of lost interest in the one she had and would look at me expectantly. Then she’d go chasing after the second ball and the sequence repeated.
What she never learned to do was to let go of the ball, or chew toy, so I could throw it again.
@Richard Gardner:
Charlotte, NC is well outside the 100-mile zone, but that didn’t stop the Border Patrol there. For some reason, their zone didn’t seem to be an issue anymore.
@Kathy: I wish I could get Sadie to play fetch. I could just sit on a lawn chair and wear her out in comfort.
Instead, she likes tug of war and running up hills. She is a full body workout.
On the plus side, my upper arms and calves haven’t looked this good in years.
@becca:
I love dog stories.
@Kathy:
https://womenwriteaboutcomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/NTOTO.jpg
@Richard Gardner:
@Eusebio:
Portland and Charlotte aren’t outside 100 miles from the coastal border. Take a look at a map of the actual enforcement zone and it covers about 2/3 of all people in the US given how most people live near a coast.
@Mu Yixiao:
Nice. That’s not what Emm did. She’d lay on the ground, leaning against me if she could, and chew frantically at the ball. I had to take out the second ball before she did this.
I’d also sometimes kick a soccer ball, gently, downfield. She’d chase after it, get in front of it, and use her forepaws to stop it. She’d then try to bite it, which was ludicrous as the ball was about 3/4 as big as she was.
Interesting piece by a finance guy on the difference between our current idea of what the poverty line is and what he calls participation. His conclusion is that a family of 4 needs an income of 140K a year to participate in the economy without government assistance, or you know, slowly (and then not-so-slowly) going broke.
I could quibble about the numbers, maybe, but the basic premise squares with with what a living wage represents. Using the MIT Living Wage calculator, a family of 4 with 2 parents working (thus child care) in the Trumpy/flyover town where I grew up needs to be making 110k a year. Google says the median household is around 49k.
It explains why so much of this country’s discourse about money and wealth hinges on the poverty-mindset version of grinding like an idiot and marveling at how great tech advances are and overall sucking up. Most everyone who needs to be ‘inspired’ is poor, and they’re being told to cheer on the conditions of their poverty rather than do anything else.
@becca:
Our earlier dogs, Fuzz and Daisy, were quite playful in their first year, then lost interest in any kind of play.
When we got Emm, I figured I’d best play with her while she remained interested. I did. thing is she remained playful all her life. I never taught her to fetch. I just threw a ball or a toy, she went after it, and then ran back to me and chewed on it leaning against me. Sometimes I’d pet her while she was doing this. If I stopped, she’d stop chewing and look at me.
Once I told her, “If you could manage to eat as well as chew your toy and be petted, you’d be in heaven, right?”
She just wagged her tail.
@Kathy: up until Sadie, I had yellow labs. Max, Jack and Ben. We had lots of other dogs, but those guys were mine. So swimming and fetching were built-in. No training necessary.
Hunters used to cull yellow puppies, believing they were inferior retrievers. I love them because they have discernible eyebrows that convey such a range of emotion.
@Gregory Lawrence Brown: If it ain’t baroque….
Betrayal (with illustration!)
@SKI:
Portland is in the zone, but Charlotte is indeed outside the 100-mile zone. A more detailed map of the zone shows it. The city is well inland–about 140 miles from the nearest coastline.
Regarding the “US Peace Plan for Ukraine”
Some interesting points made by Jimmy Rushton:
– if this plan was drafted by Witkoff, how come Christo Grozev got an almost identical version from a Russian source months agao?
– how come basic linguistic analysis shows sizable parts are direct transliterations from Russian?
– why did the Witkoff/Kushner “plan” not get read-in from apprarently anyone at State, CIA, or senior Republicans in Congress, but appears in a leak to Atrios (guessing now is that the source was Kushner)
– why did Rubio initially tell several Republican Senators that the plan was a Russian “wish list”, then walk this back? Indications are, due to pressure from Vance/Kushner etc winning the ear of Trump to accept it as “his plan”.
@CSK:
One fine Sunday afternoon I was watching two games at the same time. This required switching channels over and over. This was at the time when ultrasonic TV remotes were the latest thing. Fuzz lay placidly beside me, not napping, but not watching the games, either. I petted her absently and she seemed content.
I noticed every time I used the remote her ears twitched. after a while, she would look up at me when I changed channels. I figured she could hear the remote and it distracted her.
After a while, I decided to go downstairs for something to drink. Fuzz sat up, which I figured meant she wanted to follow. I told her, “stay here, I won’t be long.”
As soon as I moved a few steps, she jumped across the couch to the side table, grabbed the remote in her mouth, and ran downstairs. I ran after her as best I could, and reached the lower floor to see her heading full speed ahead to the back yard.
The door to the yard sometimes was left open, sometimes closed. This time it was open. I followed Fuzz, to find her furiously digging some loose dirt with her forepaws, remote firmly held in her mouth.
I laughed so hard, it took me a while to rescue the remote.
She objected to this, and to have her paws wiped off before going back inside.
I wonder what she heard.
FBI plans to interview Sen. Mark Kelly, other Democrats Trump accused of seditious behavior
Petty. Dictators. Trump and his henchman.
Trump and Whiskey Pete not fit to lead.
Trump and Whiskey Pete not fit to lead.
Trump and Whiskey Pete not fit to lead.
@Rob1: I can’t imagine how an “interview” might go. What exactly would the questions be? And what is an answer except for “I quoted the constitution and the UCMJ. Now let’s talk about your oath of office.”
Oh and watch the medals issue be a reversed photo.
A martinet criticizing a uniform is a sure sign of incompetence.
@Gregory Lawrence Brown: Truly awful. I love it.
@Kathy:
Thank you!
@Rob1: There is a scene in “Band of Brothers” where the initial commander of Easy Company, Herbert Sobel, sort of conjures up some violation out of thin air to cancel all weekend passes for the men and for the other officers. Lt. Winters shows his strategic acumen by refusing to go along with it and insisting that Sobel court-martial him.
In the end, Sobel is removed from command, when the company sargeants convey to higher leadership that they don’t have a lot of confidence in Sobel’s ability to lead them in the field.
Sobel is reassigned. Winters becomes company commander (I’m not sure it was right then, but by the end of D-Day, yes.)
The thing I like about the performance is that you can see Winters making a calculation about what might happen if he refuses to play along with Sobel’s game.
I’m thinking about this for, oh, no reason at all.
Why is this a thing that the president of the United States has time to lobby on/for?
‘Rush Hour 4’ in the Works at Paramount at Trump’s Request
@Rob1:
Re: Hegseth’s nonsense here:
A number of people pointed out that the photo was mirrored/reversed. Which happens with selfies.
I have been noticing more print about humans getting dumber. Just do a search and all sorts of studies and theories pop up. Pretty depressing, but it explains a lot.
The internet and teaching by rote are two of, I’m sure, many reasons. Conservatives went to war on teaching critical thinking skills decades before the CRT bullshit. It shows.
During WW2, our pilots on the Pacific side were more likely to be successful and survive than Japanese pilots. Many war historians credited some of that success to the pilots being taught to think critically in training while the Japanese were not.
I don’t think a day passes lately that I haven’t thought to myself “I’m glad I’m old.”
@becca:
I don’t have a day that passes where I’m not worried about my kids and grandkids. And they are doing pretty damn good right now!
@Scott:
Thinks fishing expedition, with heavy use of innuendo and deception. Kelly will be asked about contact with foreigners, whether he has employed illegal aliens, voted by mail, said anything uncomplimentary about El Taco, and in particular every little incident in his naval career all the way back to basic training.
The purpose will be to find something, anything, they can charge him or smear him with.
@Jen: Trump is calling Hollywood, Tweeting, buying gold filigree, Tweeting, going over ballroom plans, Tweeting, and watching Fox News. Someone has decided it’s better to keep him doing crap like that than having him attempt to do what an actual president would spend the day doing.
@Scott: I worry about my grandkids future. My daughter worries about their future. We can’t dwell on it, but we can consider it.
@Eusebio: The ACLU map is missing the 100 miles around every international airport. Something about not wanting to cede an argument to the fascists, I would imagine.
@Jen: if Trump can get his base to go see Rush Hour 4 — if going to the theaters to see it as it was meant to be seen becomes the patriotic, white, American thing to do — the movie will be a massive success.
I can see why a movie studio might be inclined to listen.
It’s one of the least offensive things the administration has pushed for.
Podcast recommendation:
Shield of the Republic: The Pentagon’s Confederate Cover-Up
Brigadier General Ty Seidule, U.S. Army (Retired) is Professor Emeritus of History at the United States Military Academy at West Point. He is the David H. and Ann L. Hinchcliff Professor of History and Executive Director of Common Ground, A Program for Active Citizenship at Hamilton College in Clinton, NY.
In 2021, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin appointed Ty to the Congressional Naming Commission tasked with redesignating Department of Defense assets which honor Confederates. His fellow commissioners elected him as Vice Chair.
Ty’s forthcoming book with Connor Williams is A Promise Delivered: Ten American Heroes and the Battle to Rename Our Nation’s Military Bases.
Some good history past and present.
Saying the quiet part out loud: peace in Ukraine is not in US interests. This war is a gift. For very little money and no American lives, we are seeing one of our two strategic foes weakened and exposed. And we get the secondary effects of making problems for China and strengthening Europe. Best case we see Putin and his fascist oligarchy fall which sure, could be a problem depending on which surviving warlord gets the nukes, but that’s a down the road problem. We want a smaller, weaker Russia. Russia has never been anything but a global pain in the ass. And the Ukrainians are bleeding it for us using our aged-out weapons. Not to mention giving us a preview of future wars. Kissinger would get it.
All I am saaaaaying, is give war a chance.
I wonder if there are any Transgender Ice Agents. I think it would break a few minds.
I get that being an ICE Agent isn’t always about political philosophy and White Supremacy — some people were just the types to pulled the wings off flies as a kid, moved on to larger animals, and who grew up wanting to hurt people, and this is the career where you get to hurt people. There are Black and Brown ICE Agents, and they’re far more into hurting people just to hurt people than in the ethnic cleansing.
The trans community is smaller than Black And Brown, but still large enough that there are bound to be some who hurt animals because they can’t hurt people (I am assuming a random distribution of both Transgender and Gets Off On Hurting People*, and no statistical correlation), so there should be some who really want to join ICE.
Now I almost wish I was going home to visit my family for Thanksgiving. I think this idea would make for an excellent conversation with my MAGA brother, and I could goad my nihilist brother along for the ride.
*: I’ve definitely started capitalizing like a Founding Father. They may have had really shitty views on race and women and democracy, but that Capitalizing For Emphasis was pretty spot on. Makes more sense now compared to then, when so many people are tapping things out on touchscreens and a lot of the bold, italics and quotation marks are just annoying to get to.
@Scott: Might go pretty bad for Patel and/or Heggie. What are they going to do if a famous astronaut and senator tells them to go eff themselves? Arrest him? Kelly can welcome that.
@Scott: Might go pretty bad for Patel or Heggie. What are they going to do if a famous astronaut and senator tells them to go eff themselves? Arrest him? Kelly can welcome that.
@Charley in Cleveland:
So that JD couch boy and his band of idiots can prove they can do even worse? I mean, see the plan that serves Ukraine on a silver platter to Mad Vlad sold as a peace plan.
@Gustopher: I suspect many ICE agents joined up because it is a well paying job requiring minimal skills. No real deeper thinking into signing up than that. In our economy, there are not many jobs like that.
@Kathy: There’s an old trick to train a dog to release the toy instead of playing tug of war, blow into their nose. Nobody knows exactly why it works, but I suspect it’s “Ugh! Human breath!!”
@Michael Reynolds:
My criticism of this is that it has been entirely within the power of the US since 2022 (arguably since 2014) to provide Ukraine with suffiecient support to inflict much greater damage on Russian forces.
I still conside President Biden, Secretarys Blinken and Austin, and above all Jake Sullivan, and various other national security folks at the time, to have have been fundmantally mistaken in following a policy that emphasised “calibration”, “messaging”, “sending signals”, “escalation management” and generalised bureaucratic consensus chin-stroking.
Plus patronising attitudes of “we know best” and “Ukrainians can’t operate system x, y, or z”
Granted it was not the sheer squalid idiocy of Trump, or the outright malice of Vance, or the compulsive greed of Kushner.
But it was still pretty damn stupid.
As someone who knows Ukrainians who have lost friends or family in this damnable war, the entire saga of US policy seems to have been an utter shitshow from the outset (that outset being 2014), that has gotten progressively shittier.
Though, tbf, the European response, in general, does not rate much better, until recently.
See Germany still refusing to supply Taurus missiles, seemingly out of a reflexive cringing response to “never get out of step with Washington”.
@dazedandconfused:
With our dog a friendly touch on the nose does the trick.
@Modulo Myself:
I read it in between work and other distractions. I’m stunned. I think this is what physicists in the late XIX century felt when the Michelson Morley experiment failed to find the aether.
It explains a lot. Why the middle class is shrinking, credit card debt, anxiety, angst, etc. And even why people fall for El Taco’s lies and conspiracy theories.
I’d add the abundant supply of cheap goods, like appliances, toys, pretty much everything on Temu these days, fast fashion, etc. give an illusion of prosperity that doesn’t match the reality.
I wonder, too, what the hourly living wage should be, as per the quoted piece. $15 falls well short. Even the of quoted figure if minimum wage kept pace with inflation and productivity, $24, falls short by about 1/3.
Let’s see: 8 hours a day, five days a week, figure 48 weeks per year given unpaid vacation, sick days, and assorted time off here and there, produces 1,920 hours. To get to $140,000, before taxes, the hourly wage should be about $73. Divide this by two if we asume two incomes as the norm, and it’s $36.50.
To quote myself from a far earlier snarky comment, “You want that much for flipping burgers?”
Higher wages are not the only solution, though it would be nice to get the oligarchy to pay them. Better public transportation would help a lot, as would government funded day care. And something really needs to be done about healthcare costs one way or another. and that’s just for starters.
@dazedandconfused:
Thanks. I’ll keep that in mind the next time I have a dog..
For some reason, I’d sometimes blow on the faces of Fuzz and Daisy. They tried to wipe their snout with their paws when I did this. If I did it again, Fuzz would growl. A third time elicited a fierce bark and an air bite in my direction.
I know, why did I keep doing it? I was young and stupid.
I was older when we got Emm. I never blew in her face.
@Michael Reynolds:
There were those two Ferengi Rules of Acquisition
War is good for business
Peace is good for business
Reagrding Wittkoff:
There are indications he was “approximate” at times to Russian mafiya money, as the Russians ousted the old mob as the key players in NY.
And also linked to our old acquaintance Paul Manafort.
And before that, had, like Trump, at least “frequent crossings of paths” with the “Five Families”.
“Let’s make a deal”, indeed.
@JohnSF: Reynolds seems to be right about Biden’s goal in Ukraine, to use them to weaken Russia down to the last Ukrainian. Perhaps this was based on not wanting to drive them into the arms of China and fear that Putin might be replaced by something even worse. It strikes me as not only hugely immoral, but as too clever by half. Up to a point, countries are strengthened by war. Germany’s military got bigger, better equipped, and more technically advanced up to near the end in WWII, just slower than the Allies. Russia is learning new methods, building arm factories, and becoming more technically sophisticated. And they’re developing ties to China and North Korea. Would have been better to slam the door in their faces and make it clear they were no match for us and NATO.
Somebody take me to the horse races, stat!
Why?
Dear Wife and I have a daily guessing game. Who says the daily mass on EWTN? I chose 3rd favorite* and I was right.
I sometimes suffer from low blood sugar. DW tests me at least two times daily. Tonight she tested me two hours after we ate dinner. I guessed 133. My guess was right on the button.
So I’m on a hot streak. Too bad they closed Pompano Park a few years ago. I do know how to read a horse racing program. My father owned standardbreds off and on for over 20 years. His former ownership partner, is now in the Harness racing Hall of Fame. Dad and Bruce’s most famous was Fast Clip.
*- There are 7 or 8 priests who say daily mass on EWTN. Dear Wife has given them nicknames. 1st favorite, 2nd favorite, The Pastor, Friday Regular, Roundface, Wendell, and Father Where have you been.
Tell me you don’t feel some envy of Brazil. Bolsonaro went to prison today.
And not just him, but several others in the armed forces and his cabinet who took part in the attempted coup.
I did not have this on my bingo card:
ICE arrests woman with family ties to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt
@Jen:
Much as I’d like to engage in snark and mockery, I don’t think the worst of the worst includes the worst of the worst merely by family association.