Wednesday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
·
Wednesday, August 13, 2025
·
33 comments
OTB relies on its readers to support it. Please consider helping by becoming a monthly contributor through Patreon or making a one-time contribution via PayPal. Thanks for your consideration.
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
Twitter and/or
BlueSky.
It’s official. We’re taking a HAL world cruise in 2027. 129 days (including my 66th birthday) and 28 countries. My yakuza book better be the best seller everyone thinks it will be because I will need the $$$$. LOL
Why don’t I set a book of mine on a cruise ship in order to write off some of the trip. Center it around dung beetles and call the book – ‘The poop cruise’. My LA will disown me if he hears me even mention the idea.
If you’re wondering Dear Wife and I have travel insurance. Experienced and smart cruisers know it is essential.
I have embarked on reading Stella Rimington’s Liz Carlyle books. Back around 10-15 years ago I read a few of them but my memory is sketchy. The book I am reading now is unfamiliar to me. It is good, ten times than this crude work I finished recently. Only one thing, maybe because I’m not a British woman and that is making my clueless, but what woman leaves her basement flat for two days with laundry running in the washing machine?
If you can’t tell, my fiction writing muse is on holiday at present. After churning out 7 new books in 18 months*, you’d be wanting to take a vacation too, right? So I’m reading, playing SOM baseball, and trying hard not to drive my wife too crazy. So far I am succeeding at 2.
*- Five of them were up to 2/3 written before 2024 began.
The headline of the day- Bear steals sunflower seeds from pickup truck in Massachusetts
The Florida headline of the day- Broward man convicted of killing girlfriend with spear
File this under Oh FFFS or “Gee, maybe it WAS about the $$$. Per newser.com and USA TODAY:
Personally, I suspect The Supremes will welcome the chance to move two more steps backwards…
When is Congress going to learn to not trust anything this administration says?
Could DoD buck ‘congressional intent’ on billions in reconciliation?
Just floated in on a cloud of Oxy, Dilaudid, and Tylenol to say “hi” from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
@CSK: Get well soon.
@Bill Jempty:
Thanks, Bill. I’ll be moved out of the ICU shortly. Yesterday was awful.
@Bill Jempty: Congratulations. Had to look that one up. Have to say I’m jealous. It’s a cruise of a lifetime!
@CSK:
That sounds delightful. All this bullshit would be so much easier to handle if I could get my hands on some artisanal Quaaludes.
Let’s do some math, shall we?
Tariffs bring in record $27.7 billion in July as Trump calls haul ‘incredible for our country’
Tariffs are taxes paid by Americans. $28 Billion divided by 350 Million Americans is $80/person tax in one month. Or $320 tax on a hardworking American family of four. In one month.
Why can’t Democrats pound that into the nation’s consciousness day by day, hour by hour?
@Beth:
Hey, good to hear from you! Remember, when I get to rehab, you’re organizing my OTB host/commenter visitation kickline with Ethel Merman singing “There’s No Business Like Show Business” as background.
Only you can do this. I’m expecting great things from you.
I’ve been looking up means to bypass Microsoft gatekeeper to upgrade older, unsupported systems to Windows 11, in an effort to further extend the lives of old PCs. After all, they work adequately well, and I’m not ready to afford a new PC.
The problem is my desktop dates from 2011 (yikes!). Hell, it came with Win7 (!). The laptop is newer, but I can’t find exactly when it was made or remember when I bought it (2012-2014 range). Still pretty old.
I guess I’ll find out come October….
On rare good news, a project we’ve been expecting for months was published yesterday after 10 pm. I forwarded it to the manager today. It’s due for Aug 27th, which is exactly one day after I’m due back from vacation 😀
Thomas Edsall had a column in NYT (gift link) a couple days ago that I highly recommend, How Liberalism Went to Die on the Texas-Arkansas Border. He opens by looking at Texarkana, which benefited hugely from Biden’s policies. They were named an “energy community” under the IRA. GDP and employment greatly improved. But “deliverism” as a political tactic, delivering tangible benefits for voters, failed. Trump’s margin there grew from 2020 to 2024. “Texarkana serves as a case study in the uphill struggle of the Democratic Party to win — and win back — working-class support.”
Edsall talked to several experts.
That seems a conventional centrist summary, but perhaps not entirely reflecting what the experts said, which include emphasis specifically on economic inequality, the effect of social isolation (more of a thing with blue collar than the educated), noting that class disparities are becoming more salient compared to racial and ethnic disparities, and cancel culture rated just a mention.
I would say the condensed takeaways in terms of political advice are:
1. Promise to improve the economy, with an emphasis on reducing inequality.
2. Demonstrate solidarity with non-elites.
3. Support community, including patriotism and religion.
It seems to me 3. is easy, it’s mostly symbolism. The hard part is the conflict between 1. And 2. It’s hard to help people without implying they need help. Republicans square the circle by not really helping anyone, lying, and playing to prejudice. Edsall’s intro demonstrates how hard it is to succeed by actually helping people.
@Scott: Tariffs are a tax. They may decrease production by siphoning money from other economic activity and result in lower inflow from other taxes. This will increase the deficit. https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/us-budget-deficit-has-widened-109b-from-year-ago-despite-influx-tariff-revenue
Fox recognizes that large tariff income means larger decreases in other US government revenues.
@Scott:
I hear you. I keep telling my Democratic/liberal friends (all more liberal/progressive than I am) that the sad reality is that the Democratic Party has become so ossified that they’ve become really poor and clueless at basic politics.
Democratic Party congressional leadership, as exemplified by Chuck Schumer, is without a clue as to how to put the message(s) out. Schumer is a Charisma Free Zone. Worse, Schumer speaks in a ‘8-points-of-Objection-to-Trump’ Style. Honest to God, it’s excruciatingly boring, it always activates my mute button or change of channel button. He’s good enough for legislating but not for delivering the messages.
Finally, it doesn’t have to be Schumer, I mean, where are the proxies? It’s pathetic.
How is this not waste/fraud/abuse?
Sh!tcanning a 12-year, $800 million software project that is almost done *for no reason other than Salesforce and Palantir want the work* is such an abuse of taxpayer resources I can’t see straight.
Once again, it was NEVER about saving money. Or finding fraud. Or addressing abuse.
ETA: oops, forgot the link:
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/how-unraveling-two-pentagon-projects-may-result-costly-do-over-2025-08-13/
@Scott:
Why do American adults need Democrats to tell them what to think? Are Americans incapable of doing basic math?
When are the Americans who put Trump in office (a majority of white voters, a supermajority of white men, nearly half of Latinos) going to grow up and take responsibility for their abject failures of ethics, morals, and basic kindergarten-level critical thinking instead blaming Democrats for their stupid, broken-brained politics and failure to listen to the 85% of black and LGBT voters who warned them against voting for an incompetent lunatic? Yikes!
@DK: One, Americans rarely take responsibility for anything. Two, because they are letting Republicans tell them out to think. And three, no, Americans are incapable of doing basic math.
You are asking everyone not to care and that time will take care of this. Well, I refuse to go down with that ship.
@DK:
As I’ve said here once or a few dozen times, the electorate are a box of rocks. Reynolds likes to blame them for our situation. But they have always and everywhere been a box of rocks, yet we managed to be more or less a democracy for 249 years, the early 1860s aside. I blame more the utter moral failure of the Republican Party. That, and the related Koch fueled Supremes who’ve opened it all up to unlimited money.
@Jen: Now this is close to my heart. I worked on the Air Force project. It was called the Air Force Integrated Pay and Personnel System (AFIPPS). I helped write the RFP and Source Selection Plan. There was three or four bidders. It was awarded to Accenture. It was basically building a pay system onto an already existing (and running) Oracle database and applications. To be off the shelf as much as possible with minimal (preferably zero) customizations.
The existing pay system was COBOL based and run by the Defense Financial Accounting Service in Indianapolis. For reasons I am still baffled by, DoD decided to split the integrated DoD wide pay system into the 3 different service systems with 3 different technical approaches and 3 different contracting approaches. DoD had tried an integrated approach with a program called DIMHRS (Defense Integrated Military Human Resources System. But that collapsed until Service disagreements and Hurricane Katrina (the program office was in New Orleans).
Anyway, AFIPPS was supposed to be a reengineering of the pay processes prior to development. We had experts from all over the AF spend months in teams ostensibly reengineering the processes. Unfortunately, there was very little adult leadership of the “functional experts” and the program collapsed again.
So I say good luck to the new contracts. What is often misunderstood about the big Enterprise Resource Planning systems like Oracle and SAP and the like is that when you buy their software you are also buying their processes and you have to adapt to them and not the other way around.
@gVOR10: In that case, the country is doomed, or always was. Because behavior change requires one to take responsibility for one’s transgressions and errors, a la postwar Germany’s reckoning. If Americans are not capable of such a reckoning, then Americans are not capable of any significant improvement, just kicking the can down the road with surface-level window dressing. So maybe the nation is destined to mimic a failed state like Russia, outside of wealthy blue enclaves (I’m in Cape Cod rn; just lovely, would not even know Trump exists).
@Scott:
Your refusal won’t make any difference if the American people cannot take responsibility for their poor decisions. Until that happens, they’re going down. Because dramatically improving one’s lot requires the taking of responsibility. It has become an essential step in every evidence-based intervention from AA to CBT on down, because it is non-negotiable. So. Good luck to an American people trying to avoid that while seeking to brink their politics back from the brink. It’s not gonna happen.
@CSK: savor the cloud of drugs while you can, it’s better up there.
I feel that we will do better if we look at people who are doing a good job, media-wise and focus on them and amplify them.
Who do people suggest? Robert Reich isn’t bad. Who else?
@DK:
Because if you’re being told that spiders aren’t real, thirty times a day, on the news, you might begin to think that spiders are not real.
By the way: trees aren’t real. There is no biological group of trees, it’s just a collection of physical attributes that we have grouped together. Oh, I just realized… it’s like race!
@Jen: At least one of them in an HR system, and I’m sure it was filled with all sorts of DEI — tracking race, gender, maybe even pronouns.
If you don’t want anyone to ever be held accountable for rampant discrimination, or anyone to try to fix it, you have to make sure you aren’t gathering the data they would use to measure it.
@Beth: @Gustopher:
The drugs ease the physical pain, for which I’m more than grateful, but I’ve noticed no effects beyond that. What do Oxy et al. do?
What is the current/past behavior to be changed? Are we talking about voting behavior or something else?
Relatedly, what is the new behavior that will presumably replace the current/past behavior?
These are not incidental questions — they are essential when considering how best to initiate and sustain the behavior change.
DK is correct to emphasize taking responsibility, as this is often a necessary (occasionally sufficient) prerequisite.
I do not think taking responsibility is always necessary — behavior change can happen without it.
And this brings me back to the first two questions.
@CSK:
Maybe you’re using them wrong? 😀
I wouldn’t know. Fact is, other than alcohol, I’ve never done drugs.
Anyway, on other good news, I’ve used up all my outstanding Audible credits, so I’m set to cancel the subscription before the next charge around Sept. 8th.
I’m currently downloading the accompanying PDF files of a bunch of Great Courses lecture series (they are a lot!) And I’ve noticed I can download whole audiobooks as well. Usually I download them to the phone, then remove them when I finish each. I wonder if it’s worth downloading the whole library to the PC and OneDrive. In theory, I should still be able to download to the phone all the books I’ve paid for that haven’t been removed from the catalogue.
@CSK: I broke my arm several years ago, sports car racing incident. They gave me oxycodone pills. I took them once. Haven’t felt like that since the 60s. Watched whatever happened to be on TV, for a few minutes Rush Limbaugh seemed to make sense. From there on I stuck to the industrial strength Tylenol.
@gVOR10:
Thank God the oxy didn’t make me hot for Limbaugh.
@Gustopher:
If you’re a gullible and very bad at critical thinking, maybe.
Black American women have access to Fox News and right wing media. 92% of black women voters still declined to vote to strip millions of Medicaid or to create the most layoffs and worst job growth since COVID, via the world's dumbest tariff scheme.
Are blacks, women, and gays immune to spider propaganda? Or is there something broken in much of str8/white/male America's culture and politics?
It's the latter. But of course you can't say that, because you're not allowed to tell truths that hurt these groups' fragile feelings. The most powerful demographics in the country will blame everyone and everybody but themselves — especially Democrats — even though admitting the problem is mainly in the mirror is step one in fixing what's wrong.
The supposed crisis in American masculinity is a crisis of personal responsibility. You can track the decline of the latter with the decline of America. When American parents are allowing their boys to be led astray by whiny, victim-mentality crybabies like Joe Rogan, Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson, and Andrew Schultz, no wonder so many played themselves by licking up behind a pathetic, pedophilic twat like Trump.
@DK:
White women fell for the spider propaganda.
You’re a fool if you think that propaganda (and advertising in general) has no effect on you.
Certain groups of people are less susceptible to propaganda on certain topics, and from certain people. A history of discrimination against a group will make them more wary of claims from the people who discriminate against them.
Blacks and LGBTQIA+ folks know where the discrimination is coming from. Far less likely to let Fox into their lives.
Notice that there’s a huge political divide in young (mostly white) folks right along sex, with the men getting way more Trumpy.
It’s because the men are getting the message from the manosphere with no countering message.
And the only message the right has for young women is that they are a bunch of whores who should settle for some conservative shithead or end up living alone with their cats.
Sure, there’s personal responsibility, but if we are ignoring the landscape around the individual, I think we would have to ask why Black folks have made fewer gains than any other group?
Weight is personal responsibility, but it’s made a whole lot harder to avoid obesity when everything is loaded with fat and sugar and engineered to encourage binge eating. Is the obesity epidemic a mass moral failing, or changes to diet and encouraged lifestyle?