Wednesday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Wednesday, October 29, 2025
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22 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
Twitter and/or
BlueSky.
The headline of the day- Father Admits to Killing 4 Children Found in Car Trunk, Sheriff Says
Tennessee sheriff arrests man, jails him for 35 days (ongoing) for posting a meme about Donald Trump.
I am on the road to visit my daughter in Nashville. On these trips I make it a point to listen to local talk radio. It had the usual poorly informed stuff about climate change, a lot fo focus on Mamdani and a lot of immigrant stuff but there was a lot more emphasis than I remember on prior trips about de-naturalizing citizens. I remember this coming up occasionally in the past but it was more of a focus on a couple of shows. I have to think that Steven’s article yesterday and the requirement to be a “heritage” American reflects that this appears to be a growing sentiment in the GOP base.
Steve
Lab leak.
Truck hauling ‘aggressive’ monkeys thought to carry hepatitis C, herpes and Covid overturns in Mississippi with at least one on the loose
Right here in America.
@Neil Hudelson: Below is a link that gives a clear picture of the meme. (It was hard for me to read on the video.) The sheriff claims it made some parents afraid of violence at their school. It is clearly labeled as something Trump said one day after a shooting elsewhere. There is no way it could be construed as a threat of violence. What it actually does is criticize Trump.
Steve
@steve222:
Well, I wonder what Ted Cruz (born in Canada) thinks about that. And that excludes Trump and his spawn.
OTOH, one branch of my family came to settle in Pennsylvania in the late 1600s/early 1700s so I qualify.
@steve222:
It should be clear by now that the authoritarian powered racist “purity” sickness in this country has yet to find its limits.
Don’t tell anyone, but there’s a country in the western hemisphere with a female name derived from the given name of an Italian sailor who came to this hemisphere illegally.
It’s official.
Trump who said he is not a king and denounced the No Kings protests is gifted a gold crown while in Korea
Maybe there was a bit of chuckling after he left.
I ran a quick test of the Comet AI browser.
I asked it to search for large food processors for 850 pesos or less in online stores with home delivery, to skip Amazon, and to not consider any made by Black & Decker.
It didn’t do a terrible job, but for some reason favored Sears (yes, it’s alive and well down here), and actually following the link to the store was confusing. And for some reason, the mouse pointer began to behave erratically when it approached the right side of Comet’s window.
I wound up searching for food processors in Sears’ website, on Chrome*.
Maybe I need to learn to phrase my prompts better, maybe the AI browser is not as useful as it’s made out to be.
*For some reason, it’s the one browser that doesn’t slow down my home PC.
You can’t felonize the actions of a king.
Trump’s late-night appeal argues why his 34-count felony conviction should be thrown out
It’s a travesty of a mockery of a sham of two mockeries
@Scott: According to family lore, my mother’s Dutch ancestors were swindled in a land dispute that resulted in Manhattan Island. On my dad’s side, we came over in convict ships from England to Oppenheimer’s Georgia as indentured servants and my great great whatever ended up signing the Declaration of Independence for that state.
There are probably some kernels resembling truth in those stories, it the brunt of it is wishful thinking.
Adults…who needs ’em?
At the Carbondale City Council meeting last night a man elected at large to represent the denizens of the city displayed the limits of his maturity when he used both hands to display his age and his IQ.
Later he begged off with the well worn mea culpa “I wish I would have handled it differently,”.
Disclaimer: I live outside the city limits and can not vote in Carbondale City Council elections. Virtually all my consumer spending and associated sales tax goes to the City of Carbondale so I guess I contribute to this guy’s salary 0f $6000. Source
@becca:
Part of my family’s lore is that my paternal grandparents were supposed to go to the US, but wound up in Mexico by mistake. No explanation what the mistake was. Boarded the wrong ship? Got off at the wrong port? No idea.
Then a few months ago my sister found some documents from them in the Jewish community’s new digital database. Among these were travel papers for Mexico issued to both said grandparents at a Mexican consulate in Poland.
So much for a mistaken destination.
I make it a point to read a few conservative sources during my retiree’s morning news read. Started out trying to understand but I confess it’s turned into more point and laugh. But for the first time in months The American Conservative had an interesting post. Purports to name Epstein’s major source of money and ties him to Israeli intelligence and the CIA. The author seems to be a nobody and the TAC isn’t reliable, but this bit seems credible.
Elon Musk’s Grokipedia Pushes Far-Right Talking Points
The “first principles” Elon Musk repeatedly touts as his guiding pathway include neither honesty nor factuality. For being a self identified “data-head,” Musk exhibits far too much irrationality and far too little empiricism, compliments of an excessively large ego.
Last week I made my bi-annual contribution to Wikipedia, a pinnacle crowdsourced endeavor by humans to understand themselves and the universe they occupy.
Quite a contrast to Grokipedia, an egotist’s effort to foist his self-serving worldview onto society with heavily curated content his own A.I. has hoovered up from everywhere allowed.
Trump officials ask supreme court to allow firing of top copyright official
Trump first tried to fire Perlmutter in May after she released a pre-publication version of the third part of the Copyright Office’s report “Copyright and Artificial Intelligence,” which suggested that AI companies could be infringing on copyrighted works
When you buy a product these days, you have to wonder what hidden surprises you are getting. From tFuturism–
Is my toaster spying on me? What really concerns me is my vacuum and toaster are talking to one another!
Seriously who knew this 55 year old movie would predict a day when shutting off technology would have consequences.
@becca: @Kathy: I love family folklore. I started documenting my family history during the pandemic and learned some facts that were contrary to the standard stories. My grandfather supposedly was born in San Francisco but the birth certificate was destroyed during the 1906 Earthquake. Uh no, he was born in Los Angeles. I have found untold stories, like suicides and mental illness. I have two 1st cousins I never knew about from my uncle’s short 1st marriage. Children who died of epidemics or stillborn. Very common 100 years ago. Even found a couple of 3rd cousins who are very wealthy billionaires. Pretty sure they don’t know me and want to know me. And, to tell the truth, it is fun to find out all these facts and uncover some of the more shameful aspects.
@Rob1: Too bad Heinlein didn’t trademark his word invention.
And there it is: A “rapid reaction” military force in every state and territory
No need to even guess why. It’s right there at the link:
This is how you get the Fourth Reich
@Scott:
I feel the same way about the word I invented: Snotsicle. AI claims the first use of the word was by the BBC in 202o. Bullshit. Barf O Rama #1 The Great Puke-Off, by Pat Pollari (your humble narrator) way back in 1996.
See also Diaper Gravy. AI credits some alternative weekly that no one read in 1993. Popularized, supposedly, by the movie Baby Geniuses, which also no one watched. But in 1996 literally dozens of stoned college kids read the phrase for the first time, and had their lives changed. Just another attempt to steal my glory.
But even AI cannot deny that I coined the word, Barficane, along with the Barficane Rating System, modeled on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale.
On the topic of Barf-O-Ramas…
Two US prosecutors suspended for referring to Jan 6ers as “…a mob”.