Cinco de Mayo Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Monday, May 5, 2025
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87 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a retired Professor 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.
Trump is ordering the re-opening of Alcatraz. While he is at it, why not Woolworths.
Rufus T. Firefly: Gentlemen, Chicolini here may talk like an idiot, and look like an idiot, but don’t let that fool you: he really is an idiot. I implore you, send him back to his father and brothers, who are waiting for him with open arms in the penitentiary. I suggest that we give him ten years in Leavenworth, or eleven years in Twelveworth.
Chicolini: I’ll tell you what I’ll do: I’ll take five and ten in Woolworth.
Just one more stupidity added to the interminable stream. Trump is deteriorating mentally, but he has managed to create a team of incompetents who are malicious or delusional as well.
So how bad can it get. This piece I posted yesterday says the “Conservative” media bubble has created a whole swath of the public that is pretty complacent while being seriously deluded also about the competence and goals of the Trumpist regime. (The N Y Post as an example of clueless complacency)
“N Y Post“
@charontwo:
That was a wrong N Y Post link, I wanted this one:
“Gift”
The author:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_W._Mosher
Tariffs on foreign movies.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/04/trump-alcatraz-movies-tariffs-00326220
In comments at LGM
Legal complexities make my poor little head hurt.
It took Pence a while but he got there. Take the win. This is another award that will drive Trump nuts.
Mike Pence defends Constitution after getting Profile in Courage Award
Can somebody check me on this?
Kilmar Abrego Garcia is worth almost nothing to this Administration alive and unreleased.
If he died in prison in El Salvador, the idea of “facilitating his release” would simply evaporate, and an entirely new set of charges or court cases or whatever would have to be raveled, but with no direct testimony. “He might have been MS-13″ is all the government has to defend. On the other side, Bukele will suffer no consequences if KAG dies in prison, so if Bukele wanted to help his buddy, some “horrible accident” would happen.
If he were released, those same court cases would evaporate and subsequent court cases would take literally years to recover a pittance sum. There would be no consequence for Donald – it was his officials, after all, who did the Bad Thing. Likewise, Bukele would lose no face by releasing him to the US: he could declare that the US government admitted it made a mistake and El Salvador had nothing to do with it, just complied with the request to release him.
That means KAG is alive and unreleased for a reason. And since the US government only gains by the opposite condition, that means El Salvador is the one keeping him where he is.
Which almost assuredly means Bukele is asking a king’s ransom to let him out.
How much do we think is “too much” for Trump to pay to make this go away? It’s not even his money he’s playing with, it’s ours. Is it just him trying to save face to not pony up? Or is Bukele asking for something more personally ruinous to Trump? (I’m not particularly imaginative about conspiracies, so I can’t think of what this might be.)
Anyway, if someone else has an explanation for why it would be beneficial to Trump et al for KAG to be alive and still in prison at this point, I’m all ears.
@ptfe:
You are attempting logical and rational thinking, which is a category error when applied to subjects who do not think rationally or logically.
There once was a tinpot dictator
Who had all the brains of a gator
He screamed votes were rigged
While adjusting his wig
And observing the stock market crater
FYI. Putin is doing so much winning.
27 lives per kilometre: How Russia took record losses in Ukraine in 2024
Trump is all for the troops.
For-Profit Colleges Would Be Freed to Scam Veterans Again Under GOP Bill, Advocates Say
@charontwo:
The Hallmark Channel will go immediately out of business!!!
Although a 100% tariff may still be cheaper than filming in the States???
@charontwo:
I posted this on the other thread and I’ll repeat it here. When you posted that yesterday, I looked up Mosher and was shocked to discover that rather than being an economist or someone from business and international relations, he’s a member of one of the most hated (by the right) fields in academia: anthropology. It’s amazing who people will lay down with when they say stuff they agree with.
To be clear, this isn’t a knock on anthropology (especially as most of my graduate work was in that field). That said, I wouldn’t take economic or business advice from me (after all I’ve been proven not to know the difference between an investment banker and a principal investor).
I’m still waiting to see the NYT and WaPo to do a front page WOE IS US…THE PRESIDENT IS SENILE report that certainly would have appeared if Joe Biden had done three incoherent, delusional interviews like Trump did last week. He told Kristen Welker he doesn’t know if he has to defend the constitution; when Terry Moran asked what the Declaration of Independence meant to him, he babbled for 20 seconds and showed he has no idea what the Declaration is about; and the never ending references to 2020 show he isn’t lying about the election – it’s worse – he truly believes he won it, and to that end, he has sicced the DOJ on Chris Krebs for daring to rely on his IT expertise to declare the election was secure. The divisive, delusional rantings of an ignorant dotard are dismissed as “Trump being Trump,” and over in Wingnuttia, the rubes are told that the media and the Dems have to answer for Joe Biden’s cognitive decline being hidden. What a mess!
“PNG”
Trump’s oath of office.
@Charley in Cleveland:
He doesn’t need to understand what Stephen Miller puts in front of him, he just needs to sign it.
Let’s put Alcatraz on the list of things that won’t ever happen, like the 30,000 beds at Gitmo, the Epstein files, and Musk auditing the gold at Fort Knox.
@charontwo: Actually, I’m thinking this through like a mob boss.
I agree that Trump et al will act irrationally because they simply suck at this. Bukele? I dunno, he negotiated a pretty sweet deal to pull in $60M; he tried the “margs at the pool” trick; and he’s been very consistent in nodding along with whatever Trump says, while adding only that he would have to “smuggle” KAG back into the country. Maybe he’s also irrational. Or maybe he’s just a complete asshole.
At this point, Trump is so buried by his own idiocy and assertions that KAG is “evil” and a “gang member” that the entire apparatus would come crashing down if Bukele just, like, shipped him back to the US. The threat of returning him exists while KAG is alive and in El Salvador.
Bukele’s got Trump by the short and curlies, and I can’t imagine he doesn’t know it.
@Daryl:
Alcatraz has no water. So that’s a bit of an issue. If they had water I’d suggest Trump turn it into the bestest condo development ever. Like no one’s ever seen before. Trumpcatraz. Could be even better than Trump Gaza.
To get Alcatraz up and running as a prison would cost all of Elon’s mostly-imaginary DOGE savings.
@charontwo:
We may see people who live near the border cross into Mexico and Canada to catch a movie. Or the end of movie theaters in America. For streaming, use a VPN and set it to a country that’s not insane.
@Kathy: I was just wondering how tariffs would work for a film. I mean, it is not as though film canisters are shipped to a port where a duty can be placed on them. Is there an existing system to track and tax digital product?
Especially when America wants to court preventable diseases, May 5th marks the 4th anniversary of my fist dose of the BioNtech/Pfizer COVID vaccine.
I’d say Trump wants to change the subject from the disastrous “have less stuff, pay more for it” stuff he said and discussion of the economy/tariffs.
So, like the old guy he is, he’s yelling at the clouds about how dumb it was to close Alcatraz.
@Scott:
I was wondering the same thing. To use my example, Hallmark, why not just run your x-mas films on cable from someplace in Canada?
This seems like just another “Doughboy Delusion.”
(trademark applied for)
@Michael Reynolds:
I feel silly even treating this 1/2 way seriously…but…
I’ve been to Alcatraz, years ago, as a tourist. The only way to do this is to scrape it down to the rock and start over. But it’s on all those pesky historic registry’s, so good luck with that.
My guess is that the old Eastwood movie, or maybe the Cage/Connery version, was on TV at 3:00am and the Diaper-clad Doughboy was watching between rage posting on Truth Social. I’m sure it seemed like a brilliant idea to his alzheimer-addled brain.
@Bill Jempty:
Maximum leader seeks to inflict maximum pain by way of his maximum stupidity.
[Note that Steven banned the user that this was directed at and we are now automatically enforcing that ban. -the management]
[Note that Steven banned the user that this was directed at and we are now automatically enforcing that ban. -the management]
@Daryl:
The only upside is for my wife’s occasional writing partner, Gennifer Choldenko, who wrote Al Capone Does My Shirts, and other funny, Alcatraz-connected books. Getting the rock back in the news might sell a couple books.
@Daryl:
The image of that little “Niedermeyer” sadist Stephen Miller seems to hover over Trump’s shoulder at these moments.
@Scott:
@Daryl:
Beats me. Movies tend to be made in several places. There are location shoots (involving multiple locations), soundstage shoots, sometimes re-shoots or re-recordings of dialogue, sound effects, visual effects, and editing; there’s also the matter of writing and re-writing the screenplay.
Then, too, whom do you charge a tariff on? Suppose the movie was shot in locations in Mexico, Canada, and the US, in soundstages in England, plus effects in America, editing in California, and it’s distributed from Hollywood.
How is it collected? By ticket sales? Such sales are broken down and divided between theater and distributor (as far as I know). the latter pays the studio (I assume a percentage of their percentage of ticket sales), and the studio pays royalties to actors and others. Where do you charge how much tax?
@ptfe: “Kilmar Abrego Garcia is worth almost nothing to this Administration alive and unreleased. ”
I would put it as him coming back and testifying is bad for the Trump/Miller administration. They want and need ‘Nacht und Nebel’.
@Charley in Cleveland: What’s your track record on spotting presidential senility?
Would these movie tariffs have impacted Sergio Leone? The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is my favorite movie. I can’t imagine my life without it.
While I am making personal rants, I understand that real ID is now mandatory at airports. What problem does this address? How will we know that it’s working ? It has always been clear that this ever increasing security kabuki can’t possibly be effective against a state sponsored terror attack.
@Mister Lucky:…
Help us all out and give us a dollars and cents figure of how much of taxpayers money it will cost to realize your boyfriend Trump’s totally rational plan to reopen Alcatraz.
@Kathy:
One of the Dirty Harry movies, The Enforcer, had its concluding scenes on Alcatraz. The movie was filmed there.
DW and I took time from other activities, to watch it during our honeymoon in June 1989. Ah the Magellan* hotel in Cebu City Room 444……
*- The Magellan burned down around 5 years later.
@Mister Bluster:
If Alcatraz is too expensive to re-open, maybe Trump can ask his buddy Putin to do the same here. Another possibility- Have the military begin drawing up plans to seize Devil’s Island.
My cousin is a very successful sound engineer headquartered in LA. We visited his studio a few years ago and he described a sound session where he was stitching clips collected from multiple musicians from multiple places, and playing options in real time for his decision makers sitting in NY and Australia while they listened. Where was that production made?
@Barry: I keep hearing people say “testifying against Trump” or whatever, but…like…testifying against his goons about what? (Sure, they probably added him to a Signal chat or two, but who hasn’t been?)
This is an administration that’s gotten away with a shitload of explicitly illegal behavior. They sent a load of people without criminal records to permanent imprisonment in a foreign country! We don’t need KAG to testify that he was put on the plane and shipped to said foreign country – we all know it already. Unless you think they actively tortured him on the way down, which, I suppose? But more likely it was just run-of-the-mill inhumane treatment given by ICE to everyone they kidnap.
I think you’re right that Trump & co would prefer that he die. The best scenario for the Trump Administration is that the current court cases go away and they don’t have the guy they’ve been calling MS-13 around to defend himself in the civil suit that is definitely going to hit them. And if you and I know that, Bukele surely knows it too. Sooooo….why hasn’t he fallen 12 times on a knife in the mess hall? Again, I can only think that Bukele specifically is keeping him around.
So far I haven’t seen anything that convinces me this isn’t just Bukele pressing Trump for a huge bonus.
Like, I’m genuinely trying to figure out another reason, but nobody has served up a convincing answer.
@Joe:
Trump would have been a youth in the early to mid-60’s. I think that’s the world he still lives in. People dealing with declining, age-related mental changes, tend to retreat into safe memories of the past, even though their memories are invariably false to some degree.
So much of what we are enduring now comes from the fact that many elderly people, and most morons, are unable to adjust to the complexities of the current age. They react fearfully to change. Overburdened brains struggling just to tread water, cannot adapt to the present. As senility took my father down he just kept going back again and again to largely false memories. As my MIL spiraled down into Alzheimers she resurrected dead people and replaced living people. Hence her daughter became her sister. She was forever trying to move back to homes she’d lived in 70 years ago.
It’s a retreat to familiarity, to perceived safety and the comfort of simplicity. Trump simply lacks the mental candlepower to understand trade in the 21st century, or culture, or science. Trump’s stubborn stupidity is the retreat to safety of an overtaxed mind.
Something I never quite recognized before: in this OTB forum of unusually intelligent people, there is an absence of nostalgia. Interesting, though not surprising. Intelligence sees nuance and nuance tends to kill nostalgia.
@ptfe:
I think it’s a lot simpler than that:
The so-called administration made a mistake in disappearing Abrego Garcia to the tropical gulag, and they’re never going to admit it much less correct their error. Instead, in felon rapist fashion, they’ll double down and keep going until this poor man is worse than hitelr, stalin, Satan, and trump all combined.
Just look how the actions ascribed to him have gone from misdemeanors to crimes to atrocities.
If the felon wants to open Alcatraz, why not the old Portsmouth Naval Prison.
@charontwo:
That article is just absolutely insane. Like, how disconnected from reality can you be? The comments are even better:
Like, what is the last person going to think when they get to target and shit is missing?
40 years of rightwing info-tainment has absolutely rotted these people’s brains. How is the U.S. going to recover when these morons will consistently demand that their stupidity and wrongness is celebrated?
@Michael Reynolds:
Nostalgia tends to conflate with memories of how one felt when young.
It’s not possible to become younger. everyone know that, whether they admit it or not. So the tendency is to try to change things to what they were then. This may or may not be possible, but it won’t make you any younger.
There are lots of things, other than my youth, that I miss from past decades. Few could be recreated now, and some are even better now.
Wife is bed bound for a while. Any Netflix recommendations? She likes mysteries. Just watched Residence. (Preferable nothing Chinese. Would like to avoid the tariff. Besides, 3 good American mysteries are better than 30 Chinese ones.)
Steve
@ptfe: Do you have any evidence, or just a theory? A theory based on your assumptions about the motivations driving groups of people behind the scenes?
@Sleeping Dog: Because there are no Steve McQueen movies about the Portsmouth Naval Prison.
@Joe:
But there is a Jack Nicholson film, The Last Detail, where the PNP is the journey’s end.
@steve: Netflix streams a lot of Harlan Coben mysteries. Safe and The Stranger are pretty good. Pretty PG, but not as formulaic as a lot of mysteries or whodunnits.
Hope Mrs steve gets back up and about soon!
as I understand, movies make money from ticket sales, streaming fees, digital rental fees, and, believe it or not, still some physical DVD sales.
So, a tariff on foreign movies would make sense to be charged at each point of sale. this means a 100% tariff would net the studios, distributors, and movie theaters, exactly $0.00 after paying the tariff. That is, a $15 ticket would incur $15 in tariff. you can’t even raise prices. A $1,500 ticket would net $1,500 in tariff tax.
Movie theaters might survive, as they make most of their income from concessions (and maybe advertising?). But not having movies to show might hurt popcorn sales.
the same should apply to streaming, and digital sales and rentals
DVD sales might work, as DVD are tangible assets, not intangible ones like a movie. So all movies might have to be released direct to DVD, at prices like, oh, maybe $500-$600 each. But this is good. it would perforce bring back DVD rentals and Blockbuster (have you bought Blockbuster futures yet?). Don’t you miss Blockbuster?
@Fortune: I mean, I expressly laid out that this was a theory, presented the evidence I have (that is: information available to me and you) and why it leads me to this conclusion, and specifically asked people to poke holes in it.
Can somebody check me on this?
…if someone else has an explanation for why it would be beneficial to Trump et al for KAG to be alive and still in prison at this point, I’m all ears.
Like, I’m genuinely trying to figure out another reason, but nobody has served up a convincing answer.
Your comment suggests that the entire premise was lost on you and you think it’s some Great Gotcha to point out the exercise I tell everyone I’m trying to engage in?
The point of this isn’t to congratulate myself in the mirror for being so damn well-dressed, it’s to ask the other people in the room if my ass is hanging out.
@ptfe: But there isn’t any evidence, is there?
@Fortune: Like talking to a wall.
@ptfe: I’m sorry, I don’t want you to feel frustrated. But there isn’t any evidence, is there?
@Joe:
Some of those were done pretty darn well. It was essentially using some of the best studio musicians for re-makes of classics remotely. The best IMO was a reprisal led by John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin, “When The Levee Breaks.” An eclectic set of musicians as there ever wuz… Worth a listen.
@Kathy: If you wanted to pre-emptively discredit anything he says when he comes back, this would be a good way to do it. And in theory if Bukele and Trump are on the same page about this, Bukele could just hold onto him until the Administration thinks he’s a sufficiently soft target to begrudgingly allow back on US soil.
Again, once he’s back, the current court cases related to him disappear.
If they think they just need to damage his rep enough to make his release toxic to either Dems or the judiciary, the exponential increase in slander will probably start to bleed over to his wife and friends, just to be sure that the whole area is smeared.
I do think many people are underestimating how much exposure they will have in a civil suit.
Interesting. I had my antibodies tested for my childhood vaccinations. I have antibodies for everything except mumps. I guess I can feel comfortable until RFK Jr makes mumps great again. 😉
@ptfe: Welcome to the club. Sadly, it’s strictly honorary; we don’t have meetings or parties or awards ceremonies or anything. And so far, we don’t do charitable causes/drives, either. But welcome, all the same.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: Eventually, everyone joins.
@ptfe:
Exactly. There is no point to engaging with someone whose whole game is pretending to not understand.
Excellent political news from Georgia. GOP governor Brian Kemp, who is beating Democrat Jon Ossoff by 3 points in the polls, has decided not to run for Senate. The likely GOP candidate becomes (drumroll) Marjorie Taylor Greene, who trails Ossoff by 17 points in a recent poll. Retaking the Senate will still be a heavy lift, but this may make it not impossible.
@steve:
“Knives Out!” is a winner.
@gVOR10: I understand the difference between an evidence-based theory and a conspiracy theory. I can’t tell if if ptfe or any other commenters understand it though, and it’s important.
@Fortune is that guy who shows up at Cons so he can say, “Actually, in episode 64 the Klingons were blah blah blah,” while the poor bastards on the dais struggle not to roll their eyes and long to be released to the nearest bar.
ETA: I’ve been one of those poor bastards on the dais.
Please change the title of the post. President Trump has issued an executive order that the day only be referred to as “Fifth of May”, in line with his policy that English is America’s official language.
On the ongoing matter of LLM (aka AI), I’ve mentioned I use them to summarize things I write, mostly to check whether I’ve conveyed what I wanted to convey.
Yesterday I was going over a nearly finished story (it needs a few changes and some editing*), and noticed my home version of Word has a more intrusive Copilot presence. It tries to get me to ask Copilot to re-write things the grammar check finds, for instance.
On a whim, I used the function to summarize the whole story. Now, maybe I wrote it all wrong, but actual humans who’ve read it (hat tip @Franklin) did understand it. Copilot made a hash of it.
So, I’ll restate my advice: it works well summarizing a few (4-6 or so) pages of text. Not so much for whole stories.
*I cut out an in-joke, because the scene was superfluous and the joke wouldn’t make sense to most people.
I left the Babylon 5 reference in another scene. That one was shorter and relevant.
@Michael Reynolds:
Fortune reminds me Of Uriah Heep. The Dickens character, not the band.
@Michael Reynolds:
I’ve often wondered why the governor doesn’t close down San Quentin and transfer those prisoners to a new prison built in the Central Valley near Bakersfield (in Kevin McCarthy’s old district). Near Larkspur Landing, on the bay, it’s a great location for new affordable housing units ($1.5M each).
Alcatraz? Open it, rename it Mar-a-Gulag-o.
@ptfe:..Like talking to a wall.
@Steven L. Taylor:..Eventually, everyone joins.
@gVOR10:..pretending
@Just nutha ignint cracker:..we don’t have meetings or parties or awards ceremonies or anything.
We do have an Anthem.
Hello Walls
Faron Young
I missed the fun, and apparently it wasn’t Fortune (sad, he really wants to be the victim, just give it to him). I assume Guanoberry Drew Connor of the zero hedges to give?
@Michael Reynolds: At least you’re a writer of the relevant material (I assume you weren’t asked about Klingons, but something you wrote) and might have an interesting answer to the discrepancy, rather than an actor who can only say “yeah, I guess they changed that.” Either in universe or out.
Also, I would have loved if Star Trek Discovery showed Klingons as perfect ST:TOS Klingons after the time jump to the far, far future. Just to mess with those people.
@CSK: I actually had dinner with a member of the band Uriah Heep! Ken somebody…Jesus that was a flash from the past. I just remember a lot of talk of curry places in London and I am pretty sure there was a bit of cocaine involved. Nashville was a very snowy city back in the day.
@Jax: I’m a little surprised it is easier to test for antibodies rather than just shrug and give you all the vaccines again. Medicine continues to advance! Certain tests get cheaper!
I guess I should ask my doctor when I get around to my annual physical.
@Gustopher: I read a piece a while back where they said certain mid 70’s and early 80’s vaccines weren’t as efficient as they would have liked, and given the current measles status, I figured I better check. I am very much Team Not Dying of a Preventable Disease. 🙂 My doctor was very puzzled as to why I had no mumps antibodies, but my measles and rubella antibodies were strong.
Guessing the vaccine I got as a child fell into that “not as efficient as they would’ve liked” category!
@Gustopher:
I had short-term acclaim in the writing community because I was on a panel with like 9 other YA spec fiction writers. Neal Schusterman I remember, and a bunch of people whose names I’ll remember when I get up to pee at 3 AM. This guy comes up out of the audience to the mike and launches into some tirade on a completely unrelated topic, LA water use, maybe. I was the guy who shut him down. Thus establishing myself as the Alpha. Women swooned.
@Jax:
The MMR vaccine came out in 1971. Previously there were separate shots for measles, mumps, and rubella. In addition, the recommendation for a second dose was issued in 1989. And there’s an MR vaccine that doesn’t cover mumps.
So it may depend when in the 70s you were vaccinated and with what. I suppose the stand alone vaccines might have continued in production for a few years.
@Kathy: That makes sense. I was born in 75 (I’m 50 today!), the first shots I distinctively remember were when I was 5 and going into kindergarten. It was a buttload of shots, I remember that. Both thighs. I really worked that “Ohhhhh my LEGS hurt” the next few days. 😉
In other news of the weird, I called my Mom today, only to be serenaded with the Happy Birthday song by 5 old ladies high on THC gummies. Celebrating my birthday, they said. 😉 😉
My Mom is cooler than yours.
@Jax:
Happy birthday!!!!!
@dazedandconfused: Agreed!
@Jax: Happy Birthday! It’s my wife’s bday as well!
@Steven L. Taylor: Yay, another Cinco de Mayo baby! Happy Birthday to Mrs. Taylor!
@Jax:
Happy Birthday to you, a most interesting person!
@Gustopher:
The benefits of subscribing to a thread early…
@Jax:
Happy birthday!
On vaccines, the efficacy of the MMR varies for every pathogen. I can’t find the numbers just now, but as I recall, it was least effective against mumps (high 80s %, I think, vs over 90% for the other two).
It seems there are no simple answers in biology.
@Jax: Happy tail end of your birthday!
@becca: It’s been a good day, thank you! It rained. I’m gearing up for feeding 60 people on Saturday. I have to drive to another state to get “groceries” in that amount, so country mouse is about to go to the big city!
@Jax: Birthy happday, belated.
@ptfe: They don’t want him talking in public like a regular person. It is not convictions, it’s humanity.