Lisa Hix celebrates the gender-bending women of the Harlem Renaissance:
As it turns out, the blues world was the perfect realm for people who were thought of as “sexual deviants” to inhabit, as it thrived far outside the scope of the dominant white American culture in the early 20th century. In Jazz Age speakeasies, dive bars, and private parties, blue singers had the freedom to explore alternative sexuality, and on a rare occasion, they even expressed it in song.
“In lyrics, they talk about ‘bulldaggers,’ which is they called butch lesbians at that time, or ‘BD women,’ ‘BD’ being short for bulldaggers,” [documentarian Robert Phillipson] says. “There were references to being ‘in the life,’ which was understood to mean same-sex activity.”
In 1930’s “The Boy in the Boat,” Ma Rainey’s protégé Bessie Smith sang, “When you see two women walking hand in hand, just look ’em over and try to understand: They’ll go to those parties–have the lights down low–only those parties where women can go.” A married woman who kept a female lover on the road with her, Smith is known to have exploded at a girlfriend, “I got twelve women on this show, and I can have one every night if I want it.”
The big news—perhaps the biggest Senate news of 2013—is that Democratic Governor Brian Schweitzer decided not to run for Montana’s open Senate seat. Many thought Schwietzer would run and win—polls showed him over 50 percent and he has strong approval ratings. Now there’s no obvious candidate for Democrats in Montana, a state that will vote for a populist, western Democrat, but still voted for Romney by 14 points last November.
With the GOP’s odds suddenly looking much better in Big Sky Country, their road to 51 seats in the Senate is looking much clearer. Republicans will need to pick-up six seats to make Mitch McConnell the Senate Majority Leader, as Democrats will hold 55 Senate seats after Cory Booker wins in October and Vice President Biden would cast a tie-breaking vote in a divided chamber. Republicans start with easy pick-up opportunities in South Dakota and West Virginia, two open seats on GOP friendly turf where Republicans have a strong candidates and Democrats do not.
Republicans might now be close to even-money to win control of the chamber after next year’s elections. Our best guess, after assigning probabilities of the likelihood of a G.O.P. pickup in each state, is that Republicans will end up with somewhere between 50 and 51 Senate seats after 2014, putting them right on the threshold of a majority.
Because Democrats will have to lose a net six seats — quite a lot in a single year, though with plenty of precedents — we would tentatively give the Democrats slightly favorable odds of retaining control with a reduced majority. But we’ve passed the point where a GOP Senate majority is purely theoretical, and we are approaching the point where Republican takeover of the Senate is easily imaginable, dependent on just a medium-sized wave in November 2014.
Ender’s Game, a film based on a book by Orson Scott Card, is stirring considerable controversy in advance of its November 1 release because of his history of opposing gay rights. Money quote from Card in 1990:
Laws against homosexual behavior should remain on the books, not to be indiscriminately enforced against anyone who happens to be caught violating them, but to be used when necessary to send a clear message that those who flagrantly violate society’s regulation of sexual behavior cannot be permitted to remain as acceptable, equal citizens within that society.
Last week, Card issued a statement in defense of the film:
Ender’s Game is set more than a century in the future and has nothing to do with political issues that did not exist when the book was written in 1984. With the recent Supreme Court ruling, the gay marriage issue becomes moot. The Full Faith and Credit clause of the Constitution will, sooner or later, give legal force in every state to any marriage contract recognized by any other state. Now it will be interesting to see whether the victorious proponents of gay marriage will show tolerance toward those who disagreed with them when the issue was still in dispute.
Scott’s statement provedunconvincing to manyopponents. Ampersand maintains that Card is a “vicious homophobe,” but believes “artists shouldn’t be boycotted for their political views.” Likewise, Alexandra Petri pleads, “Don’t punish the work for its creator”:
[G]iven the choice, I’d rather have despicable artists and great art than creators with sedate, tolerant lives who made things that were dull and ugly. If you believe art changes things, of course that’s what you want. The more good art you have, the better for humanity. It expands and deepens your understanding. It forces you into another perspective. There is a moral element in it — even if it’s not overt. As [Oscar] Wilde wrote, “They will not say ‘We will not war against France because her prose is perfect,’ but because the prose of France is perfect, they will not hate the land…. It will give us the peace that springs from understanding.” Start penalizing beautiful things for coming from an ugly place, and you wind up with a less lovely world.
A statement by Lionsgate, the film’s distributor, creates distance between the film and Card:
As proud longtime supporters of the LGBT community, champions of films ranging from GODS AND MONSTERS to THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER and a Company that is proud to have recognized same-sex unions and domestic partnerships within its employee benefits policies for many years, we obviously do not agree with the personal views of Orson Scott Card and those of the National Organization for Marriage. However, they are completely irrelevant to a discussion of ENDER’S GAME. The simple fact is that neither the underlying book nor the film itself reflect these views in any way, shape or form.
Gay marriage advocates are trying to build up a boycott of Ender’s Game because of Orson Scott Card’s personal views on marriage. It seems very strange to me that so many artists and people on the left are supporting the idea that to make art in the mainstream you have to have the right political opinions. This used to be considered the heart of McCarthyism: loyalty oaths for filmmakers as the condition for working in the film industry. (These were imposed by the industry, not the government, remember, in response to public pressure).
It was just a little more than a year ago that the National Organization for Marriage, of which Gallagher is board chair, called for a boycott of Starbucks. I’ve grown to believe that organized boycotts are almost always futile in achieving their aims. That said, I do believe that we are all free to spend our money however we choose. I don’t purchase gasoline at Exxon on Mobil, and I don’t shop at Wal-Mart. And if the gross receipts for Ender’s Game opening night are going to be looked at as some kind of an economic referendum for Card, then I can safely say that I won’t be seeing the movie. It’s my money, and I just don’t feel like paying Card a dime of it, and I hope none of my friends or family members will either.
But if they do — if they want to see the movie because they loved the critically-aclaimed book, or because they’re interested in the star power of Asa Butterfield, Harrison Ford, Ben Kingsley, Aramis Knight, Hailee Steinfeld, Jimmy Pinchak, Viola Davis, and Abigail Breslin — then that’s no skin off of my nose either. Evil people are capable of producing great art, and it’s not axiomatic that their personal evil compromises that art, although I also think that it’s rare for that to occur. I’m not familiar with Ender’s Game to know whether it is tainted with Card’s vindictive viewpoints or not, although I am aware that it does infect other books that he wrote later.
John Sides believes that Republicans would be wise to support comprehensive immigration reform:
I’m not suggesting that the GOP won’t win larger numbers of Latino voters in individual elections than they did in 2012 because of cyclical factors like the economy or idiosyncratic factors like the particular candidates who are running. I’m just suggesting that the GOP should be asking itself, “How do we convert some of these unaffiliated Latino voters into habitual Republican voters?” And that takes more than economic growth or, say, nominating Marco Rubio. … [S]upporting comprehensive immigration reform is a necessary, though not sufficient, step for the GOP to accomplish that goal. Immigration may not be every Latino’s highest priority but, again, I see that issue as important to winning over at least some Latino voters and many Latino opinion leaders.
But Paul Waldman notes that Southern Republicans have little incentive to woo Latinos:
In many places, and in the nation as a whole, the idea that the GOP could become (or stick to being) a nearly completely white party is very bad for Republicans. Consider that nationally, John McCain got 55 percent of the white vote, and Mitt Romney did slightly better, getting 59 percent. It wasn’t enough for either of them to win. But if you’re a Republican in, say, Alabama, where nearly nine out of ten whites vote Republican, you don’t need a single vote from non-whites. An all-white party is just fine with you.
Meanwhile, Keith Humphreys warns that doubling down on the white vote risks having the national GOP follow in the California GOP’s footsteps:
The California lesson for the national GOP? Racially divisive appeals to alienated white voters can work, perhaps especially in a mid-term election. Indeed, doubling down on white voters may well work nationally in 2014. But pursuing such short-term electoral rewards is a route to long-term political oblivion in an increasingly diverse America.
While acknowledging that she could be wrong, McArdle defends her prediction that there’s a 70% chance that the GOP will win the White House and both branches of Congress in 2016:
Since the Civil War, only two Democratic presidents have been succeeded by another Democrat. Both of them–FDR and JFK–accomplished this by dying in office. Since World War II, only four presidents have been succeeded by a member of their party. As I mentioned above, two of them accomplished this by dying in office. One of them accomplished this by resigning in disgrace ahead of his own impeachment. Only one of them, Ronald Reagan, left office at the end of his appointed term and was succeeded by a duly elected member of his own party. Mostly, the White House flips back and forth like a metronome.
Nate Cohn responds by crunching some numbers, concluding that Republicans have a 23% chance of winning both the presidency and both houses:
This is all for illustrative purposes and it isn’t close to perfect. These numbers are outright arbitrary. Some numbers are just missing: Surely the Democrats have some chance of winning the House, and surely the GOP has some shot to take back the Senate in 2016, even if they don’t win it in 2014. But the point is that the GOP doesn’t have anything close to a 75 percent chance of holding all three branches by 2017. Not even close.
First of all, look at how many times the pattern has recurred. In McArdle’s case, we’re talking about times when a president stepped aside (making a same-party succession possible). That happened in 1952, 1960, 1968, 1988, 2000, and 2008. So her pattern, to begin with, is one out of six. That’s perhaps something…but it’s not exactly an Iron Law of Politics, is it? 0 for 10, or 1 for 50, would be a lot stronger.
Then, next, we can check the qualifiers to see if they’re making the pattern look stronger. In this case, there’s one: postwar. If we put that aside and go with “20th century,” then we add 1908, 1920, and 1928 — and get two hits, with TR/Taft and Coolidge/Hoover. Is there some special reason that the postwar era should be different? Not that I can think of, and if we include those the pattern drops to three in nine — hardly something to get worked up about. Note that the more qualifiers you toss in, the more likely you are to be creating the pattern that you’re seeing, so this is an important test.
And Larison points out the danger of Republican overconfidence:
[T]he problem with expecting anti-Democratic voter fatigue in 2016 is that it could delude many Republicans into thinking that they can get away with running another ill-suited nominee with more or less the same uninspired and irrelevant agenda that Romney offered voters last year. One of the things that harmed the Republicans in the last presidential election is that they assumed that they were “supposed” to win because of economic factors. This conveyed the message they felt entitled to winning the election, and it confirmed that they were oblivious to the modest improvement in the economy. Depending on the state of the economy in 2015 and 2016, Republicans may end up setting themselves up for disappointment again if they assume that a majority will be eager to throw the other party out.
Late last week the trailer for Sharknado went crazy viral on Twitter:
Thomas Vitale, SyFy’s executive vice president for programming and original movies, explains how much these films cost:
We pay $750,000 or $800,00 for these movies. They cost about a million and a half to two million. The budgets are often helped by tax grants and incentives from the locations we’re shooting in. We’ve shot all over the world, pretty much every continent except Antarctica. They’re done as coproductions with independent companies. The Asylum made “Sharknado.”
If the Asylum’s films are naive camp, its marketing strategy is all deliberate. “It’s a parody of the studio system,” Latt says. “We’re making fun of the commerce side of this. You made your movie for $200 million? I’ll make it for 20 bucks.”
Consider the Asylum’s line of “mockbusters,” designed to ride the coattails of the zillion-dollar publicity pushes for big-studio films. When DreamWorks studios came out with Transformers in 2007, the Asylum raced out Transmorphers. When Columbia Pictures released Battle: Los Angeles in 2011, the Asylum countered with Battle of Los Angeles. When mockbusters trip legal threats from the big studios—and they usually do—the Asylum will fuss with the cover art and change the titles to pacify the lawyers, then thank the studios for throwing more publicity their way.
Amelia Schonbek points out that The Asylum is making lots of money:
The films’ success ultimately depends on the idea that, as The Asylum’s chief operating officer, Paul Bales, says, “If you are a fan of giant transforming robots, you are going to find everything you can about giant transforming robots.” By this logic, a movie doesn’t have to be good to be successful. It just has to be topical.
So far, the formula has worked: between 2011 and 2012, the studio made twelve million dollars in revenue with a fifteen-per-cent profit margin. As of last March, even after making hundreds of movies, The Asylum has not yet lost money on a single film—making the most important number for this movie zero.
And Meghan Neal looks at how these films cater to viewers’ preferences:
Netflix is one of Asylum’s regular buyers, along with Red Box, Blockbuster, Amazon, and others. And it buys the whole shebang. It scoops up every new release and has the studio’s entire catalog available. And Netflix doesn’t just stop at licensing new releases. In a sense, it’s influencing their being made in the first place. Netflix provides Asylum with data on what its users are interested in, and the studio obliges.
… The unsettling part is that the masses can be terribly off base, and even the most sophisticated algorithm can’t sniff out, you know, actual art. In the words of thisSalon article, viewers are turning into puppets. “Now Netflix is using the same formula to prefabricate its own programming to fit what it thinks we will like,” wrote Salon. “Isn’t the inevitable result of this that the creative impulse gets channeled into a pre-built canal?”
Bragging about their capacity to blackmail or terrify their own government seems, well, at best hyperbolic, and when the threat is made in a foreign newspaper, disturbing.
Worse. By announcing to the entire planet that if any country or faction or war lord or cartel kingpin or terrorist organization or highly-motivated anti-gummint nutjob on Earth wants to see the United States humiliated and its most intimate secrets splashed all over the media and all they have to do is kill one guy, Glenn has effectively hung a target around Snowden’s neck.
Glenn emailed the Dish to dispute the “Reuters article [that] wildly distorted what I said in that interview.” Another reader:
Greenwald says (1) that Snowden took the “blueprints” because they’re necessary in order to prove “that what he was saying was true,” but (2) that Snowden doesn’t want the blueprints to be disclosed. But how can Snowden rely on the documents to corroborate what he’s saying unless he discloses them?
In our latest video from the Arab world expert, Hanna notes how frequently the West oversimplifies Islamism:
Along these lines, H.A. Hellyer points out the overly binary way that last week’s violence has been interpreted, both in and outside of the Egypt:
Pro-Morsi campaigners insist that the Muslim Brotherhood is non-violent and has no weaponry, and they focus all attention on the killings that took place at the pro-Morsi sit-in in front of the Republican Guard, at the hands of state forces. On the other side, anti-Morsi commentators argue that the Brotherhood is essentially a militia; that the sit-in was armed; and that the Brotherhood tries to redirect attention to the deaths that have taken place elsewhere at the hands of pro-Morsi activists. The media in Egypt is primarily imbued with the latter, with little nuance — the international media and pro-Morsi outlets in the region are generally concerned only with the first narrative.
Again, reality lies in between, and with elements of both.
The Muslim Brotherhood undoubtedly has weaponry — such was evident when the headquarters was attacked during the uprising. However, there is really no evidence that heavy weaponry was at the sit-in — at best, according to eye-witnesses and civil rights groups, the weaponry was mediocre and much of it homemade. Certainly, it would be difficult for anyone to justify the break up of a sit-in, resulting in dozens of casualties, with the level of firepower used by the army. One suspects that privately the state agrees, and that this was a mistake arising from a tense situation and probably Morsi-supporters resisting arrest — but we will probably never hear that line in any state broadcast. At the same time, the reality is that on top of this tragedy, many civilians have been attacked, and killed, by pro-Morsi forces around the country in the past week — and the killings are often sectarian.
Of course, recognizing the truth of both narratives, at the moment, is unthinkable. Sins of omission, as well as commission, are rife — either due to unfamiliarity with Egypt altogether, or clearly partisan agendas. Objective media is, unfortunately, rare indeed. The importance of that kind of coverage and analysis cannot be overestimated at such a crucial time — not simply because good information is rare to come by, but because so much poor disinformation is so utterly common. On Egypt, right now, truth really is the greatest victim. It is a victim worth rescuing, and right now, it seems that the best source of information is going to be direct access to eyewitnesses of particular controversies, as well as civil rights and human rights organizations.
Michael Wahid Hanna is a Senior Fellow at The Century Foundation, where he works on issues of international security, international law, and US foreign policy in the broader Middle East and South Asia. He appears regularly on NPR, BBC, and al-Jazeera. Additionally, his Twitter feed is a must-read for anyone interested in Egyptian politics. Our ongoing coverage of the current events in Egypt is here. Michael’s previous answers are here. Our full Ask Anything archive is here.
Jamelle Bouie says that Republicans shouldn’t give up on the Latino vote just yet:
If I were advising Republicans, I would push them to work hard to counter the perception that they’re hostile to Latinos and oppose their inclusion to political life. It doesn’t have to be comprehensive reform. Support for something like the DREAM Act–in addition to something that makes room for more high-skilled immigration–would do the trick.
House Republicans seem to be doing just that with their newly announced (and tentatively named) KIDS Act. Elise Foley reports:
[The bill] would be a Republican alternative to the Dream Act that failed in the Senate in 2010, and would allow undocumented young people to become legal residents.
Although offices for Cantor and Goodlatte would not get into details or the timetable, Cantor has said previously that undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children should be allowed to become citizens. The KIDS Act would be one of several bills that the House could consider on immigration reform as part of its piecemeal approach. So far, Republicans seem far more comfortable with legalizing so-called Dreamers than they do with a path to citizenship for their parents.
[J]ust a month ago, Rep. Steve King added an amendment to the Homeland Security funding bill written to end a policy begun by Barack Obama in 2012–“deferred action” on deporting illegal immigrants under 30. It was seen as a pseudo-DREAM Act, and the King amendment was seen as a pseudo-repeal of psuedo-DREAM. It passed, 224-201, with all but six Republicans voting with just three red-district Democrats.
What happened? The Senate bill really did put some fear into House Republicans; the King amendment is going to have to be explained as blow against executive overreach, not as anything to do with Dreamers.
The Dish 