TAPPED

THE HAGEE APPEASEMENT PLAYBOOK.

2008-05-16T21:51:16Z

Over at HuffPo, I break down a pattern with which long-time Prospect readers, particularly followers of the Pastor Strangelove chronicles, already know: that Bush's speech smearing Obama as this century's Neville Chamberlain is straight out of John Hagee's playbook.

Who has a pastor problem now? McCain is trolling for votes by propping up the spiritual credentials of the pastor who equates diplomacy with coddling Nazis and thinks that war is a grand idea that God not only relishes, but requires. What would Jesus do, indeed.

--Sarah Posner

GAY MARRIAGE AND THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT.

2008-05-16T21:45:12Z

Andrew Sullivan asks "where's the fierce urgency of now?" with regards to Barack Obama and gay marriage, the movement towards which he describes as "The Civil Rights Movement of our time".

I think it's useful to remember that the Civil Rights Movement was not lead by elected officials, but actually by community leaders who engaged in very serious and prolonged arm-twisting of elected officials and pressure government institutions in their quest for equality under the law. I think criticism of Obama is warranted on this front, but I also think it's silly to expect politicians to play roles they've not historically been known to play. Obama is no MLK, and he's not even really a leader in the traditional civil rights mold. Those kinds of leaders need to not be able to care what voters think.

-- A. Serwer

GAMING THE GENERAL ELECTION AND THE VEEPSTAKES.

2008-05-16T21:15:26Z

Since I argued yesterday against Jim Webb for VP, I suppose I ought to argue in favor of someone else. And the best choice I see is Bill Richardson.

If Richardson were running for the U.S. Senate seat in New Mexico, I wouldn't want him in the VP slot for the same reason as Webb -- to have a strong Dem voice in a strong Senate majority. But Richardson is pretty much a free agent at this point (unless he desires to fulfill the rest of his second term as governor), so it makes sense to look at what he would bring to an Obama ticket. The answer, it seems to me, is that Richardson could bring the Southwest with him, and the electoral votes of New Mexico, and possibly, Nevada. Winning both of these states is not critical for Obama to win the general election but he needs to win one of them (each are worth five electoral votes).

The above map, which describes a 278-260 Obama win, is based on the current poll averages available at fivethirtyeight.com. Basically, it show Obama winning the states Kerry won in 2004 plus Iowa, Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico. Obama outpolls McCain consistently in Iowa, so I'm going put that in his win category for the time being. If Obama loses Colorado but wins the other three states, it's a 269-269 tie. But since there's no VP pick that could help him in Colorado, it only makes sense to see who could help him in the Southwest, where his current lead is thin.

Obviously, all this changes if Ohio or Florida suddenly comes into play. But that would be gaming a Hillary Clinton win, which wouldn't require the Southwest. As of today, the above map is how Obama wins. And unless that changes, Bill Richardson makes a lot of sense strictly from the point of view of electoral strategy.

--Mori Dinauer

DEEP CAMPAIGN THOUGHT OF THE DAY.

2008-05-16T20:50:43Z

I realize it plainly says "Senator John Edwards endorses Barack Obama" but doesn't this image on Obama's web site look like a pair of running mates? Discuss.

--Mori Dinauer

OIL WILL LAST FOREVER AND IF IT DOESN'T NOBODY KNOWS WHEN IT WILL RUN OUT.

2008-05-16T20:33:45Z

Jim Manzi, at the Corner:

This is pure emotionalism. Global warming doesn’t come close to threatening “a whole way of life”. Its expected impact is to make a much richer world 100 years from now ~3 percent poorer. Protecting ourselves against the outside risk of much worse effects mostly requires some prudent investments in fallback technologies as insurance. Crude oil production will reach a maximum at some point in the future. I don’t know when that will happen, and the record of those who have tried to forecast this not been very good over the past 70 years or so. When that happens, the price will probably rise. We will develop technological alternatives and find substitute fuels. (emphasis mine)

There's plenty to mock in this, but I wanted to look at the part in bold. As you probably know, in 1956 a geologist with Shell Oil named M. King Hubbert made a forecast that oil production in the United States would peak sometime in the late 1960s or early 70s. Oil production in the United States did peak in 1970, so it isn't really defensible to say that nobody knows when world oil production will peak. The only thing holding back a reasonable prediction, it would seem, is the reluctance of autocracies like Saudi Arabia to release accurate data about production, reserves and remaining supply.

Oh, and since oil now costs over $120 a barrel, does that mean oil has peaked, Jim? It never ceases to amaze me how willing people are to ignore the realities of simple arithmetic and lazily assume that technology will save us all. And no, I don't think the world is going to end because of high oil prices, but I don't think it can be denied either that the transition from the carbon-based economy is going to be a fundamental one.

--Mori Dinauer

GIRLS TOLD THEY CAN'T ATTEND PROM WITHOUT MALE DATE.

2008-05-16T20:01:06Z

Amidst all the excitement about yesterday's California ruling legalizing gay marriage, it's worth remembering that reactionary heteronormativity, while on the decline, isn't going away. The interim principal of an all-girls Catholic high school in Staten Island, New York has declared that junior girls may not attend their prom next week unless they are accompanied by a male escort. Watch a local TV news report here. I know. It's almost too 1950s to be believed. Parents are pissed, while students have been barred by the school from speaking to the media. Principal Florence Bricker, what are you thinking? Don't you want your students to grow up into assertive, independent young women capable of having a great, safe night without relying on men? Or don't you?

--Dana Goldstein

FOR PROFIT DETENTION.

2008-05-16T19:20:07Z

One of the more disconcerting aspects of the growth and use of immigrant detention centers is the enlisting of private prison corporation CCA to handle immigrant detainees. I was discussing Dana Priest and Amy Goldstein's recent immigration story with a friend of mine named Renee Feltz who told me has been doing her own extensive reporting on private rather than federal detention centers.

If you think the WaPo report on substandard medical care in federal immigration facilities is shocking, consider that the already strapped Department of Immigration Health Services was forced to take over health care in a San Diego CCA facility because they were trying to maximize profits by skimping on medical care for detainees. ICE cited CCA for failing to maintain their phone system so that detainees could communicate with legal counsel, when even ICE provides access to lawyers under circumstances described by the Post as less than what "convicted murderers in maximum security prisons" get. A Senate bill introduced in August designed to make private detention facilities more transparent hasn't made it out of committee (I'm also kind of shocked at the main sponsor, but good for him.)

I'm sure that there are "national security" and efficiency arguments that can be made for using detention centers to this degree. The government can argue that people who are detained are less likely to flee, and the usual post-9/11 boilerplate that is used to justify human rights violations of all kinds. There's probably a school of thought that says making these places hell makes immigrants less likely to come back. In the same vein, an immigrant trying to fight deportation might simply accept it if it means he's going to have to remain under such conditions. A typical conservative strategy is to starve government programs by underfunding them, but in this case underfunding immigrant prisons might be seen as a deterrent to immigration itself. Who wants to try to sneak back into the United States for whatever reason if you're just going to end up in one of these places again?

Obviously not all of this is exactly news, but since the Federal government clearly can't afford to do detainment properly or contract to someone who will, it should be considering other options other than throwing people into draconian facilities.

--A. Serwer

INVADING BURMA -- ALL THE RAGE WITH PUNDITS.

2008-05-16T18:32:39Z

Let's see. First the Times ran an "op-classic" on Sunday, a 1990 think piece on the wisdom of invading places like Myanamar. On Wednesday, Robert Kaplan pondered the wisdom of such an intervention on humanitarian grounds, prompting Josh Marshall to remark, "But I have an even simpler idea. Why don't we not invade any more countries for a while?" George Packer took it up at his New Yorker blog, observing that "It seems that there’s no such thing as an uninvited humanitarian mission of foreign soldiers that doesn’t turn into something more -- something ugly." before noting in the very next paragraph that "And yet this might be what’s necessary in Burma." Lisa Schifffren provided the predicable right-wing response at the Corner: "On the speculation about a humanitarian invasion of Burma, it's clear that NRO readers are on to the fact that liberals will only use force when our own national interests are not at stake."

Correct me if I'm missing other conversations about the wisdom of invading foreign countries, but I think the take-home point is that few in the opinion-generating business are really serious about re-evaluating the wisdom of invading and occupying other countries. It's always going to be premised on either our national "interest" or security from the right, and always going to be premised on humanitarianism from the left. During the dark days of the run-up to the Iraq War it really became clear that the only daylight between a neocon hawk and a liberal interventionist was the labels. Now that that war has exposed the folly of using the blunt instrument of the military for whatever purpose suits our political zeitgeist, it's a race to differentiate the liberals from the neocons, without ever seriously taking stock of the unprecedented decline in American moral authority in the world, not to mention our increasing inability to actually carry out and fund these foreign policy adventures. Like it or not, idealism is dead in American foreign policy, and apparently only the pundits didn't get memo.

--Mori Dinauer

OBLIGATORY COMIC BOOK NERDBLOGGING.

2008-05-16T17:40:54Z

Spencer Ackerman is right that the complex version of Tony Stark in the comic book version of Iron Man can't lend itself to the big screen--Marvel's Civil War is an allegory of government overreaching that culminates in the symbolic death of American freedom with Captain America's assassination and that would still be a little heavy several films down the line.

Favreau's Iron Man is merely a critique of unregulated capitalism, a brief and shallow admission that just maybe America might kinda sorta bear some responsibility for some of it's current problems. But the film doesn't even come close to suggesting that we should stop sticking our nose into other countries' business, after all, superheroes need people to save.

Besides updating the Iron Man story for a contemporary audience, the Afghans in the film are only there to rationalize Stark's imperialist tendencies. Whether its Dr. Yinsen sacrificing his life so Stark can escape (a classic Magic Negro style moment), terrorists murdering and pillaging or innocents crying out for help, their only purpose in the film is to argue for Iron Man's (or in a broader sense) America's intervention. Even Obadiah Stane's trading Stark weapons to terrorists is an allegorical plea for further American involvement, an invocation of the Pottery Barn rule.

Ultimately the point of Favreau's Iron Man is that even though we may have screwed up, it's still our responsibility to save everyone from themselves. No where in comic book mythology has there been a hero who respects the free will of mortals enough to hang up his tights or titanium armor, and America's love affair with the genre probably has something to do with the fact that we feel something of the same way. Watching folks flip through the catalog of new countries we might invade this year, it's pretty clear that infectious desire for foreign policy "heroism" in the short term that Ackerman correctly identifies as "corrosive" is still pretty prevalent among some prominent foreign policy folks.

In any case, using my unimpeachable objective status as a guest blogger I'll cosign the editor's recommendation, Ackerman's "Iron Man Versus the Imperialists" is a good read.

--A. Serwer

MORE ON MCCAIN'S SPEECH

2008-05-16T16:54:26Z

When asked about his speech yesterday, John McCain says explicitly that he was not setting a timetable for withdrawal -- he was "talking about victory." McCain said "[S]aying you are withdrawing" is "setting a date for surrender."

This should come as news to the Wall Street Journal, whose headline is "McCain Names Drawdown Date."

--Jordan Michael Smith

MULTICULTURE CLUB.

2008-05-16T16:26:58Z

Amanda Marcotte writes about today's multicultural music:

The urge to borrow and take inspiration from the music of other cultures is nothing new, of course. The Beatles famously helped introduce the sitar to American and British pop music after they gained an interest in India. The band Santana made a splash bringing Latin American rhythms to American rock music in the late 1960s. Musicians in the 1950s, mostly African American at first, borrowed some of the sounds from country-western music and injected them into R&B to create what became known as rock ?n' roll. R&B itself developed from two separate arms of black musical tradition, combining upbeat jazz riffs with blues rhythms. In the Caribbean, musicians were hearing R&B and rock ?n' roll and manipulating them into the local sounds that became ska, rocksteady, and reggae.
But the concept of blending the music of various cultures kicked into high gear in the 1970s. Punk musicians in the U.K. like The Clash, The Specials, and The Slits began to borrow not just a sound here or a sound there from Caribbean music but to lift entire genres like reggae and ska and put a punk spin on them. In the U.S., the jazz fusion band Mind Power decided it would rather be a punk band and ended up combining punk with reggae to create a distinctive and widely copied sound called hardcore. In the late 1970s, bands like the Talking Heads began to borrow heavily from traditional African music for their rhythms, creating hits like "Life During Wartime."

Read the rest and comment here. And subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they're published.

--The Editors

BLOWBACK.

2008-05-16T15:57:21Z

The massive turnout of black voters this year is a beautiful thing, especially in the South, where black folks are making it known that there will be consequences to using them as scapegoats:

Between an initial vote on April 22, when Mr. Childers fell just shy of getting the 50 percent he needed to win, and Tuesday’s runoff election, when he won with a decisive 54 percent, the Republican campaign to link Mr. Childers with Mr. Obama intensified, with a barrage of advertisements specifically on that theme. Perhaps not coincidentally, vote totals in counties with large black populations went up sharply between those two dates. In Marshall County, which is 48.8 percent black, the votes nearly doubled, to 5,083. In Clay County, 56.8 black, nearly 1,500 more people voted, pushing the total to 3,898.
The attacks on Mr. Obama clearly had a galvanizing effect, local officials said. “The people I talked to said, ‘Man, I don’t like that they’re trying to use Obama against him,’ ” said Eric Powell, a black state senator who helped in voter turnout efforts. “It actually helped Travis.”

The Davis ad didn't feel just like an attack on Obama, but on black folks in general. Enthusiasm for Obama, (and blowback from racist campaigning) could make him competitive in southern states like North Carolina.

What the Times article doesn't say is what Republicans will do to counter the growing influence of black voters in the South. We'll probably see a concerted effort across the board to institute policies that have been successful in disenfranchising black voters, basically the kinds of tactics that have made Hans von Spakovsky such a popular guy in the Bush Administration. (While von Spakovsky's nomination to a seat on the FEC has been blocked, he's still been making the rounds.) Efforts to get voter-ID laws like Indiana's passed in other states in time for November are already underway, although some won't be passed in time. Numbers like these should motivate Democratic lawmakers to get same-day voter registration laws passed as soon as possible, to make sure folks who want to vote can and to diminish the effect of deceptive mailings, robocalls, and other time-worn vote suppression tactics that are likely to make appearances in the Fall.

--A. Serwer

THE IRON MAN DOCTRINE.

2008-05-16T15:39:45Z

Spencer Ackerman places the box-office hero in the context of an evolving critique of American militarism:

For years, Iron Man's lesson was just that simple: Stark's keen technological mind represented the secret of American vitality; Iron Man's contribution to the nation's defense was an obligation that his gifts bestowed. America, under this Cold War logic, is powerful because America is inquisitive because America is free because America is good. Doesn't America have the right to defend itself? And shouldn't America use its endowment to the benefit of mankind? If so, doesn't that mean that when Wong-Chu comes to take over a South Vietnamese village, America would be irresponsible not to vanquish him with a souped-up transistor? In that vein, Iron Man's adversaries were fiends like the Red Barbarian, a Soviet general and spymaster who lived up to his nickname by bludgeoning his doltish subordinates with a ham hock.
But before long, the lessons of Vietnam sunk in on the comics juggernaut. Perhaps the idea that all the United States had to do was build bigger gadgets of disaster to use on a complicated world was hopelessly flawed. Perhaps Iron Man was symptomatic of the rot. Perhaps, by holding up a mirror to U.S. policies, Iron Man could become a vehicle for cleansing the country of its Cold War hang-ups. Marvel set to work reworking the character and its themes.

Read the rest and comment here. And subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they're published.

--The Editors

CANDIDATE REACTIONS TO THE CALIFORNIA GAY MARRIAGE RULING.

2008-05-16T15:13:34Z

As Ben Smith notes, all three candidates have said the issue should be left up to the states, but only John McCain actively supported a gay marriage ban in his own state, Arizona. That initiative failed at the polls in 2006, making Arizona the first state in the nation to reject such a measure once it reached the ballot.

In any case, I was fascinated yesterday by the fact that the Obama campaign quickly sent out a press release in response to the California ruling, but the Clinton campaign did not. Here's what the Obama folks had to say:

Barack Obama has always believed that same-sex couples should enjoy equal rights under the law, and he will continue to fight for civil unions as President. He respects the decision of the California Supreme Court, and continues to believe that states should make their own decisions when it comes to the issue of marriage.

~~Still no word from Clinton, who's known as a longstanding ally of LGBT groups.~~

--Dana Goldstein

Update: Apologies -- although the Clinton campaign has not released a press release on the ruling, they have made the following statement to the Associated Press:

[Clinton] believes that gay and lesbian couples in committed relationships should have the same rights and responsibilities as all Americans and believes that civil unions are the best way to achieve this goal. As president, Hillary Clinton will work to ensure same-sex couples have access to these rights and responsibilities at the federal level. She has said and continues to believe that the issue of marriage should be left to the states.

THE MATTHEWS SMACKDOWN.

2008-05-16T14:45:32Z

As entertaining as it was to watch Chris Matthews light up Right Wing Radio host Kevin James (who was apparently drafted into the Republican Noise Machine straight out of the WWE), it wasn't really about the content of what James was saying. Matthews challenged James to explain his comparison of Barack Obama to Neville Chamberlain, and James had no idea what Chamberlain did. But Matthews didn't challenge James in the name of accuracy or clarity, he was simply pissed that James was on his show yelling his head off like a natural fool.

This wasn't a great journalistic moment, it was a David Broder moment; James came onto Hardball and trashed the place, and that wasn't his place. So Matthews got angry. It isn't the kind of thing that indicates a departure from embracing the kind of Right Wing themes that have made Matthews so infamous among some liberals, and if James had been polite, he would have gotten away with spewing as much bile as he wanted. It's too bad reporters can't seem to get as angry about their shows being used as an echo chamber by Pentagon propagandists posing as objective "military analysts".

--A.Serwer