Month: August 2015

Jeb!’s got a problem

by digby

I wrote about Jeb’s struggle  explaining what the hell happened with Iraq today for Salon.  Here’s an excerpt:

Bush says “we do not need … a major commitment” of American ground troops in Iraq or Syria to fight against the Islamic State — at least for now. But he proposes embedding U.S. soldiers and Marines with Iraqi units, which basically means leading them into battle. He proposes much greater support for Kurdish forces, which are loath to fight in the Sunni heartlands where the Islamic State holds sway. And he wants the establishment of no-fly zones and safe havens in Syria, as a way to battle both the Islamic State and dictator Bashar al-Assad.

That all sounds like a “major commitment” of something. And none of it addresses the fundamental problem in Iraq, which George W. Bush also failed to grasp: the lack of political reconciliation among Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds. Bush 43’s vaunted “surge” was a Band-Aid that masked, but did not heal, this underlying wound.

There hasn’t been a lot of recent polling on the public perception of the Iraq War, but there has been some. And that polling suggests that — especially in a Republican primary election — the war is not the toxic topic that it was in 2008.

In June, NBC News and the Wall Street Journal included support for the Iraq War in a long list of questions about how people would view candidates who held particular positions. For 64 percent of respondents, having backed the Iraq War either didn’t affect their view of the candidate or made them view the candidate more favorably.

More telling is a survey the same month from Gallup. The polling agency compared the number of people who said the war was a mistake in February 2014 to the percentage saying that now, and broke out the results by party. Both Democrats and independents were more likely to say that the war wasn’t a mistake than in the past — but only 31 percent of Republicans thought it was a mistake at all. Leaving 69 percent with either no opinion or a favorable one. In a 17-person race, support from 69 percent of the electorate is surely more than welcome.

Lying to themselves at you
by Tom Sullivan

One hears repeatedly that questioning people’s motives is rude. Impolitic. Impolite. Paul Waldman a few years ago posted that motive questioning is toxic because it is akin to calling people liars and bad people. Then again:

I’m not saying that on certain occasions it isn’t reasonable to question someone’s motives. In fact, voter ID laws offer one such case. The idea that all these Republican legislatures set out to address the non-existent problem of people impersonating other people at the polls just because they care so deeply about the integrity of the ballot, and did so in a way that purely by accident has the potential to significantly reduce turnout by some of the people most likely to vote Democratic, is more than a little hard to swallow. I’ll absolutely grant that Democrats dislike voter ID laws primarily for the same political reason, because it means their voters may find it difficult to vote. But on the substantive merits, Democrats also happen to be right.

Perfect example. In fact, on several occasions federal courts have questioned the stated rationale behind passing these laws as without substance, including just days ago in the Texas case. But one of the most frustrating things about attempting to engage “a Republican argument” is precisely how often the arguments seem disingenuous. It is not as if rank-and-file activists are actively lying about their motives. It is that they have never questioned them themselves. They have simply heard and regurgitated the talking points so often that they believe their own bullshit and are beyond questioning it. The frustrating thing is not that they are lying to you. It is that in effect (to borrow a Colbert construction), they are lying to themselves at you.

Likely, most True the Vote activists really believe that on Election Day — unlike honest, decent, Real Americans — hordes of would-be felons stand in line at polling places waiting for their chance to commit felonies punishable by five years in prison, just to add a single extra vote to their candidate’s total. It’s hard to keep a straight face when they insist that’s why we need to require photo IDs.

Certain topics I seldom comment on because I don’t feel best qualified to. Women’s issues, for example. Making an exception here as it is directly related.

Over the weekend, Margo Kaplan, an associate professor at Rutgers Law School, asked why anti-abortion groups don’t target in vitro fertilization clinics. IVF clinics destroy embryos all the time. Want to donate embryos left over from fertility treatments for medical research? Just fill out a simple form. There are no questions about competence. No waiting periods. No mandatory videos. With rare exceptions, the government stays out of your decision. She writes:

The disparity between how the law treats abortion patients and IVF patients reveals an ugly truth about abortion restrictions: that they are often less about protecting life than about controlling women’s bodies. Both IVF and abortion involve the destruction of fertilized eggs that could potentially develop into people. But only abortion concerns women who have had sex that they don’t want to lead to childbirth. Abortion restrictions use unwanted pregnancy as a punishment for “irresponsible sex” and remind women of the consequences of being unchaste: If you didn’t want to endure a mandatory vaginal ultrasound , you shouldn’t have had sex in the first place .

It’s the non-procreative sex they really hate, writes Kaplan. The same conservatives who rail against abortion also oppose insurance coverage for contraception. It promotes consequence-free sex outside marriage.

IVF patients make less-attractive targets because we don’t challenge the expectation that women want to be mothers. Abortion, on the other hand, thwarts conservative ideals about a woman’s proper role as a wife and mother. This may be why, counterintuitively, I have greater freedom to decide what to do with an embryo in a petri dish than a pregnancy in my own body.

There is much more there involving issues of class and race, none of which appears in the usual anti-abortion rhetoric. Not that anyone would admit in public or to themselves. You should read the whole thing.

Sunday perspective on our wonderful species

by digby

Huh:

If we’re going to be pointing fingers of blame for the savageness of the 20th Century — and you know you want to — raw numbers are probably not enough. There have been plenty of episodes of concentrated brutality that don’t show up on the list above simply because the affected population is so small. Meanwhile, a major reason that Russia and China stand so prominently at the top of the list is that they have so many potential victims to begin with. Therefore, I’ve taken all the episodes of mass killing of the 20th Century and divided them by the population of the country that suffered the losses.

If you look carefully at the chart with the intention of determining which race, religion or ideology has been the most brutal, you’ll see a pattern emerge. It’s quite a startling pattern, so I’d rather you find it by yourself. Go back and take a second look. I’ll meet you at the next paragraph after I explain that, honestly, I did not manipulate the data. I simply took the most likely death toll (military and civilian) among the natives of each country (such as all the South Vietnamese — ARVN soldiers, civilians and Viet Cong — who were killed in the Vietnam War), and divided it by the population of that country (prewar). I didn’t take, say, only the military dead, or only the victims of genocide. I didn’t arbitrarily decide to split one horror into two in order to make each seem smaller (the only borderline case is that I calculated the Russians dead from WW2 and Stalin separately. A judgement call.), or eliminate countries of a certain size. No, I had no predetermined point to prove. I did the math and let the chips fall where they would. (Here are the raw numbers if you want to check behind me.) 

That’s why I was so startled to discover that there is absolutely no pattern to the chart. If I had simply picked 25 countries out of a hat, I could not have gotten a more diverse spread than we’ve got here. We’ve got rich countries and poor countries; industrial and agrarian; big and small. We’ve got people of all colors — white, black, yellow and brown — widely represented among both the slaughterers and the slaughterees. We’ve got Christians, Moslems, Buddhists and Atheists all butchering one another in the name of their various gods or lack thereof. Among the perpetrators, we’ve got political leanings of the left, right and middle; some are monarchies; some are dictatorships and some are even democracies. We’ve got innocent victims invaded by big, bad neighbors, and we’ve got plenty of countries who brought it on themselves, sowing the wind and reaping the whirlwind. Go on — take a third look. Find any type of country that is not represented among the agents of a major blooding, and probably the only reason for that is that there aren’t that many countries in that category to begin with (There are no Hindu or Jewish countries on the chart, but then, there’s only one of each on the whole planet, and they’re both waiting in the wings among the next 25.). 

In a way, it’s rather disheartening to realize that we can’t smugly blame the brutality of the century on the Communists, or the imperialists, or the Moslem fundamentalists, or the godless. Every major category of human has done it’s share to boost the body count, so replacing, say, Moslem rulers with Christian rulers, or white rulers with black rulers, is not going to change it at all.

As I’ve said here for many years: It’s not a cultural, racial, religious or national problem.

It’s a species problem. 

h/t

Monsters in our midst

by digby

This literally made my stomach churn. This man is a total fucking barbarian:

During an appearance on CNN’s State of the Union this morning, Mike Huckabee was asked about “Mainumby,” a ten-year-old Paraguayan girl who became pregnant after she was raped by her stepfather. The girl, whose name is a pseudonym, was denied an abortion and forced to carry the baby to term, despite objections from medical experts.

When CNN host Dana Bash asked Huckabee if he would have allowed Mainumby to have an abortion, Huckabee responded with a stock answer: “Does it solve the problem by taking the life of an innocent child?”

Bash then asked Huckabee if it would be easy “looking in the eyes of a 10-year-old girl and saying, ‘You had a horrible thing happen to you, and you’re going to…carry it out for the next nine months.’”

Huckabee responded: “No, it isn’t easy. I wouldn’t pretend it’s anything other than a terrible tragedy. But let’s not compound the tragedy by taking yet another life.”

His rationale for such a decision is two-fold Huckabee explained, it protects both fetus and mother: “There are two victims. One is the child; the other is that birth mother who often will go through extraordinary guilt years later when she begins to think through what happened — with the baby, with her. And again, there are no easy answers here.”

No! It does not “protect” that girl. That’s fatuous nonsense. It makes it a thousand times worse for her. He’s worried about her psyche in the future so he thinks after going through rape that pregnancy and childbirth at the age of 10 is better? I’m incredulous.

That little 10 year old girl is being punished by patriarchal overlords and zygote worshippers for having the misfortune of getting pregnant after being criminally assaulted by a child molester. And forcing her to go through nine months of pregnancy and childbirth makes Mike Huckabee and everyone who thinks like him criminal child molesters as well. That seems to be a common attribute of these ultra conservative religious types.

It would not have been a tragedy to abort that fetus. It is a terrible tragedy what they all consciously did to that poor little girl.

I hope Huckabee and all his superstitious ilk are right and there is a hell. Because if all this is a test for the qualification for the afterlife, he’s going there. Too bad about the hell that 10 year old has to live on earth because of primitive jerks like him.

Oh, and add Marco Rubio and Scott Walker to the list hellbound monsters too.

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Carson on anti-semitism. Oy gevalt!

by digby

John Amato sat through today’s Fox News interview with noted brain surgeon Ben Carson so you don’t have to.

His entire appearance was of the head banging, brain cell destroying variety, but I’ll focus on one segment now because it was so egregious.

Dr. Carson demonstrated that he has a lot to learn about foreign policy and that he doesn’t understand what the term anti-Semitism means. Carson, wrote an article in The Jerusalem Post, in which he said President Obama is anti-Semitic:

When asked to defend his remarks by Wallace, he obviously couldn’t and sounded like a dummy in the process.

Wallace: It’s one thing to argue your policy differs from Israel, but you say in your article– and you’re talking about domestic critics in this country– that there’s anti-Semitic themes there. What specifically is anti-Semitic in what the president is saying?”

Carson: I think anything is anti-Semitic that is against the survival of a state that is surrounded by enemies and by people who want to destroy them. And to sort of ignore that and to act like everything is normal there and that these people are paranoid, I think that’s anti-Semitic.

So, to recap. Ben Carson believes that if you disagree with his policy positions regarding Israel, you’re anti-Semitic.

Click over for the vid.  This is, to put it mildly, and extremely sweeping definition of the term.  

Keep in mind, folks, that Carson is sitting at number 2 in most of the GOP presidential primary polls. If you add it up, braindead amateurs Trump and Carson represent a strong plurality of the GOP base. If you add in the crackpots, cranks and overrated scions of overrated families who say equally ridiculous things every day, it’s a huge majority.

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Anything Can Happen


by digby

You never know what kind of curve ball life is going to throw at you. You could have an accident. Even rich people sometimes wind up with nothing in this crapshoot of a life.  And a whole lot of us just plug along, doing our best and come to the end of our lives and find we don’t have much money to show for it.

But we do have this. For now:

Via TNR

The reviews are in!

by digby

Wingnuts love Trumps “policy paper” on immigration:

IT’S MORNING IN AMERICA, AGAIN! @realDonaldTrump‘s Immigration policy paper – http://t.co/l7nq8gN7i5

— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) August 16, 2015

We haven’t seen anything like this since Dwight Eisenhower’s “Operation Wetback.” Even @MittRomney wasn’t this pro-American on immigration.

— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) August 16, 2015

Nothing else matters. Unless we stop 3rd worlders pouring in, bloc-voting 4 the Dems, conservatives lose EVERYTHING. http://t.co/l7nq8gN7i5

— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) August 16, 2015

These morons with their little position papers on how to replace Obamacare, deal with Iran and defund planned parenthood …

— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) August 16, 2015

… too stupid to grasp that they’ll never be in a position to do any of that unless we stop foreigners from voting in our elections.

— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) August 16, 2015

Without @realDonaldTrump‘s immigration plan, it will be nothing but Obamas and Hillarys as president for the rest of our lives. #USAmatters

— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) August 16, 2015

QOTD: The Donald

by digby

Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” when host Chuck Todd questioned Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump on his military positions, Trump said he watches television shows for military advice.

Todd asked, “Let’s go foreign affairs. You want to knock the hell out of ISIS, how?”

Trump said, “I want to take away their wealth. And as you know, for years, I’ve been saying, don’t go into Iraq. They went into Iraq, they destabilized the Middle East. It was a big mistake. Okay, now we’re there, and you have ISIS. And I said this was going to happen. I said Iran will take over Iraq, which is happening, as sure as you’re sitting there, and ISIS is taking over a lot of oil in certain areas of Iraq. And I said, you take away their wealth. You go and knock the hell out of the oil, take back the oil. We take over the oil, which we should have done in the first place.”

Todd continued, “What you’re talking about is ground troops, maybe 25,000.”

Trump answered, “That’s okay. We’re going to circle it. We’re going to circle it. We’re going to have so much money. And what I would do with the money that we make, which would be tremendous. I would take care of the soldiers that were killed, the families of the soldiers that were killed, the soldiers, the wounded warriors that are — I see — I love them. And they’re walking all over the streets of New York, all over the streets of every city, without arms, without legs, and worse than that. And I would take care of them.”

Todd pressed, “So, America should take over these oil fields. [They] shouldn’t be given to the Iraqis?”

Trump added, “Well, we can give them something, but we should definitely take back money for our soldiers. We’ve had soldiers that were decimated, so badly hurt, the wounded warriors, and killed, of course. But we’ve had soldiers that were so badly hurt and killed. I want their families to get something. Because we got nothing out of that war. We spent $2 trillion, Chuck. We had thousands of people killed, wounded warriors all over the place. They got nothing, and they can’t even say we had a victory.”

Todd asked, “Who do you talk to for military advice right now?”

Trump answered, “Well, I watch the shows. I mean, I really see a lot of great — you know, when you watch your show, and all of the other shows, and you have the generals, and you have certain people –.”

Todd continued, “But is there somebody, is there a go-to for you? Every presidential candidate has a go-to.”

Trump answered, “Probably there are two or three. I like Bolton. I think he’s a tough cookie, knows what he’s talking about. Jacobs is a good guy –.”

Todd asked, “You mean Ambassador Bolton? You mean Colonel Jack Jacobs?”

Trump confirmed saying, “Colonel Jack Jacobs is a good guy, and I see him on occasion.”

Trump said he favored abortion rights in cases of rape, incest and the health of the mother “if the mother is close to death.”

“I’m talking about death,” he reiterated when Todd asked him about the health of the mother. “If the mother will die and we’re going to know that. The problem with [saying health] is, what, you have a cold and you’re having an abortion?”

Trump said he would not fund Planned Parenthood if it continued to provide abortion services. “It has to stop with the abortions,” he said, while insisting, “Women’s health issues to me are very important. I cherish women. My mother was this incredible woman. I have great children. I have a great wife. I have such great respect for women. I understand the importance of women. I have many executives in my organization that are women that frankly get paid more than many of my men executives. They’ve done great with me.”

I think I’m starting to lose my sense of humor about this guy. It’s depressing that millions of people like an utter asshole like this. It’s even more depressing that an utter asshole — and idiot — has all that money. Ugh…

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What’s old is new again: Digital tar and feathers
by Tom Sullivan

The religion professor began his Introduction to the New Testament section by holding up and describing the textbook the class would use. He declared it a thoroughly researched, well-regarded scholarly work, a leading textbook in the field, etc., etc. He himself was one of the authors. After extolling his work’s virtues, he held up a copy of the Bible, saying, “And this?” Then he ceremoniously dropped it into the waste basket.

I did not witness this bit of academic theater, but a close friend did over 40 years ago. It was at a Baptist university, too. If the professor shocked freshman naifs straight from First Baptist Church, Anytown, USA, that was the point. This wasn’t Sunday school. Students would be learning things from scholars that would challenge the comfortable theology they had brought with them from home. In the university, they would be asked to “put away childish things,” as Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 13. There was no “trigger warning.” Students survived without fleeing to the security of the nearest campus “safe space.” If they wanted that, Bob Jones University was right down the road.

In September’s Atlantic, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt examine how the embrace of “emotional reasoning” in higher education today “presumes an extraordinary fragility of the collegiate psyche, and therefore elevates the goal of protecting students from psychological harm.” Instead of challenging them and preparing them to fend for themselves intellectually and emotionally, the notion that “words can be forms of violence” may, the authors argue, be “teaching students to think pathologically.”

This is the opposite of how cognitive behavioral therapy works to minimize distorted thinking that leads to depression and anxiety. The object is to teach coping mechanisms, to desensitize patients to what today are called “triggers”:

Therapy often involves talking yourself down from the idea that each of your emotional responses represents something true or important.

Emotional reasoning dominates many campus debates and discussions. A claim that someone’s words are “offensive” is not just an expression of one’s own subjective feeling of offendedness. It is, rather, a public charge that the speaker has done something objectively wrong. It is a demand that the speaker apologize or be punished by some authority for committing an offense.

Sorry, Socrates. Your methods are upsetting the students. Lukianoff and Haidt beat me to it:

There’s a saying common in education circles: Don’t teach students what to think; teach them how to think. The idea goes back at least as far as Socrates. Today, what we call the Socratic method is a way of teaching that fosters critical thinking, in part by encouraging students to question their own unexamined beliefs, as well as the received wisdom of those around them. Such questioning sometimes leads to discomfort, and even to anger, on the way to understanding.

But vindictive protectiveness teaches students to think in a very different way. It prepares them poorly for professional life, which often demands intellectual engagement with people and ideas one might find uncongenial or wrong. The harm may be more immediate, too. A campus culture devoted to policing speech and punishing speakers is likely to engender patterns of thought that are surprisingly similar to those long identified by cognitive behavioral therapists as causes of depression and anxiety. The new protectiveness may be teaching students to think pathologically.

This seems like the cognitive corollary to the notion that raising children in an environment that is overly hygienic can actually be harmful to health. Playing in dirt builds immunity. But as mankind moved from the farm to an urban environment, less exposure at an early age to microbes and microflora has weakened our immune systems. Now universities seem intent on fostering a sanitized, “bubble boy” intellectual environment free of “microaggressions,” and one that reinforces hypersensitivity and hypervigilance.

Lukianoff and Haidt continue:

Because there is a broad ban in academic circles on “blaming the victim,” it is generally considered unacceptable to question the reasonableness (let alone the sincerity) of someone’s emotional state, particularly if those emotions are linked to one’s group identity. The thin argument “I’m offended” becomes an unbeatable trump card. This leads to what Jonathan Rauch, a contributing editor at this magazine, calls the “offendedness sweepstakes,” in which opposing parties use claims of offense as cudgels. In the process, the bar for what we consider unacceptable speech is lowered further and further.

[snip]

Surely people make subtle or thinly veiled racist or sexist remarks on college campuses, and it is right for students to raise questions and initiate discussions about such cases. But the increased focus on microaggressions coupled with the endorsement of emotional reasoning is a formula for a constant state of outrage, even toward well-meaning speakers trying to engage in genuine discussion.

What are we doing to our students if we encourage them to develop extra-thin skin in the years just before they leave the cocoon of adult protection and enter the workforce? Would they not be better prepared to flourish if we taught them to question their own emotional reactions, and to give people the benefit of the doubt?

It took years of decades of the Southern Strategy and years of conservative talk radio and Fox News to inculcate a constant state of outrage on the right. On campus, academia has accomplished that seemingly overnight.

These fashions come and go like “Satanic ritual abuse” panics and suction-cupped “Baby on Board” signs in car windows. The corporate world has seen its share: team-building sessions, personality profiling, mission statement workshops, etc. In education, it’s the same. I asked a relation who retired after years in public schools how she had coped with educational fads. “We just tried to ignore them and eventually they would go away.” Yet Lukianoff and Haidt suggest that cognitive distortions (they list several) are not so fleeting.

But the creepier part of this trend Lukianoff and Haidt only hint at is the digital tarring and feathering of alleged offenders you can see any day on social media by online mobs. Faculty must worry that their careers can be ruined over some real or imagined offense for which there is no response except to make public obeisance. Callout culture works like that, or #BowDownBernie.

My last semester as an undergraduate, I took a course in Chinese history. Mao had just died. The Cultural Revolution had just ended. I bought a subscription to China Pictorial, one of their propaganda magazines. It was filled with scenes of happy, smiling, air-brushed faces of cadre members merrily harvesting crops, performing in stadium-sized flag routines, and sitting around the commune sternly engaging in daily self-criticism and ritually denouncing counter-revolutionaries Madam Mao, Lin Biao, and the Gang of Four for crimes against the people’s revolution.

It was creepy to me then. It’s creepy now.

Saturday Night at the Movies

Bananas– Yes, I know. This 1971 Woody Allen film takes place in the fictional banana republic of “San Marcos”, but the mise en scene is an obvious stand-in for Cuba. There are also numerous allusions to the Cuban revolution, not the least of which is the ridiculously fake beard donned at one point by hapless New Yawker Fielding Mellish (Allen) after he finds himself swept up in Third World revolutionary politics. Naturally, it all starts with Allen’s moon-eyed desire for a woman completely out of his league, an attractive activist (Louise Lasser). The whole setup is utterly absurd…and an absolute riot. This is pure comic genius at work. Howard Cosell’s (straight-faced) contribution is priceless. Allen co-wrote with his Take the Money and Run collaborator, Mickey Rose.

Buena Vista Social Club– This engaging 1999 music documentary was the brainchild of musician Ry Cooder, director Wim Wenders, and the film’s music producer Nick Gold. Guitarist/world music aficionado Cooder coaxes a number of venerable Cuban players out of retirement (most of whom had their careers rudely interrupted by the Revolution and its aftermath) to cut a collaborative album, and Wenders is there to capture what ensues (as well as ever-cinematic Havana) in his inimitable style. He weaves in footage of some of the artists as they make their belated return to the stage, playing to enthusiastic fans in Europe and the U.S. It’s a tad over-praised, but well worth your time.

Che– Let’s get this out of the way. Ernesto “Che” Guevara was no martyr. By the time he was captured and executed by CIA-directed Bolivian Special Forces in 1967, he had put his own fair share of people up against the wall in the name of the Revolution. Some historians have called him “Castro’s brain”. That said, there is no denying that he was a complex, undeniably charismatic and fascinating individual. By no means your average revolutionary guerilla leader, he was well-educated, a physician, a prolific writer (from speeches and essays on politics and social theory to articles, books and poetry), a shrewd diplomat and had a formidable intellect. He was also a brilliant military tactician. Steven Soderbergh and his screenwriters (Peter Buchman and Benjamin A. Van Der Veen) adapted their absorbing (two-part) 4 ½ hour biopic from Guevara’s autobiographical accounts. Whereas Part 1 (aka The Argentine) is a fairly straightforward biopic, Part 2 (aka Guerilla) reminded me of two fictional films with an existential bent, both of which are also set in torpid and unforgiving South American locales-Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear and Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God. Like the doomed protagonists in those films, Guevara is fully committed to his journey into the heart of darkness, and has no choice but to cast his fate to the wind and let it all play out. Star Benicio del Toro shines.

The Godfather Part II – While Cuba may not be the primary setting for Francis Ford Coppola’s superb 1974 sequel to The Godfather, it is the location for a key section of the narrative where powerful mob boss Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) travels to pre-Castro Havana to consider a possible business investment. He has second thoughts after witnessing a disturbing incident involving an anti-Batista rebel. And don’t forget that the infamous “kiss of death” scene takes place at Batista’s opulent New Year’s Eve party…just as the guests learn Castro and his merry band of revolutionaries have reached the outskirts of the city and are duly informed by their host…that they are on their own! And remember, if you want to order a banana daiquiri in Spanish, it’s “banana daiquiri”.

Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay – Picking up where they left off in their surprise stoner comedy hit Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, roomies Harold (John Cho) and Kumar (Kal Penn) excitedly pack their bags for a dream European vacation in weed-friendly Amsterdam. Unbeknownst to Harold, Kumar has smuggled his new invention, a “smokeless” bong, on board. Since it is a homemade, cylindrical device containing liquid, it resembles another four-letter noun that starts with a “b”.  When a “vigilant” passenger, already eyeballing Kumar with suspicion due to his ethnic appearance, catches a glimpse of him attempting to fire up in the bathroom, all hell breaks loose. Before they know it, Harold and Kumar have been handcuffed by onboard air marshals, given the third degree back on the ground by a jingoistic government spook and issued orange jumpsuits, courtesy of the Gitmo quartermaster. Through circumstances that could only occur in Harold and Kumar’s resin-encrusted alternate universe, they break out of Cuba, and hitch a boat ride to Florida. This sets off a series of cross-country misadventures, mostly through the South (imagine the possibilities). As in the first film, the more ridiculously over-the-top their predicament, the funnier it gets. It’s crass, even vulgar; but it’s somehow good-naturedly crass and vulgar, in a South Park kind of way. Also like South Park, the goofiness is embedded with sharp political barbs.

I Am Cuba– There is a knee-jerk tendency in some quarters to dismiss this 1964 film about the Cuban revolution out of hand as pure Communist propaganda, and little else. Granted, it was produced with the full blessing of Castro’s regime, who partnered with the Soviet government to provide the funding for Russian director Mikhail Kalatozov’s sprawling epic. Despite the dubious backing, the director was given a surprising amount of artistic leeway; what resulted was, yes, from one perspective a propagandist polemic, but also a visually intoxicating cinematic masterpiece that remains (accolades from cineastes and critics aside) curiously unheralded. The narrative is divided into a quartet of one-act dramas about Cuba’s salt of the earth; exploited workers, dirt-poor farmers, student activists, and rebel guerrilla fighters. However, the real stars here are the director and his technical crew, who leave you pondering how in the hell they produced some of those jaw-dropping set pieces (and if you think Birdman has tracking shots, think again).

The Mambo Kings– Look in the dictionary under “pulsating”, and you will likely see the poster for Arme Glimcher’s underrated 1992 melodrama about two musician brothers (Armand Assante and Antonio Banderas) who flee Cuba in the mid-1950s to seek fame and fortune in America. Hugely entertaining, with fiery performances by the two leads, great support from Cathy Moriarty and Maruschka Detmers, topped off by a fabulous soundtrack. Tito Puente gives a rousing cameo performance, and in a bit of stunt casting Desi Arnaz, Jr. is on hand to play (wait for it) Desi Arnaz, Sr. (who helps the brothers get their career going). Cynthia Cidre adapted her screenplay from Oscar Hijuelos’ novel.

Our Man in Havana– A decade after their collaboration on the 1949 classic, The Third Man, director Carol Reed and writer Graham Greene reunited for this wonderfully droll 1960 screen adaptation of Greene’s seriocomic novel. Alec Guinness gives one of his more memorable performances as an English vacuum cleaner shop owner living in pre-revolutionary Havana. Strapped for cash, he accepts an offer from Her Majesty’s government to do a little moonlighting for the British Secret Service. Finding himself with nothing to report, he starts making things up so he can stay on the payroll. Naturally, this gets him into a pickle as he keeps digging himself into a deeper hole. Reed filmed on location, which gives us an interesting snapshot of Havana on the cusp of the Castro era.

Scarface – Make way for the bad guy. Bad guy comin’ through. Tony Montana (Al Pacino) is a bad, bad, bad, bad man, a Cuban immigrant who comes to America as part of the 1980 Mariel boat lift. A self-proclaimed “political refugee”, Tony, like the millions of immigrants before him who made this country great, aims to secure his piece of the American Dream. However, he’s a bit impatient. He espies a lucrative shortcut via Miami’s thriving cocaine trade, which he proves very adept at (because he’s very ruthless). Everything about this film is waaay over the top; Pacino’s performance, Brian De Palma’s direction, Oliver Stone’s screenplay, the mountains of coke and the piles of bodies. Yet, it remains a guilty pleasure; I know I’m not alone in this (c’mon, admit it!).

638 Ways to Kill Castro– History buffs (and conspiracy-a-go-go enthusiasts) will definitely want a peek at British director Dolan Cannell’s documentary. Mixing archival footage with talking heads (including a surprising number of would-be assassins), Cannell highlights some of the attempts by the U.S. government to knock off Fidel over the years. The number (638) of “ways” is derived from a list compiled by former members of Castro’s security team. Although Cannell initially plays for laughs (many of the schemes sound like they were hatched by Wile E. Coyote) the tone becomes more sobering. The most chilling revelation concerns the 1976 downing of a commercial Cuban airliner off Barbados (73 people killed). One of the alleged masterminds was Orlando Bosch, an anti-Castro Cuban exile living in Florida (he had participated in CIA-backed actions in the past). When Bosch was threatened with deportation in the late 80s, many Republicans rallied to have him pardoned, including Florida congresswoman Ileana Ross, who used her involvement with the “Free Orlando Bosch” campaign as part of her running platform. Her campaign manager was a young up and coming politician named (wait for it) Jeb! Long story short? Jeb’s Pappy then-president George Bush Sr. granted Bosch a pardon in 1990. Oh, what a tangled web, Jeb! BTW, Bosch was once publicly referred to as an “unrepentant terrorist” by the Attorney General (don’t get me started).