Political Theatre category archive
What’s Cohen On? 0
Shaun Mullen wraps up this week in the Trumpling.
In Other Words, DHS Wants To Be like Facebook 0
If you have trouble viewing the embed, follow this link.
Aside:
Damn computers. They expect u to splet stuf rite.
Ryan’s Derp 0
Paul Krugman wonders how Paul Ryan got a reputation amongst the political media as being a “policy wonk.” An excerpt:
Look, the single animating principle of everything Mr. Ryan did and proposed was to comfort the comfortable while afflicting the afflicted. Can anyone name a single instance in which his supposed concern about the deficit made him willing to impose any burden on the wealthy or in which his supposed compassion made him willing to improve the lives of the poor?
And his “deficit reduction” proposals were always frauds. The revenue loss from tax cuts always exceeded any explicit spending cuts, so the pretense of fiscal responsibility came entirely from “magic asterisks”: extra revenue from closing unspecified loopholes, reduced spending from cutting unspecified programs. He’s been a flimflam man all along.
Justice Decried 0
Thom explains to a right-wing caller that a legally-obtained, well-founded search warrant is not a violation of civil liberties; indeed, itt is rather the epitome of them. (The conversation gets a bit contentious towards the end, but remains civil.)
Ryan’s Derp 0
Reckon he figures he’s done all the damage he could.
All That Was Old Is New Again 0
Thom explains how Nixon’s odious Southern Strategy led to Donald Trump.
Which Hunt? 0
Juanita Jean corrects some terminology.
The Rule of Lawless, Warranted Intrusion Dept. 0
The news is full of stories about what the Mueller investigation’s raid on Michael Cohen’s office and home might portend and I will not speculate. You can find plenty if speculation at legitimate (and, no doubt, illegitimate–see below) news sites.
Nevertheless, I will this teeny contribution from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Jay Bookman regarding the nature of the search warrant (emphasis added):
(snip)
Such exceptions are rare, however. Judges asked to approve such an exception and grant a search warrant must be convinced of a prima facie case that a crime has occurred and that the lawyer had somehow been involved in the actual commission of that crime. That’s always a high bar for prosecutors to clear, and it no doubt becomes even higher when the client in question is the president of the United States.
In other words, this is no fishing expedition.
All the News that Fits 0
Lance Dutson, a Maine Republican think-tanker, is dismayed to realize that one of the things he helped tank was truth. Here’s a bit of his article; I urge you to read the whole thing (emphasis added).
What I didn’t understand then was how destructive a total lack of common reality could be. While I chided the filtered evening news model, I didn’t realize we’d replace it with an anarchic ecosystem of unvalidated truths. I never imagined conservatives could be so successful in undermining the credibility of the traditional media, and I never envisioned a world where common truth ceased to exist.
(snip)
In this model, stories do not need to be true, or fair. They need to make people mad enough to share them.
Sympathy escapes me.
Television Comedy 0
“There’s One Now” 0
Dick Polman muses about how to spot a sociopath.