Political Theatre category archive

Below the fold because it autoplays on some systems.

Read more »

In the usual bad taste.

I don’t know whether today’s announcement is a case of successful Obama brinkmanship or Putin to the rescue or a merely speed bump on the way to raining robotic death from the sky, so I got nothing.

It will be fun to watch the spin cycle.

I can, nevertheless, take delight in its having rendered at least 50% of today’s columns and editorial cartoons irrelevant.

Addendum, Later That Same Day:

Josh Marshall has a pretty good first take.

I remember these days very well.

Some would bring them back.

In fact, some would be quite happy to bring back these days:

Video via Contradict Me.

Do it our way or we won’t play.

The Siskiyou County Board, located in the upper reaches of Northern California, voted to secede from the state by a vote of 4 – 1 due to what they say is a lack of representation at the legislature in Sacramento, a local CBS station reported Wednesday.

Noz keeps his poker face.

Dan K. Thomasson does:

In the illusive perfect world, there would be a law against electing nitwits to public office, especially to the Congress.

Follow the link.

In the Roanoke Times, John Winfrey tries to explicate the different strains of “Libertarianism.”

Here’s but two of the angles:

A true libertarian (that is, Ayn Randian–ed.) owes nothing to losers, certainly not safety nets or social programs. Losers are burdens — good riddance.

By contrast, the libertarian movement that controls Republicans in the House and Senate and most Republican states is heavily influenced by the Christian right. The cumbersome title “tea party libertarian Christian right” has become part of our public discourse on television, radio, newspapers and, of course, the Internet.

Nowhere does he get to the fundamental underlying truth of what passes for “Libertarianism” in the contemporary political landscape:

A “Libertarian” is a Republican who is ashamed to admit it.

Republicans skip the celebration of the 1963 March on Washington.

Via Bob Cesca’s Awesome Blog.

James Perry wants to know (emphasis added):

Are Americans dumber than they used to be?

The question might better be, Are Republicans dumber than they used to be?

And the answer seems to be — the envelope, please — yes. Yes, they are.

That’s not to say there aren’t plenty of dumb Democrats. Of course there are, but it’s members of the Grand Old Party these days who are regressing by refusing to accept scientific fact.

(snip)

“It is politically effective, and socially acceptable, to deny scientific fact” today, the professor (Adam Frank, U. Rochester–ed.) says.

When a party embraces promoting dumb as a tactic, what does that say about its goals?

(Don’t answer that. You likely don’t want to know.)

Chartering a new course in education:

The founder and former CEO of Pennsylvania’s largest cyber-charter school has been charged with siphoning more than $8 million from the school through a network of companies, then scheming with his accountant to avoid income taxes.

When you turn a public trust into a private profit center, you ask for trouble.

Details of his trappings of wealth purchased with the public’s nickels at the link.

More on Republican efforts to gut public education in Philly.

Again, it’s not just in Philly, pholks.

Groklaw performed a major service to the community and the polity in reporting on and explaining the legal issues in the scurrilous SCO patent trolling suit.

Via Mr. Feastingonroadkill.

At SFGate, Paul Viviano, long-time foreign correspondent, cautions against taking twits as revealed–or revealing–truth.

There is “little doubt that (social media) provided a new means for ordinary people to connect with human rights advocates trying to amass support against police abuse, torture and the Mubarak government’s permanent emergency laws allowing people to be jailed without charge,” a New York Times reporter wrote Feb. 5, 2011, one week before Mubarak resigned. “Facebook and YouTube also offered a way for the discontented to organize and mobilize – and allowed secular-minded young people to seize the momentum from Egypt’s relatively neutered, organized opposition.”

For the older generation of Middle East correspondents, including me – I covered Egypt periodically for 30 years, half of them at The Chronicle – there was something glaringly amiss with this picture. Cairo isn’t Egypt, not by a long shot, and secular-minded young people with social networking accounts aren’t more than a tiny segment of the national population.

Facebook penetration in North America surpassed 50 percent of the total population in 2011. In Egypt, it stood at 5.6 percent.

Read the rest, and, the next time twits light up the sky, reach for several grains of salt.

Halford Ryan recites the Republican Beatitudes. Here’s two:

It is easier for a rich man to enter public office than for a poor man ever to enter public office.

Let the rich ask what the commonwealth can do for them; let the poor ask what they can do for the rich.

Consider the rest your memory verses for the week.