Political Theatre category archive

In case you have ever wondered about the difference between “stupid” and “teh stupid,” Historiann graciously provides a definition.

Jonathan Chait is not optimistic.

He believes that the right-wing has decided that, if they can’t save the country from the forces of truth, justice, and the American Way, they might as well just burn it down.

A nugget:

The Republican Party has spent 30 years careering ever more deeply into ideological extremism, but one of the novel developments of the Obama years is its embrace of procedural extremism. The Republican fringe has evolved from being politically shrewd proponents of radical policy changes to a gang of saboteurs who would rather stop government from functioning at all. In this sense, their historical precedents are not so much the Gingrich revolutionaries, or even their tea-party selves of a few years ago; the movement is more like the radical left of the sixties, had it occupied a position of power in Congress. And so the terms we traditionally use to scold bad Congresses—partisanship, obstruction, gridlock—don’t come close to describing this situation. The hard right’s extremism has bent back upon itself, leaving an inscrutable void of paranoia and formless rage and twisting the Republican Party into a band of anarchists.

And the worst is not behind us.

Bill Maxwell sees an insidious undercurrent in the charter school movement: the rebirth of seg academies. A nugget; follow the link for the rest:

No matter how we frame the debate, we are talking about contemporary segregation academies — those private schools that proliferated during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s as a way for whites to circumvent the desegregation order of the Brown vs. Board of Education decision. After these academies took hold, many public schools, especially in the South, were left with mostly black students.

Operating with public money, charters are more subtle in determining who attends them. In addition to location and word-of-mouth marketing, many self-select by establishing curricula that appeal to specific groups. Touting their core mission, they do not mention diversity in their recruitment.

At my breakfast meeting this morning, someone brought up the Trayvon Martin case. I went off, pointing out that the bigots never give up; they just go into hiding from time to time and then try again.

Chris Honore is dismayed by the Republican intransigence on SNAP.

The GOP has indeed been transformed, but into what? Republicans are consumed by a rigid ideology and a persistent and debilitating mean-spiritedness that is paralyzing their ability to compromise and therefore to govern. They are not simply a cohort of grumpy men and women gone anachronistic. They are a party that is doing incalculable damage to our nation with a studied righteousness that is appalling, claiming Pyrrhic victories that have consistently put doctrine before the common good.

Methinks he is too restrained.

She’s back, and she’s still not a witch.

Via Raw Story.

NSFW. Most decidedly NSFW.

Via Delaware Liberal.

Kavips explains how the charter school scam works.

Via Bob Cesca’s Awesome Blog.

Dick Polman tries to explain the internecine wars within the Republican Party. As First Son used to say when he was a teenager, “It’s complicated.”

Apparently, it does to Republicans.

PoliticalProf analyzes the power of economics in Republicanism:

Think about the whole conservative assault on the very notion of payments to families for food and housing (what most people think of as welfare). The whole critique insists that such payments create cycles of dependency and thus entrap generations of persons in poverty and, well, laziness. Again, never mind that actual fact that the vast majority of people who go on benefits at some point in their lives stay on them only temporarily. Never mind that the typical recipient of benefits is a recently divorced white woman with children. Nope: it’s laziness and dependency, and programs like workfare are, we are told, needed to cut the vicious circle of welfare and dependency. (By the way, do we provide transportation to these jobs the poor are to take? No? Daycare? No.)

Follow the link to find out who left his Marx on the Republican Party.

Addendum, Later That Same Morning:

Discussion and clarification. Worth the two minutes it takes to read. A nugget:

. . . that human beings are not just economic creatures. They are social and antisocial and enculturated and alienated and self-interested and altruistic and every other contradictory impulse and condition all at the same time.

It’s what we want.

PoliticalProf explains. A nugget:

See, we’ve built a culture that assumes that more punishment is always better than less; that more layers of “security” translate inevitably into actual security. (They don’t by the way: most of what passes for “security” these days is really theater; and layers upon layers of bureaucracy for “security” is just so many more places things can get lost in the system.) So just as any “cuts” to “defense” will somehow make us less secure (since F-22 fighters are central to the war on terror against the almighty Taliban Air Force), any “cuts” to “security” will apparently make us “less secure.”

More on the effort to destroy public education.

Not what quite what they expected.

Via C&L.