Political Theatre category archive

Not if you are a Republican. E. J. Dionne comments on the recently-defeated Farm Bill:

The collapse of the farm bill will be played as a political story about Boehner’s failure to rally his right wing, and it should remind everyone of the House leadership’s inability to govern. But this is also a story about morality: There is something profoundly wrong when a legislative majority is so eager to risk leaving so many Americans hungry. That’s what the bill would have done, and why defeating it was a moral imperative.

Read the rest.

In Der Spiegel, Christian Stöcker comments on the surveillance state. It’s a subject that Germany and Germans are particularly sensitive to, because Germany and Germans have lived it.

A nugget–follow the link for the rest (caveat: they fell into the trap that others have of confusing SFTP with “direct access,” but, from a policy standpoint, that’s pretty much irrelevant):

And for good reason. The fact that the Americans and the British — it is yet to be revealed who else participated — have granted themselves this enormous power, without ever informing their own people, is a scandal of historic proportions. To the initiated, all the recent public debate about data retention, Internet privacy and the practices of Facebook and Google must have been downright amusing. The state, as it turns out, knew everything all along.

That was precisely the goal, according to the head of the NSA, Lieutenant General Keith Alexander. “Why can’t we collect all the signals all the time?” he asked in an internal document acquired by the Guardian. “Sounds like a good summer project for Menwith,” he continued, referring to a GCHQ facility at Menwith Hill in northern England.

I have a thought: Substitute “Russian” and “Chinese” for “American” and “British” wherever those words appear in the article and imagine the uproar that would be coming from Washington over this.

Via BartCop.

More on Republican attempts to destroy public education.

In Wingnut World, there is no such thing as the “public good.”

Public cyber-schools, my anatomy.

(Re)Public(an) cyber-crime.

Sometimes, it is best to keep them “innermost,” especially if you are a not nice person.

An Illinois Republican official resigned from his leadership post Thursday amid outrage over an email in which he berated a biracial former Miss America as a “street walker” who could fill a law firm’s “minority quota” if she loses her bid for Congress.

Courtland Milloy, long-time reporter and columnist for the Washington Post, tells what it is like to “look fishy” to someone somewhere.

Back in 2003, during one of those code-yellow terrorist alerts, I was doing interviews near the Jefferson Memorial in Washington when an anonymous tourist reported me to the U.S. Park Police. I was detained as a “suspicious person” and my notebook confiscated. Asked why, one of the officers replied, “We hear you’ve been asking curious questions.”

Later I learned that the tourist also thought I looked a lot like Saddam Hussein.

And that’s all it took. Say goodbye to Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure.

Ezra Klein looks at Bobby Jindal and sees an example of the political (in the sense of “polity,” not in the sense of “horserace”) bankruptcy of Republicanism. A nugget:

Jindal gives Republicans some reasons to take heart. First, they have 30 governorships, which is true. Second, they “took control of the House in 2010 and held it in 2012,” which is true, but omits the crucial fact that Republicans got 1.5 million fewer votes in the 2012 House elections than Democrats did. Getting fewer votes than the other guy is not necessarily a good sign for a political party, even if the idiosyncrasies of congressional apportionment protected their majority. But his big argument is that Republicans just ran a bad play in 2012. ”The just completed presidential campaign strategy of playing it safe and assuming a poor economy would win it for us was an obvious mistake,” he writes.

(snip)

The upside of this theory is that it frees Jindal and the rest of the Republican Party from having to do the hard work of rethinking and renewing its own governing agenda. The downside of this theory is that it’s utter nonsense. And the most damaging part of this theory is that it’s utter nonsense aimed at Jindal’s own base.

In the course of discussing criticism he has received for a column he wrote on Ayn Rand, Jonathan Chait dances around his own feeling about that lady:

What I really mean is, I find Rand evil.

Read the rest.

The usual warning: Language.

When confronted with the truth, slur the messenger.

Warning: Language.

In Der Spiegel, German Minister of Justice Sabine Leutheusser reflects on the surveillance state and marvels at America’s surrender to fear. A nugget:

On the weekend, President Obama reacted by saying that it is impossible to have 100 percent security and 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience.

I don’t share this view. The more a society monitors, controls and observes its citizens, the less free it is. In a democratic constitutional state, security is not an end in itself, but serves to secure freedom.

No scans unbarred. Mike Nichols reports in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

Count Frank Schadt among those of us who believe government — and not just the federal government — is taking extreme liberties with our liberties.

Schadt owns OB’s Brauhaus, a successful restaurant and bar in Appleton, where police have developed a habit of asking local establishments to use police-issued scanners to collect information on patrons.

At least some bars now scan every person who comes in on certain weekend nights — proof that the program is about a lot more than deterring underage drinking. At the end of the night, the bars return the scanners to police along with all the information about who showed up to have a beer or, God forbid, a shot with their buddies.

Police say the program is entirely voluntary.

Voluntary, just like renewing your on-premises license is voluntary.

Part of being privileged is not having to hear about being privileged, because your being privileged is, well, it just is.

It’s being able to get a popular, effective, and challenging teacher reassigned because you don’t like the lesson.

Students study speeches by Dr. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and invite local community leaders to speak in the class. They are prompted to talk honestly about racism, class disparity, and privilege in their day-to-day lives at the start of every session. Assignments include analyzing “the way media and society fetishize both women and people of color.”

But the provocative discussions that Meyer found so revelatory abruptly ended a few months ago when a female white student accused the teacher of creating an “intimidating educational environment.”

Here’s a bit from another report, this one from one of the teacher’s former students.

Greenberg was hesitant to speak on the record, but he would tell me that he’s never gotten a parent complaint before this year, and he feels that the finding by the district was based on limited evidence—evidence he hasn’t seen. That he was ordered to immediately halt his curriculum “assumes that the materials are objectionable until proven otherwise,” he says, and he’s upset that a single family would have the ability to shut down classroom work so swiftly and entirely, without input from any other students or families.

There is another, larger story here that I don’t feel qualified to tackle. The established press doesn’t seem to have noticed this story of censorship.

I learned about it by listening to amTWib.

It would appear that the Republican Party got its sex education the same way that I initially did–in whispered conversations with equally-ignorant peers in back alleys and locker rooms.

I, however, later decided to read up on the topic. So did Dick Polman.

Field has a question:

It’s these hipsters, Libertarians, and white liberals getting into a hissy fit about their privacy rights because of the NSA snooping on their phone conversations and Internet searches. They are crying a river about the Constitutional protections that are being stripped away by “Big Brother”, the police state infringing into their personal lives, and they want answers from their government.

Fair enough. But where was the outrage when government decided that it was cool to “stop and frisk” young minority men in America’s largest city?

Cenk cannot restrain his sarcasm.