Political Theatre category archive

Warning: Language.

I’ve said it before, but it holds, especially this month:

The next time you hear someone bemoaning “The Lost Cause,” remember just what cause was lost.

cassandra_m has a thought:

. . . this makes sense to me. If we are focused like a laser beam on compensating *teachers* for effectiveness (and for effectiveness over factors they can’t always control), why not compensate legislators the same way? What do you think?

Pay for performance for pols.

The legislative payroll budget drops to zero!

I say, “Go for it.”

In the Roanoke Times, Tom Arcaro has a thoughtful piece on the purpose of education.

Buried in it is a statement that helps explain why technocrats and wingnuts seem so determined to rip the charter from public education and give it over to profiteers for-profit charter schools (emphasis added).

The blind algorithm of capitalism, extolled in its virtues by neoliberals both domestic and international, creates the kinds of systems that will keep it moving forward. Eisenhower understood that the military-industrial complex was a natural outgrowth of a maturing capitalism, and the same phenomena have occurred to produce the education-industrial complex.

Are these two ends of higher education — to serve democracy or serve the economic system — mutually exclusive? No, not literally, but I have never in my three decades teaching in higher education had a parent ask how majoring in sociology will make his daughter a better global citizen.

Institutions of education “create the public” more than just teach it.

. . . and an informed polity is inimical to conservative dogma.

Read the rest.

Read Harvard’s story on the fluoride study that Mr. Ticker refers to. Not surprisingly, it’s somewhat over-stated in the video.

After all, why should he be any more accurate than the networks (and he at least admits he’s a parody, something Meet the Press has not yet fessed up to).

There’s a lot of “maybe” and “perhaps” in this report, but, given the history of draconian tactics by the MPAA and the RIAA, they are likely to be likelies.

I outgrew “April Fools Day” a long time ago, once I realized the most “practical jokes” manifest an undercurrent of cruelty.

Others clearly still relish the cruelty. All you need to do to see this is watch an episode of AFV. Scattered amongst the babies and kittens and puppies, you will see a sadistic need to humiliate others.

Dick Polman offers a list of Republican outreach April Foolery, more fool than April.

His examples illustrate that “undercurrent of cruelty” which I recognized so long ago.

I give you the Republican Party, the party of childish nastiness, the party for those who don’t want to grow up.

No ADA for the TSA.

As my freshman roommate once said about some of the cadet officers in ROTC, “Give some people a flat hat and they think they rule the world.”

Via Down with Tyranny, which has commentary.

Steven D. asks a question.

Ripped from the headlines!

Indeed.

Republicanism, agin’ big guvmint except when for big guvmint.

The governor’s office has hired a consultant to study Virginia’s military assets as part of a growing effort to protect the state from future base closures.

(snip)

The Spectrum contract is the latest in a series of steps aimed at protecting the state from military downsizing. The governor’s office did not announce the agreement, but a copy of the contract is posted on the state’s website.

Jeez oh man! Words fail me.

Emphasis added:

Air traffic control facilities at three Pennsylvania and airports will close down as a result of budget cuts, the Federal Aviation Administration said Friday.

Capital City Airport in Harrisburg, Arnold Palmer Regional Airport in Latrobe and Lancaster Airport in Lancaster were included on the FAA’s final list of 149 air traffic control facilities that will close nationwide starting early next month.

In New Jersey, the traffic control tower at Trenton-Mercer Airport will close.

The closures will not force the shutdown of any of those airports, but pilots will be left to coordinate takeoffs and landings among themselves over a shared radio frequency with no help from ground controllers under procedures that all pilots are trained to carry out (this should work out well–ed.)

“We are extremely disappointed with the Federal Aviation Administration’s decision to close the contract air traffic control tower … due to sequestration,” said Timothy Edwards, executive director of the Susquehanna Area Regional Airport Authority, owner and operator of Capital City.

And it’s happening elsewhere.

Have you noticed how, now the sequestrian waltz has started, everyone is shouting

NOOOOOOO! Cut the other guy’s stuff!

With acerbic commentary by Julianna Forlano.

Via the The Daily Banter.

Der Spiegel looks back at the Great and Glorious Patriotic War for a Lie in Iraq and attempts to learn something from it. Here are two of their conclusions:

6. It was the war of the neocons

(snip)

7. The neocons learned little from the war

Follow the link for the rest, including their reasoning.