Political Theatre category archive

Honest to Pete, you can’t make this stuff up.

The Republican Party has become a vile and disgusting thing which pleasures itself at the expense of the nation.

It’s two minutes. Watch it.

Via TPM.

Via C&L.

Sanford, New York, tells its citizens to keep quiet and just take it.

A lawsuit filed Tuesday by the National Resources Defense Council and Catskill Citizens for Safe Energy claims the Broome County town of Sanford is violating residents’ First Amendment rights to free speech.

The board in the small town in eastern Broome passed a resolution in September saying there had already been hours of public comment for and against gas drilling and no further discussion would be allowed.

Daniel Ellsberg speaks:

Leonard Pitts, Jr., on the Republican Party’s vaunted attempts to “rebrand” itself:

Because you know what you call a pig with lipstick on? A pig with lipstick on.

Read the rest.

Dick Polman contemplates Republican “rebranding.” A nugget.

It’s tough to see how the GOP can “rebrand” itself as a kinder, friendlier party if it saddles itself anew with Senate candidates who can’t win outside their conservative House cocoons. Rove is busy trolling for donors who share his concerns. Some of them are speaking out. Veteran GOPer Fred Malek told Politico, “We are tired of losing.” Minnesota mogul Stan Hubbard fumed about the “nut cases,” like Indiana’s Mourdock, who sealed his defeat last fall when he described rape-related pregnancies as God’s will. Malek and Hubbard are planning to help Rove, who vows to conduct opposition research against candidates who lean too far rightward.

You can revise the labels and logos all you want.

It’s what’s in the can that counts.

And what’s in the can is pernicious.

Via Mr. Feastingonroadkill.

Here’s another take:

Mike explains that the “no labels” movement arose because persons are embarrassed to be labeled “Republicans,” but that the stupid will continue with a new label.

Via ABL.

Very large disappearing twits.

The House of the Republi-can.

Dick Polman sums it up in a column on immigration:

Ah yes, the Republican House – the Bermuda Triangle of lawmaking, where common sense often vanishes without a trace.

Best headline yet on Fox not picking up Palin’s option.

In a sensible column about the senseless who-shot-john over Beyonce’s rendition of the national anthem at the Inauguration, Tony Norman embeds this nugget:

In his seminal 1961 work “The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America,” the late historian and theorist Daniel J. Boorstin coined a term that described perfectly the postmodern synthesis of politics and the entertainment-friendly choreographing of reality. Boorstin called these non-spontaneous moments that were supposed to look spontaneous “pseudo-events,” because they were elaborate simulations of real things projected onto a larger canvas. These events are tailor-made for broad dissemination in what Boorstin called an “age of contrivance.”

Sounds like a book worth reading.

Belle Rose remembers another American political party that tried to hang on to power by rigging the election laws. A nugget:

When parties fall out of step with the will of people, desperation sets in as politicians try to hold on to power. As is happening today with Republicans, it also happened in the late 1790s and early 1800s as Federalists felt power slipping through their fingers. James Madison words to Thomas Jefferson about Federalists could just as well be written about today’s GOP: “The horrors which they evidently feel at the approach of the electoral epoch are a sufficient warning of the desperate game by which they will be apt to characterize the interval.”

Jefferson was fully aware of the Federalist’s strategy, writing to his daughter, Patsy: “Our opponents perceive the decay of their power. Still they are pressing it, and trying to pass laws to keep themselves in power.”

We know how well that worked.

Uniform twits twitting uniformly.

The U.S. Army hosted an online chat today via its official @USArmy Twitter account to talk about the role of social media in the organization, and how the Army employs tools like Twitter to tell its story.

More uniformity at the link.