Political Theatre category archive

George Smith:

Our system of government was set up assuming a political party would not want to destroy the place.

Read the rest of his comment here.

Thom on the significance Django Unchained.

I disagree with many of Governor Christie’s positions, but I compliment him for having an integrity that is too often missing in politicians.

What Atrios said.

We have a party in Congress that believes Russian roulette is a legitimate tactic of governance.

Hint: It’s not the party to which I re-upped my membership today.

With a twist:

Via Raw Story.

Actions speak louder . . . .

The two Republican U.S. senators from Utah have scheduled fundraisers on the ski slopes in the first days of January, just as America is likely to be headed over the fiscal cliff.

Remember, the phony phiscal cliff was a Republican creation. In their world, fund-raising trumps governance.

Talking Points Memo announces this year’s Golden Duke Awards honoring the most egregious scandals of 2012.

Dick Polman wants you to take his quiz.

I haven’t taken it yet. I’ll post my results when I do.

Rachel Maddow explains:

Via Raw Story. If the embed doesn’t work, follow that link.

Just heard a reference to “Republican soul-searching.”

Read more »

Odd. That’s two YouTube embeds that disappeared somewhere between saving and posting.

Suffering from the agony of defeat, Pennsylvania Republicans want to change the electoral college rules. A nugget from Dick Polman:

It’s simple, really: Scrap the winner-take-all rule, and award the electoral votes in a way that mirrors each candidate’s share of the statewide popular vote (with two EVs being awarded to the statewide winner). This way, the losing side – presumably, the Republicans – would at least get on the College scoreboard. President Obama won all 20 of Pennsylvania’s electoral votes last month because he prevailed by five percentage points in the popular tally, but, if Pileggi’s plan had been state law, Obama’s electoral haul would have dropped from 20 to 12.

What a great deal for the GOP! If the party can’t win fair and square under the existing rules, just change the rules. And in Pennsylvania, they have the power to do it. They hold the gubernatorial office and both state chambers, so what’s to stop them (aside from public scorn)?

The idea that they might change some of their policies, soundly rejected by the polity, is, natch, unthinkable.

Via Bob Cesca’s Awesome Blog.

In my local rag, local activist Don Tabor outlines the fundamental racism underlying our immigration laws and argues that, if they want to come, let them.

Between our Civil War and World War I, our country grew by as much as 1 percent a year through legal immigration by the poor and oppressed of Europe. Many of us can trace our American story to that period. But in 1924, spurred by fears that the United States would be inundated with “inferior races,” such as Irish and Italian Catholics, and guided by the eugenics movement, the nation adopted immigration quotas based on country of origin.

The quotas essentially excluded Africans and Asians from immigration and limited Hispanics and Eastern and Southern Europeans to the point that in the 1920s and ’30s, legal immigration added less than 0.01 percent a year and has held growth by legal immigration to under 0.5 percent ever since.

In 1965, the blatantly racist quotas were abandoned in favor of more subtly discriminatory “skills-based preferences,” which accomplish pretty much the same results under a veneer of merit.

The capsule description of Mr. Tabor describes him as a Libertarian.* That means I probably disagree with many of his positions.

On this one, though, he’s got it right.

____________________

*Libertarian: a Republican who is ashamed to admit it.

Leonard Pitts, Jr., evaluates the spectacle of our elected representative incongruously assembled backing away from their pledges of fealty to the troll under the bridge Grover Norquist. A nugget:

So this revolution against “he who must be obeyed,” however modest, is nonetheless welcome. It suggests reason seeping like sunlight into places too long cloistered in the damp and dark of ideological rigidity.

But it leaves an observer in the oddly weightless position of applauding a thing and being, simultaneously, disgusted by it. Has politics ever seemed more ignoble than in these clumsy, self-serving attempts to justify a deviation from orthodoxy? They have to do this, of course, because the truth — “I signed the pledge because I knew it would help me get elected, but with economic ruin looming and Obama re-elected on a promise to raise taxes on the rich and most voters supporting him on that, it’s not doing me as much good as it once did.” — is unpretty and unflattering.

In this awkward about-face, these lawmakers leave us wondering once again whether the vast majority of them — right and left, red and blue, Republican and Democrat — really believe in anything, beyond being reelected.

Via Bob Cesca’s Awesome Blog.

In my local rag (TM), Daryl Lease visualizes a meeting amongst the new secessionists. A nugget:

“Hey, what do we do with the 47 percent?”

“The 47 percent who voted for Mitt Romney?”

“No, knucklehead, the 47 percent who are moochers. Even if we secede, we’ll get stuck with some of them.”

Read the rest. Oh, do read the rest.