Political Theatre category archive

Raj Pate:

There are two novels that can transform a bookish 14-year-kld’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish daydream that can lead to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood in which large chunks of the day are spent inventing ways to make real life more like a fantasy novel. The other is a book about orcs.

After all, out of sight is out of mind.

Rachel Maddow parses the prevarication.

Via Raw Story.

There are seven million stories in the naked airport: Alyona reacts to this story. Also, in part two, the there’s one born every minute dept.

Scrapple, you will recall, is made from the bits that didn’t make the cut for sausage.

Warning: Good taste shortage (in the video, not in scrapple, at least, not in Habersett brand scrapple; Rapa brand wouldn’t make the cut for Habersett, but that’s another issue).

I don’t think the old boy thought through the implications of his remark. From TPM:

McCain says he didn’t pass over Romney for Veep because of anything to do with taxes. It was because “Sarah Palin was the better candidate.”

Contradict Me looks at colorful contradictions.

Via PoliticalProf.

Read The Nation’s expose of campaign myths.

. . . the first and most important step is to define the problem accurately.

Via Bob Cesca’s Awesome Blog.

Having an incompetent attorneys is like having no attorney.

Indeed, it may be worse. There is an appearance of fairness.

Robyn Blumner tries to follow the money and finds the trail disappears into the Bermuda Taxangle:

Whether technically legal or not, the idea of using international tax havens to skirt U.S. tax obligations is not only a rich man’s game, it speaks to one’s character. Romney’s flirtation with countries of looser financial morals suggests that the candidate who doesn’t drink or have a wandering eye may have a weakness after all.

Darryl Lease, writing in the local rag, discusses the Republican Party’s dedication to making sure sick people go bankrupt because of crushing medical bills voting against the tyranny of the Affordable Care Act.

He does the arithmetic and points out that House Republicans have voted to repeal it almost once a week.

Now, you’ll probably hear some folks question the wisdom of spending so much time trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act when, clearly, it’s not going to happen until after the November elections, if then.

Those folks just don’t get this whole tyranny thing. We’re talking about legislation passed in 2009 by the House and Senate, signed by the president and upheld as constitutional by the Supreme Court. You call that democracy? Smells like tyranny to me.

According to CBS News, the House has spent at least 80 hours, or two full work weeks, on the repeal effort. It costs taxpayers about $24 million a week to operate the House, according to the Congressional Research Service.

So that would mean these 33 votes have cost us about $50 million. Money well spent, I’d say.

Read the rest. Really. It is delightful.

Via BartBlog.

In a typically long, tighly-reasonsed post, Chauncey Devega suggests a strategic rationale for Randian rhetoric. Here are a couple of nuggets, but, really, read the whole thing:

To this point, the Tea Party GOP has successful deployed Ayn Rand conservatism, with its language of “surplus/unproductive” people and “job creating” citizens, to hoodwink the white authoritarian inclined populist classes into supporting policies which are against their immediate political and economic self-interest(s).

Attitudes about the State, “big government,” and taxes are closely tied to racial animus and hostility. These are dog whistles and code words for white conservatives which enable them to talk about “lazy” black and brown people. Without exception, these appeals are rarely, if ever, centered on how the white middle class is subsidized by the submerged state.

(major snippage)

Since the 1960s, the face of poverty in America has been African American. As such, “black” poverty and “black” degeneracy will be repeated themes in Romney’s Ayn Rand-like campaign language of “productive citizens,” “job creators,” and “lazy” “parasites.”

Via DelawareLiberalw