Political Theatre category archive

The San Jose Mercury-News wonders why Democrats do not adopt Republican campaign tactics. It asks

Why don’t Democrats just make stuff up too?

Forcing assessors to innovate (emphasis added):

The assessed values for residential properties dropped 4.5 percent while residential condos fell 2.4 percent. The assessed value for general commercial and income commercial fell 5.8 percent and 1.5 percent, respectively. Also, the assessed value of vacant land fell 6.9 percent.

Residential properties make up about 70 percent of taxable properties in the city, according to the city manager’s office.

Because of the lack of buyers, the Office of the Real Estate Assessor had to rely more heavily on the data from foreclosures and short sales, Bunn said. That resulted in a loss in assessed value across the city.

Dick Polman, on the interminable Republican nominating process:

The new rules are not the problem. The candidates are the problem.

Via Bob Cesca’s Awesome Blog.

Leonard Pitts, Jr., points out that the Republican Party as it presently exists looks not to the future, but to the past:

On issue after issue — gay rights, contraception, labor rights — the goal seems to be to return the nation to the supposed tranquility of its Beaver Cleaver years, before Martin Luther King had his dream, before Betty Friedan wrote her book, before Rock Hudson was gay, before everything changed.

In short the days, when old white men were in control (or at least thought they were in control) and no one else mattered or, for that matter, was considered to exist.

Read the rest.

Take the quiz.

Via PoliticalProf.

Alyona and her guests wonders why the sudden Republican focus on birth control and suggests that Republican men might be having identity problems because of not being able to go all Don Draper with (perceived to be) their women:

Mike Papantonio traces Republican attacks on learning and knowledge back to Big Tobacco.

Actually, it goes back much further.

Warning: In bad taste, but not as bad the targets.

The story is about the perceptions of the populace popped by drones.

American drone strikes inside Pakistan are killing far fewer civilians than many in the country are led to believe, according to a rare on-the-ground investigation by The Associated Press of 10 of the deadliest attacks in the past 18 months.

The widespread perception in Pakistan that civilians, not militants, are the principal victims — a view that is fostered by leading right-wing politicians, clerics and the fighters themselves — fuels pervasive anti-American sentiment and, some argue, has swelled the ranks of al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

But an AP reporter who spoke to about 80 villagers at the sites of the 10 attacks in North Waziristan, the main sanctuary for militants in Pakistan’s northwest tribal region along the Afghan border, was told that a significant majority of the dead were combatants.

I have no doubt that this will be cited to prove that raining death on innocents from the sky is okay if the percentage of innocents is small enough.

This reminds me of the olden days, when I was a young ‘un, and body counts were all the rage amongst the uniformed set.

(Link fixed.)

AKA full employment for Generals, consultants, and munitions makers.

Asia Times considers the ambling course of endless war over what seems like endless decades.

With the United States now well into the second decade of what the Pentagon has styled as an “era of persistent conflict”, the war formerly known as the global war on terrorism (unofficial acronym WFKATGWOT) appears increasingly fragmented and diffuse. Without achieving victory, yet unwilling to acknowledge failure, the United States military has withdrawn from Iraq. It is trying to leave Afghanistan, where events seem equally unlikely to yield a happy outcome.

Elsewhere – in Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, and Somalia, for example – US forces are busily opening up new fronts. Published reports that the United States is establishing “a constellation of secret drone bases” in or near the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula suggest that the scope of operations will only widen further.

Clarence Page muses upon Republicans’ skeevy (my word, not his) fascination with the sex lives of others. A nugget:

How has an election year that was supposed to be all about economic recovery suddenly become all about sex? Critics blame the media. They have a point. The media keep reporting what the candidates are saying.

The Booman Tribune contributes two excellent articles contemplating the hollowness of Mitt the Flip and of Republicanism in general.

Here’s a bit from the first:

This is what happens when you take a poll-driven position that is wrong on the merits. Romney opposed the bailout (of auto manufacturers–ed.) because he saw it as a way to score political points. Because the bailout was deeply unpopular, he assumed that he’d be well-placed later on for having opposed it. And so one piece of bullshit begat another and begat another and begat another. In the end, Romney wound up in the same place he wound up with ObamaCare, out on an island surrounded by a sea of contradictory nonsense and lies, looking like the most inauthentic man to ever run for high office.

And from the second:

Conservatives have done a great job of organizing to take over the Republican Party, but they seem like the dog that caught the car. The dog doesn’t know how to drive. The dog doesn’t even think a car should drive. That’s why they chased it in the first place. In the first issue of the National Review, William F. Buckley said “It stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.” I think he launched a movement that succeeded in slowing the government to a stop. But where do the Republicans go from here?

In other words, conservatives have basically arrived at their destination and now they are in a position to actually act on their rhetoric. And people want no part of their actual agenda, which has been fueled on lies and bullshit and fear and paranoia.

Check them both out.

It would appear that the contemporary Republican party has gotten a field of candidates that it deserves.

Just sad.

Via Balloon Juice.

Take the quiz.

Ronnie Polaneczky reminds us:

But the more I thought about asking Santorum to shut up, the more I realized that we need him to keep blathering.

Because the more he talks, the more he reminds us that the personal liberties enjoyed by Americans – particularly female Americans – are always at threat from primitive minds that want to rescind rights we thought had already been won.

Read the rest.

In other news, I understand that Primitive Minds is protesting the comparison as slanderous.

Daniel Ruth comments on the fact-free zone which is the Republican campaigns. A nugget:

And we still have a good eight months to go of phony negative commercials produced by shadowy groups like Americans for the Freedom to Be Dumber Than a Sack of Sea Slugs, or the Committee for Truth-Free Propaganda.

Read the rest.