Political Theatre category archive
TSA Security Theatre 0
Thom Hartmann tells what happened when he said, “I’ll take the grope,” then explains what he thinks is motive for the kabuki.
I’m a Southern Boy. I Know the Code. 0
Re-Seg 0
They never stop trying, do they?
“It feels like the Deep South in the days of Jim Crow segregation,” said Orfield, who directs the University of Minnesota Law School’s Institute on Race & Poverty. “When you see an all-white school and an all-black school in the same neighborhood in this day and age, it’s shocking.”
After all, despite the proverb, familiarity breeds friendship, which militates against hate, and we can’t have that, now, can we?
Link Love 0
The Booman suggests that you click on NewtGingrich.com. Several times.
You’ll be glad you did.
Go to the Booman’s place for his interpretation of what this means.
Teabag Lights
0
Joel Connelly, at SeattlePI dot com, considers the ramped teabaggery in the House of Representives. A snippet:
(snip)
The craziness now can even be viewed through a light bulb.
At a Seattle open-house last Saturday, Rep. Jay Inslee talked about how, five years ago, he worked with Republican Rep. Fred Upton of Michigan on legislation to phase in energy-efficient light bulbs.
Of course, this made sense. Only 10 percent of the energy consumed by an old 100-watt incandescent bulb goes to create light. The rest is wasted heat. The industry is phasing in a more efficient product and have come to live with the phase-out of old pear-shaped bulbs.
Yet, Thomas Edison’s little-changed invention has become a cause celebre for dim bulbs of the Tea Party.
Read the rest.
The Long Game 0
Keith Olbermann and Andy Koll discuss the Republican cave-in on payroll taxes.
It will be reconsidered in two months.
Republicans have set themselves up to display their desire to make the rich richer and the poor poorer just as primary season gets under way.
Republican Economic Theory 0
Robyn Blummer wraps it up in once sentence.
Shorter version: Make the rich richer, the poor poorer.
It’s what they do.
A Newt Is a Small Lizard 0
A roundup of commentary about Newt the Gingrinch’s Humpty-Dumpty view of the law (that is, laws mean what he wants them to mean).
Dick Polman:
(snip)
Ah yes, this is the real Newt – the reckless Newt in touch with his inner thug – that veteran Newt-watchers saw so often during his brief mid-’90s heyday. The real Newt’s hatred of so-called “activist” judges (i.e., judges whose rulings he doesn’t like) is so unhinged that two recent attorney generals, Michael Mukasey and Alberto Gonzales, have stood up to voice their revulsion.
Mike Littwin:
In tossing away about 200 years of American jurisprudence — and, by the way, for a historian/not-lobbyist, Newt made a complete hash of Jefferson’s attack on court appointments, which had nothing whatever to do with court rulings — he said he might abolish certain courts while ignoring others. He called for a best-of-three constitutional test, which, let us say, you can’t actually find in the Constitution.
(snip)
Under the Gingrich Rule, consider that Obama and Congress could ignore the Supreme Court if it overturns Obamacare. In the ’50s, the president and Congress could have ignored Brown vs. the Board of Education. The whole idea is crazier even than anything Ron Paul has ever said.
Jay Bookman:
That is a 180-degree reversal of Hamilton’s actual position. He saw the courts as vulnerable guarantors of freedom whose independence must be preserved at all costs against the likes of Gingrich.
In Federalist Papers #78, for example, Hamilton writes that the judiciary “is beyond comparison the weakest of the three departments of power; that it can never attack with success either of the other two; and that all possible care is requisite to enable it to defend itself against their attacks.”
The Republican War on Women 1
Hadley Freeman predicts the next campaign:
The Republicans ban women from having sex (except with them)
In 2011 America’s right wing, and especially the Christian right wing, at last let slip what their problem is with contraception and abortion: it’s not squeamishness, morality or a fondness for hanging outside Planned Parenthood clinics toting misspelt placards – they just don’t like women having sex. At all. . . . This was borne out in their frankly unhinged attacks on Planned Parenthood, the HPV vaccine, insurance coverage of contraception and, as I discussed last week, the puritanical mood they created that encouraged President Obama to restrict access to Plan B, or the morning-after pill, none of which have much to do with abortion and everything to do with women’s temerity to have sex.
Thus, in 2012 the Republicans propose the female anti-sex bill, in which women are expressly forbidden from having sex with anyone other than the occasional lecherous politician who happens to hurl himself, bodily, sweatily, in her lucky, lucky path.
Follow the link for the rest of her predictions.
Twits on Twitter 0
Galluping twits:
A copy of the report is available at the link.
A. P. Ticker Remembers Dear Leader 0
Warning: Some language.
Droning On 1
The government has found more brown people to point drones at, now on this side of the big pond.
The winding down of the ground operation over the next two months stems from growing concerns over the cost and effectiveness of the $10 million-a-month National Guard effort that has provided reassurance along the border and political cover for politicians in Washington but has had limited impact on arrests and drug seizures.
It won’t be long before drones are pointed at everyone everywhere, sort of like Google Earth in real time. With bombs.
Meanwhile, in the Guardian, Gary Younge quotes a statement that sums up the anti-immigration movement: it’s about hatin’ on The Other:
Follow the link for the rest of Mr. Younge’s column.