Political Theatre category archive

Bill Maher:

The next time you hear anyone say ‘job creator,’ I want you to picture [The Situation from Jersey Shore]. Yes, The Situation made $5 million dollars last year, and if he has to pay a little more in taxes, it won’t mean he’s creating fewer jobs. It will mean a tiny fraction of his money actually pays for the government that works to keep him alive. The EPA that contains his oil runoff. The Postal Service that delivers his body wax. The Bureau of Weights and Measures who weigh his dumbbells. The Centers for Disease Control that provides a steady supply of penicillin. And the military, who keep the Taliban away. Because if a single human proves that America is asking for it, you’re looking at him.

Another growth industry suffers: the one based on incarcerating human beings for profit.

In a memo sent Thursday to Virginia Department of Corrections employees, the agency’s director, Harold Clarke, explained that the state recently received informal notice of the decision from officials in Pennsylvania, and he expects Pennsylvania will soon deliver the written, 180-day notice required to end the contract between the two states.

Green Rock, one of 44 state prisons in Virginia, is in Chatham in Pittsylvania County. Opened in 2007, it houses roughly 970 inmates, all of them from Pennsylvania. No other Virginia state prison has Pennsylvania offenders.

(snip)

“The transfer of the Pennsylvania inmates from Virginia will place the department in a difficult financial situation,” Clarke wrote. “The revenue from out of state inmates not only pays for the operation of Green Rock, it also provides funding to other inmate beds.”

Adding a profit motive to imprisoning persons skews the balance away from justice towards incarceration.

Creating prisoners for pay must be ended.

Tom Papantonia interviews Chancey Devega on the Republicans’ odious Southern Strategy:

Excerpt:

. . . mostly a mix of old, white, angry people who are upset that a black man lives in the White House.

Please, someone, convince Ralph Nader to learn to play the flute, cut the soles out of his shoes, and go live in a tree somewhere far far away.

His habit of public self-gratification is not only tiresome, but also destructive.

He is unsafe at any speech.

The terrorism of fear is the goal of terrorism. It has turned our national fear of terrorists into its our own homegrown form of terrorism.

Dan MacArthur writes of modern day witch hunts:

Hebshi is a self-described half-Jewish, half-Arabic, dark-skinned mother of twins. Armed agents handcuffed her and removed her from a flight from Denver to Detroit on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Fighter jets accompanied the aircraft to its destination where it was isolated and surrounded by officers.

It seems that fellow passengers expressed suspicions to the flight crew about Hebshi and a couple of men sitting in her row who they believed spent an inordinate amount of time in the restroom.

Hebshi was placed in a holding cell, strip-searched and interrogated. She told The Associated Press that she felt “violated, humiliated and sure that I was being taken from the plane simply because of my appearance.”

She was released after four hours with profuse apologies for the inconvenience. But that was small comfort to Hebshi and certainly would be for my wife.

My wife fears she may be similarly targeted as a dark-haired, dark-eyed Nebraska-American — burdens she bears with grace in a blonde-worshipping, Big Red-loathing state.

Will Bunch on Countdown:

Via Bob Cesca.

Peter van Buren, author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, tells of his experiences being intimidated investigate by the State Deparment’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security.

On the same day that more than 250,000 unredacted State Department cables hemorrhaged out onto the Internet, I was interrogated for the first time in my 23-year State Department career by State’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security (DS) and told I was under investigation for allegedly disclosing classified information. The evidence of my crime? A posting on my blog from the previous month that included a link to a WikiLeaks document already available elsewhere on the Internet.

As we sat in a small, gray, windowless room, resplendent with a two-way mirror, multiple ceiling-mounted cameras, and iron rungs on the table to which handcuffs could be attached, the two DS agents stated that the inclusion of that link amounted to disclosing classified material. In other words, a link to a document posted by who-knows-who on a public website available at this moment to anyone in the world was the legal equivalent of me stealing a Top Secret report, hiding it under my coat, and passing it to a Chinese spy in a dark alley.

Attempts to classify documents that are already public would seem somewhere between laughable and stupid, except that those attempts are backed by the life-crushing police power of the state.

Read the whole thing.

Via Contradict Me.

Shaun Mullen wonders how it got this way:

I am still having a difficult time getting my head around this, but it appears that today’s Republican Party is adamantly against abortions for the unborn, adamantly against health care for the newborn if their mother chooses not to have an abortion and lacks insurance, adamantly for letting an adult with serious health issues die if they lack insurance, and adamantly for executing people even under the flimsiest of evidence.

Have I got that right? Yes I do, but the question arises as to how the GOP got itself tied in such seemingly contradictory knots.

That’s easy: Obeisance to ideological purity no matter the circumstances, an unwillingness to listen to the views of others and a win-at-all-costs mentality as the GOP continues to devolve from a traditional political party to something resembling a religion.

Via Contradict Me.

Read Anne Laurie on Making a Stink in Public. A nugget:

The current GOP obsession with keeping the government from functioning uses Making A Stink in Public as its most powerful tactic, but if you listen to the Koch-bankrolled lobbyists, the Murdoch-bought media, and their wholly-owned (mostly) GOP legislators, it’s that Black guy in the White House who’s… Making A Stink in Public. Who gave him the right—the power—to stand up in public and argue against them?

The latest straw poll winner in the GOP is Herman Cain. From John Baur in my ex-local rag:

WATCHING Republicans stagger through their candidate-selection process is like watching kids at a birthday party play Pin the Tail on the Donkey.

They’re blindfolded, so you never know where the pin gets stuck.

How else to explain Saturday’s surprise win of pizza king Herman Cain in Florida’s straw poll?

The event itself was meaningless was a meaningless fundraiser in which voting came with a fee and few persons participated, but it reminded me of Dick Polman’s column on teabag litmus tests last week:

Perry certainly passes the right-wing litmus test on a huge range of issues – global warming is a fraud, Social Security is a con, regulation is bad – but conservatives are looking for someone who will toe The Line 100 percent of the time. And Perry soured his Florida debate listeners when he stood up for the ’01 Texas law that provides in-state college tuition rates to some children of illegal immigrants. For purists, the law that Perry signed is a no-no. Worse yet was the way he defended the law:

“If you say that we should not educate children who have come into our state for no other reason than they’ve been brought there by no fault of their own, I don’t think you have a heart. We need to be educating these children, because (otherwise) they will become a drag on our society.”

Two problems for Perry: (1) The tea-partying Floridians want to kick out the illegals, not educate them; as one straw-poller told Politico last night, “If they’re illegal, they need to get the hell out of America.” And (2), the kick-’em-out folks resented being told that they are heartless.

Litmus paper, in case you may have forgotten because of the adoption of that term by political reporters, is used for quick and dirty pH tests.

Litmus tests reveal that the Repubican base is acidly corrosive.

They claim it’s a satire of affirmative action:

A Facebook post announcing plans by a UC Berkeley Republican group to sell baked goods priced according to race, gender and ethnicity – “White/Caucasian” pastries for $2 and “Black/African American” pastries for 75 cents, for example – has drawn outrage on campus.

This sort of stuff is funny only through the lens of racism.

Otherwise, otherwise.

A snippet from Dick Polman’s comment on Thursday’s Republican debate provides supporting evidence (emphasis added)

There’s no point in devoting acres of space to the latest Republican debate, given the paucity of new material last night. It was akin to watching a predictable pulp-action summer movie, and by the third reel one’s eyes have long since glazed.

It was also predictable that the Republican debate audience would act out in some repulsive fashion, and so it did, this time booing a gay soldier who had volunteered to put his life on the line for his country. The gay soldier appeared on video – which was fortunate for the cowardly homophobes, because this way they could safely bark their bigotry without having to confront the soldier, and his thick biceps, live and in person.

Mike Littwin:

The reviews are in. And it’s now pretty much official: Rick Perry is, in fact, the Texas governor for those who think George W. Bush was too cerebral. (I don’t remember whose joke that is — it’s not mine, but I do like it.)

More at the link.