Political Theatre category archive

You really don’t need Jon Stewart to parody politicians. They parody themselves.

But Stewart does it so well.

Via Bob Cesca.

Amy Goodman thinks she has found his heirs:

Speaking of the Tea Party, Texas Gov. Rick Perry has caused a continuous fracas in the Republican presidential debates with his declaration that the U.S.’s revered Social Security system is a “Ponzi scheme.” Charles Ponzi was the con artist who swindled thousands in 1920 with a fraudulent promise for high returns on investments. A typical Ponzi scheme involves taking money from investors, then paying them off with money taken from new investors, rather than paying them from actual earnings.

Social Security is actually solvent, with a trust fund of more than $2.6 trillion. The real Ponzi scheme threatening the U.S. public is the voracious greed of Wall Street banks.

I interviewed one of the “Occupy Wall Street” protest organizers. David Graeber teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London, and has authored several books, most recently “Debt: The First 5,000 Years.” Graeber points out that, in the midst of the financial crash of 2008, enormous debts between banks were renegotiated. Yet only a fraction of troubled mortgages have gotten the same treatment.

Jennifer Abel reads to us from the ACLU database of complaints about TSA cops copping feels, and then points out that:

The explanation is simple: TSA policy is to focus on genitalia at the expense of the security checks they should be doing. Last week, the House subcommittee on homeland security said the TSA was to blame in the death of a teenage stowaway who hid in the wheel-well of a parked airplane. (If a thoughtless teenager can do it, a terrorist with a bomb can, too.) TSA also fired or suspended 28 baggage screeners in Honolulu who weren’t screening checked bags for explosives. Checking the cargo hold’s contents, checking the plane itself – all take a back seat to checking what’s in our underwear, because only the latter lets the TSA live up to the motto that was posted in its training center shortly after its founding: “Dominate. Intimidate. Control.”

For a surfeit of skeevy screening stories, follow the link.

I’m glad my road warrior days appear to be over.

Stephen Colbert discusses original sin and Rick Santorum.

No, they are two different discussions in the same segment, but the link seems appropriate.

Via Mano Singham.

A nice catch of tea bag logic by Mano Singham (emphasis added):

The concrete sound barriers erected along the highways to shield nearby residents from noise were crumbling long before the advertised 20-year life expectancy was reached, presumably because inferior concrete had been used. Repairing them will cost the Ohio transportation department more than $1 million per mile, money that is hard to come by these days when governments are being squeezed by the demand for tax cuts.

What struck me was the comment of one resident who said, “It looks terrible. I know they don’t have the money, and I don’t want my taxes to go up to fix it. But they need to do something.”

And I want a Lamborghini.

Richard Wolff, writing at the Guardian, considers Republican claims that expecting those who can most afford shoulder some of the cost of governance is somehow “class war.” That’s another misdirection play designed to distract the discourse from economic fact.

Here’s a nugget:

Neither logic nor evidence supports either claim. The charge of class war is particularly obtuse. Consider simply these two facts. First, at the end of the second world war, for every dollar Washington raised in taxes on individuals, it raised $1.50 in taxes on business profits. Today, that ratio is very different: for every dollar Washington gets in taxes on individuals, it takes 25 cents in taxes on business. In short, the last half century has seen a massive shift of the burden of federal taxation off business and onto individuals.

Dick Polman comments. A snippet:

How tiresomely predictable. While President Obama was readying his tax-the-rich deficit-reduction plan for a Monday rollout, the GOP were already howling on the Sunday shows about the dreaded CW. In the words of budget maven and aspiring Medicare-killer Paul Ryan, “Class warfare will simply divide this country more.” He was duly echoed by Republican brethren like Sen. Lindsey Graham, who remarked, “When you pick one area of the economy and you say, ‘we’re going to tax those (rich) people because most people are not those people, that’s class warfare.”

This has been the GOP’s conditioned response to tax-burden issues since around 1992, when party wordsmiths began to own the phrase via frequent repetition. What’s amazing, of course, is that the Republicans have been allowed to get away with it – given the fact that the GOP’s rich clientele has been incrementally getting richer at the expense of everyone else. If there has indeed been “class warfare” in this country during the past three decades, the rich have already won. They have already staged their victory parade, brandishing a surrender document signed by most of their fellow citizens.

At least, not in Wingnut World:

David Lewis, a 26 year old Tea Party activist believes the man he is mounting a primary challenge against, Speaker of the House Rep. John Boehner (R-OH), is a “socialist.”

In Wingnut World, “Socialist” is just another empty dirty word, something bad to say about one’s opponent.

It has nothing to do with the state’s ownership of the means of production.

Empty words appeal to empty heads.

Afterthought:

Indeed, in Wingnut World, “socialism” appears to have become a synonym of “compassion,” something else to eschewed in that universe.

Leonard Pitts, Jr., looks at death penalty supporters through the lens of the Republican debate.

Full disclosure: I oppose the death penalty, not because I think it is morally wrong (I am convinced that some persons do deeds so heinous that they forfeit their right to be allowed in society), but because we get it wrong just too damned often.

It was a chilling moment, but also a clarifying one in that it validated the grimmest suspicions about at least some of those who support capital punishment. That support, after all, is often framed in terms of high morality, the argument being that only in taking an offender’s life can a society truly express its revulsion over certain heinous crimes.

But when the audience at a recent GOP presidential debate cheered the observation that Texas Gov. Rick Perry has overseen a record 234 executions, that fig leaf was swept away. You knew this was not about some profound question for philosophers and august men. No, this was downturned thumbs in a Roman arena, vengeance putting on airs of justice, the need to see someone die.

People dress that need up in rags of righteousness and ethicality, but occasionally, the disguise slips and it shows itself for what it is: the atavistic impulse of those for whom justice is synonymous with blood. If people really meant the arguments of high morality, you’d expect them to regard the death penalty with reverent sobriety. You would not expect them to cheer.

Mr. Pitts goes on to discuss one of the cases in which the chances are good that we got it wrong once more.

At least Mitt is consistently inconsistent. This cartoon is four years old.

Daniel Ruth of the St. Petersburg Times reports on his experiences observing the teabaggery at the recent CNN Republican candidates sideshow. A nugget:

But wait, it only gets more loopy.

At one point, former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman suggested Texas Gov. Rick Perry was flirting with treason simply because Perry believes trying to build a 1,200-mile fence along the border is a crazy idea. Now Perry may very well possess the intellectual firepower of a Lhasa apso, but opposing a border fence for pragmatic reasons hardly rises to the level of becoming the Lord Haw Haw of the Rio Grande.

Later in the spin room, even Huntsman’s spinners were flummoxed over the treason allegation. When the best explanation your surrogates can come up with is “Beats me,” it might suggest the campaign is getting close to toe-tag status.

“Loopy” would seem to be an understatement.

Shaun Mullen could care less.

Via Bob Cesca’s Awesome Blog.

CLick for a larger image.

Via Bart Blog.

Mike Littwin looks at poll results (which are pretty meaningless this far out, but the create jobs for newsreaders), concluding that the seem favorable for the (dis)loyal opposition party.

Then he considers the field:

Of course not. Instead, if you’ve watched the recent Republican presidential debates — and I recommend you watch them all — you know the official Republican response is to make certain that independents would never vote for them.

. . . It’s the Ken Buck/Christine O’Donnell strategy writ large. As I’ve mentioned before, Rick Perry is the Ken Buck that Michael Bennet wanted to run against.

Read the whole thing.

Peter Bergman explains. Listen at least to the first five minutes.

Key quote:

Washington is rigged for big corporations that hire armies of lobbyists.

Via Balloon Juice.