Political Theatre category archive

Slightly over a year ago, Dennis G. at Balloon Juice wrote a long post on theft of labor as a tactic of the rich and powerful to get more rich and powerful. Here’s a bit (I would recommend the whole thing–it explains the purpose of Reagonics):

The Confederacy really wasn’t about slavery. That was just a tactic. The real issue was finding the best way to steal the labor of others.

Before the Emancipation Proclamation and the passage of the 13th Amendment (which Mississippi has still NOT officially ratified) slavery was a State sponsored institution in America and it was the easiest way to steal the labor of others. Protecting the simplicity of that labor stealing system is why the Confederates started the Civil War.

Now Georgia tries to bring back press gangs, dressing them up as “probation officers.”

“Incognegro”: Two liberal black bloggers infiltrate the Right Online conference:

A bit from the write up:

Elon and I receive quick glances at our credentials as we walk through the door. Neither of us can believe it — we’re in! Our hearts are pounding. We are immediately conspicuous — it’s hard to find any other black faces in a sea of white ones. Heads turns and people stare…hard. I start walking toward the front but Elon wisely suggests that we head for some empty seats in the back near the one other black conservative we see. Given that we stand out, best not to attract too much attention to ourselves lest we be recognized by a more plugged-in, net-savvy conservative. After all, a couple of years ago, Right Online speaker Erick Erickson and I had had a public and ugly battle on Twitter in which he kinda made an ass of himself. And Elon’s This Week in Blackness has achieved its own strong internet following.

Via the Booman.

Very creative.

California state Controller John Chiang announced Tuesday he was halting pay for state lawmakers, saying their budget plan was not balanced and did not meet the state’s requirement for them to be paid.

Chiang issued his decision after conducting an analysis of the budget package pushed through by Democratic lawmakers last week on a simple majority vote. Lawmakers said they believed that action allowed them to continue receiving paychecks, but Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed the package, saying he didn’t want to see billions more in borrowing or questionable maneuvers.

The larger issue is that California has rendered itself ungovernable. Governor Brown seems to have the guts to make push come to shove.

H/T Karen for the link.

Imprisoning brown persons for profit(eers):

Harold Meyerson considers the wingnuttiness of most of the declared candidates for the Republican Presidential nomination and wonders who’s responsible.

Then he suggests an answer:

How did the Republican Party become at once so insular and unmoored that winning its presidential nod requires an extremism that would give Barry Goldwater the creeps? Many are responsible for the Republicans’ descent into madness, but pride of place surely goes to Fox News chair Roger Ailes, the onetime Nixon aide who created a counterfactual network that in turn helped create a counterfactual Republican Party. Ailes, we now learn from a recent article in New York Magazine, despairs over the current crop of Republican candidates, but he has no one more to blame than himself for driving more electable Republicans from the race. The man who gave Palin (as well as Huckabee, Santorum, and Gingrich) a regular gig at Fox, according to one Republican close to Ailes who’s quoted in the article, now thinks “Palin is an idiot. He thinks she’s stupid.”

Via DelawareLiberal.

In Mitt World, it’s always Opposites Day.

Joan Venocchi considers Mitt’s position on the auto industry (first, criticizing McMaverick during the campaign of the Republican nomination for proposing nothing, then criticizine President Obama after the election for doing something) and on Michigan’s overall employment situation (not so hot, despite the improvement in the auto sector):

If they (jobs numbers–ed.) stay that way and Romney is the Republican presidential nominee, he will try to use them to make Michigan voters forget that first, he criticized McCain for doing nothing. Then, he criticized Obama for doing something.It’s classic Romney — in favor of something and nothing and on the side of everything.

One could argue the Mitt the Flip is a weather vane/vain (either spelling works) blowin’ in the winds of whatever the hell sounds good today.

Aside: I might have posted this before, but it’s worth a reminder, so I’m not going to check.

Via The Richmonder.

Asia Times interviews Sebastian Gorka, a military affairs analyst at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy regarding the complex politics of Pakistan. As is normally the case with Asia Times stories, the article is long and wonky.

It’s also worth at least a skim to provide a frame of reference to the cross-currents and internal contradictions of Pakistani politics.

Here’s a nugget (RFE/RL stands for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty):

RFE/RL: What does it say to you about Pakistan’s military when you hear that instead of hunting down the people who helped Bin Laden hide in their country, it is instead hunting down the people who helped the United States find and kill him?

Gorka: I think this is a wonderful example of why one cannot talk of Pakistan as a unitary nation. After Bin Laden was killed, the immediate comment one heard in the American media and internationally was, “Clearly Pakistan must have known. Or if Pakistan didn’t know, they were incompetent.” This is a misunderstanding of the reality that is today’s Pakistan. There is no one political elite in Pakistan.

You can quite easily imagine, for example, that the political leadership – the civilian leadership in Islamabad – had no idea that Bin Laden was living in Abbottabad. But at the same time, you could imagine, for example, that the ISI [Inter-Services Intelligence] or that members of the military were well aware of it because, let’s be honest, he was within a block and a half of the equivalent of the [US Military Academy at] West Point for Pakistan.

The Philadelphia Daily News offers a theory about politicians behaving badly.

It’s absurd, but so are they.

Last Friday’s Fresh Air explored the history of Prohibition.

A confluence of twisted events led to the passage of the Volstead Act. A tidbit, from the transcript:

GROSS: You write in your book that for some populists, Prohibition was a good way to justify the institution of an income tax. What was the connection between Prohibition and an income tax?

Mr. OKRENT: Well, going back as far as the Whiskey Rebellion of the 1790s and then the beer tax that was brought in during the Civil War to finance the Civil War, the federal government had been dependent upon the excise tax on alcohol to operate.

In some years, domestic revenue, as much as 50 percent of it came from excise taxes. So the Prohibitionists realized that they couldn’t get rid of liquor so long as the federal government was dependent upon liquor to get its revenue and to operate. So they supported the income tax movement, and in exchange, many of the populists who were behind the income tax movement supported Prohibition.

In 1913, the 16th Amendment is passed. The income tax comes in. The federal government has another means of supporting itself. And at that point, the Prohibitionists who had been operating state by state by state decided we can now have an amendment to the federal Constitution because the government is no longer dependent. There’s another source of revenue.

Also, the state of Maryland had an official state bootlegger.

Follow the link to listen to the show or read the transcript. It’s worth it.

Noz asks the question:

proponents of proposition 8 (i.e. opponents of same-sex marriage in california) are arguing that the decision striking down propositioin a same sex relationship and thus had an interest in the outcome of the case.

(snip)

if they really believe that’s the case, then a heterosexual judge also has an interest in the outcome of the case. the same argument they are using to disqualify judge walker because he is homosexual could be used to disqualify any heterosexual judge. so who does that leave to hear the case?

The answer is clear.

Read more »

. . . and it’s a doozy.

August J. Pollack is puzzled:

I have an ongoing fascination with the weird unspoken rule in the media that politicians are never liars. They are “inaccurate” and “misleading” but never, well, full of it, even when the last few weeks has been an expo-quality product demonstration of how the media lets everyone get away with making stuff up (themselves included.)

Click through to see his comic for the week.

Faked body counts in Viet Nam Afghanistan.

Peter Bergman distinguishes between what is and what isn’t going on:

It’s time for some perspective on what’s going on. What’s not going on is Weinergate. Who cares if some horny legislator is Twitting his bulge in cyberspace? What’s not going on is whether Evita Palin is going to throw her wink in the ring. What substantive contribution could this ignorant opportunist add to the national debate? What’s not going on is the cat and mouse game being played over raising the national debt. What can the Republicans hope to gain, except a further trashing of their already diminished brand by delaying the inevitable?

What is going on is a simultaneous crises in our economy, our environment and our health care and education systems. Wise minds have warned of this gathering storm for decades, but the American public would rather go Dancing With The Stars than Dealing With The Facts.

Follow the link. It’s a delicious, reality-based rant.

Eugene Robinson:

Ryan Crocker, the veteran diplomat nominated by President Obama to be the next U.S. ambassador in Kabul, gave a realistic assessment of the war in testimony Wednesday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Here I’m using “realistic” as a synonym for “bleak.”

Making progress is hard, Crocker said, but not hopeless.

Not hopeless.

What on earth are we doing? We have more than 100,000 troops in Afghanistan risking life and limb, at a cost of $10 billion a month, to pursue ill-defined goals whose achievement can be imagined, but just barely?

“Because we are already there” is not a good reason to stay.