Political Theatre category archive

Someone once said of the Viet Namese War that the only way to end it was the declare victory and withdraw.

Lesson learned.

I congratulate Mr. Obama on the courage to sort-of-end George Bush’s Great and Glorious Patriotic War for a Lie in Iraq, but there is no joy. As Atrios points out,

The best part of Obama’s speech was the suggestion that lighting trillions of dollars on fire in the service of killing random foreigners was perhaps not the best use of our limited resources.

Excerpt:

Maybe you trust this particular administration, but, you have to ask yourself, will you trust the next one?

Or, I must add, the previous one?

. . . now comes with American-style teabagging.

The hate does get tiresome.

In a post that’s getting a lot of play in Left Blogistan, Steven Benen wonders what the Beckites and their fellow travelers want.

Actually, it’s pretty clear what they want.

Like kids driving around looking for stop signs to shoot, they’re all fired up and they want a target.

Any target.

Chris Satullo explains. A nugget:

Saying you want to run government more like a business is like saying you want to run your toaster oven more like a vacuum cleaner. The two appliances have a few similarities – they have electric cords- but they operate differently, to different ends.

Business exists to make a profit, for the benefit of a limited group of owners. It serves customers only so far as doing that furthers its primary goal.

Government’s goal is to break even, while promoting the public good . And in government, your shareholders – the voters – are the same people as your customers. That makes it a lot harder to please the boss by cutting costs.

Details.

Via curv3ball.

One more time.

See Steven M’s post on “L. Ron Beck.”

Via TPM.

I am shocked–shocked!–that stuff like this happens these days:

The Nettleton (Mississippi) Middle School elections are divided between offices pegged for black and white students, according to the memo, which was provided to TSG by a parent. The document was handed out to every student in the school’s sixth, seventh, and eighth grades, and it details the race requirements for each of four class officer spots (president, vice president, secretary-treasurer, and reporter).

Updates indicate that the policy is being changed.

More here.

It is nothing new to charge crusaders for human rights with being socialists (emphasis added):

At the turn of the 20th century, many Americans believed the vote would make women more worldly, less feminine, and less able to play their primary roles: wife and mother. In fact, the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage called the suffragists “radicals bent on destroying American values and replacing them with socialism.”

Via TPM.

A little better but not enough to make a never mind.

Initial jobless claims dropped by 31,000, the first decline in a month, to 473,000 in the week ended Aug. 21, Labor Department figures showed today in Washington. The number of people receiving unemployment insurance decreased, while those getting extended benefits climbed.

The weekly average over the past month climbed to the highest level since November even as the latest reading provided some relief to the drumbeat of negative economic data in recent weeks. Employers have delayed hiring plans and some have renewed firings as the year-old recovery shows signs of petering out, raising the risk consumer spending will weaken further.

But the not a mosque not on the World Trade Center site fuss is anything but silly. Glenn Greenwald explains. A nugget:

As Aziz Poonawalla put it: “if the project does fail, then I think that the message that will be sent is that bigotry and fear of Muslims is not just permitted, it is effective.”

That’s exactly the message that will be sent, and that’s what makes this conflict so significant. Obviously, not all opponents of Park51 are as overtly hateful as those in that video — and not all opponents are themselves bigots — but the position they’ve adopted is inherently bigoted, as it seeks to impose guilt and blame on a large demographic group for the aberrational acts of a small number of individual members. And one thing is certain: if this campaign succeeds, it will proliferate and the sentiments driving it will become even more potent. Hatemongers always become emboldened when they triumph.

The hate does get so tiresome.

Via TPM.

Dick Polman considers the current situation in Iraq. A nugget:

In all likelihood, there will be no finality to this neoconservative folly. Fifty thousand U.S. troops remain, ostensibly to “advise and assist” the Iraqi security forces that will supposedly keep the peace despite the absence of a functioning coalition government. In case you haven’t permanently tuned out Iraq, that is indeed the situation: Nearly six months after the staging of national elections, the various sectarian and religious political parties still haven’t formed a government. Meanwhile, jihadists are still killing with impunity – 61 people died in a Baghdad bombing the other day – and a former U.S. ambassador to Iraq is warning that the current instability “has the potential to re-polarize” the country.

Excerpt from the transcript:

There was a proposal supported by Democrats and Republicans that would’ve required corporate political advertisers to reveal who’s funding their activities. When special interests take to the airwaves, whoever is running and funding the ad would have to appear in the advertisement and take responsibility for it – like a company’s CEO or an organization’s biggest contributor. And foreign-controlled corporations and entities would be restricted from spending money to influence American elections – just as they were in the past.

You would think that making these reforms would be a matter of common sense. You’d think that reducing corporate and even foreign influence over our elections wouldn’t be a partisan issue.

But the Republican leaders in Congress said no. In fact, they used their power to block the issue from even coming up for a vote.

This can only mean that the leaders of the other party want to keep the public in the dark. They don’t want you to know which interests are paying for the ads. The only people who don’t want to disclose the truth are people with something to hide.

Look for the fourth comment down, from The Farmer.

2nd District Virginia House of Representatives. The preliminaries and introductions take the first ten minutes or so.

There was a story in today’s paper about it, but it doesn’t seem to be the website as I draft this. Found it.

Via Vivian Paige.

Addendum:

Vivian Paige analyzes the debate.