Political Theatre category archive

Date: Saturday, July 24th Time: 9-10:30 a. m.

Location: Bubba’s Deli & BBQ, 3600 Dam Neck Rd, Virginia Beach (west side of Dam Neck Rd. between Princess Anne Blvd. and Rosemont Rd.; access via service road at Lansdowne Ct. next to the Farmers Market).

Cost: Adults $10.00, Under 12 &6.00 for all-you-can-eat buffet (it’s a pretty good buffet, too–plenty of variety).

Willard Smith, Executive Director, Vetshouse, which serves homeless veterans, will speak; $2.00 from every adult meal and $1.00 from every kids’ meal will go to Vetshouse. Donations are also welcome.

More information and suggested items to donate here.

Read it here.

“‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves . . . .”

Mike Littwin in the Denver Post:

There’s an old political axiom in this state, after all, that goes this way: If Tom Tancredo is the answer, you should immediately come up with a new question.

No further comment is needed.

At the Booman’s place.

Excerpt:

Now in the past, Presidents and Congresses of both parties have treated unemployment insurance for what it is – an emergency expenditure. That’s because an economic disaster can devastate families and communities just as surely as a flood or tornado.

Suddenly, Republican leaders want to change that. They say we shouldn’t provide unemployment insurance because it costs money. So after years of championing policies that turned a record surplus into a massive deficit, including a tax cut for the wealthiest Americans, they’ve finally decided to make their stand on the backs of the unemployed. They’ve got no problem spending money on tax breaks for folks at the top who don’t need them and didn’t even ask for them; but they object to helping folks laid off in this recession who really do need help. And every day this goes on, another 50,000 Americans lose that badly needed lifeline.

Excerpts and summary here.

At Religion News Service.

Via Article IX, which suggests that “no new drilling” would be a more palatable and accurate term than “moratorium.”

Received via email, origin unknown:

Did you know that the words “race car” spelled backwards still spells “race car”?

That “eat” is the only word that, if you take the 1st letter and move it to the last, spells its past tense, “ate”?

And if you rearrange the letters in “so-called tea party Republicans,” and add just a few more letters, it spells: “Shut up you free-loading, progress-blocking, benefit-grabbing, resource-sucking, violent, hypocritical *******s, and face the fact that you nearly wrecked the country under Bush.”

How weird is that?

The local rag today told a powerful story of an Iraq vet whose life fell apart after his return from the war and who received no assistance from his chain of command.

His life fell apart to such an extent that, for a reason even he cannot explain, he attempted armed robbery.

Local rag has hidden the story behind a login wall.

Even though we pay happily for a dead-tree subscription, I refuse to create yet another innertube password. (If you let me read it on paper, you should damned well let me read it in electrons.)

If you want to read the story, here’s the link; you can register for the site.

hamptonroads.com/2010/07/iraq-veteran-posttraumatic-stress-help-never-came

The story relates to this:

Transcript here.

And I am certain it’s not just in LalaLand. From the San Jose Mercury-News:

A lobbyist has an idea to make life better — but only for his client. The lobbyist writes the bill, shops for a willing lawmaker to introduce it and lines up the support. The legislator? He has to do little more than show up and vote.

This is the path of the “sponsored bill,” a method of lawmaking little noticed outside California’s capital but long favored on the inside. In many states lobbyists influence legislators; in
California, they have — quite baldly — taken center stage in lawmaking.

Although lawmakers in recent years have routinely failed to grapple with health care, the state budget and other matters of public interest, they’ve managed to do the bidding of the private interests who tout sponsored bills at an impressive clip.

.

John Cole points out the intellectual incoherence of “shoot first, ask questions later” Neocon foreign policy.

From the Toimes:

More than one in seven homeowners with loans in excess of a million dollars are seriously delinquent, according to data compiled for The New York Times by the real estate analytics firm CoreLogic.

By contrast, homeowners with less lavish housing are much more likely to keep writing checks to their lender. About one in 12 mortgages below the million-dollar mark is delinquent.

Though it is hard to prove, the CoreLogic data suggest that many of the well-to-do are purposely dumping their financially draining properties, just as they would any sour investment.

“The rich are different: they are more ruthless,” said Sam Khater, CoreLogic’s senior economist.

Via John Cole, who wonders

how Republicans (will) try to pin this . . . on black people and Fannie Mae and Barney Frank.

Leonard Pitts, Jr., on the “no-fly” list:

• They won’t let you fly.
• They won’t tell you why.
• They won’t show you the list.
• They won’t take your name off the list.
• They won’t give you any way to appeal.

The list, then, is a purgatory to which one can be consigned in perpetuity with neither due process nor judicial review, because one’s name happened to be similar to that of some bad person. And there is no form you fill out or person you can talk to to have the error corrected. You’ve simply got to live with it.

I can understand a desire to keep the list confidential.

The no appeal thing, though, is beyond the pale.

Via Bob Cesca.

Jeff Jacoby meditates on the Declaration of Independence and on its glorious phrasing contrasted with the reality of chattel slavery.

He argues that charging the Founders with hypocrisy is simplistic hindsight and points out that the Founders themselves were aware of the contrast between the lofty language and the reality of the subjugation of the chattel slave. A nugget:

The Founders weren’t stupid. Of course they knew that the universal ideals embraced in the Declaration were not matched in reality across the colonies. The controversy over slavery was intense; but even more intense was the need for a united front against England. The urgent choice in 1776 was not between slavery or abolition. It was between hanging together, as Benjamin Franklin supposedly quipped in Philadelphia, or most assuredly hanging separately. They chose to hang together, and the confrontation over slavery was left for later.

But in that confrontation, the lofty ideal of equality enshrined in the Declaration — precisely because it was enshrined in the Declaration — imparted enormous moral authority to the abolitionists’ cause. Those who indict the Founders because their treatment of African slaves didn’t come up to the standard of “all men are created equal’’ should be asked: Would the Declaration of Independence have been improved if those words had been omitted? Would slavery have ended sooner had abolitionists not been able to invoke that “self-evident truth’’?

The men of 1776 did not create chattel slavery in the English-speaking colonies; it was part of the reality into which they were born. Slavery in the New World was long-established in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies when slaves first arrived in Virginia in 1619.* Even as many of the Founders held slaves, most of them knew that it was wrong. Jacoby refers to Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia:

Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference! The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest.–But it is impossible to be temperate and to pursue this subject through the various considerations of policy, of morals, of history natural and civil. We must be contented to hope they will force their way into every one’s mind. I think a change already perceptible, since the origin of the present revolution. The spirit of the master is abating, that of the slave rising from the dust, his condition mollifying, the way I hope preparing, under the auspices of heaven, for a total emancipation, and that this is disposed, in the order of events, to be with the consent of the masters, rather than by their extirpation.

Jefferson’s wish for emancipation with the consent of the masters, of course, was not fulfilled. Only one American society managed to end slavery peacefully: Brazil in 1888. And in all countries racial and ethnic bigotries persist, even until and beyond today.

Without imputing moral equivalence, I make an analogy which I believe is valid from a sociological and economic point of view, if not from a moral one (and, as we consider the death, devastation, and human exploitation which accompanies what is now oh-so-politely referred to as “extraction,” I wonder whether a degree of moral equivalence also appertains):

Disentangling the 18th Century North and South American societies from slavery was, I think, comparable to disentangling modern societies from fossil fuels. Many do not want to do so; fossil fuels are the source of wealth for some and convenience for all. Many deny the dangers of the present course, not because the dangers are not apparent, but because they wish not to see them. And even those who want to change the present course are not sure how, even as they are certain it is necessary.

Ultimately, the United States was unable to end chattel slavery without war. Attempts to recreate slavery and subjugation of former slaves and descendants of former slaves under persisted overtly for a century following that war and covertly much longer, even to this day. The aftermath of chattel slavery greets every American with the dawn and walks with him and her in the street.

I do not wonder that the Founders failed to grapple with it.

____________________

*When I was wee bairn studying Virginia history in fourth grade in a Virginia public school, the text book called 1619 the “Red Letter Year,” for it saw

• the arrival of the first English women to the Virginia colony for marriage to the colonists,
• the first meeting of the Virginia House of Burgesses, the first elected legislature in the English speaking colonies, and the
• the arrival of the first Negro (probably indentured, not chattel) servants.

I wonder whether it’s taught the same way these days.

Aside: As a Virginian, I am obligated to point out that, in 1619, the Pilgrims had not yet set sail for the New World.

Grant Calder, writing in the Philadelphia Inquirer, looks back to a 1813, when Pennsylvania considered a law requiring free blacks to carry their papers with them at all times. If found without their papers, they would be subject to jail and, eventually, being sold into slavery.

Proponents justified the legislation as a protective measure. The United States was at war with the British Empire for a second time, and many white Pennsylvanians feared that in the chaos of the conflict hordes of runaway slaves would head north and seek refuge in the Commonwealth.

Does this sound familiar? It should. A new Arizona law makes the failure to carry immigration documents a crime and provides police officers with broad powers to question and detain any person they suspect might be an illegal alien. If the backers of the so-called Support our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act hold the truths enumerated in the Declaration of Independence to be self-evident, it’s hard to tell.

(The law was defeated, thanks in large part to the efforts of James Forten, a free black who had fought in the Revolutionary War, who is mentioned in the beginning of the column.)

The ease with which bigotry reinvents and rationalizes itself is most impressive.

A couple of weeks ago, I asked rhetorically why the right wing is so obsessed with sex.

I may have found an answer in a column in the Guardian by Jennifer Abel. A nugget:

A common argument against sexy businesses says they violate “community standards”. Whose standards, exactly? If the community truly disliked a business, it would go bankrupt for lack of customers. Those who cite community standards to ban otherwise-harmless things assume “the community” refers only to those who believe as they do.

Today’s economy is the worst in three generations, so why now of all times do we focus on moral crusades we can’t afford? Because of a nasty aspect of human nature: faced with problems beyond their personal control, people often respond by kicking scapegoats instead.

If you haven’t read it, now would be a good day to do so. It’s not that long, fewer than 10,000 words. (From the Government Printing Office.)

Reading it will put you ahead of Republicans and Teabaggers. Reading and understanding it will put you ahead of gLibertarians, who tend to carry copies of it around but do not understand the meaning of “as amended”).

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the
common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings
of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this
Constitution for the United States of America.

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