Political Theatre category archive

Water-filled ham flavor Here (H/T Karen for the link).

Regency smoked ham flavor here.

The end of ACORN, slain by a lie.

Editor Clark Hoyt finally admitted that both he and his paper were “wrong” in the way, for the last six months, they unskeptically and inaccurately covered the Rightwing hoaxsters who released doctored-up, heavily-overdubbed, secretly-taped hit videos targeting the national community organization ACORN, largely for their work in legally registering hundreds of thousands of low-income voters so they could have their voice heard in their own democracy, the group is announcing that it will be “bringing its operations to a close”.

The rightwing feared and destroyed ACORN because ACORN helped the helpless.

StevenD proposes an answer. They whole thing is worth a read. A nugget:

So what are we left with as an answer to the question what motivates the raw hatred and venom of the Tea Party? Sadly, I think we know the answer, and it isn’t pretty. Here’s only one very recent example (you know so many of them one will suffice) of what we’ve witnessed over the last fourteen months:

House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.) received racist faxes Monday in the wake of Sunday’s House vote approving health care reform legislation.

Clyburn, a veteran of the civil rights movement, told Keith Olbermann Monday that faxes sent to his office had racist images including a noose. “If you look at some of the faxes that I got today, racial slurs, nooses on gallows, and I’m telling you, some very vicious language. This stuff is not all that isolated. It’s pretty widespread. I hope it’s not too deep.”

Don Hamson argues in the Philadelphia Inquirer that the Teabaggers are not conservative. That may be true in some linguistic sense, but it’s irrelevant.

Teabaggers think they are conservative. Persons who call themselves conservative have bankrolled them. Other conservatives consider them conservative. Persons who campaign as conservative campaign for their votes.

Persons who want to call themselves “conservative,” but are repulsed by Teabagging, may try to kick the Teabaggers out of the conservative bed, but they can’t.

They birthed the Teabaggers. They nurtured them. They groomed them and lusted after their fealty.

Now, they are stuck with them.

Transcript here.

The Regent is not happy.

Somebody might get some health care.

Some while ago, I accompanied my friend to the optometrist.

He had Glenn Beck on his telly vision in the waiting room.

I had to leave and wait outside. The dumbness and hate were beyond my capacity for endurance.

And there are persons who think his politics are sane. God help us all.

Video via TPM.

That’s why there was an event to educate girls about the dangers of firearms in Wilmington:

City Police Master Cpl. Maurice Thompson said the event was worthwhile, even though the attendance sheet was shorter than the list of Wilmington’s 2010 shooting victims. More than two dozen people have been shot, five fatally, so far this year.

Satire, but it’s reasoning is so eerily pseudo-academic (in a scholastical sense) as to read like true wingnuttery.

When the kids hit the streets because they don’t know enough to get a job, accompanied by retired teachers whose pensions have been shafted . . . .

The new state budget will result in $700 million less going to public schools over the next two years, including $177 million less in lottery funding, said Kent Dickey, assistant superintendent for finance with the state Department of Education.

The impact would have been more than a billion dollars if legislators hadn’t also cut the amount the state and localities have to contribute to teachers’ retirement plans, he said.

at least they will be able to relieve themselves.

Last month, the Commonwealth Transportation Board responded to Gov. Bob McDonnell’s call to reopen 19 closed rest areas by reversing its June 2009 decision to reduce the number of VDOT rest areas and welcome centers from 42 to 23.

Eighteen facilities closed in July 2009 and the final facility – the Interstate 66 West Manassas Welcome Center – closed in September in an effort to save $9 million annually as the agency grapples with a $4.6 billion revenue shortfall over the next six years.

A pissoir in the hand is worth a physics class in the bush.

Aside: My mother retired after two decades of teaching in Virginia (she went back to work after my brother and I reached high school). The pension check she gets is not very much at all.

If that and social security were all she had, she’d be on the street.

The blatherings of right-wingers who would have the citizenry believe that public employees get some kind of gold-plated retirement are gold-plated nonsense.

Last month, On the Media ran a story on authorities’ use of cell phone tracking. From the website:

The cell phone that you’re carrying doubles as a tracking device. That’s right, Verizon has a record of where you’ve been and now the government is seeking explicit permission from the courts to access those records without probable cause. Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Kevin Bankston explains.

Follow the link for the story and transcript or listen here:

Among other things, the story included this tidbit (emphasis added):

At a security and surveillance conference a few months ago, the Sprint electronic surveillance manager admitted that law enforcement was making such extensive use of this capability that Sprint had set up essentially a Web portal for law enforcement to go to, to ping cell phones to find their location based on GPS. He said that that website had been used eight million times over a one-year period.

And that’s Sprint, usually ranking as the number three or four player in the industry. (When kids can hack into their schools’ computers and change their grades, we can wonder how secure, even with Sprint’s best efforts, that website can be.)

When we see portrayals of wireless tracking on the telly vision, it looks quite straightforward. The script has already convinced us that X is a bad guy. How convenient: with one call or click, the good guys know where X is.

Life ain’t telly vision (and anyone who has ever watched “reality TV” knows that telly vision ain’t life). Identifying the bad guy isn’t always as easy as it seems on NCIS and government has a significant record of tracking the wrong persons, such as this eight-year old who is on the Do Not Fly List, (and once you are on their list, getting off is haaarrrrrddd to do).

In Vermont, the ACLU has had enough:

The ACLU of Vermont is suing the state after unsuccessfully seeking to find out whether police agencies are using cellphone tracking technology to keep tabs on people’s whereabouts. Discuss

The state attorney general’s office refused public records requests by the ACLU seeking information about the practice, saying that information is exempt from public records statutes.

So the ACLU filed suit Monday in Washington Superior Court, asking a judge to force the state to produce documents under the Public Records Act.

(snip)

“The location information can reveal very personal data, like where they shop, whose houses they visit, churches they attend, therapists they see,’’ said Mariko Hirose, an ACLU legal fellow in New York.

Power exercised in secret is power exercised without restraint.

Afterthought, Have Cake Eat It Too Dept.:

Many persons who style themselves as “conservative” loudly broadcast their suspicion of government.

I find it curious that that suspicion, so dearly clutched to their hearts, seems to be conditional.

They are hostile to anything a government might do that leads to helping folks have food, shelter, health care, and other basic needs of life, yet enthusiastically support anything a government might do that leads to locking folks up.

The last three minutes are the best.

Via Josh Marshall.

Shadows of Massive Resistance.

Dick Polman:

The nullification cause – also known as “state’s rights” – has flared periodically ever since 1865, of course. Virginia’s attempt this week to defy any federal mandate on health insurance is eerily reminiscent of Virginia’s ill-fated attempt, more than 50 years ago, to defy the federal mandate on school desegregation. Virginia and other southern states passed laws to thwart the feds; Arkansas even amended its state constitution to separate the schoolkids by race. But the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously nixed those nullification efforts in 1958, ruling that the federal desegregation mandate had a “binding effect” on the states, and that “no state legislator…can war against the Constitution without violating his undertaking to support it.” And in 1982, while dealing with a commerce issue, the high court again nixed nullification, declaring that “a state statute is void to the extent that it actually conflicts with a valid federal statute.”

. . . But this new nullification effort is not about legal scholarship, it’s about political theater. It’s about ginning up grassroots opposition and flipping off Washington. It’s about scaring the Democrats during the run up to the November elections . . . .

Massive Resistance didn’t work either. But it did a lot of damage along the way.

With apologies to Samuel Coleridge:

A study of almost half a million birds, belonging to over 100 species, shows that many are gradually becoming lighter and growing shorter wings.

This shrinkage has occurred within just half a century, with the birds thought to be evolving into a smaller size in response to warmer temperatures.

Via Andrew Sullivan.

A degree does not an education equal.

See the Booman.

For two years, in between carpools, I transferred between the bus and the subway at the Pentagon subway station in Arlington, Va., where yesterday some yahoo with a gun cut loose.

Just to be clear, I am against prohibiting firearms. I like shooting and I’m pretty good when I’m in practice. Guns are neither inherently good nor bad. At the same time . . . .

Read more »

Karen Heller in the Inquirer sums it up:

Seven hours of polite discussion can’t mask huge chasms of dissent. This nation doesn’t have the best health-care system in the world if 30 million people are denied equal access, and Americans die daily because they don’t have proper diagnostic and preventive care. Democrats need to do the right thing, even if it’s unpopular in the polls. The time for talking has passed. Pass health reform, now.

It is idea that seems attractive at a distance, but, close up, it’s a non-starter.

FDR tried it and failed. I think that precedent would prevail.