Political Theatre category archive

The police always concentrate on the modus operandi. Frank Rich in the Toimes:

What we don’t know will hurt us, and quite possibly on a more devastating scale than any Qaeda attack. Americans must be told the full story of how Wall Street gamed and inflated the housing bubble, made out like bandits, and then left millions of households in ruin. Without that reckoning, there will be no public clamor for serious reform of a financial system that was as cunningly breached as airline security at the Amsterdam airport. And without reform, another massive attack on our economic security is guaranteed. Now that it can count on government bailouts, Wall Street has more incentive than ever to pump up its risks — secure that it can keep the bonanzas while we get stuck with the losses.

Mysteries are always easier when you read them back-to-front.

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Steve Bell:

It has nothing to do with security, but it makes persons feel good as they leave the airport.

Afterthought:

For those who miss the point, the dirty little secret of security is that, for all the metal detectors in the world, there is no such thing as “perfectly safe.”

Those who demand it are deluded; those who promise it, charlatans; those who believe the promises, fools.

As long as health care is a profit center, as long as care for the sick is considered “losses,” executives’ country club memberships will be more important than patients’ well-being:

About 27,000 people who buy Personal Choice health insurance directly from Independence Blue Cross rather than through an employer are facing steep increases in their premiums in March to maintain similar coverage – for some, greater than 60 percent – or are finding comparable coverage unavailable.

Despite angry complaints from policyholders, Blue Cross says the changes are necessary because of continuing losses in the Personal Choice plans. And the state Insurance Department says there is little it can do, even after it resisted a proposal last spring to raise rates for the plans by amounts ranging from 10 percent to 58 percent.

One reason: Blue Cross sidestepped the issue by withdrawing its proposed increases. Instead, it told state officials it planned to discontinue the trio of Personal Choice plans in question, which it has offered for the last two decades, and give current policyholders two new choices instead – choices many find unattractive.

Nice end run by BCBS. They took their football, went home, and came back with two new, pricier footballs.

H/T Susan for the idea.

The U. S. Chamber of Commerce is beating the drum against unions again.

The last time I looked, no union was asking for multi-million dollar bonuses and country club memberships and crying that their rights were being violated if they didn’t get them. (Living wages and health care maybe, but not multi-million dollar bonuses.)

A snippet from the Bloomberg story (emphasis added):

Companies have added anti-union videos to training programs, required employees to sit through anti-union meetings and hired outside labor-relations consultants as a pre-emptive strike against a union organizing campaign.

“The whole culture that currently allows us to be a low-cost producer while paying top wages would probably be destroyed” by the legislation, Craig Milum, president of Milum Textile Services, a Phoenix-based linen supplier, said in an interview.

The internal contradiction: If they are treating their employees so damn good, what are they afraid of?

Full disclosure: I worked in a heavily unionized industry for many years. Unionized workers are no different from any others, except maybe for the living wage thingee and the health care.

A basic lesson of labor history is this:

Management creates unions.

Sure, it’s a little teeny study, and I am suspicious of making big conclusions from little teeny studies, but . . . .

In a study conducted by University of California researchers, 16 volunteers were given a strictly controlled diet including very high levels of fructose. Another group was given the same diet but with high levels of glucose (regular sugar) replacing the fructose. Over 10 weeks, the volunteers that were given fructose produced new fat cells around their heart, liver and other digestive organs. They also showed signs of food-processing abnormalities linked to diabetes and heart disease. The control group of volunteers on the same diet, but with glucose sugar replacing fructose, did not have these problems.

Via Seeing the Forest, who muses:

All you have to do is look around to see that something has changed in the American diet. Everyone is gaining a lot of weight. It isn’t “personal responsibility” if it is systemic. You can’t blame everyone who is getting fat if everyone is getting fat at the same time.

Everyone is getting fat. Just look around.

And corporate America has never been known to let safety stand in the way of a buck. Just ask Philip Morris.

The EPA, OSHA, and the CPSC were not created as power-grabs. They were created in self-defense.

Maybe the “con” in ConAgra does indeed stand for “con.”

John Cole said this so I didn’t have to.

I stumbled on some of the coverage of yesterday’s attempt to blow up a Northwest Airlines plane (you could tell it was “Northwest” because of the word, “Delta,” on the tail) on CNN (“Coddling Nevous Nellies”). I was channel hopping. None of the major networks was doing wall-to-walleye coverage, but CNN was covering its heart and popping nitroglycerin pills like mad.

I listened to a snippet.

The anchor was interviewing by phone one of the passengers from the plane. I don’t have the conversation verbatim, but it went something like this:

Anchor: Were you scared when it was happening?

Passenger: Not really.

Anchor: How about now, now that you’ve had a chance to think about it?

Passenger: No, not really.

I cut the television off.

The anchor’s disappointment at not being able to foment fear was thick as asphalt on a hot summer day and twice as icky.

I remember a time when Americans weren’t expected to be afraid, be very afraid, all the time.

A historical perspective. Read the whole thing.:

Once upon a time, in the good old days, Americans celebrated Christmas in their public schools. They sang hymns, hung stockings, and decorated trees. And nobody complained.

There’s just one problem with this bleak winter’s tale: It’s not true. Despite what you might hear about our contemporary “War on Christmas,” holiday celebrations have sparked dissent in American public schools for more than a century. By pretending otherwise, we miss an opportunity to teach our children something important about America.

I was in a store yesterday. A check-out clerk routinely said “Merry Christmas” to the customer ahead of me; she, in return said to the clerk, “Thank you for saying, ‘Merry Christmas.'”

I thought, “Fox News viewer,” then silently told me to STFU.

Furrfu.

Return of the Swamp Thang:

A Xe (formerly Blackwater) official told the Commission on Wartime Contracting Friday that the company has contracts for security as well as for training Afghan police and a “drug interdiction unit.” Xe is also in the running for more work in Afghanistan. The comments of Xe Vice President Fred Roitz were first reported by the Virginia Pilot.

The underlying issue is that, after years of “privatizing” military functions, such as policing, quartermastering (?), and the like, the military does not have enough people to do what needs to be done. This produced an appearance of restraint in defense spending, but no savings, as mercenaries, who are loyal to whoever signs their paycheck, took up the slack.

It was also a great strategy for hiding the actual costs of military operations, since expenditures for the mercenaries are hidden in various line items in the budgets for numerous departments, including State and the CIA, while shoveling money out the back door into the swamp, as it were, and saving nothing.

This is another example of bad (Republican) policy leading to disastrous results, with which we are now stuck.

I get mail:

The Senate’s health care bill must be killed.

It is an ungodly mess of errors, loopholes, and massive giveaways. When the American people find out what’s actually in this bill, they will revolt. Congress and President Obama have no choice but to do better for health care than this bill.

It goes on to list all the ways in which the Senate bill is not perfect, and there are many. (The full text of the email is below the fold).

All or nothing never won a battle, and this is just one battle. All or nothing (“unconditional surrender”) has won wars, but not battles.

This is the Senate bill, not the final bill; the conference committee still awaits. The odds are that the final bill won’t be much better, but, if the Senate bill is killed, nothing else will get done for the next 20 years. Killing it won’t lead to improvements; it will lead, instead, to two more decades of nothing.

It is very difficult to disenfranchise folks once they have been enfranchised. If a health care bill passes, it will enfranchise millions of persons with health care, lame though it may be. The next battle will be about improving it, not about junking it.

Ideologues are great for bringing issues forward; they aren’t very good at getting bills passed (at least not progressive ideologues; right-wing ideologues seem to have had a field day the past decade) because they tend to put purity above feasibility–that works great for engineering soap, but it doesn’t mean much in politics.

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The newscaster said, “Vice President Joe” and I thought “Lieberman” before he could say “Biden.”

DId I mention that the whole Republican Party is completely against making anything better for anyone other than the veddy veddy rich?

Addendum:

DIck Polman on Holy Joe.

Mithras catalogs the new crop:

Over at snopes, of the 60 items on their “What’s New” page, 13 are wingnut obsessions.

Follow the link for the list of nuttiness.

It’s nutty, but it’s also dangerous that real persons believe this crap.

. . . is not how to things get done.

Martin Kettle at the Guardian comments on the tendency of liberals to be rigid and doctrinaire:

For some the tension with Obama has reached breaking point. “I did not think he would lose me so soon,” recently lamented the historian Garry Wills, a fellow Chicagoan who 18 months ago wrote a soaring comparison of Obama’s Philadelphia campaign speech on race with the campaign speeches of Abraham Lincoln. Though others gave up earlier, “I kept hoping”. But then came the Afghanistan announcement. “Obama will not get another penny from me, or another word of praise, after this betrayal,” Wills announced.

Betrayal? Not in my book. A mistake? Perhaps. The dilemma in Afghanistan is profound. Obama’s chosen course may prove disastrous, masterly or, more likely, somewhere in between. But that does not make it a betrayal. I yield to few in my admiration for Professor Wills. In my eyes, Garry Wills is up there with Hugo Young as one of the commentarial paragons of my era. But betrayal? If the Nobel committee was naively premature in elevating Obama to the pantheon, Wills is surely naively premature in banishing him from it.

Betrayal has long provided a liberal comfort zone from which to survey the difficult issues in modern politics.

Read the whole thing.

The world is neither simple, nor easy. Neither is politics.

Indeed, one of the (many) flaws of Republicanism is that it attempts to render the world to simple (usually either with bombs and bullets or with tax cuts–too many Clint Eastwood movies) and ends up with simpletons.

Grow up, stop moaning on the innerwebs because things ain’t easy and simple, take out your pens, and write your damn Congresspersons, write them real letters, and sign them by hand.

And don’t give up, for giving up is giving in.

Politicians stop being scared only if they think there are votes in not being scared.

And, while we are at it, clean up TV.

Senator Dorgan takes on prescription drug ads (which never should have been allowed):

Commentary starts at about 3:40. It gets good about two minutes later.

Via TPMDC.

Thoreau at Unqualified Offerings:

Has it occurred to (the talking head on television–ed.) that maybe “taking responsibility for their own security” and “siding with uninvited and heavily armed foreigners” are not quite the same thing in the inscrutable* Afghan mind?

____________
*Refers to this.

In pictures.

Aside: Rush Limbaugh is preserving his fourth. He’s gaining on Larry King and Liz Taylor.

From Scientific Blogging:

The results of the study demonstrated that Americans who pay attention to the news are better able to prudently evaluate a foreign policy, while those Americans who tend to ignore political news are heavily swayed by what the White House tells them. Reading or watching the news allows citizens to evaluate what the president says rather than just accept the bill of goods, Drury said.

The summary of the study did not consider real vs. faux news.