Political Theatre category archive

The inmates do the work for free — a perfect fit for local governments who are looking for ways to stretch their budgets.

“We’ve received probably twice as many requests for free labor,” said Les Moore, a major at the detention center. “It’s definitely because of the economy.”

Not that I have anything against inmates doing something useful and, frankly, I suspect they enjoy getting out and about, but, when unemployment is around 10% and real unemployment is no doubt much higher, this does look a bit like balancing the budget on the backs of the jobless.

The Boston What’s Left of the Globe:

Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world’s largest retailer, has agreed to pay $40 million to as many as 87,500 current and former employees in Massachusetts, the largest wage-and-hour class-action settlement in the state’s history.

The class-action lawsuit, filed in 2001, accused the retailer of denying workers rest and meal breaks, refusing to pay overtime, and manipulating time cards to lower employees’ pay.

Plus I like stores with ceilings.

[RANT MODE ON]

Anyone who is surprised by Mr. Obama’s decision to push the war in Afghanistan wasn’t paying attention during the campaign, when he repeatedly said that one of the reasons the war in Iraq was wrong (aside from the whole war for a lie thing) was that it took attention away from Afghanistan.

It continually surprises me how many of my leftie friends listened to him throughout the past two years and didn’t hear what he was saying, and are therefore worked up because his actions in office are consistent with his statements during the campaign.

Don’t like it if you think it’s a bad idea, but for Pete’s sake stop acting surprised at something as predictable as a blizzard in Colorado.

[RANT MODE OFF]

Do I think it was a good decision?

No.

The Republicans made such a mess that there were no good decisions left. Making messes is what Republicans do. It results from making decisions rooted in ideology and fantasy, rather than in objective reality (and, if you want to argue whether there is such a thing as objective reality, please go stand in front of that bus coming down the street, then come back after it has hit you and we can talk)

It was probably the least bad decision, but I fear that the Previous Federal Administrator long ago frittered away the possibility of anything resembling success–success being a stable regime not inimical to Western interests–while he played Army Men in Baghdad.

Afterthought:

The other thing to stop being surprised at is that generals want more troops.

Of course, generals want more troops.

Generals always want more troops.

Ghostly:

Stokes is (state representative) Perzel’s brother-in-law, and served as his campaign manager. The grand jury report said Stokes was put on the state payroll in late 2000 because he needed health benefits.

He “applied” for his state position 13 days after he was hired. Over six years, taxpayers paid him a total of $196,808 in salary.

Kathleen Parker in the Washington Post on the Republican loyalty oath purity pledge:

It’s too bad that “elite” and “nuance” have become bad words in the Republican lexicon. Elites are viewed in Republican circles as “those people” who are out of touch with “real Americans.” And “nuance,” the definition of which suggests a sophisticated approach to understanding (as opposed to “Because I said so, case closed”) has come to be viewed as a Frenchified word Republicans successfully hung on presidential candidate John Kerry in 2004. His flip-floppery on issues became associated with nuance, a.k.a. lack of decisiveness. Ergo, a lack of leadership skills.

It was superb message manipulation, if you go for that sort of thing. But it was also pandering to America’s inner simpleton. Not to defend Kerry, specifically, but heaven forbid anyone should ever consider shades of meaning or new developments and change his mind. As Kerry said during a 2008 Associated Press interview, “Decisiveness wrongly applied can create a lot of pain.” This nation was, after all, for slavery before it was against it.

Remember, when Curly and Larry weren’t sure what to do, Moe was decisive.

Via Balloon Juice.

Katha Pollit in the Guardian:

For her fans Palin may be a goddess of vitality and truth, but for everyone else she’s the first political female train wreck, the Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan of the Republican Party. We can’t stop looking. Maybe she’ll confuse Iran and Iraq again! And tell about praying on the phone with Rick Warren while taking a shower! Or write another letter in God’s voice about her baby, Trig! Maybe Palin is cosmic payback for all those nasty jokes about Hillary’s pantsuits and thick ankles, and for the mighty cry of “borrring!” that goes up all over the media whenever a politician – Al Gore? – displays actual knowledge of a complex subject. You wanted hot and relatable? You got it.

For a party that has nothing, a star who is nothing.

My leftie friends who complain that President Obama has not changed the world,nor moved the planets in their orbits, and nor leapt tall buildings in a single bound during his ten months in office would do well to read this.

Then start calling and writing their congresscritters rather than sitting back and bitching.

Winning the election was reaching the starting point, not crossing the finish line.

It is old news, but it is worth remembering who were the liars and who were the “useful idiots.”

President George Bush was able to disguise his blatant militarism behind the false sincerity of his ally Blair and his own secretary of state, Colin Powell. The president’s task was made far easier given the role of useful idiot played by much of the mainstream media in the US and Britain, where reporters and editors alike dutifully repeated both the hyped-up charges levied against Iraq and the false pretensions that a diplomatic solution was being sought.

. . . not private armies of clerks:

American doctors and hospitals have to employ far more billing clerks than counterparts in, say, Germany or Canada, Princeton University health economist Uwe Reinhardt said.

“We have without any question the most complex, bureaucratic health system in the world. There is just no other nation that spends as much on paper and computers . . . just claims-processing. . . . To my mind, we get very little for that in terms of social value added.”

There is no way that a government system could be as bad as what we have.

Just think: social security recipients get their government checks on time; doctors don’t get the private insurance reimbursement on time.

But I forgot. Government officials don’t get country club memberships from the stockholders.

It is all about the insurance execs’ country club memberships.

Act here.

In today’s Inky, Susan Estrich portrayed Sarah Palin as a victim of sexist libruls pointing and giggling at the picture of Palin on the cover of Newsweek (the link is to Yahoo, because I could not find the column on the Inky website).

The irony is that the cover, far from skewering Palin, as was its clear intent, helps her. The picture overwhelms the caption — “How Do You Solve A Problem Like Sarah? She’s Bad News for the GOP and Everyone Else, Too” — and reduces it to a hit piece. It makes Palin a heroine to the people who hate the liberal media, reinforcing the view that the media are biased against conservatives. It makes women like me horrendously uncomfortable, because sexism is not OK under any circumstances. And it makes non-political, moderate women (you know, the kind who decide every election) more sympathetic to a woman who, on most issues (not just abortion, but health care, for instance, and stem cell research), is on the opposite side of them.

The libruls I know found the cover in quite poor taste, as I remarked here.

But there’s another way to look at it. She loves to play the MILF card when it’s to her advantage, then play the “you’re sexist” card when it benefits her. Jessica Valenti writes at the Guardian:

You simply can’t have it both ways – it’s ridiculous to be upset about being treated differently by the public because you’re a woman and a mother, while demanding the same biased treatment when it might give you the edge in an interview. Hers is a gender politics of convenience, one that insults all women in politics.

It’s as it may be. But all the charges of sexism in the world don’t answer this question:

Is Palin aware that every other word that comes out of her mouth a lie, or is she merely delusional?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Will Bunch crunches the numbers.

Vote here (Facebook account required).

It’s got to better than the Newsweek article. I read The Nation. Agree or disagree with its writers, you must concede that they can string sentences together using a subject and a predicate (click the image for the link):

Ten bucks for the ebook.

Frank Rich in the Toimes on the murders at Fort Hood:

Their screeds about the Hasan case are completely at odds with both the Afghanistan policy they endorse and the leadership that must execute that policy, including Gen. Stanley McChrystal. These hawks, all demanding that Obama act on McChrystal’s proposals immediately, do not seem to have read his strategy assessment for Afghanistan or the many press interviews he gave as it leaked out. If they had, they’d discover that the whole thrust of his counterinsurgency pitch is to befriend and win the support of the Afghan population — i.e., Muslims. The “key to success,” the general wrote in his brief to the president, will be “strong personal relationships forged between security forces and local populations.”

(major snippage)

Perhaps those on the right are correct about Hasan, and he is just one cog in an apocalyptic jihadist plot that has infiltrated our armed forces. If so, then they have an obligation to explain how pouring more troops into Afghanistan would have stopped Hasan from plotting in Killeen. Don’t hold your breath. If we have learned anything concrete so far from the massacre at Fort Hood, it’s that our hawks, for all their certitude, are as utterly confused as the rest of us about who it is we’re fighting in Afghanistan and to what end.

Frankly, I think the issue is much simpler than does Mr. Rich. It is not confusion of policy.

It is that there is a contingent of the US population for whom war–that is, killing people–is the preferred, indeed, the only course of action in all cases, whether it is Crime in the Streets or Those People over There. They think it is quick, clean, and final, when it is none of those things.

As long as the children of others do the killing.

Frank McClellan in the Inky:

Should the richest country on Earth value the market so highly it allows people to suffer or die because they cannot afford medical care?

Follow the link. Read the whole thing.

All you ever needed to know here.

Krugman:

. . . if Tea Party Republicans do win big next year, what has already happened in California could happen at the national level. In California, the G.O.P. has essentially shrunk down to a rump party with no interest in actually governing — but that rump remains big enough to prevent anyone else from dealing with the state’s fiscal crisis. If this happens to America as a whole, as it all too easily could, the country could become effectively ungovernable in the midst of an ongoing economic disaster.

The point is that the takeover of the Republican Party by the irrational right is no laughing matter. Something unprecedented is happening here — and it’s very bad for America.

Bill Shein has the skinny. A nugget:

4:20 p.m. – Meet Bill Kristol, editor of the neoconservative Weekly Standard, in parking garage sub-basement. Accept copy of next “David Brooks” column on foreign policy, this one breathlessly urging an escalation of the war in Afghanistan. Return to office.

4:25 p.m. – Edit column slightly. Add suggestion that U.S. soldiers wear bulletproof pink Oxford dress shirts to remind them of the super-genius neoconservative hawks who masterminded the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

4:26 p.m. – Remove suggestion that soldiers wear bulletproof pink dress shirts. File column.