Political Theatre category archive

. . . searching for the stupid in Stupak.

The Bushonomics Hangover continues. Bloomberg:

Payrolls fell by 190,000 workers last month, compared with a 175,000 drop anticipated by the median forecast of economists surveyed by Bloomberg News, figures from the Labor Department showed today in Washington. The jobless rate gained from 9.8 percent in September and exceeded 10 percent for the first time since 1983.

One more time, this resulted from Republican policy. It was not an accident.

It was the logical result of persisting in error.

James Reston, from the Quotemaster:

An election is a bet on the future, not a popularity test of the past.

For analysis, see the Booman or Balloon Juice.

One thought:

Turnout was very low.

Voting is a duty, not a right. If enough persons fail their duty, bad things happen.

Brendan writes a column.

There is a related story here.

David Corn on health insurance companies:

Just because you are vilified doesn’t mean you’re not a villain.

But this is progress:

Democratic leader Harry Reid said on Monday the U.S. Senate’s healthcare overhaul will include a government-run insurance plan that lets states opt out, handing liberals an early victory on the bill’s most contentious issue.

After days of closed-door talks, Reid said he would include the “public” insurance option in a healthcare reform bill headed to the Senate floor for debate because it was the best way to lower costs and create competition.

This is hardly the final bill, but it’s a significant start. The “opt-out” provision is a joke; it makes no economic sense and is clearly a sop to advocates of the status quo; whether it survives will be interesting to watch.

The Booman has an excellent analysis of the politics of potential passage.

Interesting to note that, a few paragraphs farther down in the Reuters story was this gem:

(the health insurance industry’s) stock prices fell out of apparent concern about the prospect of competition from the government-run plan.

If they are doing such an all-fired good job, why are their investors concerned about a little competition?

It is clearly because they are not doing such an all-fired good job, except in the country-club membership for CEO’s department.

It really is all about their country-club memberships.

DougJ wants to know:

The thing I always wonder is: how did the neocons amass so much influence? Everything they attempt fails and, when you consider how unpersuasive their arguments are, this failure isn’t surprising. How did it come to pass that a naive-sounding theory with no supporting body of empirical evidence became so influential? Yes, part of it is that our media elites are hacks and morons, part of it is that the so-called think tanks are staffed by hacks and morons, but give that there are an infinitude of dumb-sounding, empirically unsupportable theories, why did this particular one become so popular?

Predictable results. Dan Froomkin:

Pretending that Fox News is fair and balanced only serves the right wing, in the same way that it only served the Bush administration when traditional-media reporters pretended Bush didn’t have a credibility problem — and didn’t call him out for his lies — for fear of appearing partisan. It’s self-muzzling, plain and simple.

One of the startling shifts in the last decade has been how so many of the most important policy issues of our time have become matters not of honest political debate, but of competing realities (only one of which, mind you, is supported by facts.) During the Bush years, whether it was related to Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, progress in Iraq, torture, or tax cuts for the rich, Bush and his acolytes operated in their own fictional world — with the traditional media only rarely issuing a reality check.

The world of Fox News exists in ideology and wishful thinking, not in any objective reality (and, yes, there is such a thing as objective reality–if you doubt that, stick your finger in that electrical outlet over there and report back to me).

Take the quiz.

Glenn Greenwald dissects the internal contradictions of Beltway blather. A nugget:

Beltway elites have health insurance and thus the costs and suffering for those who don’t are abstract, distant and irrelevant. Identically, with very rare exception, they and their families don’t fight the wars they cheer on — and don’t even pay for them — and thus get to enjoy all the pulsating benefits without any costs whatsoever. Adam Smith, all the way back in 1776, in An Inquiry into the Nature And Causes of the Wealth of Nations, described this Beltway attitude exactly:

In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the provinces remote from the scene of action, feel, many of them, scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies . . .

Lounging around in the editorial offices of the capital of a rapidly decaying empire, urging that more Americans be sent into endless war paid for with endless debt, while yawning and lazily waving away with boredom the hordes outside dying for lack of health care coverage, is one of the most repugnant images one can imagine. It’s exactly what Adam Smith denounced. And it’s exactly what our political and media elite are.

Read it.

And the inevitable result.

I listened to this today, which John Cole discussed here.

Missing from it is any mention of this: Fox consistently reports lies as truth.

The quotation below was said about an article in Time, but it applies to every day on Fox:

This, by the way, is exactly the kind of nonsense that marked Time’s Beck profile. Some say 2 million people were at a rally; others say 70,000. We gave you both sides. You figure it out.

I’d love for Newton-Small or anyone else at Time to explain exactly what value they think they’re providing to readers when they report two statements, one of which must be false, but refuse to say which.

There should be more to journalism than he-said-she-said. When someone says something demonstrably false, competent journalists demonstrate that it be demonstrably false–they don’t keep repeating it as if it were true.

It’s here.

And he expands on it here.

Coming clean:

Politically embarrassing information about Michal Kaminski, a Polish politician who now leads the Tories in the European parliament, was removed from Wikipedia by someone in the (British House of–ed.) Commons three days after the alliance was formed.

Chris Bryant, the government’s new minister for Europe, called on the Conservatives to “come clean” after the Observer discovered that details of Kaminski’s previous membership of the far-right National Revival of Poland party had been mysteriously removed.

Editing a Wikipedia page to hide stuff is a mug’s game. The Wikipedia gnomes usually fix it within a couple of hours.

You can see the edit history of the entry here.

Josh Marshall has the scoop.

Tell me again how talking hate is just talk.

The Booman mines a nugget from a two-year old interview with Colin Powell:

“What is the greatest threat facing us now?” Powell asked. “People will say it’s terrorism. But are there any terrorists in the world who can change the American way of life or our political system? No. … The only thing that can really destroy us is us. We shouldn’t do it to ourselves, and we shouldn’t use fear for political purposes—scaring people to death so they will vote for you, or scaring people to death so that we create a terror-industrial complex.”

“It’s smoke and mirrors. It’s bogus. And it’s all too familiar. Every time we get close to passing reform, the insurance companies produce these phony studies as a prescription and say, ‘Take one of these, and call us in a decade.’ Well, not this time.”

It really is all about their country club memberships.

Via Balloon Juice.

Just a friendly reminder:

This was caused by Republican ideology, profligacy, and mismanagement:

The U.S. budget deficit hit a record $1.4 trillion in the just-ended fiscal year, the government said on Friday, as the deep recession and a series of bank rescues cut a gaping hole in public finances.

And their only prescription is more of the same what got us here.