Political Theatre category archive

(A month later) Whoops.

So much for abstinence only (emphasis added–note that the persons referred to in the bold type are those least likely to have independent resources for learning or indepedent financial resources for medical care):

The new CDC report notes that “Every effort was made to present the data in a consistent manner with regard to age groups, race/ethnicity, sex and geographic location,” leaving an explicit investigation of poverty out of the equation altogether – though its findings indicate that American teens whose race/ethnicity and/or geographic location suggest a greater likelihood of poverty are also the most likely demographic to have increased rates of unwanted pregnancy and STDs. Both pregnancy and Aids rates are higher among Hispanic and non-Hispanic black young women aged 15-19 than any other ethnic group. Chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis were highest among non-Hispanic black young women and men aged 10-24. And the southern states “tend to have the highest rates of negative sexual and reproductive health outcomes, including early pregnancy and STDs.”

Abstinence may be effective in preventing unwanted births, but abstinence-only sex “education” is a fraud and a sham. It doesn’t educate, and it doesn’t prevent anything.

Anyone who believes that “education” based on leaving stuff out and ignoring reality actually educates anyone in anything lives in a fantasy world. Or in the Creation Museum. Same difference.

Walter Brasch at ASZ has summed up the case for action on health care quite eloquently. A nugget:

Marie Antoinette, contrary to popular opinion, never said a solution for the starving masses of revolutionary France in the late 18th century was, “Let them eat cake.” But, Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) apparently said something close to it.

At a public meeting, one of Grassley’s constituents asked him, “Why is your insurance so much cheaper than my insurance and so much better than my insurance?” He then asked, “How come I can’t have the same thing you have?” Grassley’s response was a flip, “You can. Just go work for the federal government.” Grassley, who opposes universal health care, is happy with health care programs paid for with tax dollars and available for every member of Congress, all Congressional staffers, everyone in the executive and judicial branches, and the military and their families. He doesn’t even oppose Social Security and Medicare. He just doesn’t want the masses to have the same quality of medical care that Senators have.

That’s just the intro. It gets better. Follow the link. Read the whole thing.

Oliver Willis boards the time machine.

Sorn Jessen thinks that reporters missed the point of Mr. Obama’s speech to the NAACP:

The original headline of the New York Times article (“Obama tells fellow blacks: ‘No excuses’ for any failure”), if not the entire article, is a lazy, half-assed way of reporting on a sermon that was meant to be and was inspiring, if only in a typical Sunday go-to-meeting type of way. In the NYT article the two ways that mainstream society have of viewing those outside it are fused. We get both types of stereotypes. On the one hand, there’s the noble savage stereotype in Barrack Obama. On the other hand, there’s an element, in the article, of the “good” minority who’s come back to tell the “bad” minority how to adopt the white man’s ways and be successful.

The problem with this entire way of reporting is that somewhere in the fusion of stereotypes, people lose their humanity.

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Radio Times host Marty Moss-Coane suggests that Senators preface their questions with

But enough about me.

July 17, 2009, show, Hour One.

I can’t beat this.

Just read it.

Via Air America.

Skip the artlcle. It’s not worth the time. It’s less coherent than the bad poetry I used to write in fifth grade.

Read the comments.

Emails reveal right-wing media efforts to protect Gov. Mark “the Hiker” Sanford:

It’s not surprising that the emails underline the utter confusion that beset the governor’s hapless aides as they tried to ward off inquiries about their boss’s whereabouts, without themselves having any idea where he was.

But they also show something even funnier: an effort by the right-wing media to curry favor with Sanford’s office by dismissing the story as a storm in a teacup created by the liberal media. It’s fair to say that, as news judgments go, it would be hard to find one that turned out worse than this — given the subsequent revelations about Sanford’s Argentinian liaison and his abandonment of his post.

Right-wing conspiracy? What right-wing conspiracy?

The Booman summed it up so I don’t have to:

. . . It’s pretty plain that something pathological has dwelt within the Right for a very long time. The difficulty in diagnosing it has been that almost none of us were alive and conscious in the 1920’s, the last time before the Bush Era that the GOP controlled all three branches of government.

The 1930’s brought a deep and abiding minority status for the Republican Party, all of which they spent nursing one form of paranoid grievance or another. In the 1930’s it was red-baiting, foaming about the New Deal, and apologizing for fascism. In the 1940’s, after the war, it was an unhealthy obsession with the Red Menace of Russia and China. In the 1950’s it was all about communist infiltration of the government, Hollywood, and the armed services. From the 1960’s on, it has been about countering the counterculture and fighting the expansion of rights to all our citizens, regardless of race, gender, religion, or sexual preference. Their one decent president in all this time wasn’t even much of a Republican. The Democrats would have happily nominated the Supreme Allied Commander in 1952 if Ike had only agreed to run on their ticket. The rest of the GOP’s lineup has been thoroughly corrupt, if not corrupt and incompetent.

Really, not much has changed. The right is still the right that Richard Hofstadter diagnosed over half a century ago.

They are afraid.

They are afraid of history.

Anonymous Liberal on health care:

The bottom line is that, when it comes to health care, all the market is really capable of doing is providing reasonably affordable care to the young and healthy, people for whom the risk profile is essentially random and therefore the economic model more closely resembles that of other major types of insurance (car, home, life). But a system that only covers the young and the healthy is, by definition, a failure. That’s why every other industrialized country has long since adopted some sort of government insurance system. Expecting the market to provide affordable health care to all is like expecting the market to provide everyone with an affordable personal chef. It’s never gonna happen.

Ruin your Sunday. Read the whole thing.

Graphing the wingnuttery. Click the chart for the explication:

One would think that the Democrats, who now control both houses of Congress and the White House, would be taking the bull by the horns and ramming their agenda through despite the objections of the defeated and humiliated Republican Party. After all, that’s what the Republicans did in the wake not only of their questionable 2000 “victory,” but of September 11 as well, passing enormous unsustainable tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, gutting the federal government’s ability to respond to disaster, starting a needless, stupid, unwinnable war in the Middle East, stacking the Supreme Court with the same kind of judicial activists they pretend to deplore, and of course, eviscerating Americans’ civil liberties.

One would think.

Walter Brasch at ASZ eavesdrops on the sirens’ call.

In other news, DougJ at Balloon Juice speaks of myths.

Test your knowledge; follow the link to take the quiz:

Out of 100 possible test questions, applicants for citizenship are asked 10. They must answer at least six correctly.

Before you gaze misty-eyed at the flag today, see how many you can get, from these test questions on the Immigration Services Web site.

Then and only then read this.

To answer Mithras’s question, in the neocon world of make-believe in which this story originates, if you just clap hard enough, Tinkerbell will live.

. . . good old Golden Rule Days.

AKA, what happens when wingnuts control the guv’mint.

Via Cookie Jill.

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