Political Theatre category archive

Over at Brendan’s.

Oh, man, this is a hoot. I suggest you read it if you need a chuckle.

See what a Good Joe thinks about a bad Joe.

Clearly, they fear that the voters might actually, like, you know, vote. Can’t have that, now, can we? The will of the people might get expressed, after all. Gasp. Horrors. (emphasis added)

U.S. District Court Judge Kane wasted no time ordering Colorado Secretary of State Mike Coffman to stop removing names for the Colorado voter lists on the eve of the election, an act that violates federal law.

H/T Karen for the link.

It’s not over till it’s over.

Because his goons didn’t like their looks.

As one of my old friends would have said, R22Dumb.

Jeez oh man, you can’t make this stuff up.

Is it because they think we’re stupid or because they’re stupid or both?

Blair Levin, who worked on the 1982 Bradley campaign, says yes: that, although race might have been part of the “Bradley Effect,” it was, if not a neglible element, hardly the most significant element of the discrepancy between the polling and the polls.

So what was the reason Bradley lost if it wasn’t a matter of white people lying to pollsters? It’s rather simple, Levin says in his op-ed and in an interview he granted to Michel Martin of National Public Radio [NPR].

“But he wasn’t losing because of race. He was losing because an unpopular gun control initiative and an aggressive Republican absentee ballot program generated hundreds of thousands of Republican votes no pollster anticipated, giving Mr. Deukmejian a narrow victory,” Levin wrote. “This is not to say that race wasn’t an issue; it was in 1982 and it has been since. But to those who keep citing the Bradley effect–not so fast. It’s more complicated than you think.”

Levin told NPR’s Martin that the Republican Party spent close to $1 million to get GOP voters to vote by absentee ballots. The year 1982 was particularly significant as well because it was the first year California residents were permitted to vote by absentee ballot–without a legitimate reason.

NPR’s Day-To-Day explored the issue in a story last week. Similar points were made about the surprisingly high Republican turnout from the Central Valley of California generated in great part by the gun control issue. Follow the link to see the synopsis and listen to the story.

Text here.

Oops, I forgot.

That’s Duncan’s line about the Sunday morning talk shows.

Oh, well.

Jon Swift documents the absurdities.

If you didn’t hear the McBushy/Beyond the Palin supporter yell, “He’s a nigger,” click “Replay.”

It’s there.

And it’s theirs.

It is their campaign. They have nothing else left.

By their supporters shall ye know them.

Via Brendan.

From Josh Marshall:

Tongue in cheek, just like the orginal.

Full of truth, just like the original.

Via Brendan.

Anchorage Daily News endorses Senator Obama:

Gov. Palin’s nomination clearly alters the landscape for Alaskans as we survey this race for the presidency — but it does not overwhelm all other judgment. The election, after all is said and done, is not about Sarah Palin, and our sober view is that her running mate, Sen. John McCain, is the wrong choice for president at this critical time for our nation.

Sen. Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee, brings far more promise to the office. In a time of grave economic crisis, he displays thoughtful analysis, enlists wise counsel and operates with a cool, steady hand. The same cannot be said of Sen. McCain.

Since his early acknowledgement that economic policy is not his strong suit, Sen. McCain has stumbled and fumbled badly in dealing with the accelerating crisis as it emerged. He declared that “the fundamentals of our economy are strong” at 9 a.m. one day and by 11 a.m. was describing an economy in crisis. He is both a longtime advocate of less market regulation and a supporter of the huge taxpayer-funded Wall Street bailout. His behavior in this crisis — erratic is a kind description — shows him to be ill-equipped to lead the essential effort of reining in a runaway financial system and setting an anxious nation on course to economic recovery.

Sen. Obama warned regulators and the nation 19 months ago that the subprime lending crisis was a disaster in the making.

Via Andrew Sullivan.

According to the Republican Party, Ronald Reagan ended the Cold War* and Communism is dead, dead, dead.

Except when it isn’t.

_________________

*More likely, it happened to collapse under its own contradictions of history while he happened to be watching.

One can only hope.

Jon Swift has the answer.

“I thought they already made a movie called Ship of Fools.”

Just a cute little Josephine McCarthy:

It’s a Know Nothing thing.

The Demon Princess sums it up nicely:

Of course, the Bush administration is not entirely to blame for creating such a huge debacle–its roots go back to Mr. Morning in America himself, Reagan–but for perfecting it and taking it to its logical and disastrous conclusion, and consistently treating the federal taxpayers’ monies with an approach that amounts to “friends and contributors welcome to back the trucks up to the Treasury door and take it all away,” and to years of conservative think tanks, letting lobbyists write legislation and appointing foxes like Paulson to guard the henhouse, we have years of concerted and tireless Republicon efforts to thank.

(snip)

Face it, America–the worst President ever and his maleific friends have just succeeded in completely subverting democracy in the name of ‘capitalism’–except that, like everything else in this Administration, with its penchant for trying to convince us that up is down and other disingenuous misnomners, the fact is that ‘capitalism’ has somehow succeeded in privatizing profits and socializing losses, the precise opposite of what we all supposed it to be.