Political Theatre category archive

Diversity, Inc., outs who’s behind the smears of Senator Obama. It’s the SOB: same old bunch:

Why won’t these rumors die? Those who perpetuate them don’t tell you the whole story. Are the individuals behind this “true patriots”? No doubt most of them wear flag lapel pins. And most of them probably put their hands over their hearts during the National Anthem.

(snip)

A group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, who waged war on the 2004 presidential campaign of Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., by attacking his Vietnam War record despite the medals he received, is behind many of the Internet rumors now circulating about Obama’s patriotism.

The Republican-funded group, now called “Swift Vets and POWS for Truth,” was founded shortly after Kerry secured the Democratic nomination in 2004; it published a book and a series of television advertisements denigrating his war record, reports SourceWatch. The smear campaign was financed mostly by Sam Fox, a billionaire conservative who was denied a post as U.S. ambassador to Belgium when this information came out during a Senate confirmation hearing. President Bush, however, appointed Fox to the position anyway while the Senate was in recess. Read more about the money and agenda behind this propaganda machine on MediaTransparency.com.

Meanwhile, John Cole documents the atrocious, as they hide behind their American flag lapel pins.

Bill Maher goes over the rules for flag lapel pins here (the relevant portion starts about six minutes in). Warning: language:

This is not hilarious:

Ralph Nader said today he will run for president as a third-party candidate, criticizing the top White House contenders as too close to big business and pledging to repeat a bid that will “shift the power from the few to the many.”

Anyone who believed his claim in 2000 that there was no difference between the Democratic and Republican Parties wasn’t paying attention then. And he helped facilitate the long national nightmare which, one hopes, will come to an end 11 months.

This, on the other hand, is hilarious:

Video via Phillybits.

Apparently, he’s taking lessons from the Clinton campaign. From Fact Check dot org.

In television ads, Clinton’s campaign says her health care plan is the only one that will provide universal coverage, while Obama says his plan will cover all Americans, too. We find:

• Obama is being misleading when he says his proposal would “cover everyone.” It would make coverage available to all, but experts we consulted estimate that 15 million to 26 million wouldn’t take it up unless required to do so.
• Clinton stretches things a bit, too. Even her plan – which, unlike Obama’s, includes a mandate for individuals to get insurance – would leave out a million people or perhaps more, depending on how severe the penalties would be for those who don’t comply. She won’t say how her mandate would be enforced, but has said that she was open to the possibility of garnishing wages.
• Update, Feb. 15: A new Obama ad in Wisconsin misrepresents the words of former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, falsely claiming he said the Obama plan produced greater savings than the Clinton plan.
• Experts also are skeptical of both candidates’ claims that their plans will reduce the cost of insurance for the typical family by $2,000 or more. ” I know zero credible evidence to support that conclusion,” says M.I.T’s Jonathan Gruber.

Behind the dueling ads there is a legitimate disagreement. Obama is reluctant to force people to buy health insurance they don’t want even if the government makes it available at a subsidized price. And Clinton says that any proposal that doesn’t aim to cover 100 percent of the uninsured would be “nibbled to death” by opponents.

No, I’m not changing my sidebar.

Libertarianism is, of course, a crock.

The persons who espouse it have no concept of the intentions of the Founders, nor of the modern world. They envision a world of log cabins, in which each householder can feed himself by shooting at some food (and without discovering crude).

At best, they are sincere in their beliefs.

At worst (like someone I know), they are closet wingnuts.

The Libertarian candidate for the Republican nomination for President has made headlines by raising money, but not by dealing with reality (then, again, not dealing with reality seems to be a Republican thing). From Fact Check dot org:

Ron Paul doesn’t have much of a chance of winning the Republican nomination, but he persists with his well-funded campaign and even talks of turning it into a permanent “Revolution” that will continue far beyond 2008.

We’ve given his statements little attention until now. But here we look at some of his more outlandish claims:

• Paul claims that a secret conspiracy composed of the Security and Prosperity Partnership and a cabal of foreign companies is behind plans to build a NAFTA Superhighway as the first step toward creating a North American Union. But the NAFTA Superhighway that Paul describes is a myth, and the groups supposedly behind the plans are neither secret nor nefarious.
• Paul says that the U.S. spends $1 trillion per year to maintain a foreign empire and suggests that we could save that amount by cutting foreign spending. Paul gets that figure by including a lot of domestic programs that he isn’t planning to cut, like the U.S. Border Patrol and interest payments on the debt.
• Paul has run television ads touting an endorsement from Ronald Reagan, but he fails to mention that, in 1988, Paul wanted “to totally disassociate” himself from the Reagan administration.

Why the tax rebates are a bunch of hooey. From today’s local rag:

The U.S. economy depends a great deal on consumer spending. Repeat after me: Consumption accounts for 70 percent of the $14.08 trillion U.S. economy.

(snip)

So along comes the president and Congress with an economic stimulus check for you. What the politicians, economists and Wall Street want you to do is to run to Best Buy (better yet, drive your Hummer there) and buy that plasma TV. Or hit the mall to buy those spring fashions at Macy’s.

By doing that, you’ll be priming the U.S. economy, helping it pull up from the slide that’s been occurring.

In other words, they don’t think you should use that check to pay down your debt, pay off a credit card, pay a little extra on your mortgage, or pay off your car loan.

Or worse, to start saving. Americans have become lousy savers. Would the country collapse if enough folks starting shoveling that government gift coming sometime in May into a money market, CD, or a retirement account? Even trickier, what if you were to take that $300, $600 or $1,200 that’s promised and had your employer shift that amount into your 401(k) account, boosting your savings for retirement.

Why we’d be acting in our own self-interest rather than for the greater good.

As was pointed out here, the Fed has already provided stimulus by reducing interest rates 1.25%. By the time the rebate checks arrive, the Fed’s stimulus will have succeeded or failed; the deed will have been done, the “rebates” will be irrelevant.

Me, I’m using mine, if I get one, to help defray my medical insurance premiums (yeah, I finally got medical insurance. $3000.00 deductible, almost $400 a month premium, made possible by the tremendous buying power of AARP–like I said, I’m old. Unless my son or I drive into a tree or get really really sick, we’ll never see a dime of coverage).

ASZ takes it to reductio ad absurdum.

Well, not really ad absurdum. In the Bushie world, nothing is absurd any more.

Brendan nails it.

No sales today.

No, not Willys. That was the company that created the jeep (which is now just another Chrysler hunk o’ junk). I saw one on the road today that actually looked like a Hummer rip-off for heaven’s sake).

Willies.

That what’s Hillary Clinton gives me, as I’ve mentioned several times before.

Susie has a post linking to a satirical debunking of Obama’s positions. It’s really quite clever (No, I haven’t researched how factual it is).

But it doesn’t still my case of the willies, because there is more to candidates than positions.

(Aside: Hell, if policy positions mattered all that much, George Bush might have turned out to be at least a mediocre president, rather than a moral and political disaster who lied the country into a fraudulent war and has been leading the middle class into poverty.)

Booman has this video up. I’m not saying that I agree whole-heartedly with the hero-worshipping last five minutes of the video–I’m old, I don’t have heroes any more, just hopes–but the first ten minutes or so sure puts the finger on part of what about Senator Clinton gives me the willies:

It is rather amusing watching the Republican Party turn upon itself:

>. . . Because McCain has a conservative problem that he’s trying to solve. A huge number of American right-wingers despise him – Ann Coulter even said she’d campaign for Hillary Clinton if McCain wins the Republican nomination – and he’s not quite sure what to do about it. If it was a simple disagreement over issues, McCain might be able to flip-flop his way out of it, and indeed, he’s tried.

(snip)

It hasn’t worked. Many conservatives have been willing to excuse Romney’s flip-flops on a whole number of issues, from immigration to abortion to gun control, but not McCain’s. They’d rather throw their lot in with the former one-term governor of the most liberal state in the union than vote for a senator with an 82% lifetime American Conservative Union (ACU) voting record, who rails against pork-barrel spending and voted against the Bush initiative to have Medicare pay for prescription drugs for old folks.

Hope they keep it up.

Addendum, 2/2/2008:

Balloon Juice.

(profanity)

Ralph Nader has formed a presidential exploratory committee, and said in an interview Wednesday that he will launch another presidential bid if he’s convinced he can raise enough money to appear on the vast majority of state ballots this fall.

Via TBogg.

Dick Polman parses the State of the Union Address.

I won’t even try to summarize or excerpt it.

I’ll just recommend it to you. Here.

The long national nightmare may soon be over.

Empty Suit four and a half, McCain one half, the others one each.

From Fact Check dot org. Follow the link for the full analysis:

With a nationwide wave of nominating contests looming next week, Republican presidential candidates held their last scheduled debate against the backdrop of Ronald Reagan’s retired Air Force One. But we found some of the candidates’ facts just won’t fly.

• Romney complained that McCain used “the wrong data” about job creation to support his assertion that Massachusetts had ranked 47th among the 50 states while Romney was governor. Romney was wrong; McCain was correct.
• Romney said his hundreds of millions of dollars in “fee increases” merely caught up with years of inflation and weren’t tax increases in disguise. Independent budget experts contradict him on that.
• Romney said the over-budget costs of his Massachusetts health care plan were due to changes made by his successor. Authorities on the plan say that’s mostly untrue; costs went up because more people than expected signed up for state-subsidized insurance.
• Romney wrongly claimed McCain’s anti-global-warming bill would boost gasoline prices by up to 50 cents per gallon. Actually, the official estimate is 40 cents for most vehicles, and not until the year 2025.
• McCain and Romney traded oversimplified assertions regarding a “timetable” for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq.
• Huckabee cited a Heritage Foundation study to back up his assertion that rebates to taxpayers aren’t as good a way to stimulate the economy as the highway construction he favors. In fact, the study does disparage rebates but urges tax cuts instead, not increased spending.
• Ron Paul repeated his claim that defending the U.S. “empire” is costing “a trillion dollars a year.” But the dubious figure includes costs such as the entire Veterans Affairs budget. Paul also claimed “nobody” is talking about cutting spending, even as his rivals did so 14 times during the same debate.

By the way, a thought occurred to me as I read John Cole’s musings, quoted here:

As to Romney, I have thought about this a good deal, and I simply can not narrow down what exactly it is that thoroughly repulses me about him. It isn’t the Mormonism, as I couldn’t care less about people and their religion unless they are chucking it in my face. I think it is equal parts his naked opportunism, who is supporting him (Hugh and company), and the fact that he is the one individual in the race that when I look at him, my inner self says “he is so totally full of shit.” I haven’t been so thoroughly convinced someone was full of it every time they opened their mouth since, well… Bill Clinton. It really is a mystery why I can not stand the man so much- he isn’t as objectionable as Tancredo or some of the others, but I just have had a knee-jerk dislike of the man since the beginning.

Maybe it’s the emptiness in the suit.

Empty Suit is touting his experience as a “management consultant.”

One of the definitions of a “management consultant” is someone who is more than 50 miles away from home, carrying a Blackberry, who charges [mumble] hundreds of dollars an hour to tell the client what the client wants to hear.

Considering how consistently Mitt the Flip has changed his positions in the past year, it seems pretty clear that he can’t figure out what this client–the American electorate–wants to hear.

His business model is crashing about his ears, because he now has to think for himself.

And the OEM “think-for-yourself” equipment seems to have shorted out.

TBogg:

Let’s be perfectly honest here: Mitt Romney is a businessman and, on top of that, he has a Master of the Universe view of himself, and when he spends millions of his own dollars and he still can’t buy a thrill from the electorate, he’s going to be bitter at the fools who refuse to buy what he’s selling . . . .

Under normal circumstances I would say that Romney would be playing for a tie, in this case a brokered convention, where he undoubtedly believes that he could attempt to convince the powers that be (as opposed to the stupid fucking yokels who vote in primaries) that he is the man. But even the powers that be have to see that the more people see of Romney, the less they like him. That’s not the message that every dollar of his campaign has set out to sell, but that’s the one that’s being received.

Josh Marshall:

Or so he thinks:

Even though he forced Congress to change its original bill, Bush’s signature yesterday came with a little-noticed signing statement, claiming that provisions in the law “could inhibit the President’s ability to carry out his constitutional obligations.” CQ reports on the provisions Bush plans to disregard:

One such provision sets up a commission to probe contracting fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan. Another expands protections for whistleblowers who work for government contractors. A third requires that U.S. intelligence agencies promptly respond to congressional requests for documents. And a fourth bars funding for permanent bases in Iraq and for any action that exercises U.S. control over Iraq’s oil money.

In his “Memorandum of Justification” for the waiver, Bush cited his Nov. 26 “Declaration of Principles for a Long-Term Relationship of Cooperation and Friendship” between Iraq and the United States. This agreement has been aggressively opposed by both Republicans and Democrats in Congress as not only unprecedented, but also potentially unconstitutional because it was enacted without the agreement of the legislation branch.

So little Bushie Boy had a temper tantrum because the elected representatives of the people of the United States of America incongruously assembled passed a law he didn’t like.

So he’s just going to ignore the law.

Again.

So take that, people of the United States of America!

Pffffft!

He’s the king. You are forbidden to tell him no.

I didn’t watch the speech, as I promised here.

Reading the post mortems, I can say quite certainly I didn’t miss a thing.

From Fact Check dot org:

Bush pretty much stuck to the facts in his final State of the Union address. But he chose his facts carefully and didn’t always tell the whole story (and this surprises us how?–ed.)

• He correctly noted that the number of jobs has grown steadily for a record 52 straight months. But the number of jobs gained is a fraction of the gains made during Bill Clinton’s years, and wage gains have been eaten up by inflation.
• He claimed his proposal to give tax deductions for those who buy their own health insurance will “put private coverage within reach for millions.” Some say that’s true, but other experts doubt it. And even the most optimistic say his plan would still leave the large majority of the uninsured without any coverage.
• He said “we” foiled a terrorist plot to blow up U.S.-bound airliners over the Atlantic, but the plot was actually uncovered by the British, as Bush himself said in last year’s State of the Union address.
• He talked tough about pork-barrel spending, saying he’d issue an executive order for agencies to ignore more Congressional “earmarks.” But he delayed the effect until November, rather than making it effective with the current fiscal year.

On other matters, Bush noted that he has begun bringing troops home from Iraq, which is true, though troop levels have been reduced by only a few thousand since the peak of the surge. He said more than 80,000 Iraqis are fighting terrorists, a figure that includes at least 60,000 “concerned local citizens” who are being paid by the U.S. He was mostly correct in describing progress in test scores since his No Child Left Behind Act was passed, but he overlooked some recent backsliding in reading scores and the fact that some test scores were on an upward trend before the new law went into effect.

I understand that, on Monday, the Current Federal Administrator will deliver his final “State of the Union” address.

Just as a reminder, the Constitution of the United States of America (which the Current Federal Administrator has ignored at his whim) mandates that persons have rights the President

shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the state of the union, and recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient; he may, on extraordinary occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in case of disagreement between them, with respect to the time of adjournment, he may adjourn them to such time as he shall think proper; he shall receive ambassadors and other public ministers; he shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed, and shall commission all the officers of the United States.

(We’ll forget that horseshit about taking care that the laws be faithfully executed and such–that’s clearly not relevant in This Day and Age.)

Me, I’m more interested in reality.

So, on Monday evening, I think I shall go up into the attic and dig out my copy of Tarzan Meets the Ape Men from Mars, so I can indulge in something more securely connected to reality than anything that would come from the mouth of the Current Federal Administrator.

From the Onion:

H/T to Raymond.

Up the road a piece, the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture decided to forbid dairies to label milk produced by cows who have not been feed synthetic bovine growth hormone (BGH) as “hormone free.” (That’s the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture as in the “Reg. Penna. Agr.” that appears on so many labels).

They claimed that the label confused consumers.

Well, apparently, consumers don’t think that knowing that cows have been fed synthetic BGH (which, by the way, has been banned in Europe because of posing a risk to the health of cows) is all that confusing:

Pennsylvania agriculture officials backed down today from a controversial ban on milk labels that identify the milk as coming from cows not treated with synthetic growth hormone.

The ban was to take effect Feb. 1, to the dismay of consumer activists and many smaller dairies who choose not to inject their cows with hormones. But the move was superseded by new standards issued today, after a review by the office of Gov. Rendell.

Now, I don’t have a position on BGH per se. I grew up on a farm and therefore I grew up with chemicals. There are good chemicals and bad chemicals, and I don’t know about this chemical.

Nevertheless, I find it suspicious when the guv’mint doesn’t want us to know about a particular chemical, because, in the words of one of the members of the panel that recommended removing the warning from the label, the chemical “means more income for the producers” (that is, more milk per cow).

I heard him say that in an interview on Radio Times. I urge you to listen to it. The guy from Penn State and the guy from Consumers Union were at each other’s throats so much that the host had to remind them that “It’s my show” (smackdown).

From the website:

The Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture recently ruled that dairies that do not inject their cattle with synthetic growth hormone can no longer label their milk as hormone-free. The decision, which has been put on hold until the beginning of February, raises serious questions for consumers, dairy farmers, and retailers. We talk to TERRY ETHERTON of Penn State University and MICHAEL HANSEN of Consumer’s Union.

The show is worth a listen, if only to hear the host rein in the guests. But it’s also worth a listen to help understand how more and more food is being turned synthetic.

Go to the website and search for 1/16/2008 or listen here.

In other news in the same vein, the same show had a very interesting interview about nutrition and “nutritionism.” (Go to the website and search for 01/10/2008) or listen here. This one is worth it.

Yeah, I know, I’ve said that before. But, if you’ve followed the links, you know that, whether you agree or disagree with what’s on the show, shows I recommend are worth it.

In his new book, ”In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, author MICHAEL POLLAN argues that “instead of eating food, we’re consuming ‘edible foodlike substances,’ (such as Cheez Whiz–ed.) no longer the products of nature but of food science.” His advice for a healthy diet can be summed up in seven words — Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

And if you have a podcatcher, make Radio Times a regular on it.

Josh Marshall tries to make sense of it: