Political Theatre category archive
The “Trump Effect” 0
In related news, Berwood Yost looks at the news coverage of voter registration figures and finds that a fascination with Trumpery and other bright shiny things has led to skewed reportage. Here’s a snippet:
How could the media and their expert commentators be so mistaken? The answer could be the real “Trump effect”: Members of the media were captured by the compelling national storyline about the Trump candidacy. Knowingly or not, they substituted what they knew was happening elsewhere for what they thought might be happening in Pennsylvania. That’s a too-common mistake when many of us make quick judgments, particularly about those things that seem to confirm what we think we know.
Image via Job’s Anger.
I Read It on the Internet . . . 0
. . . so it must be true.
Tax Frauds 0
They pop up every year (and it’s not who you think it is).
No Longer Welcome 0
A long-time Maine Republican explains why she has finally chosen to–more properly, been driven to–leave the Republican Party. Here’s bit:
Details, Details 0
One of the facts seldom mentioned in the coverage of the Democratic presidential campaign is this: Even though he’s campaigning for the Democratic nomination, Bernie Sanders is not a Democrat.
If you think this somehow doesn’t matter to persons who are grassroots members of a political party–attending boring meetings even when no election is imminent, campaigning on behalf of candidates and causes about which they may be at best lukewarm because the party chose to support them, handing out literature in the rain and making GOTV phone calls to persons who probably don’t care, sometimes supporting the lesser of two evils because the alternative is the evil of two lessers–you need to think again.
“The Word” 0
The Roanoke Times thinks it may have found “the word” that explains the resilience of Republican rule of the rural.
Methinks they are on to something. Follow the link to decide whether I am correct.
A Cat’s Cradle of Procedural Opacity 0
I was at a gathering earlier today in which the process for choosing delegates to my party’s local and state conventions and, ultimately, to the national convention, was the topic (no, I’m not planning to be a delegate to anywhere). The person in charge of the gathering stated in passing that the selection process still makes his brain hurt.
Daniel Ruth wrote in his column yesterday that our parties’ processes for nominating candidates are a hodgepodge of procedural pitfalls surrounded by tripping hazards surrounded by thickets and despairs of their rationalization. A snippet:
Can it get any worse? You betcha, as long as a Koch brother can stroke a cat.
Follow the link for why he says that.
Plus Ca Change, Flail the Bern Dept. 4
Eight years ago, as Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination fell behind Barack Obama’s, I gave forth a screed* in which I suggested that, as hope for her campaign faded, she had begun acting like a jerk. (People sometimes do that when they start to lose hope in a cause. My two or three regular readers also know that, in my opinion, she has redeemed herself in her subsequent conduct.)
In an eerie reprise of history, the role is reversed and it is now her opponent who is acting like a jerk.
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*I haven’t done a screed for a long time. I think I got them all out of my system in this blog’s youth.
“The Birds” 0
Shorter Reg Henry: Hitchcock had nothing on this campaign.
“If You Can’t Google It, It Must Not Be” 0
Remember the University of California at Davis campus cop who egregiously pepper-sprayed a group of peaceful Occupy Wall Street protestors a couple of years ago?
Well, UC-Davis doesn’t want you to, so it tried to make it go away. The Sacramento Bee has the documents:
The payments were made as the university was trying to boost its image online and were among several contracts issued following the pepper-spray incident.
Some payments were made in hopes of improving the results computer users obtained when searching for information about the university or Katehi, results that one consultant labeled “venomous rhetoric about UC Davis and the chancellor.”
Much more at the link.
By the by, if you follow the link in the first sentence, the money does not appear to have been well-spent.
Asides:
Because I pay attention to stuff like this, I know that the most common technique used by the outfits that promise to cleanse your on-line reputation is not to make bad stuff go away, because they can’t. It’s to fabricate promulgate a bunch of good stuff, hoping that it pushes the bad stuff off the first page of search results, because most persons don’t look beyond the first page.
Also, remember that, with rhetoric, “venomous” and “accurate” are independent variables.
