Political Theatre category archive

Truman was right.

He was right then, and he’s right now.

Via BartCop.

Via BartCop.

Via BartCop.

Sally Kalson, in the Pittsburg Post-Gazette, sums up the recent round of Supreme Court opinions.

In all areas but one, the Supreme Court seems to have been operating on the principle of “If It Ain’t Broke, Break It.”

Follow the link for her reasoning.

This is delightful.

Via C&L.

Addendum, Later That Same Day:

In related news, the Commander Guy explains how gay-bashing is a logical outcome of Richard Nixon’s odious Southern Strategy and how the persons it recruited to the Republican Party have come to control it. A snippet:

I believe gay bashing is the result of the Southern Strategy, i.e., the decision to transform from the Party of Established interests in to the party of all whites by adding Catholics, Jewish folks and ethnic whites to their coalition of Northern WASPs which had dominated the GOP for the previous 100 years. To get the party started, race based appeals are crucial. But as time goes on race based appeals started to bring diminishing returns. Then Party Leaders turned to white evangelicals (or religious fundamentalists as Sullivan puts it) to bolster their percentage of the white vote.

Mainline Protestant and Evangelical Groups having reconciled after their earlier Civil War era split once again diverged after WWII over the issue of race, with Mainline groups identifying racial discrimination as a big problem (see: Holocaust, The) and Evangelical groups preferring that people should accept the social situation they were born into (hint: they mean black folks). Picking “Family Values” Dan Quayle as a VP candidate is an example of this strategy in action – the GOP telling Evangelicals that we are one of you now.

Der Spiegel:

Some of the ideas that may have occurred to Jobs are now on display in the Netherlands. Eleven “Steve Jobs schools” will open in August, with Amsterdam among the cities that will be hosting such a facility. Some 1,000 children aged four to 12 will attend the schools, without notebooks, books or backpacks. Each of them, however, will have his or her own iPad.

There will be no blackboards, chalk or classrooms, homeroom teachers, formal classes, lesson plans, seating charts, pens, teachers teaching from the front of the room, schedules, parent-teacher meetings, grades, recess bells, fixed school days and school vacations. If a child would rather play on his or her iPad instead of learning, it’ll be okay. And the children will choose what they wish to learn based on what they happen to be curious about.

The one certainty about this is sales of iJunk: twice the price for half as much.

The rest is a combination of wishful thinking and charlatanry, like sleep learning, “Baby Einstein,” and cyber schools.

Political Prof has posted a copy of a Louisiana literacy test ca. 1964. It was administered to (black) folks who wanted to register to vote.

See how you can do.

You have 10 minutes: the passing score is 100%.

Plus ca change.

Delaware Dem looks at Republican rebranding efforts and suggests a new strategy:

So with the GOP going to great great pains to alienate minorities and women, the GOP better embrace homosexuality soon since they are going to need white men to start breeding with each other, not to mention advances in medical science, which they are also against.

I can’t decide whether, in its ruling on the Voting Rights Act, the majority in the Supreme Court was being delusional or craven. Or both.

Anyone who pays attention knows that attempts to suppress votes are no farther away than your local legislature’s last attempt to restrict the franchise and that they are more common in the South.

And the white South has not changed, not that much, and not that fundamentally. The number of Stars and Bars decals on cars and trucks attests to that.

This was a vile ruling, a boon to bigots, a compounding of corruption, a polluting of the polity.

See Dick Polman for more and even more.

George Smith expects the worst. According to TPM, he’s not far off the mark.

Are other countries resisting attempts to extradite Snowden because they are finally fed up with U. S. arrogance international conduct?

Worth a thought.

Not if you are a Republican. E. J. Dionne comments on the recently-defeated Farm Bill:

The collapse of the farm bill will be played as a political story about Boehner’s failure to rally his right wing, and it should remind everyone of the House leadership’s inability to govern. But this is also a story about morality: There is something profoundly wrong when a legislative majority is so eager to risk leaving so many Americans hungry. That’s what the bill would have done, and why defeating it was a moral imperative.

Read the rest.

In Der Spiegel, Christian Stöcker comments on the surveillance state. It’s a subject that Germany and Germans are particularly sensitive to, because Germany and Germans have lived it.

A nugget–follow the link for the rest (caveat: they fell into the trap that others have of confusing SFTP with “direct access,” but, from a policy standpoint, that’s pretty much irrelevant):

And for good reason. The fact that the Americans and the British — it is yet to be revealed who else participated — have granted themselves this enormous power, without ever informing their own people, is a scandal of historic proportions. To the initiated, all the recent public debate about data retention, Internet privacy and the practices of Facebook and Google must have been downright amusing. The state, as it turns out, knew everything all along.

That was precisely the goal, according to the head of the NSA, Lieutenant General Keith Alexander. “Why can’t we collect all the signals all the time?” he asked in an internal document acquired by the Guardian. “Sounds like a good summer project for Menwith,” he continued, referring to a GCHQ facility at Menwith Hill in northern England.

I have a thought: Substitute “Russian” and “Chinese” for “American” and “British” wherever those words appear in the article and imagine the uproar that would be coming from Washington over this.

Via BartCop.

More on Republican attempts to destroy public education.

In Wingnut World, there is no such thing as the “public good.”

Public cyber-schools, my anatomy.

(Re)Public(an) cyber-crime.

Sometimes, it is best to keep them “innermost,” especially if you are a not nice person.

An Illinois Republican official resigned from his leadership post Thursday amid outrage over an email in which he berated a biracial former Miss America as a “street walker” who could fill a law firm’s “minority quota” if she loses her bid for Congress.

Courtland Milloy, long-time reporter and columnist for the Washington Post, tells what it is like to “look fishy” to someone somewhere.

Back in 2003, during one of those code-yellow terrorist alerts, I was doing interviews near the Jefferson Memorial in Washington when an anonymous tourist reported me to the U.S. Park Police. I was detained as a “suspicious person” and my notebook confiscated. Asked why, one of the officers replied, “We hear you’ve been asking curious questions.”

Later I learned that the tourist also thought I looked a lot like Saddam Hussein.

And that’s all it took. Say goodbye to Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure.