Political Theatre category archive

Ezra Klein looks at Bobby Jindal and sees an example of the political (in the sense of “polity,” not in the sense of “horserace”) bankruptcy of Republicanism. A nugget:

Jindal gives Republicans some reasons to take heart. First, they have 30 governorships, which is true. Second, they “took control of the House in 2010 and held it in 2012,” which is true, but omits the crucial fact that Republicans got 1.5 million fewer votes in the 2012 House elections than Democrats did. Getting fewer votes than the other guy is not necessarily a good sign for a political party, even if the idiosyncrasies of congressional apportionment protected their majority. But his big argument is that Republicans just ran a bad play in 2012. ”The just completed presidential campaign strategy of playing it safe and assuming a poor economy would win it for us was an obvious mistake,” he writes.

(snip)

The upside of this theory is that it frees Jindal and the rest of the Republican Party from having to do the hard work of rethinking and renewing its own governing agenda. The downside of this theory is that it’s utter nonsense. And the most damaging part of this theory is that it’s utter nonsense aimed at Jindal’s own base.

In the course of discussing criticism he has received for a column he wrote on Ayn Rand, Jonathan Chait dances around his own feeling about that lady:

What I really mean is, I find Rand evil.

Read the rest.

The usual warning: Language.

When confronted with the truth, slur the messenger.

Warning: Language.

In Der Spiegel, German Minister of Justice Sabine Leutheusser reflects on the surveillance state and marvels at America’s surrender to fear. A nugget:

On the weekend, President Obama reacted by saying that it is impossible to have 100 percent security and 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience.

I don’t share this view. The more a society monitors, controls and observes its citizens, the less free it is. In a democratic constitutional state, security is not an end in itself, but serves to secure freedom.

No scans unbarred. Mike Nichols reports in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

Count Frank Schadt among those of us who believe government — and not just the federal government — is taking extreme liberties with our liberties.

Schadt owns OB’s Brauhaus, a successful restaurant and bar in Appleton, where police have developed a habit of asking local establishments to use police-issued scanners to collect information on patrons.

At least some bars now scan every person who comes in on certain weekend nights — proof that the program is about a lot more than deterring underage drinking. At the end of the night, the bars return the scanners to police along with all the information about who showed up to have a beer or, God forbid, a shot with their buddies.

Police say the program is entirely voluntary.

Voluntary, just like renewing your on-premises license is voluntary.

Part of being privileged is not having to hear about being privileged, because your being privileged is, well, it just is.

It’s being able to get a popular, effective, and challenging teacher reassigned because you don’t like the lesson.

Students study speeches by Dr. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and invite local community leaders to speak in the class. They are prompted to talk honestly about racism, class disparity, and privilege in their day-to-day lives at the start of every session. Assignments include analyzing “the way media and society fetishize both women and people of color.”

But the provocative discussions that Meyer found so revelatory abruptly ended a few months ago when a female white student accused the teacher of creating an “intimidating educational environment.”

Here’s a bit from another report, this one from one of the teacher’s former students.

Greenberg was hesitant to speak on the record, but he would tell me that he’s never gotten a parent complaint before this year, and he feels that the finding by the district was based on limited evidence—evidence he hasn’t seen. That he was ordered to immediately halt his curriculum “assumes that the materials are objectionable until proven otherwise,” he says, and he’s upset that a single family would have the ability to shut down classroom work so swiftly and entirely, without input from any other students or families.

There is another, larger story here that I don’t feel qualified to tackle. The established press doesn’t seem to have noticed this story of censorship.

I learned about it by listening to amTWib.

It would appear that the Republican Party got its sex education the same way that I initially did–in whispered conversations with equally-ignorant peers in back alleys and locker rooms.

I, however, later decided to read up on the topic. So did Dick Polman.

Field has a question:

It’s these hipsters, Libertarians, and white liberals getting into a hissy fit about their privacy rights because of the NSA snooping on their phone conversations and Internet searches. They are crying a river about the Constitutional protections that are being stripped away by “Big Brother”, the police state infringing into their personal lives, and they want answers from their government.

Fair enough. But where was the outrage when government decided that it was cool to “stop and frisk” young minority men in America’s largest city?

Cenk cannot restrain his sarcasm.

As an ex-Delawarean, I can attest that there’s a reason that Delaware loves Joe.

He’s Joe.

Via Balloon Juice.

Reg Henry knows whom to blame

The natural temptation is to blame Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush and the Congress. That is fair up to a point. But as a great Republican once said, it is a government of the people and by the people. Whether it is a government for the people is the question of the hour.

Inconveniently, we cannot view this president, his predecessor and the Congress as a breed apart from the rest of us. They are doing what most ordinary Americans wanted them to do. That’s the unfortunate truth of the matter.

E. J. Dionne tackles the fundamental hypocrisy of “Libertarianism.” A nugget:

From this, Mr. Lind asks another question: “If socialism is discredited by the failure of communist regimes in the real world, why isn’t libertarianism discredited by the absence of any libertarian regimes in the real world?”

The answer lies in a kind of circular logic: Libertarians can keep holding up their dream of perfection because, as a practical matter, it will never be tried in full. Even many who say they are libertarians reject the idea when it gets too close to home.

Follow the link; read the rest.

One more time:

A “Libertarian” is nothing more than a Republican who is ashamed to admit it.

One more time: old news.

If you didn’t know it was going on, you weren’t paying attention.

Via Rawstory.