Political Theatre category archive

SLANTblog has a slant on Congress.

Speaking of trolls, Funny or Die has a parody:

Warning: Language.

As borrow a phrase from Atrios, there’s nothing better than taking it out on the poors and the olds:

A panel appointed by Mayor Rahm Emanuel to review taxpayer-subsidized health insurance for retired government workers suggested the city could drop coverage to help erase a financial shortfall.

Notice the framing: It’s no longer an “earned retirement benefit,” even though that’s what it is.

It’s now “taxpayer-subsidized.”

Of course, if I dropped coverage of my credit card bills “to help erase a financial shortfall”–oh, never mind.

We need single-payer.

. . . well, you know, we won’t get fooled again.

Nick Cohen marvels at the conservative obsession with the sex lives of others. A nugget:

In the US, the path from the pulpit to the gay massage parlour is so well trodden by evangelical preachers it is a wonder there is a blade of grass left on it. Faced with yet another scandal, a weary Christopher Hitchens wrote: “Whenever I hear some bigmouth in Washington or the Christian heartland banging on about the evils of sodomy, I mentally enter his name in my notebook and contentedly set my watch. Sooner, rather than later, he will be discovered down on his weary and well-worn old knees in some dreary motel or latrine.”

I know it is dangerous to generalise on a subject as vast and complicated as human sexuality, but I have learned from my admittedly sheltered life that men who are, as they say, “secure” in their heterosexuality have little interest in what their homosexual friends do in bed and our indifference is reciprocated. Whenever we hear conservatives announce that equality for gays “undermines marriage”, we think: Our marriages can take it, what’s so wrong with yours?

Rick Perlstein explains why he is proudly a “liberal” (emphasis added):

Liberals, in fact, make you freer everywhere. Look at liberty’s greatest historic advances: ending slavery. Giving women the vote. Outlawing legal segregation.

Each and every time, the people at the forefront of advancing those reforms—often putting their lives on the line—called themselves liberals.

Each and every time, people who called themselves conservatives announced that those reforms would unravel civilization.

Then—each and every time—once the reform was achieved and taken for granted, and civilization didn’t collapse, conservatives claimed to have always been for it, even holding themselves up as the best people to preserve it.

Read the rest.

It’s all the explanation you need for why, as Stephen Colbert says, “the facts lean left.”

And the explanation for why “conservatism” is continually fighting a rearguard action to take things–retirement, pensions, safety, health care, security, rights and freedoms–away.

Via Will Bunch.

Warning: In worst taste than usual.

Dick Polman thinks he knows why Chris Christie is all the rage these days.

It’s not his bluster; it’s certainly not his policies; it’s certainly unlikely to be the avoirdupois.

No, it’s that politics abhors a vacuum, even as it loves vacuity.

Seriously, who speaks for the GOP these days? John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, leaders of the hapless congressional wing? John McCain and his sidekick-echo Lindsey Graham, the showhorses of Sunday TV? Newt Gingrich, whose power peaked circa 1997? Paul Ryan, who couldn’t even carry his home town in the ’12 election, arguably fills the pragmatic conservative niche, but that’s all. Marco Rubio, who, unlike Ryan, opposed the fiscal cliff deal, arguably fills the purist conservative niche, but that’s all. Meanwhile, there’s nary a peep from George W. Bush or Dick Cheney. And Mitt Romney has apparently vaporized. A few years back, the pollsters at Pew asked Americans to name the leader of the GOP; only 27 percent managed to same someone. The number-two choice was Rush Limbaugh.

This is where Christie comes in. He’s a potential party leader, if only by default.

The incorporated was his co-pilot.

Jonathan Frieman, a 56-year-old San Rafael resident and self-described social entrepreneur, failed to convince a Marin County Superior Court jurist Monday after he argued that he was not alone when a California Highway Patrol officer pulled him over in October while driving in the carpool lane.

Instead, Frieman admitted that he had reached onto the passenger’s seat and handed the officer papers of incorporation connected to his family’s charity foundation.

I give him points for creativity. Details at the link.

Mean for the sake of mean.

Via Raw Story.

(Link fixed–not the orginal link, but it will do.)

Since he enlisted, First Son has lived in Arizona, North Carolina, and Georgia, in addition to Iraq and Afghanistan, all places he was sent by him employer and I forget where else.

What, exactly, is his state of residence (emphasis added)? (More at the link.)

Until last year, the Department of Veterans Affairs would cover up to the highest rate charged for in-state students at a public school in that state. But under changes that took effect in August 2011, while veterans can receive up to $17,500 a year for study at private schools, the agency will pay only “the actual net cost for in-State tuition and fees assessed” by the public institution the veteran is attending.

And if that person is deemed a nonresident, the veteran often must pay the difference out of pocket.

This is not right.

Full Disclosure:

This dooesn’t affect First Son. He has a degree.

It’s still not right.

It’s the chain gangs of the past remade for today’s prison industrial complex.

David Cook explains:

The hot racism of old has been replaced by a new form of legalized discrimination. No longer are black Americans imprisoned through slavery or the fear of lynching and white hoods at midnight, but through a legalized form of discrimination of prisons, drug laws and felon-branding.

It’s the new Jim Crow.

“Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color ‘criminals’ and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind,” writes Michelle Alexander in her stunning “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.”

“As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow,” she writes. “We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.”

Via Raw Story.

George Smith:

Our system of government was set up assuming a political party would not want to destroy the place.

Read the rest of his comment here.

Thom on the significance Django Unchained.

I disagree with many of Governor Christie’s positions, but I compliment him for having an integrity that is too often missing in politicians.

What Atrios said.

We have a party in Congress that believes Russian roulette is a legitimate tactic of governance.

Hint: It’s not the party to which I re-upped my membership today.

With a twist:

Via Raw Story.

Actions speak louder . . . .

The two Republican U.S. senators from Utah have scheduled fundraisers on the ski slopes in the first days of January, just as America is likely to be headed over the fiscal cliff.

Remember, the phony phiscal cliff was a Republican creation. In their world, fund-raising trumps governance.