Political Theatre category archive

Talking Points Memo announces this year’s Golden Duke Awards honoring the most egregious scandals of 2012.

Dick Polman wants you to take his quiz.

I haven’t taken it yet. I’ll post my results when I do.

Rachel Maddow explains:

Via Raw Story. If the embed doesn’t work, follow that link.

Just heard a reference to “Republican soul-searching.”

Read more »

Odd. That’s two YouTube embeds that disappeared somewhere between saving and posting.

Suffering from the agony of defeat, Pennsylvania Republicans want to change the electoral college rules. A nugget from Dick Polman:

It’s simple, really: Scrap the winner-take-all rule, and award the electoral votes in a way that mirrors each candidate’s share of the statewide popular vote (with two EVs being awarded to the statewide winner). This way, the losing side – presumably, the Republicans – would at least get on the College scoreboard. President Obama won all 20 of Pennsylvania’s electoral votes last month because he prevailed by five percentage points in the popular tally, but, if Pileggi’s plan had been state law, Obama’s electoral haul would have dropped from 20 to 12.

What a great deal for the GOP! If the party can’t win fair and square under the existing rules, just change the rules. And in Pennsylvania, they have the power to do it. They hold the gubernatorial office and both state chambers, so what’s to stop them (aside from public scorn)?

The idea that they might change some of their policies, soundly rejected by the polity, is, natch, unthinkable.

Via Bob Cesca’s Awesome Blog.

In my local rag, local activist Don Tabor outlines the fundamental racism underlying our immigration laws and argues that, if they want to come, let them.

Between our Civil War and World War I, our country grew by as much as 1 percent a year through legal immigration by the poor and oppressed of Europe. Many of us can trace our American story to that period. But in 1924, spurred by fears that the United States would be inundated with “inferior races,” such as Irish and Italian Catholics, and guided by the eugenics movement, the nation adopted immigration quotas based on country of origin.

The quotas essentially excluded Africans and Asians from immigration and limited Hispanics and Eastern and Southern Europeans to the point that in the 1920s and ’30s, legal immigration added less than 0.01 percent a year and has held growth by legal immigration to under 0.5 percent ever since.

In 1965, the blatantly racist quotas were abandoned in favor of more subtly discriminatory “skills-based preferences,” which accomplish pretty much the same results under a veneer of merit.

The capsule description of Mr. Tabor describes him as a Libertarian.* That means I probably disagree with many of his positions.

On this one, though, he’s got it right.

____________________

*Libertarian: a Republican who is ashamed to admit it.

Leonard Pitts, Jr., evaluates the spectacle of our elected representative incongruously assembled backing away from their pledges of fealty to the troll under the bridge Grover Norquist. A nugget:

So this revolution against “he who must be obeyed,” however modest, is nonetheless welcome. It suggests reason seeping like sunlight into places too long cloistered in the damp and dark of ideological rigidity.

But it leaves an observer in the oddly weightless position of applauding a thing and being, simultaneously, disgusted by it. Has politics ever seemed more ignoble than in these clumsy, self-serving attempts to justify a deviation from orthodoxy? They have to do this, of course, because the truth — “I signed the pledge because I knew it would help me get elected, but with economic ruin looming and Obama re-elected on a promise to raise taxes on the rich and most voters supporting him on that, it’s not doing me as much good as it once did.” — is unpretty and unflattering.

In this awkward about-face, these lawmakers leave us wondering once again whether the vast majority of them — right and left, red and blue, Republican and Democrat — really believe in anything, beyond being reelected.

Via Bob Cesca’s Awesome Blog.

In my local rag (TM), Daryl Lease visualizes a meeting amongst the new secessionists. A nugget:

“Hey, what do we do with the 47 percent?”

“The 47 percent who voted for Mitt Romney?”

“No, knucklehead, the 47 percent who are moochers. Even if we secede, we’ll get stuck with some of them.”

Read the rest. Oh, do read the rest.

Via Bob Cesca’s Awesome Blog.

Fox News is often rightly characterized as the official propaganda outlet for the Republican Party.

Or is it perhaps the other way around? Jay Bookman reports:

Somehow — and that “somehow” is a no doubt fascinating story in its own right — Bob Woodward at The Washington Post has obtained a digital recording of a long, detailed conversation between Fox News correspondent Kat McFarland and then-General David Petraeus in the spring of 2011 in Afghanistan during which McFarland:

A.) Urges Petraeus to run for president against Barack Obama;

B.) Tells Petraeus that she was instructed to carry that message to Petraeus by Fox News President Roger Ailes and its owner, Rupert Murdoch;

C.) Tells Petraeus that Fox would fully back his presidential campaign, and by fully back she means:

D.) Murdoch would finance the campaign. Ailes would leave Fox to run the campaign. And Fox News itself would become the house organ of the campaign. As McFarland puts it point blank, “The big boss is bankrolling it. Roger’s going to run it. And the rest of us are going to be your in-house.”

No doubt this would have worked out well.

After all, everything else being equal (which, of course, it would not have been), the Paula Broadman story would have broken three days after the election.

The Virginia Beach city fathers are continuing their attempts to convince the citizenry that Virginia Beach needs nothing more than a sports palace to achieve civic nirvana, as the potential costs proliferate (many more details at the link):

Details of the proposal in a draft of a report to be presented to the City Council today show that financing costs would bring the city’s total to just under $241 million. Last week, Mayor Will Sessoms estimated the cost at $195 million but noted that did not include borrowing costs.

At the same time, city officials have suggested boosting the hotel tax by 1 percentage point to help pay for the proposed arena at the Oceanfront, and resort hoteliers voted Monday to support the idea.

A rate increase to 14 percent, from 13 percent, would generate an estimated $2.8 million per year for the project. For a $200 hotel room, a customer would pay $28 in tax, up from $26.

“We think it will be a big boost for Virginia Beach and the region,” said Verne Burlage, president of the Virginia Beach Hotel-Motel Association, which he said voted unanimously to support it.

Supposedly, this will attract the Sacramento Kings, a third-rate basketball team distinguished primarily by the duplicity of its owners.

My two or three regular readers know that I see this as of a sport-fan-induced pipe dream the primary result which will be to deliver truckloads of money to developers. It is notable that, to create their rosy marketing predictions, the marketing consultants have extended their version of the metropolitan area as far as Richmond–90 miles away, about the distance from Manhattan to Trenton.

It takes so little effort with Google to find piles of the smoking ashes of arena pipe dreams in other cities that I’m not going to waste my time.

Instead, I will point out this little fact that seems lost in the shuffle: Several decades ago, two nearby cities smoked the same stuff and built very nice arenas. Major civic events, big-time professional sports, transformative effects, and magical visits from the revenue fairy were predicted. One of them even had a professional basketball team for a few years.

As I write this, both cities are still nice little cities with nice arenas that host concerts and other performances, but neither provides evidence that shoveling money to developers to build sports palaces transforms a relatively small city into anything other than a relatively small city with a mortgage on a sports palace.

Thom wonders what the next targets will be and visits with Congressman Alan Grayson.

kavips comments on the latest rage. All the cool gazillionaires have one:

Remember those few donors during the Republican primaries who were sheltering candidates almost to the point of being their prime funder?

Among the nouveau riche, it appears one hasn’t arrived until he/she has a prize winning candidate in their barn… It used to be racehorses. It is now GOP candidates…

She goes on to link this to the phony phiscal cliff.

Susan Antilla, writing at Bloomberg dot com, considers the disparate treatment of the principles in the affair of the Petraeus affair. A nugget:

But there is something a little bit off when one party to a sex scandal is congratulated for the sins he managed not to commit while the other gets attacked as “a shameless, self promoting prom queen,” which is the way Broadwell was described by an unnamed military officer in the blog Business Insider. (Memo to Mr. Unnamed Military Officer: Next time you get on the phone for a media interview, show a little military-style courage and attach your name to those smears.)

Petraeus is no stranger to self-promotion himself, and several writers have called him out both for his assiduous courting of the reporters who covered him and for his tacky decision to adorn his civilian clothes with military medals for a recent speech in Washington.

But that self-promotion hasn’t led to any portrayals of Petraeus as “a shameless self promoting prom king.”