Political Theatre category archive

Why, half a century after the invention of The Pill, has birth control become an issue?

Shaun Mullen thinks he knows:

With the economy finally showing signs of recovering and Obama’s approval ratings climbing back into the low 50s, Republicans and their presidential wannabes are being denied a cudgel that they have been swinging since Obama took office, so they are defaulting to the tried-and-true culture wars. That is, tried and true for them; most voters don’t give a spit. And how ironic that the mandate that Republicans now so vehemently oppose was being promoted by them in 1993 as an alternative to HillaryCare.

Follow the link for the rest. It’s delicious.

. . . then it must be scrapple.

As told by Noz:

. . . when most pundits say that “we must do something” about a problem in a foreign country, they usually mean doing something that involves killing people. ideas that do not involve killing people or arming other people so they can kill people is what they call “doing nothing.”

Dick Polman reminds us that Little Ricky doesn’t like how you have sex:

In fact, he’s (Rick Santorum, R., SigmundFreud–ed.) most dissatisfied with the way most American women have sex:

“One of the things I will talk about, that no president has talked about before is, I think, the dangers of contraception in this country. It’s not OK. It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”

(Link fixed.)

Click for a larger image.

Via BartBlog.

Mike Littwin is taken aback by the attacks on the Chrysler commercial that aired during the Super Bowl:

This commercial is so good, I wrote, it almost makes me want to buy a Chrysler product.

Almost.

You see, I had missed what was apparently clear to many others. I thought the reason Chrysler had spent $13 million on this ad was to sell Chryslers. The reason I had reflexively come to this now-controversial conclusion was that every other Chrysler commercial I’d ever seen was about selling Chrysler products.

And, not to belabor the point, but every Ford commercial and every Chevy commercial and every Toyota commercial and every Honda commercial and every Kia-with-hip-hop-hamsters commercial I’d ever seen was about the same thing. I thought maybe I’d spotted a trend.

Follow the link to find out how wrong he was.

A. Parents.

Denying birth control coverage to persons is ultimately coercive.

Karen Heller comments on the Catholic Church’s renewed attempts to dictate the sexual habits, not just of Catholics, but also of non-Catholics who happen to work for an enterprise that receives financial support from the Catholic Church.

Face it, that’s what a “Catholic Hospital,” to pick one example, is–an enterprise.

It may be an enterprise with charitable intent, but I can tell you from personal experience that it’s open to the public, it employs non-Catholics, and it sends a bill when it’s done with you.

In the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Jackie Hogan considers how Abraham Lincoln would fit in with today’s Republican Party. The conclusion: Not a chance.

A snippet:

While Republican candidates today win kudos for signing Grover Norquist’s anti-tax pledge, it is unlikely that Lincoln would sign on, since he, in effect, invented income tax. That is to say, he was the first American president to sign federal income tax into law. And not only that, but it was a progressive income tax, with the wealthiest Americans paying a higher rate. He made no distinctions between earned income and capital gains — money made was money earned — and Lincoln’s administration needed its cut to pull the nation back from the brink of collapse. Strike One against Honest Abe.

Strike Two: He didn’t advertise his faith. The debate over Lincoln’s religious beliefs is a heated one. But there is good evidence that he questioned Christian orthodoxy, perhaps not so surprising at a time when biblical verses were routinely used in defense of slavery (See Note–ed.), an institution he found morally repugnant. While it is true that Lincoln frequently evoked the Divine in his speeches, he never took up membership in a church, and certainly never spoke publicly about his personal relationship with Christ.

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Note: Sound familiar?

OhMyGov! analyzes Congressional twits. Follow the link for the top twits.

Via Kiko’s House.

Now with the Heart and Mind-O-Matic. A must-see.

Via Dick Destiny.

A how-to:

Via Bob Cesca’s Awesome Blog.

Jeffrey (not Jonah) Goldberg analyzes the music from the chorus of Republican racist dog whistles. A nugget:

Mr. Kennedy (Randall Kennedy of Harvard School or Law-ed.), who studies the role of race in national elections, told me last week of a rule he uses to measure whether a candidate’s appeal to prejudice will succeed: If it takes more than two sentences for a critic to explain why a dog-whistle is a dog-whistle, the whistler wins. Mr. Gingrich seems to understand this, and so, despite criticism from blacks, has made the term “food-stamp president” a staple of his stump speeches.

Mr. Kennedy offers the theory that this campaign’s dog-whistling may be prompted by a realization by right-leaning provocateurs that voters have become inured to charges of racism. I suspect another phenomenon has hastened this realization: A handful of black Republicans have abetted dog-whistling by making their own bombastic statements about the degraded moral health of the black community, the putative foreignness of the Obamas and the Democratic Party’s plantation-like qualities.

Dick Polman composes songs for Newt the Gingrinch.

Don’t miss this cabaret act.

Chauncey Devega, in a typically long post on a different issue, turns the tables with this nugget:

The Future of Black Politics issue (of the Boston Review–ed.) has the following question on its cover: Is Black Politics Good for America? My response to such inquiries has always been, “is white politics good for America?”* As a student of black politics I am always suspicious when “our” concerns are racialized, and those of other folks taken to be “normal” or “mainstream.” That assumption explains so much about the challenges which face black and brown communities in the 21st century. I remain puzzled that it has not been more thoroughly interrogated.

The same could be said about every issue relating to persons marginalized or viewed as “different” from stereotypical white-bread Americans. Such reasoning makes the “out” group, whoever it is, appear more out, more strange, more different, more somehow inhuman. It’s how you turn other persons into a “Them.”

For instance, I give you this article by Dick Polman.

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*Based on the evidence of things seen, no.

Will Bunch points to an article about Saul Alinsky and reminds us:

The other takeaway from the Sugrue piece is something that seemed clear the moment back in 2008 that Sarah Palin belittled Obama for his past as a community organizer. A community organizer such as Alinsky (or Obama in what feels like his very distant, distant past) tries to help disadvantaged folks take full advantage of the rights and opportunities they already have — registering to vote, for example. The idea of Americans from different communities exercising their rights is terrifying to conservatives. They should be ashamed.

Hadley Freeman, writing at the Guardian, discusses the politicization of everything. A nugget:

Having helmet-like hair: rightwing. Eating vegetables: leftwing. Religion: rightwing. Science: leftwing. But really, the possibilities here are endless! Flowers: rightwing (so decorative, so expensive); trees: leftwing (so climate change-y, so environmental). Dresses: rightwing (so ladylike); trousers (on women): leftwing (so Hillary Clinton-y).