Political Theatre category archive

Then again, you can’t come back if you’ve never been there.

Dick Polman looks at yesterday’s meaningless (that is, no delegates at stake) contests:

Today’s fun trivia question: Which Republican presidential candidate has won the most contests?

Answer: Rick Santorum (4).

Is this an un-Mitt-igated disaster for the Boy from Bain? Follow the link for what comes next.

From the artist:

In the Rightwingoverse, doubt must be cast upon facts, science, and basic reality, in order to sustain an otherwise unsustainable ideology.

Click for a larger image.

Karen Heller wants to know

Why are we always fighting about women’s bodies, and never about those of men?

Read more »

Might the laws of war (aside: it is to laugh) apply to raining anonymous death from the skies?

Eric Zorn, at the Chicago Tribune, considers the kerfuffle over attempts by the Catholic church, its adherents, and the element of the punditocracy that will attack the current Federal administration for any old reason at all to control what goes on between women and their doctors. He offers a bit of perspective:

Noah Millman of the American Conservative asks us to perform a thought experiment: Pretend it’s not the Catholic Church at the center of the current controversy over the rights of religious institutions to exercise moral judgments regarding their employees’ health care plans.

Instead, Millman suggests in a recent commentary, pretend it’s the Church of Scientology.

And pretend that the flash point of controversy isn’t coverage of contraception, which violates Catholic teachings, but coverage of mental-health services — psychology, psychiatry and mood-stabilizing drugs, all of which violate the teachings of Scientology.

If the Scientologists operated a network of schools and hospitals, would the pundit classes be rushing to the ramparts bellowing about religious liberty in defense of the right of these schools and hospitals to deny mental-health coverage even to employees who don’t belong to their faith?

More likely, Millman suggests, the dispassionate public-policy question would be, “Should it be OK to systematically disadvantage employees of Church of Scientology schools because that church has a weird hang-up about mental-health services?”

Read the rest.

Florida is considering a new strategy to enforce prayer in public schools by calling religious messages “inspirational messages.”

At Tampabay dot com, John Romano analyzes the issue, pointing out that prayer is not now banned in public schools. What is banned is agents of the state (teachers and administrators) from organizing or compelling prayers. I recommend his column for setting forth a balanced discussion of the issue.

Near the beginning of it, he gets to the heart of this issue.

. . . prayer, by itself, is far from being the problem. It is those who would use it as an instrument, or even a weapon, for selfish purposes.

Matthew 6:5.

Follow the link for essential reading for understanding Greater Wingnutopia.

Atrios thinks he knows what’s with the skeevy desire of Republican (usually) men to control the sex lives of women to whom they’ve never even been introduced.

Via Bob Cesca’s Awesome Blog. (Link fixed.)

Ed Quillen, admitted Democrat, writes in the Denver Post of a recent visit from his “favorite inside source, Ananias Ziegler, media relations director for the Committee That Really Runs America.”

A snippet. Follow the link for the full apparition:

“Our powers are limited,” Ziegler explained. “We did manage to turn Romney into what he is now from what he had been, a pro-choice supporter of gay-rights and socialized medicine, somebody you might have voted for. But we can’t make Newt consistently sound sane.”

“That would be a challenge,” I consoled.

Ziegler snorted agreement. “He’ll talk about things that people care about, like jobs and houses. Then he’ll babble about making a state out of a lunar colony. And to think we used to call Jerry Brown ‘Governor Moonbeam.'”

Warning: Language, episodic bad taste.

Via Bob Cesca’s Awesome Blog.

Via PoliticalProf.

TPM Muckraker:

She may, famously, not be a witch, but here’s a bit of money magic from former Delaware Republican Senate candidate and recent Mitt Romney endorser Christine O’Donnell: her political campaign gave $142,000 to her super PAC, which proceeded to buy copies of her book.

I guess somebody had to buy that turkey.

Addendum, the Next Day:

Perhaps shoring up her almost-non-existent book sales wasn’t the best use for the funds. My ex-local rag reports:

O’Donnell has burned through most of the $424,000 in campaign donations remaining from the record-setting $7.4 million she raised in her failed 2010 U.S. Senate campaign.

She has nearly exhausted her leftover funds, has reportedly had lackluster book sales and is being sued by a longtime supporter who claims she’s trying to stiff him out of pay for political consulting and legal research. Her political action committee, ChristinePAC, and Senate campaign had a combined $36,100 left in the bank at the end of 2011, according to reports filed last week.

At this rate, she’ll have to look for honest work.

The story does point out that the her PAC purchased the book at the “non-royalty” rate.

Are Republican candidates spreading the stupid?

Heh.

Congressional Republicans have the producer of Gasland arrested.

Will Bunch reports.

Classy.

Click for a larger image.

Via BartBlog.

Steven M. predicts that, if Mitt the Flip does indeed lock down the Republican nomination for president, the punditocracy will convince itself that the Republican Party has beaten back the crazy and returned to being the party of Ev Dirksen and Nelson Rockefeller.*

“Look at what’s going in the states,” counsels Steven M. citing several examples, “and don’t buy the myth of a mellower GOP.”

. . .the press never wants to acknowledge the party’s extremism. The press wants to say that the party is fine, our two-party system is fine, and anything intemperate that Republicans have ever done is anomalous, and unrepresentative of the fine folks all insider journalists meet at cocktail parties.

__________________

*The evidence is that Mitt wears nice suits, doesn’t shout, and looks good in group photos

George Monbiot, writing at the Guardian, dissects the arrogant wantonness of raining death from the skies. A nugget:

. . . it must also be true that the easier and less risky a deployment is, the more likely it is to happen.

This danger is acknowledged in a remarkably candid assessment published by the UK’s Ministry of Defence, which also deploys drones, and has also used them to kill civilians. It maintains that the undeclared air war in Pakistan and Yemen “is totally a function of the existence of an unmanned capability – it is unlikely a similar scale of force would be used if this capability were not available”.

Aside:

I do think that drawing a parallel between President George the Worst and President Obama, as he does in an early paragraph, is an example of rhetoric outdistancing evidence–not that I would ever fall into that trap–but the author’s larger point stands.
/strong