Political Theatre category archive

Peter Bergman unveils the new Herman Cain ad. It starts about 13 minutes in.

Short commercial or, if you have ads blocked, delay at beginning.

Via Bob Cesca.

Debbie Wasserman-Schultz discusses yesterday’s results.

From Comically Vintage.

Via Contradict Me.

Vote.

By the way, for the candidate who thought the way to get my allegiance was a robo-call with an “Unavailable” caller ID,

fuhgeddaboudit.

Offered without comment. Click to read the rest.

Let me offer important alternative argument – the US government has a record of making terrible mistakes in this covert war. On 2 September 2010, the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan claimed to have killed Muhammad Amin, the alleged Taliban deputy governor of Takhar province in Afghanistan, in a drone strike. There was only one problem: Michael Semple, a Taliban expert at Harvard University, subsequently interviewed Muhammad Amin and confirmed that he was alive and well and living in Pakistan in March 2011.

Daniel Ruth takes a look at the Cain-paign:

All the Herman Cain story suggests is that a black political candidate is just as capable of acting like a hypocritical saucy fellow as white candidates.

Click to read the rest.

The former owner of two for-profit juvenile detention facilities was sentenced Friday to 18 months in prison for his role in a kickback scheme that led the state Supreme Court to vacate the convictions of thousands of juveniles who appeared before a now-jailed Pennsylvania judge.

There is no upside to selling prisoners or “for profit” prisons.

At Science 2.0, Enrico Uva takes a look at teachers and teaching and concludes that much energy is wasted in fixing what ain’t broke.

A recent article in the Atlantic surveyed the tiresome debate over whether teachers are overpaid. It’s really not the key issue. Students will not benefit from our salaries, regardless of how much money is wired into our accounts. You rarely hear of anybody focusing instead on the following:

(1) Improving morale among teachers
(2) improving dismal teacher training
(3) raising hiring standards
(4) and most importantly forming bridges between industry, research and schools.

By scapegoating teachers, politicians divert attention from their failures in supporting and funding (the means by which support is most commonly shown for government services) teachers, even as flocks of administrators, some of whom have no teaching experience and consequently no clues, continue to grow.

Read the whole thing; it’s short.

Via Raw Story.

Homeland twits (emphasis added):

Social media has been a driving force behind recent spurts of social upheaval around the globe, from the Arab Spring to the current Occupy Wall Street protests, and the federal government has begun to take notice and ask some questions.

The Associated Press is reporting that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is currently developing plans to monitor social networks like Facebook and Twitter in order to collect information for law enforcement purposes. And while that is sure to raise some eyebrows among civil libertarians, Undersecretary Caryn Wagner took pains to reassure the public that this will not be some kind of “Big Brother” situation.

Two words:

Yeah.

Right.

At the Guardian, Hadley Freeman considers the Republican field. A nugget:

For all the Democrats whose hearts broke in the 2004 election when the only person their party could rustle up to run against Bush was John Kerry, Romney is payback. He is the Republican version of Kerry: inconveniently wealthy, astonishingly uninspiring and with “second place” stamped through him like a stick of generically handsome Brighton rock. Romney has come second so consistently in the polls throughout his campaign that I’m beginning to suspect he is sponsored by the number two, like an episode of Sesame Street. In a time of high unemployment and social dissatisfaction, a photo recently surfaced of Romney that can only be described as his Bullingdon club picture; it shows him shoving cash in his jacket and grinning devilishly alongside his equally money-hungry former colleagues at the private equity company he founded.

The foreclosure engine remains strong:

While the number of new foreclosures has been falling in recent months, the filings remain near historic highs.

That has resulted in hundreds of distressed properties hitting the sales market in recent years, bringing down prices and preventing the region from regaining its footing, the experts told scores of residential real estate workers at a forum at Old Dominion University Wednesday afternoon.

“Distressed sales have become a significant part of the market,” said Vinod Agarwal, an economist at Old Dominion University.

Sales of foreclosures as a percentage of the overall sales market in Hampton Roads hit a high in February of about 43 percent, according to multiple listing service figures and Old Dominion’s economic forecasting project.

Mark Mardell of the BBC sums up Herman Cain’s campaign organization’s handling of the sexual harassment kerfuffle:

It is also clear that while Herman is Cain, his team aren’t able.

What Will Bunch said.