I remember hearing a few months ago the revelation that the campaign to repeal the Estate Tax, the tax recently rebuked by Congress but likely to resurface again any time soon and perilously close to action, has basically been financed by Eighteen families.

18. Worth a collective $185.5 billion. 18 Families have greased the engines so that the term “Death Tax” has come to be not laughed out of political discussion.

This is a sort of mirror moment where we compare the situation with a nation that is worse off than ours. This is analogious to Mexico and its ruleship by … is it 30?… is it 40? … ruling families, holding up an oligarchic government.

I admit to not being truly attuned and to being out of step with dominant Connecticut state politics, but I think I’m grasping what Joseph Lieberman’s latest political advertisement tells us about what is going on in his mind and where the disconnect with Lieberman and the state of Connecticut in general and the Democratic primary voters in specificity lies.

Now, go back a few blog posts and you’ll see that I derided a couple of Ned Lamont’s ads. To flesh out the flaw of the one I mentioned: Ned Lamont supporters rushing into Lamont’s living room, notably Markos of daily kos — the problem is that it seems to be referencing the bloggers that are aiding Lamont’s rise. The rub here is that nobody cares, that is a storyline that should Lamont succeed will go down in liberal blogger lore and will be tucked away as irrelevant as Lamont assumes office off of, in the end, the backing of a great deal of people not “in” on this “great wave” who will like or dislike him depending on how he assumes his responsibilities in the Senate.

Joseph Lieberman’s new advertisement, featured here likewise misses the point. Lieberman is drawing off of a Political Insider story. The Lowell Weicker storyline to this race, the man he defeated in 1988 by running to his right on certain issues and with the aid of an advertisement featuring a Bear, and haunting Lieberman in 2006 by first entertaining a campaign run and then backing Lamont when he comes forward to run, is interesting enough to follow. But it’s a minor storyline, and in the end the sort of “Insider Baseball” that does not cut across the fabled kitchen table. Maybe you read about it in Hotline and Roll Call and possibly make an appearance on Meet the Press, but Weicker is nowhere to be seen otherwise.

Beyond which, that Lamont voted “80 percent” with the Republicans on a city council (or whatever it was Lamont served on) is an absurd line of attack.

At any rate, this is the week that it dawns on me that Lamont just might win the thing, and thus… I sit back, hope, and if nothing else enjoy the fireworks.

During the 2004, circa early June, the conspiracy theorists in our midst divined that John Edwards would be John Kerry’s vice-presidential pick because … Edwards appeared at the Bilderberg Group meetings.

And so, from the “New American” magazine, the organ of the John Birch Society but nonetheless since this is a report of what is reported in the mainstream media credible enough Time/CNN reported that Kerry zeroed in on Senator John Edwards as his running mate after Bilderberg veteran Senator John Corzine called and informed him that Edwards had wowed the Bilderberg elite with his speech at this year’s Bilderberg retreat in Stressa, Italy. The clincher came a month later says Time/CNN at a the home of Bilderberg participant, Council of Foreign Relations, and Trilateral Commission member, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

And here I figured Edwards would be picked as an effort to pick up support from if not the South than culturally Southern types in Ohio and Florida. Silly me!

At any rate, Here is Alex Jones doing a bullhorn speech. It… um… kicks ass in some manner or other. Unfortunately it does not include him saying:

Alex Jones, a documentary filmmaker from Texas, showed up with two of his crew. “Man, this is just evil,” he muttered as he paced up and down, watching limos drive past. “It’s a group of very powerful individuals whose objective is to create one world government, based on an economic model from the Middle Ages,” he said.

But. We can only muster about a dozen or so people to protest the Bilderberg Group meeting? That’s depressing, considering what is at stake here, which is, to quote Michael Parenti:

Those who suffer from conspiracy phobia are fond of saying: “Do you actually think there’s a group of people sitting around in a room plotting things?” For some reason that image is assumed to be so patently absurd as to invite only disclaimers. But where else would people of power get together – on park benches or carousels? Indeed, they meet in rooms: corporate boardrooms, Pentagon command rooms, at the Bohemian Grove, in the choice dining rooms at the best restaurants, resorts, hotels, and estates, in the many conference rooms at the White House, the NSA, the CIA, or wherever. And, yes, they consciously plot – though they call it “planning” and “strategizing” – and they do so in great secrecy, often resisting all efforts at public disclosure. No one confabulates and plans more than political and corporate elites and their hired specialists. To make the world safe for those who own it, politically active elements of the owning class have created a national security state that expends billions of dollars and enlists the efforts of vast numbers of people.

It occurs to me a martian with no knowledge of American politics looking in on this blog with no sight of anything else would believe that the most powerful figures in American politics are George W Bush, Lyndon LaRouche, and Doc Hastings.

Never mind.

Ladies and gentlemen, Brain Surgeon Richard “Doc” Hastings, tapping into the Wilsonian impulse, a man who rarely speaks up on the floor of the House was driven to speak up on the floor of the House.:

“When George Washington was elected the first President there was a king in France, a czarina in Russia, an emperor in China, and a shogun in Japan. The American President was the only elected leader at the time. Today, countries on every continent elect their own leaders. The number of democracies currently stands at an all-time high, and has been growing without interruption for some time. Freedom and self-government is on the march around the world. History has shown that those countries who elect their leaders are less belligerent than those that do not.”

I think he gave that speech yesterday while debating the Congresional Resolution that more or less declared that “Be it resolved that we are AmeriCANS”, the equivalent of passing a resolution for “National Pickle Day” except with a couple landmines for political foes to step into in that after declaring that we are “AmeriCANS”, and stuffing the “where-ases” with any number of false frames, states something to the effect of “To veer onto any other course is treasonous to America.”

Or so it would seem.

At any rate, our friends in Congress can dust off the speeches they gave yesterday and provide the same speech as they debate the tried and true Flag Burning Amendment.

It’s a strange mix of late-18th century governments that Doc has listed for us to compare with our current state of affairs. A czarina in Russia as opposed to a former KGB and authoritarian President, systematically chiseling away at Democratic institutions that never quite manifested themselves in that nation. An emporer in China, as opposed to a Communist prime minister, changing the definition of Communism and squashing the myth that Capitalism is automatically a synonym for “Democracy”.

Incidentally, the Democratically elected officials, such as they are, of the sovereign state of Iraq, such as it is, are asking for a Time Table. At the same time, the Democratically elected officials of Iraq, such as they are, they’re working out how to grant amnesty to Insurgents in Iraq who aim for Americans. Figure it out for yourself.

Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, getting over his aggrivation over the disappearance of his “Bridge to Nowhere” from the Omnibus Bill, a Historian for the ages– “I really believe we ought to try to find some way to encourage that country to demonstrate to those people who have been opposed to what we’re trying to do, that it’s worthwhile for them and their children to come forward and support this democracy. And if that’s amnesty, I’m for it. I’d be for it. And if those people who are, come forward… if they bore arms against our people, what’s the difference between those people that bore arms against the Union in the War between the States? What’s the difference between the Germans and Japanese and all the people we’ve forgiven?”

The difference is that the Germans and Japanese and Confederates had just prior given unconditional surrender. Such as it was.

‘I grabbed her little sister and put her in front of me. As the bullets began to fly, the blood sprayed from between her eyes, and then I laughed maniacally … I blew those little fuckkers to eternity …They should have known they were fucking with the Marines.’

And so goes the final verse of a song that the military is investigating, that which was cheered wildly and robustly by the Marine’s comrades… a veritable campfire song… pass the s’mores.

‘Hadji Girl’ uses hyperbole and the contrast of a sweet melody with a violently twisted ending to capture the frustrations of a counterinsurgency in which the goal is not to win but to hold the line until the struggling Iraqi forces can do so.

It is a war in which 20-year-olds are counseled to have a plan to ‘kill everyone in the room’ in case they have stumbled into an ambush, but told their mission is to ‘win hearts and minds.’

At the moment we have a sudden buoyancy with the Bush Administration, and a renewed belief that the War in Iraq can once again be churned into a winning political issue. And so we have a political stunt in the halls of Congress with a stupdifying resolution calling on Congress-critters to vote yea or no on whether “We will win the Global War On Terror”.

Zarqawi, the now deceased head of a franchised version of al Qaeda, and the most nihilistic of the groups fighting in Iraq, from the estimated seven or ten percent of foreign fighters that make up the whole of Iraq’s fighters — my best guess is if we remove ourselves from Iraq, these foreign fighters would be the first to be decapitated before the sects turn against each other… but I know nothing, really.

What I do know is that you can’t be singing songs about killing Iraqi children.

Bush. Goes to Iraq. A sovereign nation, I hear tell. Why, their military even caught Zarqawi — at least in one variation of the story of Zarqawi’s capture. Bush calls in to Iraq’s prime minister — Nouri al-Maliki a google search tells me — about five minutes before meeting.

The President has shown it’s not impossible to sneak in and out of Iraq under the cover of darkness. To chat, spontaneously as it were, with a head of state. Elected in one of any number of elections that Iraq has held over the past several years. I ponder something about the meeting: could al-Maliki have closed the nation to Bush and not let him in, for political purposes (gain the support of the Iraqi people and such)? He is the head of a sovereign nation, I hear tell.

There’s a “Wheee” effect to all this. Bush jumped into Iraq by surprise before… a couple years ago at Thanksgiving. To cheering American soldiers, which is all good and dandy. I don’t think Iraq was a sovereign nation at that time (I recall Paul Bremer arbitrarily granted it in the most low key of fashions, sometime after enacting Iraq’s flat tax.) And the media ate it up, and told us all that Bush was going to a landslide victory in next years’ election.

It reminds me of Jerry Jones, president of the Dallas Cowboys, a number of years back. The Cowboys were in trouble that season. The team faced a must-win game of some sort. Jerry Jones walked out onto the field. The team went on to win the game. The Cowboys meandered along a bit more for a few games. Then came another game where the Cowboys were struggling. Jerry Jones walked back onto the field. The team lost. They went on to a 6 and 10 season. And so those Superbowl years of the first half of the 1990s were now long gone in the past.

Bush is churning out a few extra points in the approval rating front. Zarqawi is dead and Bush makes a surprise appearance in Iraq. We’re duty bound to report both incidents, and believe they mean a bit more than they do mean. If psychological alterations can be transferred to actualities, good for it all.

There’s a “pass the popcorn” moment going on in the Connecticut primary race suddenly, which is taking place as it has dawned on Lieberman that he just might lose the damned thing. I can’t quite pin-point the precise moment. I think it’s Lieberman’s new line of attack, which goes like this:

“The only public record this guy has, he voted time and again like a Republican,” Smith said. “Why would we support that?” He said Lieberman would not promise to support Lamont, because the businessman voted frequently with Republicans as a local official in Greenwich.

The irony is loud and thumping. And so Lieberman’s opening for running as an Independent is a heavy-handed misdirection trip at his opponent’s partisan credentials.

John F. Droney Jr., a former Democratic state chairman who helped Lieberman unseat Republican Sen. Lowell P. Weicker Jr. in 1988, said Lieberman should make his case for re-election to all voters in November.
“I think to be terrorized through the summer by an extremely small group of the Democratic Party, much less the voting population, is total insanity for a person who is a three-term senator,” Droney said.

And so the electoral process becomes a sense of mighty forebears believing they have a god-given right to rule over us all. What does this Lieberman-fan think of that which we call “the base”?

“Every single weirdo in the left wing will be there,” Droney said. “That’s what the Lamont strategy is all about.”

For the left-wing weirdos of Connecticut, I believe you can place Ned Lamont’s Republican dalliances next to Lieberman’s Republican dalliances and come out clean. (Although to be sure, Lieberman’s Republican dalliances are really a sort of Democratic danglings of the wrong type, but that’s another story.) What was Ned Lamont’s elected position, again? Something or other in Greenwich? School council seat or something like that? This line of attack starts looking kind of insane.

I remember reading that Ned Lamont had signed up Bill Hillsman to create his political ads — Bill Hillsman of Jesse Ventura, Paul Wellstone, and Ralph Nader fame. I don’t know whether his fingerprints were over the ads that came out a while ago, say — Ned Lamont in his living room and a bunch of supporters, including most auspiciously Markos Moulitsas, running in. I sighed when I saw those ads, believing them to be quite lame. Such that it is, Lamont did move on and is cutting Lieberman’s lead, so I suppose they did some good. I definitely approve of Lamont’s latest ad, which pushes the correct buttons and one can easily cut and splice the pieces of jujitsu Lamont is pulling with it.

The latest news of the race are: (1) According to Hotline On Call, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said that the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee “fully supports” Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-CT) in his primary bid against Ned Lamont (D), “and he refused to rule out continuing that support if Lieberman were to run as an independent.” And so we enter into Hell. The chips that the Congress-critters collect and trade amongst each other cannot, shall not, and will not be disrupted by this unruly rabble that make up your goddamned political party, the peons who should be genuflecting before almighty “three-term” Lieberman. I was theorizing that an Independent Senator Liebrman would be burning everything and everyone and would be 10 times worse than what we have now with Lieberman, but maybe that the Democratic Machinery is blessing it means it will be just as bad. (2) The latest Rasmussen poll, with a ridiculously high margin or error, shows Lamont… trailing behind Lieberman… such that it was recently twenty points and before than something astronomical: 46 to 40.

So there you go. The answer to the question of who the Democratic Party will be supporting if they are in the awkward situation of an Independent Lieberman against a Democratic Lamont.

I imagine the world elites meeting there, this year in Ottawa. They hold it in a dark room. They have a projecter up, with a map of the world, political and geographic. Several overlays are laid out, one after another, as the world elites gasp and come to agreements.

The lines shift to expose the “real” political lines, lines that we peons don’t know about and are not clued in on. The strategy session that the world elites have is how to achieve the new borders and boundaries, shifted as they are from last years “real” lines. It’s a smorgashboard of slightly changed interest rates, gold and oil influxes here and kept away over there, a war here, peace agreement there — all of which plays on scientifically calculated markers of how the peons and riff-raff out there behave.

The kicker is that the Alex Joneses and Daniel Estulins of the world are peering in, able to see shadows move and glimpse corners of the maps. This is by design, of course. It’s analogious to your cable porn stations’ tendencies to leave their stations just slightly unscrambled so you can see and hear a bit, but not much. But it’s more insiduous the cable porn stations are advertising to get you to subscribe to their premium cable channels. The Bilderberg Group is just toying with Alex Jones.

More on the flip… cheeky as always.