To both of the email addresses I reguarly use. Check it out!

AND

WOWIE!  I can’t believe I was selected to get this exciting stock tip!  What is this “ADOV”?

NORTH ANDOVER, Mass., May 24 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Andover Medical, Inc. (OTC Bulletin Board: ADOV – News), a single source provider of orthopedic, podiatric and urological durable medical equipment (”DME”) and incontinence treatment solutions, announced today that the Company closed a $1.7 million follow-on private financing on May 3, 2007. Complete terms of the offering can be found in the Company’s Form 8-K filed with the SEC on May 21, 2007 and available at http://www.sec.gov.

Gross proceeds from the private offering totaled $1,700,000. Participating investors’ purchased in the aggregate 34 Units of the Company’s securities, representing principal amount of 6% Series B Convertible Preferred Stock at $50,000 per Unit. Each Unit consists of: $50,000 face value of 50 shares of Series B Convertible Preferred Stock, convertible at $.35 per share into 142,850 shares of Common Stock; Class A Warrants exercisable for five years at $.35 per share to purchase 142,850 shares of Common Stock and Class B Warrants exercisable for five years at $.35 per share to purchase 142,850 shares of Common Stock.

With news like that, you can see how this stock is just about to explode RIGHT NOW!  I feel like I was just told to bought Coca Cola in the late 19th century.  Or McDonalds in the 1940s.  Or Amazon.com in the mid-1990s.  Or told to Sell EVERYTHING on the eve of the eve of the 1929 Stock Market Crash.

Alright.  Mock-serious consideration of an email spam is a played out joke.  I apologize for being lame.

Something worth watching is the frequent dailykos reader poll of support for the various Democratic Party leaders. Generally they have been high in this post – 2006 Election cycle. I expect to see one huge humongous dip in the support for Reid and Pelosi and Emanuel — and probably a minor dip for Dean — who is out of the picture somewhat.

I expect the Democratic Party Demoralization foray has been of a sort that has calculated that they can push this all aside, a series of 15-minute news cycles will turn Americans’ attention elsewhere.

One of the difficult things I had in digesting the 2004 election was that the performance of the Democratic Party– in their minority role — had never really did anything to suggest that Ralph Nader — always further to the left than I have ever been — was wrong in 2000, even with every liberal in America shouting “See?  See?  This is what is wrought with your precious Nader vote!” Granted, there wasn’t much the party held a horrible hand up until somewhere in 2003, but it took until the second term of the Bush presidency for the Democratic Party to find a holding on how to oppose the Republicans. After a flurry of moderately successful tidbits, they appear to have thrown themselves back to square one, unable to foot themselves.
We are now in a holding pattern of inertia until the next president. The similarity is with the Democratic Congress of 1931-1933, the last two years of the Hoover administration, which was a party that was more than willing to out-Hoover Herbert Hoover. It’s a long two years of inertia, the Congress making themselves a bigger laughing-stock than the president. All we can really do, in terms of electoral politics, is tend to your various local and state pictures and elect a better-than above average president. Reid and Pelosi are largely useless without one.

The man who cooked President George W Bush’s breakfasts, lunches and dinners for the first four years of his presidency reveals in a new book that the most powerful man in the world likes no more than a cheap processed cheese sandwich for lunch.”Kraft singles on white bread was one of this President’s most requested lunch items,” says Walter Scheib, who, from 1994 until he was sacked by Laura Bush in early 2005, was Executive Chef at the White House.

Scheib, a professionally trained cook with an outstanding CV even before he started work at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, tells me flatly that making lunch for Bush was “not very challenging and didn’t really require any of my professional training”.

But according to Scheib, this is not a making a partisan or political statement. During our conversation over coffee in a swish New York bar, he does refer to the burgers and ‘dogs to which his first Presidential employer, Bill Clinton, was partial. Yet Scheib’s book, White House Chef, part memoir, part cookbook, clearly shows who he preferred working for, and why, during his 11 years in the basement kitchen, even if his professionalism – and presumably his desire to work for the big guns again – rule out any the dishing of any serious dirt.

Scheib, or “Cookie” as President Bush liked to call him, is frustratingly discreet when it comes to talking about his tête-à-têtes over toast with his employers.  […]

The new President was into simpler food than his predecessor. “He didn’t like soup or salad, or anything green,” says Scheib. “He really just wanted beef and anything that could be prepared in Tex-Mex style. There was little challenge in preparing the President’s lunch.”

President Bush was also reluctant to dine with his wife if she had friends over for lunch or if she was having anything fancy’. “He wanted one of his go-to items such as a cheese sandwich or a peanut butter and honey sandwich on white toast with potato chips,” says Scheib.

…………….

Hm.

What’s in a diet?  Okay.  Let me put it this way.  Clinton, according to this cook, would be most at home with ribs and whatnot.  Bush?  Individually wrapped processed cheese food on white wonder bread.  Crusts, what of it exists on such bread, removed no doubt, because Bush is essentially a five year old.  But I have a particularly strange bias about bread, which is essentially that the more grains in it, the better.
Other than that, we have peanut butter and honey?  Ugh.  Does he also eat Chocolate Covered Sugar Bombs with two spoonfuls of sugar while watching cartoons on Saturday morning?  Seriously, I remember eating raw oatmeal with a ridiculous amount of brown sugar in my youth, and that’s about what “peanut butter and honey” comes out to.

Oh well.  Luara forces him to eat his broccoli and… real food, I presume.  It’s a strange era we’re living in anyway, and Bush is not alone in a sort of prolonged adolescence.  It’s just that he happens to be leader of the Free, or Free-ish, World.  Also, it seems his stunted growth hasn’t reached the adolescence point yet.
Years from now we are going to be scratching our head regarding Bush.  Actually I already am.

Ron is our last hope. They want to take away any possiblity of resisting there agenda. We must do something before we cannot even DEFEND our selves. We the people….NEVER FORGET.

This sounds strangely familiar.

Actually I am almost wondering if I ought not reconsider my statement Ron Paul is not a cult leader, which was a blog entry spurred off of a blog that compared Ron Paul with Lyndon Larouche, or more patently the supporters of Lyndon Larouche with the supporters of Ron Paul. Granted, the half a dozen comments that were sent my way were mostly okay (I get the feeling I probably would have had a couple more had this website not gone down for the night), and I can only really say I have this problem with one and a half of them. But those one and a half are indicative of something.

Generally I’ve found that the Paul admirers at Reason are more realistic in their admiration than the supproters at Lewrockwell. But this is probably something of an ideological putsch of sorts.

Again, Ron Paul is not a cult leader, and to say he is is to make statements of hyperbole and/or demogaugery. Lyndon Larouche is. (By the way, have I mentioned yet that Lyndon Larouche called this blog a “gutter outlet” of “Wall Street Fascist John Train”?) However, something in the realm of the politics they espouse somehow does bring a strange synthesis. Over the years, Lyndon Larouche has been referred to as a “libertarian”, and self-described Libertarians slapped silly with assumptions of Larouchian nature. While Larouche is the opposite of Libertarian, but the basic assumption comes with this idea that Libertarians are espousing a pallete of wild and kooky political ideas.
I observe, for instance, this. James Butler, a 25 year old student from New Jersey, has this misguided desire for Lyndon Larouche to toss some credence to his favorite poltical figure and presidential candidate, Ron Paul. A Larouche endorsement, which is physically impossible because it does not advance Lyndon Larouche’s meglomaniac agenda one iota, is about the worst thing that Ron Paul — already suspect for mainstream credentials and travelling the by-ways of fringey politics– could possibly obtain. If you think connections and support from 9/11 Truth and the Alex Joneses swirl uneasily with the mainstream electorate (both of which the person I am about to mention is a proponent of), Larouche is just poison. And Larouche responds as one would figure he would.

Ron does stand up on some important matters, but none of the candidates of which I know, including Ron, has yet to express himself effectively on the issues which will determine whether or not our republic still exists in its present constitutional form when January 2009 arrives.
Crack the code, and Larouche is running for president after pretending he’s not, with a draft-movement by his Cult kicking into high gear. He goes through the list of the party he is infiltrating (to rescue it from Howard Dean, who has sold it out to the ‘syncharists’ — also known as the International Jewish Bankers’ Conspiracy).
Some of James Butler’s comments are unintentionally spot on. Such as:

It is time to leave this fake, phony liberal/conservative paradigm in the past because it is dead.
Travelling the high-ways from Trotskyist associations with the SDS on to the anti-semitic Liberty Lobby, and feigning his way through the electoral political spectrum from there. Yes. He has certainly moved beyond the “phony liberal/conservative paradigm”.

Apparently, Mr. LaRouche believes that the US will be in a state of total anarchy in less than 2 years. Scary stuff here, folks.

More “scary ha ha” than “scary uh oh”. It’s been an article of faith for Larouche for the past 40 years. Don’t pay any mind to it.
Now do you understand why I posted that Ron Paul supporter comment on “last hope”? Help me Obe Won Kenobi. It’s a thin line; be weary of it.

The MySpace page, publicly available until Friday when it disappeared from the Internet, included cartoon depictions of rape, murder, torture and child molestation; photographs of soldiers with guns in their mouths; a photograph of a bound and blindfolded detainee captioned “My Sweet Little Habib”; accounts of illicit drug use; and a blog entry headlined by a series of obscenities and racial epithets. […]

“Yes . . . F—ING Yes!!!” said one blog entry on the Schlessinger site. “I LOVE MY JOB, it takes everything reckless and deviant and heathenistic and just overall bad about me and hyper focuses these traits into my job of running around this horrid place doing nasty things to people that deserve it . . . and some that don’t.”

Deryk Schlessinger joined the Army in 2004, telling a crowd of Santa Barbara, Calif., Army reservists gathered for an appearance by his mother that he resented the way Americans criticize the war without recognizing soldiers’ sacrifices. 

I remember seeing Deryk on CSPAN back in, probably 2000, which would have made him 14 or 15.  It was a talk by Dr. Laura Schlesinger, yattering on about raising good kids in this corrupt world of ours, proudly beaming about the young man’s home-school curriculum.  She made a point to throw the camera to Deryck for applause, and for Deryk to say something queasily wholesome.

Mike Paul, spokesman for Laura Schlessinger, released a statement which said, in part, “We hope all news media outlets will respect his privacy for his safety and the safety of those serving with him.” In an interview with The Tribune, Paul suggested that the page could be a fake.
That was a contention echoed by Army spokesman Robert Tallman, who said “it may be possible that our enemies are actually behind this.
“Our enemies are adaptive, technologically sophisticated, and truly understand the importance of the information battlespace,” Tallman continued. “Sadly, they will use that space to promulgate and disseminate untrue propaganda.” 

Interesting theory, that.  The Enemy zeroes in on a popular, but not overwhelmingly so, right wing talk show host and makes up a raunchy site so that the Enemies in America will have gist for the mill in their non-stop undermining of the troops.  Or something like that.

MySpace is an online social network in which users link pages together through like interests and shared friendships. The Deryk Schlessinger page included nearly a dozen “friends,” including a number of soldiers in Afghanistan, several of whom were linked back to Schlessinger’s page and some of whom had additional photos of, and comments from, Schlessinger on their sites. 

So much for that theory.  Or maybe The Enemy propped fake myspace pages for his friends and fellow soldiers?  Goddamnedit, this is one nasty psy-ops campaign!

The site indicated Schlessinger’s team has survived numerous mortar, rocket and roadside bomb attacks. It also included several graphic cartoons. In one of the stick drawings, a top-hatted man laughs as he rapes a bound and bleeding woman in front of her family. In another depiction, a man forces a boy to perform oral sex at knifepoint as the child’s mother pleads for her son’s life. 

I used to have ongoing discussions on an Internet message board with some fairly radical Christian fundamentalists.  One of the people, Eldon for those who remember anything and in the know, once posted something to the effect of “You never hear of kids out of Christian schools or home-schooling misbehaving.”  Then again, he was a Holocaust survivor, and Schlessinger is Jewish anyways — honorary Christian fundamentalists though she may be from various visits on Pat Robertson and the like.  It didn’t take me too much work to come up with stupid stories to dispute Eldon’s asinine statement.  The Amish are particularly amusing in their confusingly daft sinning.
I don’t quite know what to make of Deryck’s sense of humor here.  This whole story is part of a vast liberal conspiracy, right, from that well known Liberal Media outlet, the Salt Lake Tribune.  More items of interest here on the understandable fallout the writer had after writing this story, into the fury of the most conservative state in the Union.  Keep reading those comments… they will amuse you.

It will throw additional light on the latter, to go back, and run the mind over the string of historical facts already stated. Several things will now appear less dark and mysterious than they did when they were transpiring. The people were to be left “perfectly free,” subject only to the Constitution. What the Constitution had to do with it, outsiders could not then see. Plainly enough now, it was an exactly fitted niche, for the Dred Scott decision to afterward come in, and declare the perfect free freedom of the people to be just no freedom at all. Why was the amendment, expressly declaring the right of the people, voted down? Plainly enough now: the adoption of it would have spoiled the niche for the Dred Scott decision. Why was the court decision held up? Why even a Senator’s individual opinion withheld, till after the presidential election? Plainly enough now- the speaking out then would have damaged the perfectly free argument upon which the election was to be carried. Why the outgoing President’s felicitation on the indorsement? Why the delay of a re-argument? Why the incoming President’s advance exhortation in favor of the decision? These things look like the cautious patting and petting of a spirited horse, preparatory to mounting him, when it is dreaded that he may give the rider a fall. And why the hasty after-indorsement of the decision by the President and others?
We cannot absolutely know that all these exact adaptations are the result of preconcert. But when we see a lot of framed timbers, different portions of which we know have been gotten out at different times and places, and by different workmen- Stephen, Franklin, Roger, and James, for instance-and when we see these timbers joined together, and see they exactly matte the frame of a house or a mill, all the tenons and mortices exactly fitting, and all the lengths and proportions of the different l pieces exactly adapted to their respective places, and not a piece. too many or too few,-not omitting even scaffolding-or, if a single piece be lacking, we see the place in the frame exactly fitted and prepared yet to bring such piece in-in such a case we find it impossible not to believe that Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James all understood one another from the beginning and all worked upon a common plan or draft drawn up before the first blow was struck.
— Abraham Lincoln, 1858, found here.

I thought about this, and the “all the tenons and mortices exactly fitting”, in regards to the somewhat bizarre but strangely predictable ordeal that has lead to the non-benchmark Iraq War resolution. Seriously, the Democrats could have saved the trouble and come out looking better if they had followed Bush’s post-veto line of “They will send me this bill to make their political point. I will veto it. Then they will send me the money for the troops, and I will sign it.” That is how weak it all comes across.

Today Congress’s approval rating stands roughly where Bush’s approval rating is. Mitch McConnell crowed about it the other day and used it as evidence of why the Democrats should call off the hearings on Alberto Gonzalez, smarmy man that he be. But the approval rating is a symptom of an inability to pass the bull-headed Bush, or to more properly align the party into a role of still powerless opposition party..

Don Phau. A Larouchian. He spoke before a panel organized by Virginia governor Kaine to look into causes for the Virginia Tech shootings, and came out swinging against violent video games. Par for the course for the Larouchian contingency, his attacks were of a more hysterical focus than his fellow compatriots for his position.

Violent Video Games. You know. The type of video games in which the Virginia Tech shooter was not known for playing — at least not during his college years.  Or any other type of video game, for that matter.
I am breaking an unofficial rule of venturing into the politics of Larouche’s political crusades. It’s not as though there isn’t some reason for a person to believe video games are having some harmful affects on our children. My basic problem is that even by Larouche’s standards, his political opposition to video games rings hollow and false. I do not believe Lyndon Larouche gives a flying rip about violence in video games, or at least not directly.
But this whole arena leads him — and his immediate subserviants and employment– into some curious fits of ignorance. Larouche has Senator Joseph Lieberman as “Protector Of Hollywood’s Nintendo Brainwashers”. This is an interesting concept, as Lieberman is second to none in his criticism — or nagging if you prefer– of video game violence. But it is also curious in terms of company named — Nintendo, which is something akin to yelping about that heavy metal music in this year of 2007(*1). Nintendo is doing just fine, thank you very much, and I think the wii system has been a moderate bust, but the thing is… there was a moment in the mid-90s (I think, I’m only really vaguely aware of the video game industry) where Nintendo and Sony released the different versions of a new Mortal Kombat game, I believe. Sony’s was bloody, Nintendo’s wasn’t. Nintendo opted for a somewhat less “hardcore” and more family-friendly niche. Which may in fact mean that Lieberman is in the pockets of Nintendo lobbyists, what with his flailing about on video game violence, two wrongs making a right. But why would Larouche select Lieberman?
In other Larouche news, Lyndon Larouche trekked over to Russia in a historic trip and… do you care?

Okay. I have stood accused of … um… not balancing out anti-Larouche material with pro-Larouche material? This was back when I posted a series of posts on the history, from the mainstream media — filtering a bit with some odd Larouche pamphlets, and… I had not read anything from Dennis King, though the Larouchians assumed that I was just cribbing from him. (I’d be happy to do so now.) Other than that, I had posted a number of ex-Larouchites’ bitter experiences, and have posted any number of links to snide comments from … um… civilians who trekked into the Larouche realm (to a cadre shool, or just a greeting such as this encounter.) I suppose I can remedy that situation with this… positive experience shared on FACTNet:

Yes, I was a member of the west coast region. I was in Los Angeles. Yes, it was disturbing on what I saw of what was done to the older members. The tough part though is that a lot of Lyn’s theories are very sound ideas. In particular I love the possibility of freeing the third world from their dire situation. Are you sure Larouche knows about whats being done to the older members?(*2)

The reason why I left was not because of Larouche’s Ideas per say but because of the living standards. For example I had to wake up at 5:00 in the morning 3 mornings in a row for a cadre deployment and ended up vomiting during the deployment. After that Day I just felt very fatigued. I just couldn’t handle getting up really early and staying up real late. Not sure if it was because I was lazy or what it was. It seemed that everyone else was very energetic and not tired at all. I also had a stomach problem as well. I can say one thing for sure. Those 7 months were the most interesting 7 months of my life. Over all I think it was a positive experience. I still collaborate with them and they understood completely on why I felt it was best for me to leave and they are still very friendly with me. Some of the kindest people I’ve ever met in my entire life are in the movement. They’re very intelligent as well. Now of course I don’t agree with everything larouche says at all, and I hope the other members feel the same way as well.

I am attending Humboldt State University and right now am taking summer classes in Los Angeles. Not sure what I want to major in. I still love politics and absolutely want to make a positive difference in this world. I’m being dead honest when I say this. I didn’t experience what you guys are talking about with these horror stories in the movement. It was in a weird way a very relaxing environment. There would be a lot of excitement when something big was happening: such as when Alito was getting elected, but for the most part I felt at ease.

The food was crap, I didn’t get too great of a sleep too often, etc, but the people were friendly and wanted me to question things. There were a couple of members who were grumpy or cultish but i would say 95% of the members were fun to be around with.

[…] One reason why I left was because I wanted to learn more about the movement but it was hard to do so because I was constantly deploying. So ever since I left, I’ve been reading, reading, and reaing. That’s pretty much it. Reading Larouche, Reading the thinkers larouche mentions a lot, Reading the thinkers Larouche considers scumbags, etc.

Sounds like a very productive way to spend one’s time, don’t you think? He goes on to entreat you to double cubes. I myself have not doubled any cubes. Squares are another matter. I invite everyone to go a Larouche card-table with a piece of toilet paper and beg them to “Double This Square, Damneditall!”… um… you know, to help out Rosie O’Donnell.

(*1) Speaking of which, Don Phau wrote anti-heavy metal music articles for Larouche in the 1980s. It’s all starting to fit a pattern. (*2) Har de Har Har. Sigh.

Having gotten himself noticed and made a name for himself as somebody other than a man to be listed quickly in a long list of “also – runs”, I notice a bit of frettering by parts of the Ron Paul congregation (and you may use every term you desire from “supporters” to “cult members”) about some of his more… esoteric choices of media and associations.

An example:

And not to be outdone, Ron Paul’s media coordinator was on the infamous Alex Jones show the other night. Seriously, I understand that radio shows from all viewpoints are frothing at the Ron Paul candidacy, but this is just another example – in my opinion – of ammunition the opposition can – and will – use. That’s like Ron Paul appearing on the David Duke show or something.

I am pretty sure I’ve covered the burgeoning little controversy over here, sometime before Ron Paul’s q-rating rose after that last debate, and the gradual dawn of the mainstream media that Ron Paul is kicking ass on the Internet. The chief point I came in in posting that blog entry still stands, which is that Ron Paul’s greetings on Alex goddamned Jones is in many ways no less odious than the conventional candidates frequent forays onto Tim goddamned Russert and the Establishment Think politics that predominate on shows such as.

But my general thought with Ron Paul and the Alex Joneses of the world — or the 9/11 Truthers of the world — or the Gold Standard advocate — or whoever — is that even if Ron Paul wanted to disassociate himself from any of this, the genie is out of the bottom and there is no sense in doing anything but steam-rolling straight ahead. Somebody has to create a coalition of Fringe Unity.

I am terminably confused by the suggestion from the new boss-man at Air America, implanted in their hosts (or at least the two that I heard yesterday — a handful of minutes of Thom Hartmann and an hour of Rachel Maddow) — that they have “relaunched” as “Air America 2.0”.

This is a joke, right?  For some reason they inserted an interview between Mark Green, he of — who the hell knows what fame, but he bought Air America for the pittance that it cost to get it out of bankruptcy — and Eliot Spitzer.  An indelibly pointless and not terribly interesting interview.  For her part, Rachel Maddow interviewed Barak Obama.  This seems to be a forced influx of “big names” to be interviewed for the “relaunch”– in the most pointless meandering manner possible, selling the candidates for what is, I guess, Democratic Party Radio.

In reality this will fade away and it will be status quo.  Pointless and bland interviews with the Democratic presidential front-runners are nothing new, and if it weren’t pointed out that this is something somehow altogether different, I would not have noticed.  Except for that weird Mark Green interview tih Eliot Spitzer.  I scratch my head at that one.  Is that the new innovation that Mark Green has cooked up for this network — interpersing himself into the line-up in bursts and spurts?  Is that what makes a “relaunch”?  Otherwise, I don’t quite get it.  They’ve altered their schedule a little, but they’ve done that a few times before, and probably will have to do so again sometime sooner or later.
In terms of the business decisions with the alterations to the schedule:   Not only has Lionel not gained many fresh affiliates, he lost roughly a half dozen that carried Seder on delay. The only station he seems to have been added to is WINZ in Miami, on delay from 6-9P ET. Lots of stations still list him on their website schedules for his former show, but it is unknown if they are still running his new Air America show in those time slots.  Actually, I have come to think that this was a bad decision by both Air America and Lionel, but it appears to — at the moment — be worse for Lionel than I thought, who I had at least seen a slight upshot for in terms of some added exposure.  It always struck me as simple desperation on the part of Air America’s new management.