Sometimes I see a news magazine cover and feel stupider for seeing it.

I have noted in the past the design trick that Time Magazine has developed — Time Magazine has discovered it could stand out on the newstand by having a stark image against a white backdrop.

The blurb promises a story, a story which I am fairly confident could have been used for the past decades — but our politics has this weird way of running around in circles.  “They ignored the faithful for decades. Now Clinton, Obama, and Edwards want to level the playing field.”

Counting decades, I will go back three decades.   That is Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. Jimmy Carter.  Enough said.  Actually Carter almost represents the reversal of this circle we have been running in.  Bill Clinton.  Any number of incarnations of Bill Clinton focused in and refocused in on “faith”.  And how did he phrase his big apology?  “I have sinned.”

Reading the article, the problem comes in from one of these “religious advisors”, as well as Hillary Clinton herownself, that the “Faith needs to sound sincere.”  I note for the record that Howard Dean never much mentioned his faith until the drumbeat from some source on high, seeming to thunder down from the Drudge Report, forced him to sort of awkwardly wander into Jimmy Carter’s congregation, and toss out a few insincere-sounding words on that nebulous topic.  I note too the cunundrum that John Kerry was thrown in — the Catholic Church hiearchy seemed to have it in for him, and I encountered one rather jarring secularist (“Hardcore Agnostic” he called himself — an oxymoron, but never mind) base part of his anti-Kerry bias on the fact that he was a Catholic — at odds with his religion’s bosses.  (I fixed his wagon on that stupid point by pointing out this historical irony in relation to what Alfred Smith and John Kennedy went through.)  I also saw that Hunter Thompson clone from Rolling Stone magazine throw the couple of sentences on faith out of a wry article that posited his acceptance speech as “BS”, because Kerry isn’t religious — unlike Bush.  Maybe; maybe not.  But the former regularly attended church and the latter doesn’t.

Beyond that, there is some excuriacting for not buying into “Faith Based Initiatives”.  And thus is borne a new bill of goods for a new Bi-Partisan Consensus.

I will now scour the nation for a good atheist to elect as president.  Can we do so?  If not, can we also maybe elect a firmly implanted northerner, with a jab from a Southern state or two?  (Wait.  The Republicans have us snooked on that one.  Giuliani.  Romney.  It figures.)

I think this here is a conversation everybody takes a part of at some point in their life.

“I like the image of Jesus.  Really comfortable clothing.  Good Sandals.  Leads to wisdom.”

“Yeah, Jesus is cool.  Good miracles.  Loaves into bread, and etc.  There is part of the message I don’t like.  The meek shall inherit the Earth?  Haven’t seen that happen.”

“Maybe the meek inherited the Earth, but the Strong just took it back from them.”

“I think the meek inherited the Earth, than simply became the enemy they once despised.  Also, Moses… He parted the Red Sea.”

“Yeah, but that’s not that impressive.  The more impressive part is parting it back up right when the Pharoa’s army crosses.”

“I saw a movie once.  It looked pretty good.  But I think Moses ended up becoming this cranky gun nut.”
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A game to play might be to figure out which lines from that were mine.  Another game is to sort through your mind and recall the discussion you participated in which most closely matches that batch of talk, or to see if you end up in the exact same lines.  I note that the observation from sandals, slightly tweaked, was posited from Cliff Clavin on Cheers.  Human interaction is an interesting thing (I say as though I am a Robotic Mass puzzled over such a concept), in that you are compelled to say something, and thus you do.

Although that conversation is probably in some ways as ubiquitious, in the correct scheme of things, somewhere in the next 60 years I am likely to find myself dissecting it with a group in people in that matter.

Last night the U.S. Senate erased a page of history, literally.

The body agreed to permanently remove from the constitutionally mandated Congressional Record a vote taken earlier in the evening on a measure that said the president should not pardon I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff.

The Senate vote failed 47-49, but any reference to the vote itself was expunged as though it never happened.

After apparently getting annoyed, Democrats countered with the Libby amendment. “If you are going to shoot this way, we have to shoot that way,” said Sen. Ken Salazar, D-Colo., on the floor.

Republicans were beside themselves. “Until this last amendment, I haven’t seen politically inspired amendments before this body,” Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., said in opposition. There was so much audible grumbling from senators in reaction — and disbelief — that Kyl had to pause for it to subside.

After the Libby vote failed, Republicans struck back hard, offering an amendment condemning about a dozen previous pardons by former President Bill Clinton. As one GOP aide put it, “We brought our gun to the knife fight.”

Clinton was criticized after issuing more than 140 acts of executive clemency in his last few days in office.

But cooler heads prevailed when both party leaders decided not to have the Clinton vote, and Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada simply asked that the Libby vote “be vitiated and stricken from the record.”

And with those words, it never happened — except on C-SPAN tapes.

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This is one of those things that doesn’t really make any sense to me.  A couple years back, some words by a Congress-critter of heated rhetoric saying that everyone in her southern Florida believes that Bush came in through a coup was angrily strickened from the Record, Tom DeLay wanting such blasphemy to not be reported for the historical record.  I scratched my head then as I do so now.  They can do that?  Why?  In terms of historical political theater, it doesn’t measure up to physical fights that have occured on the Floor over statements about Slavery.  But something about decorum demands that these things, if they happen, can be erased — like so many Chinese historical records of 1989 — the newest generation of Chinese youth have never heard of anything happening in Tiananmen Square because it does not exist in Chinese documents — or like so many Russian images of non-persons erased from photographs.

It is the sense of the Senate that Libby ought not be pardoned.  I think if the Senate is going to expunge that vote from the record, they may as well expunge more worthy items from the record.  The Bankruptcy Reform Bill.  The Iraq War Resolution.  The vote to confirm the last two Supreme Court justices.  The vote to authorize Bush’s electors.  They never happened.  Did they?

A blast from the past, newly relevant for the Sensation of the Day: Harry Potter.

Both “Pokémon” and “Harry Potter” are fresh examples of epidemic forms of mental disease akin to the “Flagellant” cult which rampaged during Europe’s Fourteenth Century “New Dark Age,” and to the “witchcraft cults” which spread during Europe’s Seventeenth Century, as a by-product of the Venice-directed, Habsburg-led horror of religious warfare over the 1511-1648 interval.

I wonder if Larouche consigned Don Phau to write up the anti-Harry Potter material?

Speaking of Pokemon — One of the World’s Stupidest Fatwas:

Denouncing the lovable Japanese cartoon characters as having “possessed the minds” of Saudi youngsters, Saudi Arabia’s highest religious authority banned Pokémon video games and cards in the spring of 2001. Not only do Saudi scholars believe that Pokémon encourages gambling, which is forbidden in Islam, but it is apparently a front for Israel as well. The fatwa’s authors claimed that Pokémon games include, “the Star of David, which everyone knows is connected to international Zionism and is Israel’s national emblem.” Religious authorities in the United Arab Emirates joined in, condemning the games for promoting evolution, “a Jewish-Darwinist theory that conflicts with the truth about humans and with Islamic principles,” but didn’t ban them outright. Even the Catholic Church in Mexico got into the act, calling Pokémon video games “demonic.”
Wait. What am I insinuating here?
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Some impossible – to – guage and standard buffoonish .
A Brutish Idiot Who Can’t CountJuly 12, 2007 (EIRNS)–This release was issued today by the Lyndon LaRouche Political Action Committee (LPAC). July 12 (LPAC)— Echoing the line from known circles in Britain, the New Republic has published a piece of garbage by one Conor Clarke. By making itself available as the neo-con outlet in the U.S. for the garbage spillover from London, the New Republic has only succeeded in making known what a piece of garbage it itself has become. Lyndon LaRouche issued the following comment today: “This visiting lunatic who lurks in the orbit of the Washington Post, Conor Clarke, appears to be operating as a card-carrying Guardian of the Cheneyite ‘New Republic.’ His count of the population of the town of Leesburg suggests that had he ever actually visited Loudoun County within the recent quarter- century, it was by Ouija Board, or, perhaps, ‘LSD Express.’ Considering the Guardian’s track-record in the Cheney-Blair gang’s Jeremy Duggan hoax, one might estimate from his own recent scribblings, that poor wretched Conor’s personal morals are even lower than his minuscule IQ.”

I cannot make heads or tails of this insinuation. The town of Round Hill has a 2000 census report of 500 people, and today it is evidentally up to 650. A difference of 150, a drop in the bucket compared to the cows that Conor Clarke reports overwhelm the human population — because he really needs to set a bucolic scene and that is the shorthand way to do so. Round Hill is close enough to Leesburg that one commonly just lumps it in (anyone who grew up 45 miles from the nearest small media market and 3 hours from the nearest major media market knows the sensation of (1) national news reporting events — by which I mean stupdifying things such as the sighting of the Virgin Mary on a sign-post — as coming from the small media market, (2) describing the location of the town in relation to proximate places, and getting further outlier and further off base as the other person fails to recognize anything). Besides which he distinctly referenced Round Hill. The New Republic piece’s online presence is now behind a firewall where I would have to pay to see how he gets around to referencing Leesburg — but it strikes me as not mattering a whole lot.

Larouche appears to be pretending like the interview for Conor Clarke (that resulted in a banal fluff piece he can contort into “SLANDER” for the benefit of his followers) never happened, that Clarke created it out of whole cloth. I… guess(?) I don’t know. I have read enough material through Larouche’s past 40 years to see that he oftentimes leaves these dangling insinuations, where I can’t for the life or me figure out what the insinuation is — or how it connects to what he later explicates. The proof in the pudding is that he misstates the population — kind of — and locates Larouche’s estate into Leesburg — maybe.

I wait with less than baited breath a response to my query of what the hell he is talking about from a Larouchie at FACTNet who seems to think this is a “GOTCHA!”

The more appropriate title of the LPAC press release should be, “I’m a Brutish Idiot Who Can’t Read.” The New Republic article says that the town of Round Hill, Virginia [not Leesburg] has a population of 500. Guess what? So does the City of Round Tree: http://www.city-data.com/city/Round-Hill-Virginia.html.

Well, it makes sense to somebody — the cloistered unit of LYMers — I guess, as I quickly google to see what the hell a “Round Tree” is — with no success, and make sure to note that every goddamned Larouche-given location for his estate posts “Round Hill”. The next article, coming in a month or so — anticipated to the degree that such articles can be anticipated — should get an even more entertaining press release, tying up the Baby-boomers, synarchists, Jeremiah Duggan*, Dick Cheney, and on and on.

Cult leaders, I suspect, are much worse tragedies than the people who get hurt by them. The victims can snap out of it, walk away and, eventually, recover from the experience having learned some very hard, valuable lessons that can make them stronger and more fully human and compassionate beings. The cult leader seldom sees the possibility of snapping out of his self-constructed world and leaving it for healthier, more beautiful and loving ones. And, ultimately, this is a fate, whether conscious or not, that the cult leader has chosen.

Much more material is coming out of his world of make-believe out of the Larouche rss feeds, (blah blah blah — Baby Boomer Democrats stop the LYM and Democratic Youth — um? together at last? – from issuing an impeachment resolution somewhere or other… blah blah blah — will deliver to John Edwards shortly.) But really? In the world of fantasy, I hear that JK Rowling writes better stories. No hang up over out-of-date almanacs. An item from “the other side” of that story: Hm, am I wearing something that says “Potential LaRouche Cultist Recruit”? Why are they here? Does the world really need more looneytoons in it? And so it goes…
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*or, as  LL insists on calling him, Jeremy Duggan.

A couple of years ago, at Christmastime, my nephew played with a Harry Potter toy — or something to that effect — waving it around and incessantly declaring “I’ll put a spell on you.”

It was either a catch-phrase from the Harry Potter movie, or it was not a catch-phrase. My sister, his mother, expressed that “I’ll put a spell on you” was certainly not used in the movie (or book) as often as he was using it. It didn’t matter: the kid had glommed onto that expression, and for all intents and purposes, the entire Harry Potter experience for him boiled down to “I’ll put a spell on you”.

But the movies are truncated adaptations of the books, the books being too long to clip into 2 and a half hour of film, so I almost figure that perhaps some parts of the books could be shortened in that matter with a glib “I’ll put a spell on you!” Blamo! 30 pages shortened to that phrase, and we can move to the more important scene.

I have not read Harry Potter — or rather, I read the first 30 or 50 pages of the first book before moving on. Obviously I approve of Harry Potter — blah de blah: kids. read. long books. Enjoy it. Striking a blow for Literacy. Hard to disapprove of that, and short of a series of puppy mutilations, any discussion of literary value is moot to that positive.

I can haphazardly measure out basic Fantasy themes from Harry Potter information that has seeped into my consciousness through osmosis. I see the bumper sticker reading “Republicans for Voldemart”. Okay, this is the villian — authoritarian, I presume. I hear negative references to “muggle”, which I think refers to those without magical power, and more generally in our popular culture refers to a lack of creativity — for example, that woman who challenged Harry Potter in some school library or other — muggle.  (Or is muggle-wump, a further denigration downward).  Harry Potter is an ordinary child who was, in typical fantasy manner, discovered to have great powers and fit into another realm.  And thus is born the intrinsic pleasure of identifying with Harry Potter.

Who may or may not have said “I’ll put a spell on you”, but I assume that was a bad guy. And may or may not die in the final book. Page 634.  Dagnabit if that didn’t spill out onto the web like that!

The other day, The Telegraph, a major newspaper in Great Britain, linked to a blog entry here about John Edwards, a largely negative post questioning his dizzyingly wild swing on iraq between 2003 and 2007 while at the same time expressing dismay at the media fixation on his expensive haircuts. The link pushed my technorati rating up a couple of points, as well pushed my ranking down by 100,000 or thereabouts — something that I don’t really care about but find mildly interesting to note, and I pass this along .

The question from Tom Harden was “John Edwards: The Worst Presidential Candidate Ever?”, and before he clarified the meaning with

It got me wondering (wandering and wondering – I can multi-task) whether John Edwards might be the worst presidential candidate ever. I don’t mean the most inept campaigner – he’s not. I mean, intrinsically the worst candidate: the phoniest, slickest, most disingenuous, least electable.

I was already stalled with that ever omnipresent word “EVER”, which trails behind “OF ALL TIME” for probable ahistorical reference points. Unless I see a discussion about John Edwards in comparison with, I don’t know — the 1940 Thomas Dewey campaign (picked entirely arbitrarily and without any concern for whatever Thomas Dewey was actually up to in 1940, which I am not at liberty to peg one way or another), the question is not going to really be answered.

I can say that Franklin Roosevelt’s campaign rhetoric for the 1928 presidential bid of Alfred Smith was off base with his campaign rhetoric for his 1932 campaign which was again off base with what he war running on in 1936.

But this does not particularly excuse John Edwards.

Meantime, John McCain’s campaign implosion includes diatribes against “gay sweaters”, which strikes me as a more meaningful superficial image problem. Mitt Romney, who I think is John Edwards’s soul mate for the “Phoniness” “Image Consciousness” problem, has gone from campaigning against his Republican affiliation for the benefit of Democratic dominated Massachusetts to campaigning against his Massachusetts affiliation for the benefit of his Republican Party primary base, and I hold him as more problematic than Edwards.  Now I need to figure out and understand what is up with this — which does not beggar for anything less than an authoritarian presidency.

I watched the Matt Groening interview on Jon Stewart’s show this morning, and I was struck by Groening comments about a bit of censorship regarding Fox News.  It is interesting in comparison with what I had thought he said on NPR’s Terry Gross show a few years ago.

The show had a parody of the Fox News bottom-of-the-screen ticker, the joke being about you would think it is: News alert — Democrats bad, Republicans good.

Matt Groening described the reason Fox News nixed this as being because viewers would be confused, thinking it was the real thing.  Asinine reasoning, but essentially apolitical, and we’ve heard equally stupdifying corporate decisions over the years.  But the Fresh Aire interview provided a longer story which ran the gamut into the political:

During an interview broadcast today on NPR’s Fresh Air, Simpsons creator Matt Groening revealed that the Fox News Network had threatened to sue The Simpsons over a parody of the right-leaning news channel.  […]  According to Groening, the Simpsons team refused to cut out the segment, which Groening told Fresh Air he “really liked,” figuring that Rupert Murdoch wouldn’t allow the Fox News cable network to sue the Fox Broadcast Network, which carries The Simpsons.  The Fox News Network did back down on its threat, although it has told The Simpsons creators that in the future, cartoon series will not be allowed to include a “news crawl” along the bottom of the screen, which might “confuse the viewers”. 

The story is evolving, if not necessarily in a conflicting manner, a manner that de-emphasizes Fox News paranoia.

I’m watching this item from prisonplanet of some group or other of 9/11 conspiratorial windbags assaulting John McCain. The video is tedious.

What I hate about this video is not so much the crux of the content — a press outlet where these conspiratorialists ask John McCain awkward questions McCain considers beneath him — McCain having garnered their wrath for having written a preface to the Popular Mechanics 9/11 conspiracy theory debunking book. To each their own.
I loathe the production. I hate the intro. I hate the outro. I hate the trumpets at the start announcing that something is coming. I hate the stylistic drumbeat of splatting from one still image to another in rapid procession, which intercuts the thing at different points in the proceedings for a naseating effect that in its desire to captivate me into strong emotions leaves me rather detached.

They are stylistic jackasses. I see this mode of video editing for “politically provocative” “guerilla” videos of any number of political stripes, and on to the non-political. I do not like it.  I want my web content from self described grassroots fighters against the Establishment to be stripped down. If you look around there, you can find video of Alex Jones yelling in a bullhorn in the direction of the meeting of the Bilderberg Conference. I liked that one. Just as politically fringey, if a little more palatable in the sense that — indeed, it is a conspiracy of the rich and powerful making decisions on the course of human events — and in its way as confrontational — if only to a brick wall — but much more viewable.