I sort of half pity Bill Richardson. He went to what everyone has come to term the “Gay Debate”, and answered the question of whether homosexuality is a choice or not as “It is a choice.” Cue audible gasps, cue political self-immolation.

I find the question irrelevant. For the record, biological science — and basic human observation — suggests that, no, people are born that way. Or maybe some choose — and good for them.

Actually, backing up, Richardson’s answer went more to the realm of “a Humma a humma a humma Choice a humma a humma a humma.” His post-debate explanations, spin control, went to the effect of more “a humma a humma”s, with the added caveat that he instinctively said it was a choice, because he instinctively likes the word “choice”. But we have arrived at that point in politics where the instinctive go – to is not the wise move.

I did not watch the debate, and have only heard the most sensatioanl sound-clips. I will point out that other answers came out to “a humma a humma a humma”. Except probably a little more polished. This was the case when Hillary Clinton provided a non-answer to Melissa Etheridge’s statement of disappointment with the Bill Clinton administration — gays in the military at the forefront — asking how she might avoid such a let-down if she became president. “A humma a humma a humma.” Nothing to the answer — move on.

……………….

“We can’t make John black, we can’t make him a woman.” — Elizabeth Edwards

They made Michael Jackson white, so I don’t see why they can’t make John Edwards black. (It might remind too many of the old minstrel shows, unfortunately.) And you bet they can make Edwards a woman. Though I hear it is a little bit more difficult to make a woman into a man.

After last week’s run where the cat badgers the human over his pinko-liberal shirt (“Troops Out Now”), and after this, I must say: I like the way Get Fuzzy handles the political currents of the day — all concerned with character interactions, the politics being a facet of their character traits. It doesn not really veer into soap-boxing, which is what has turned me off from, say, the Non Sequitur comic strip.

I had a thought that I might shelve Lyndon Larouche and come back a little bit refreshed once the Avi Klein article comes out.  (My plan, incidentally, is to post the cover, linked to the story, with the subject title “The Shit Hits the Fan“.)  But I know better than to expect I could possibly do that.  It really has a momentum all it’s own, and things are tossed at me at a regular clip.  Okay.  It has been a while since I entertained a Larouchian for a long stead on this blog (and in retrospect I think there may have been more to their story than I could have dreamed at that time), but the good news is that since I was not mentioned in the Daily Briefing, their attention is going to be heaped on kheris.  Which thus far works online, and it should stay that way… right?
Well, if you “watch” LaRouche, you’ll see that at his webcasts there are numerous questions sent in from House and Senate offices asking about Cheney, Gore, derivatives, etc. I guess you could say the moderator is just making it all up, but that would be a conspiracy theory.

Yes.  Looking down a Larouche webcast transcript and we will be entertained by questions from all types of unnamed government officials from all over the world.  The good news is that this provides a chuckle for everyone who is not a Larouchian.  I actually do find some charm in his logic.  But Okay.  A story I found and placed up here during my December – January series of posts (the series of posts that threw me right into the thicket of all things Larouchian.)  What I posted:
In 1997, Philip Crane, a Republican Congressman on the House Ways and Means Committee, asked Clinton Treasury Secretary questions alerted to him from the “Executive Alert Service” on being “very concerned that severe budget austerity, as presently enforced Maastricht Criteria in the European Union, and Japan’s new auterity budget, threaten to detonate a systematic financial collapse.”

So, Rubin scratched his head, provided a non-answer, and asked to be sent the magazine.  You can guess what “Executive Alert Service” is.

To complete the story, Rubin good-naturedly alerted Crane to the fact that he had just asked a question based on a Larouche piece of literature, Crane was red-faced with embarrassment, they both laughed, and they moved on from there.

Some of the people who are known to have closely followed LaRouche’s proposals are wackos such as a former U.S. President and a former Secretary of the Treasury, who don’t associate with him publicly, though.

And there is a reason to single out Rubin here, as the Larouchian continues in his arguments:

Clinton and Rubin went in the direction of the “new financial architecture” indicated by LaRouche at a certain point.
And on it goes.  There was this sort of mini-scandal a couple years ago when John Conyers was making waves about Impeaching Bush.  Larouchians claimed credit, and indeed I observed them in the flesh sort of plastering the rear of an anti-war rally arguring with someone that — No, No… Larouche has been having direct talks with Conyers.  The Conyers — Larouche controversy played itself on the politics1.com website.  (Scroll down a bit).

I suppose I should look to flesh out the connections he had with the Reagan administration — where his shadow fantasy government made connections with the actual government, and I note that I saw him use today — which he will use at any opportunity — the photograph of him next to Ronald Reagan, and his now seems to have deteroiated Intelligence connections.  (Tends to be a little shaky at times, witness KKK Bilks Money Out of Larouche to Attend Star Trek Conventions.)  Today he is quite good at compiling every doom and gloom economic forecast, filtered away of every non doom and gloom forecast, and flushing it forward in his feeds.  Interestingly I note a sort of haphazardness creeping in.  The Reagan photograph was connected onto a story concerning Henry Kissinger, and Kissinger was not cast into the light of being on par with Satan.  Because Kissinger’s message worked with the Putin Russia love that Larouche is exhibiting these days.
From Kheris:  The fact that HQ named me along with King is so absurd. I don’t know what sort of visitor stats this blog is collecting, but I do know it’s not being quoted anywhere aside from Skull and Bones.

It’s “Skull / Bones”, originally named “Skull / Bones 2004” with an image of a faux bumper sticker.  Kerry.  Bush.  Harde har har.  (The “Skull and Bones” society and attendant concern over I think Larouche would take credit for popularizing in the 1980 Republican primary on behalf of Reagan over Bush I.  But never mind that.  He apparently backed away from it all sometime around full – fledgingly endorsing Kerry, who had to shake off his new-fangled supporters on a couple of occasions.)
This whole thing has felt almost as cloistered as Larouche, Inc… a small group talking amongst themselves.  But I suggest that Kheris, I, Dennis King, everybody is just about to receive a giant boost in stats.  I do not know how big a story this is in the scheme of things, but I do not it is a story — will be covered by the AP as they say, and we are tangentally a part of it.  I also wonder if being named — “Star Trek Groupie and Robert Beltran Stalker”– isn’t just a little bit too juicy and wacky for a media report to not pass by.  I am bracing myself for something, though I do not quite know what, or if it is even enough to brace myself for.
For instance, I notice that Dennis King has re-arranged his website a little bit.

So I am walking by and someone walks up to me and say…

“I know I’m black, but could you spare a quarter?”

“No, sorry.” Somehow we wind back to him being able to able to ask again.

“Now, look. I know I’m black, but could you spare a dollar?”

Two things. #1: Please don’t use the “race card” in such a situation — it is pretty tacky. #2: How can you move upward in your request like that.

Actually the third thing is that once upon a time, in slightly worse straits money-wise than currently I am, I was counting my change out in public, seeing if I could buy a can of chilli over a couple bags of Ramen. Someone asks for some spare change. I say no. He then says “What about those coins?” I reply, “I have to spend it on myself.” Good answer, no? (He looked at me with horror.)

I find the question galling.  “How many of your five sons are currently serving in the US Military, and if none of them are how do they plan to support this War On Terrorism by enlisting?” 

These questions tend to preclude the autonomy on the part of the candidate’s children.  I think that the public tends to be most sympathetic to this matter the closer the candidate’s child is to the age of 18, which sort of brings them closer to having financial dependence.  But I still have to balk, and ask you to kindly move along.  The history of these things is a little interesting.  The thought goes that Al Gore Jr joined the military during Vietnam in order to help Al Gore Senior’s re-election chances, and there’s even a Snopes-refuted rumor that “Fortunate Song”‘s subject matter has to be Gore.  (“I ain’t no Senator’s Son“).  This suggests that even if any of Romney’s children were to join, this might be perceived as a political stunt.  Or maybe that would only be the case if Romney were a Democrat.
The whole coverage of the Bush Twins I have found nearly as annoying, but at least there it falls into a storyline about Bush, somehow finding its way to their absolutely horrid RNC speech.  (“Compare Chelsea to the Bushes”, the quasi-argument goes.)

Mitt Romney’s answer was probably effective enough, in my mind, “Grown Adults” — a##hole — until he got to this money-shot quote.

“One of the ways my sons are showing support for our nation is helping me get elected because they think I’d be a great president.”

The cynical rejoinder is that the best way they can help elect Romney is by joining the military.  Or maybe that reminds the public too much of a war they don’t much like?

The funny thing about this is that it parallels something Rick Santorum said during his ill-fated Senate re-election bid last year:

“And yet we have brave men and women who are willing to step forward because they know what’s at stake. They’re willing to sacrifice their lives for this great country. What I’m asking all of you tonight is not to put on a uniform. Put on a bumper sticker. Is it that much to ask? Is it that much to ask to step up and serve your country?” 

It is an interesting mindset, which posits the election of ME as “Defending the Country”.  Freedom isn’t fee, I suppose.

It is probably a mistake to examine the prdouction out of Loudon, Kremlinology style, in anything but broad brushstrokes.  I may have overhot my load in explaining the attack on myspace.  Why is Larouche attacking mypace?  To keep his Youth Movement off of myspace.  Simple question; simple answer.

Apparently there is a back story to all of this.  Larouche Inc issued this statement to their membership after witnessing how members’ use of myspace was undermining  the cult, embarrassing them with its content, embarrassing them as people swarmed online asking blatantly phrased questions such as “Why did you kill Jeremiah Duggan?”, and embarrassing them with responses which may work well and good — for their purposes — in “meetspace” real world, but not so much online:

URGENT ANNOUNCEMENT

Please DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCE, promote or otherwise represent yourself as an OFFICIAL LaRouche PAC representative on the Internet without the express permission and oversight of LaRouche PAC authorities. Such behavior includes, but is not limited to using web community portals such as facebook or myspace to promote the website; advertising our organization in a way that reaches beyond an unofficial capacity; or pursuing opportunities to have the website crawled more often by search engines. The aforementioned authorities include legal counsel, LYM editorial, and the LYM War Room. 
So.  There you go.  That is why Larouche is currently swarming his feed with anti-myspace missives, on how myspace is leading us all back into a Dark Age reminiscent of the “New Dark Ages” era of the 1580 – 1620 interval, or something like that.  Throw in a reference to Ruppert Murdoch, and you have a vague reminiscent of the political activism which the Larouchie probably engaged in during the immediate pre-Larouchie phase of their life — mind you, the vast majority of the poop Larouche is swimming in is going to see a Larouchite, see that it is insane, and move on to — oh, I don’t know — their political science class, their beer keg party, their antiwar meeting, to the movie theater to watch the new Simpsons movie, or — what the hell — to a “9/11 Truth Conference”.

Speaking of that “previous life”, there aren’t many peoples bigger than the tag-team of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert in this mileau.  Witness the “Stewart / Colbert 2008” t-shirt.  Hence, Larouche’s words on the subject of Stephen Colbert — nonsensical as they may be:
This leads us to the subject of the method of the Stephen Colbert who amused President George W. Bush, and also Justice Scalia, with such elegance, at a Washington Correspondent’s event. I suspect that what Rupert Murdoch fears the most is what he suspects that Stephen Colbert knows what is gestating in Murdoch’s stinking pouch. Think of MySpace as Murdoch’s pouch.

Now, does this make Stephen Colbert’s — within this arena legendary — performance before Geoerge W Bush a good thing or a bad thing?  I do not quite know.  It is quite opaque on Dear Cult Leader’s part.  In thinking about it, I do not believe it matters.  Someone standing half way between the real world and the Larouche world will just be impressed that Larouche is referencing a hero of sorts to them in a manner that places him in some weird large historical context — (in Larouche’s case tends toward simply name-dropping a bunch of figures.)
The mention of Stephen Colbert is part of the mind control process for yutes. What Lyn has to do is denigrate Colbert who does more in a 1/2 hour to effect politics than Lyn has done in over THIRTY YEARS. Almost all college students who watch The Colbert report will have an interest in some aspect of politics. Lyn lusts for that young blood and neeeds to make sure that in the eyes of a new yute, he is the bigger star. The yute loses one more connection to the real world and takes one more step into the Bizarro world of Lyn’s cult of personality.

How it ends up in a rambling designed to take the LYMer away from myspace is a bit curious, but I imagine that these things just sort of pile up: tighten the levels of control by denying it all.

I looked back to see what I mentioned regarding “Baby Einstein” when Bush delivered his State of the Union address last January.

But the affect of priming a minute item and centering focus on it is to cover up the fact that there are no real popular policy initiatives that the president desires to force forward.  The spirit of this did come last night when Bush introduced the founder of the “Baby Einstein” company — something I would very much like to look into to see if this product placement was a kickback to the campaign contributor — Disney.

It was an arbitrary salute to the entrepreneurial spirit of America.  Maybe.

But things fall apart.

Led by Frederick Zimmerman and Dr. Dimitri Christakis, both at the University of Washington, the research team found that with every hour per day spent watching baby DVDs and videos, infants learned six to eight fewer new vocabulary words than babies who never watched the videos. These products had the strongest detrimental effect on babies 8 to 16 months old, the age at which language skills are starting to form. “The more videos they watched, the fewer words they knew,” says Christakis. “These babies scored about 10% lower on language skills than infants who had not watched these videos.”

Now that I think about it, this probably should have been published in the Scientific Journal “DUH!”, along with the never-ending list of studies which have made discoveries that you and I intuitively know.  Are you telling me that babies should not be staring at a television screen for long hours?  Are you telling me that babies should have regular communications and contact with with their mommy and daddy?  (Or, heck, this is a “progressive” blog — daddy and daddy; mommy and mommy.)
“I would rather babies watch ‘American Idol’ than these videos,” Christakis said, explaining that there is at least a chance their parents would watch with them — which does have developmental benefits.

So, again, why did George W Bush make it a point to mention “Baby Einstein” in his State of the Union address?  Maybe my “Disney kick-back” idea was wrong all along.  Maybe he was just giving a shout-out to those videos for aiding in his development.

This is fading news, but it is notable in that it is the first news cluster the Chris Dodd Presidential Campaign has squeezed itself into.

Bill O’Reilly campaigns against the “extremists” of Dailykos and any corporate who dares sponsor the “Yearly Kos” convention. As an aside, there is something about the convention I find a bit annoying, but the blogger Billmon already covered that one in his first fare-well posting.

After a spell, I can only ask the question “What world does Bill O’Reilly live on?” Bill O’Reilly, you see, is right there in the Center — INDEPENDENT — Fair and Balanced because he takes on people from the extreme Left (the… um… Yearly Kos convention) as well as the extreme Right. (His reference in this case? Fred Phelps, of “God Hates Fags” fame. In previous incarnations of this dichtomoy, his “extreme left” has included Meg Ryan against the “extreme right” of Skinhead neo-nazis.)

What is the lefter-most position he accepts as “responsible” discourse? Joseph Lieberman? What is the righter-most position he accepts? The Minutemen ? It is a strange perversion of the political spectrum.

Regarding the Chris Dodd interview, where Dodd aptly defended the mainstream Democratic politics inherent in dailykos’s ouvre as not being problematic in attending a gathering regarding, I found one thing insulting, something which nobody really seemed to pick up on. To the response that “it’s easy for them to take down those (offensive) comments if dailykos wanted to” — an implication that because dailykos allows a fluttering of off-based posts in its bowels, it is fair to attack it in the main off of them. Commentators have focused largely on the hypocrisy that Bill O’Reilly’s site keeps far more rabid comments up, and that sites such as freerepublic are loaded with them far and away beyond anything dailykos would produce — Rules for Thee but not for me. But more to the point: Why Should kos be expected and prodded to delete anything not in step with what he narrowly deems himself to represent? I understand that he keeps a tight lid and delete every 9/11 conspiracy theorist post — the better not to give the Bill O’Reillys of the world that opening. Beyond that, as this controversy unfolded, he listed the people that he enabled as being “Represntatives of Dailykos”. Beyond that, it is the better tact to allow a wide flow of bloviating and speech-making. That O’Reilly does not get this, that he instructs a more top-down model of operating, serves as a window inside Bill O’Reilly’s mindset.
The other tidbit from the Dodd exchange came when O’Reilly bloviated that “You Got that from the Media Matters Propaganda Swill” — probably true enough — when he misstated that O’Reilly said if al Qaeda were to bomb San Fransciso and nobody should care off his tv show. He said it on the radio show — the mis-representation of source in O’Reilly’s mind proved something. Somehow. The message that Bill O’Reilly parlayed to his viewers, and handful of listeners, was that such a comment was never made by him — and he suggests that by the half-truth inherent in stating that he never made the comment on the television — how outrageous of Chris Dodd to make THAT false accusation!

Actually, throw the ballot my way and I think I’ll vote for Dodd. Sure. Why not? Not based on this item alone, but he does strike me as a man in need of support who deserves more than he’s got.

Sometimes something floats right past me that I want to grab, and in assuming that I will easily be able to access it as it floats past me, I am not able to with great immediacy locate the item. Such is the case with a recent Kevin Phillips quotation — recent as in, within the last week.

When I saw him at Powell’s, doing a tour for his book American Theocracy, he at one point said, “I assume, based on all my touring that 90 percent of you are Democrats or Democrat-leaning.” I reference that simply to state that he was definitely in front of a largely Democratic crowd (and I almost want to say “yearlykos”, but that would be insane) when he said, receiving no audible response from the audience:

“What I worry is that the next president will be a Democrat, and he — or she — will look at the machinery of power that the current Bush Administration has built up and say, ‘Hey! That looks good!'”

I see and hear much carping that the “spineless” Democrats “Cowered” before the might of an unpopular president this past weekend in “caving” and approving an extension on Bush’s post-warrant wire-tapping powers. That would be the hopeful way of looking at the situation. The darker way goes to… well… you know where that one leads.
90 more days, and will anyone notice what is going on in 90 days?

Have we passed the age where we notice the Nixonian, which swipes at the Johnsonian?