I. This clearly traveled from this which was picked from here. Though, so far as I can tell, it doesn’t go on beyond there. Always interesting to see how things like this travel. Anyway, of note — comments:

Anyone else remember the LaRouche science mag? Is that still published? I kind of hate the fact that I know the answer to that question.

Now that is a real leader! Someone who has the guts to speak the truth. If Felix Rohatan told Nancy Peloci to lick his Nazi boots I sincerely believe she would. Nope. This guy is serious. And he manages to plug through the formula in a way I might do so, mockingly. Does he have any self-awareness. Anyways, Josh Gorenfeld provides a response, and that will have to stand. Other than that, former KGB Agent Putin is beloved by Larouche, and if he told Larouche to lick the floor…

IA. Um. James. Yes. “Al Gore is a Nazi” sang to “Dona Nobis Pacem”. Imbecilic. There is nothing to get there. Again, I defer to Josh Gorenfeld for a suggestion.

II. Because the world demands to know about the controversies surrounding Webster Tarpley within the “9/11 Truth” movement and its hodgy podgy intersection with the Peace movement. (50 long minutes…) Life is too short, and even if I did not have anything better do do, I would be more productive in spending 50 minutes staring at a white wall.

Anyway, Chip Berlet is a Stooge of the Ford Foundation, ye say? Okay. Webster Tarpley. Outside the orbit of Lyndon Larouche by now. Still thinking like him. “The Ford Foundation” is at war with the 9/11 Truthers because Cindy Sheehan has asked for her name to be dropped from a signed letter written by Webster Tarpley. Is that about the size of it?

III. I don’t think Lyndon or anyone did anything to Factnet,etc. Your friends are just demoralized because LaRouche is right, the housing bubble is bringing down the whole financial system.

Yes… Yes… Yes. Larouchies of 2007, go in a time machine and meet your cohorts of October of 1987 marching around Wall Street saying “Larouche is right” and Black Monday is bringing down the whole financial system. Whatever happened to the BAE Scandal? Oddly enough, I did see a Guardian piece about it last week — not of World Histrionics. Anyway, I think that wore thin and this story was the next opportunity to have the Larouchies on the move. Hence, the drum-beat goes on with this.

IV. From Factnet: “With the advent of this September 2007, a recent century has died, and a new millennium is born. What an ironically wonderful 85th Birthday has been delivered to me, thus.”
Now we have the briefing lead from a day or two ago, with its hebephrenic opener:
WE ARE WINNING!
GET CONGRESS TO PASS HBPA THIS MONTH!
A very, very happy Lyndon LaRouche conveyed the following message to the international organization on Tuesday: With the just-concluded Kiedrich conference of the Schiller Institute, we have resurrected the full force of our international association. The international organization is back on its feet, so let us continue to put our best foot forward.

b~~~~In concrete terms, we are turning the U.S.A. upside down with the LYM-led mobilization for the Homeowners and Bank Protection Act of 2007….
b~~~~We are, in addition to the escalating mobilization all over the United States to get Congress to pass the HBPA by a veto-proof majority, working on pinning down a date for a LaRouche webcast in Washington, D.C. for mid-October.

So proud of that first sentence, larouche moved it from this internal (internal/external) briefing to his public (external/internal) publishings. What I want to know is… did he ever acknowledge that his international — out there in Europe — organization was off of its feet and down?

Takes a bit of time to load to the correct location, but this is amusing. Also, A Tour of Loudon, and the various Housing bubbles that have popped, the most pertinent being Larouche’s.

I am going to go out on a limb and say that there is a thematic connection between the following incident and the tased college student.

An English man has admitted to urinating on a disabled woman as she lay dying in a doorway.
The man shouted “this is YouTube material” as he urinated on 50-year-old Christine Lakinski in late July, BBC News reported.
Lakinski, who had a number of medical conditions, later died of natural causes.
Anthony Anderson, 27, had smoked a joint and was drinking when he and two friends saw Lakinski fall ill and stumble into a doorway.
Anderson tried to wake Laskinski by dousing a bucket of water over her, before urinating on the stricken woman and covering her in shaving foam.
The incident was reportedly filmed on a camera phone.
Lakinski was later declared dead at the scene from pancreatic failure, an inquest found.

We are the stars of our own movies; we are all interacting into Reality Televsion shows and off of insta-celebrity of that there youtubes and such.  See, I float past the tased student — “an unfortunate combination of police over-reaction and student douche-baggery” as Jon Stewart put it — and asking the question “Must I defend him?” with the answer “yes.  Yes I must.” — that is who you tend to end up defending in that area of civil liberties — and how, rolling into more serious first amendment cases, one tends to do hoops and loops in defining “Art”.  So, the only thing I can say for him — other than not particularly being bugged by his three questions or his overstaying his welcome –  is that it worked well into his script — understand, the police make good foils in these scripts — so, um, this is working out well for the lad.

The urinating on the corpse man, I have to resist the urge to see if “this is youtube material” correlates to… actual youtube material.  By now somebody will have staged a fake version of the happenstance, which means the guy is wrong — he was not creating youtube material — True Youtube material is the deriviatives and parodies of that thing.

Hm.  General Betray Us, eh?

While we’re at it, let’s call everybody in the political sphere a name, taking off a rhyme of their real name.  For instance, Oregon has a Senator Gordon Smith that is up for re-election in 2008.  It is something like pick-up opportunity number 5 or 7 for the Democrats.  Here’s his remarks:

Sen. Gordon Smith, one of the few Republican senators who supports legislation ordering troop withdrawals, told reporters Thursday he thought Petraeus’ testimony and the MoveOn.org ad were the two biggest factors in keeping Republicans from breaking ranks with the president: Petraeus’ testimony because it was persuasive and the MoveOn add because it went too far by attacking a popular uniformed officer.

So.  Um.  Senator … Lard And Filth?  That… kind of rhymes?

Yeah, there you go.  Like you have anything better!

New Hampshire has incumbent Endangered Republican Senator #1.  Senator.  Sununu.  Hm.  Senator… Your Mumu.  But that doesn’t strike me as an insult.  Damnedit!

George Bush.  Um.  I think I’ll mock him by calling him… George Bush.  Dick Cheney I’ll mock by referring to as… yes, Dick Cheney.

No, I should really stick to Northwest politicians.  You know, it’s been a while since I mentioned the Congressional critter of my old home — Doc Hastings.  He popped up in the CREW list of “Most corrupt members of congress” — admittedly a bit of a partisan affair that CREW, but a bit of a surprise nonetheless because the strange conventional beltway wisdom had it that the man was an honorable man what with his great handling of an ethics subcommittee that dealt with the James Traficant.  But never mind.  The listing fits well enough Representative Wastings.

Gawd I’m stupid.  I should really think of something that rhymes with “Doc”.

………………………………….

Explanation for the Conventional Beltway actions and reactions in the Senate toward that moveon.org advertisement.  Understand something: I have no real opinion on the ad itself, but am insulted by the existence of this reaction.  The propaganda is being laid on thickly — thou shall not insult this man.  The storyline that follows in the Conventional Beltway does not translate into the real world, and I’m thinking there is work still to be done by that nebulous entity called the “netroots” and the non-netroots grassroots to get to that point where this type of sideshow does not overwhelm our stuffed beltway critters.

The point that Kevin Drum makes in that post, about it being a sign of desperation on the part of the Republican Party — and the Usual Suspects visa vie Fox News,  would make sense, except this is a type of technique used over and over again.  It’s being used when the Republican Party is down, as it is now, just as it was when the Republican Party was up — Desperation has nothing to do with the matter.  Frankly, I think that this show we have been inandated with is as good a vindication for moveon.org’s stupid ad as anything else.

I think it is worthwhile to look at the names of the members of the Senate Democratic caucus who voted to condemn a political advertisement.  This might make some sort of sense if this were a Republican Congress.  But, then again, A new Gallup poll came out.  Congress’s approval rating has shot up to 24 percent.  Parcing it by party, the Republicans give a 37 percent approval for Congress; the Democrats have a 23 percent approval rating.  Which makes some sort of sense, since  — for example — you see the Congress today throwing red meat to the Republican base by condemning a liberal organization that donates money to the Democratic Party.

And, of course, the list goes on to all 49 Republicans.

Baucus (D-MT)
Bayh (D-IN)

Cardin (D-MD)
Carper (D-DE)
Casey (D-PA)

Conrad (D-ND)

Dorgan (D-ND)

Feinstein (D-CA)

Johnson (D-SD)
Klobuchar (D-MN)
Kohl (D-WI)

Landrieu (D-LA)
Leahy (D-VT)
Lieberman (ID-CT)
Lincoln (D-AR)

Mikulski (D-MD)

Nelson (D-FL)
Nelson (D-NE)
Pryor (D-AR)

Salazar (D-CO)

Tester (D-MT)

Webb (D-VA)

A representative with a clip board asks:

“Are you a fan of the Polar Bears?”

The proper question for such a question:  What city do they play in?

The Republicans are sort of privately publically conceding a loss of four Senate seats in the next election. The state of play of the two parties and the seats up suggest that a Democratic majority of 60 seats is not out of the question — and, generally speaking if 2008 is as good a year as 2006 was for the Democrats (with a much slimmer Senate map up… going into 2008, the Republicans have 22 Senate seats up to defend and the Democrats have 12) they probably would. Theoretically this would mean that magical “Filibuster-proof” seat, as right now the Republicans tact is to filibuster anything worth anything, but the reality is that the number is arbitrary — Nebraska would be sending us unrepetent Iraq War supporting Democrat Bob Kerrey, for instance. Knowing the Democrats, electing Kerrey will probably be Job #1, (or 2?) which exposes the politics as a sort of Good Old Boy Network.

Bush has an approval rating somewhere in the twenties. Congress has an approval rating in the teens. The Democrats were elected out of disgust with the War in Iraq, but are impotent in doing anything about it.  Rhetorically I saw how people viewerd this non-binding resolution of several months back to the effect that they were “cutting money off to the troops” — which is the effect of how money rolls in and out of the pot handed to President Bush.  A political coup for the Republican Party, such as it is.

They are gridlocked. This past week, the Republicans filibustered a measure that from one of my favorite Seantors, Jim Webb of Virginia, that would have given the members of the military as much time at home as in action. As an “anti-war” measure, it’s a toothless joke– but our political discourse has deemed it as such nonetheless methinks partially because it’s a sort of safe way for the Democratic Party honchos to oppose something or other with regard to “The Reason they were put into the majority”. It was a worthwhile measure nonetheless. Former supporter of the measure John Warner ceased supporting this measure, perhaps taking the margin of supporters with him, and proposed a different measure — which was a non-binding version of the same exact thing. A pointless gesture — into the ether– pleasant enough, easily ignored by President Bush because it doesn’t require him to do a thing.

What the Congress did pass was a resolution condemning a newspaper ad from moveon.org that called General Petraeus a name. This is sort of a sick joke, a pointless measure which I can’t imagine anyone outside the orbit of Fox News and Republican talk radio paying attention to. It is difficult for me to see what is the point of Congress passing resolutions that do not do anything at all, passing into the ether, but that seems to be what our closely divided Congress is doing these days, out of inertia.

Hillary will come into office, with a Congress that includes somewhere between 55 and 60 Democratic Senators. And it will be the equivalent of Lyndon Johnson handing the Vietnam War over to Richard Nixon.

This caught my eye, from the This Modern World weblog (which apparently became a group blog since I stopped regularly reading it a few years’ ago.)

Well then.  This should be easy to find.  Here is Alan Greenspan’s letter to the New York Times, in its entirety, regarding Atlas Shrugged:

To The Editor:

“Atlas Shrugged” is a celebration of life and happiness.  Justice is unrelenting.  Creative individuals and undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment.  Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should.  Mr. Hicks suspiciously wonders “about a person who sustains such a mood through the writing of 1,100 pages and some fourteen years of work.”  This reader wonders about a person who finds unrelenting justice personally disturbing.

— Alan Greenspan

A case study in the quotation I’ve settled into regarding Ayn Rand — “(Ayn Rand) requires the fervent elitism of late adolescence to truly be taken in. One either needs to acquire a taste for Ayn Rand then, or not at all.”

But you can also draw a direct line between that letter, and its parasites, and his Fed Chairman era quotation about how “maintain a level of worker anxiety” was his main purpose in tending to the economy.   Libertarianism, and “Objectivism”, ceases to make sense — as a practical service, Greenspan was never drawing down the government, but pulling levers in the government, and its relations with business.  But I hear that Ayn Rand devotees of a certain stripe compare Greenspan to some character or other in one of those books (Atlas Shrugged?  That other one whose name escapes me at this moment?) — a sell-out, you cannot function into the government system like that.  And thus, a cult apparatus springs up: get away from that evil, please.

Never. Ask. John Kerry. About. Skull. And. Bones.

If you do so, you will get tasered. Right?

My interest level would perk up a tad if John Kerry answered the load of dangling and rambling questions. Skull and Bones, for instance. But I’ve already been through that one. (Or Kerry’s supposed response to Greg Palast regarding Ohio.)

So I have suggested the darker answer to Paul Craig Roberts’s question already. The other response is the sort of — what, should he have leapt off the stage and gone to hand-to-hand combat? For what it is worth, Kerry has issued a statement. Those are always great.
But I think he managed to dodge the questions. Unless someone can point to a transcript where, with the 21 year old carted away, he answered the questions. I don’t know — the cameras were all aimed at the police situation at that point. The three questions, which pushed him over the one minute limit, apparently along with a certain attitude grounds for the police rushing in — and on to his reactions which were apparently grounds for a tasering. Oh dear John Kerry, could you issue another statement and answer the three questions?

In the mind of Joe Average, the Meyers man is not a terribly likable figure, and the response is sort of a rolling of the eyes and figuring that he’s broken a breach of Polite Society, a product full to the brim with immature wailing.  (Tightly wound and an Attention-seeker. The words I have come across are “I know the type”, with a sly smile that “he had it coming”).  His cries are over-heated. But nobody’s perfect in a disorderly society.