Do [you] want the truth to it all from someone on the inside? Nothing. It does nothing and is nothing. A complete waste of money.

That always struck me as one of the more random comments this blog, regarding the doings of the Department of Homeland Security.  Random in its claim of “inside” information, without any particular reason to either believe or not believe that.

Just days before the sixth anniversary of September 11, congressional auditors are giving mixed grades to the Department of Homeland Security on its efforts to unify 22 agencies into one department and other goals.

The 320-page report from the Government Accountability Office, which will be presented to Congress on Thursday, finds that the DHS has made progress in many areas, but has failed at major management functions.

The DHS was created in 2003 by the Bush administration following the 9/11 attacks “to provide the unifying core for the vast national network of organizations and institutions involved in efforts to secure our nation.”

The report compiles other studies by GAO, the non-partisan research arm of Congress, and contains detailed analysis of the DHS’s progress in meeting 171 performance goals.

Although DHS has been developing programs in its mission areas, such as protecting the U.S. border, it has had trouble putting them into action, the accountability office report says.

I think I regarded The Department of Homeland Security as a lot of box moving, which may or may not be good or bad — but wasn’t an elixir.  Watching dispatches from “Homeland Security”, all I can really figure is that as a government agency, it’s been treatable as any government agency — an opportunity for pork for Congressional election and coffer purposes; an agency for the Executive Branch to utilize for political ends.

Here is a breakdown of the report card:

Substantial progress

On the other hand, they are right on new Bin Laden tapes.  His beard is black.

With the new school year dawning, the sight of a group of elementary school children lined up and being marched somewhere or other, all holding onto a rope, has become returned.  I do not remember hanging onto rope, but I do remember, and I do know, that elementary school is all about lining up, getting into a line, taking an inordinate amount of time to up yourselves collectively into a line — head anywhere, you need to be corralled into a line.  What took the place of the rope, which — I suppose — has no purpose of existing unless you are marching into the busy downtown of a city, so I’m freed of that contraption — for at least one grade and one teacher was the phrase “Zip your lips while you’re on a trip”, which — in addition to a quick flurry of exaggerated zipping noises seems to lead to a single minded focus, one foot in front of the other — to the lunch counter or music room or recess or wherever.

Toward the other end of the K through 12 spectrum, I have to admit to not really understanding these kids’ fashions.   Why are they not wearing something different from what was worn by us a decade ago?  I believe we have had twenty years where, to one degree or other, baggy pants — low-slung and everything — have been spot-able in some corners of groupings of teenagers.   I pick the “twenty years”, massaged a bit — (to tell the truth, 20 years back brings us to the age of — what? Acid Wash?) — for the point of asking:  At some point, don’t the kids move onto something different just for the sake of rebelling against what their parents wore as teenagers?  (Interesting to note the renewed interest of various blue-hairs in policing such fashion, which may be exhaustion at the tedium as anything else.)

Self-described pedophile Jack McClellan, who fled Washington and California amid public outrage over his habit of photographing young girls, said Wednesday that he has moved to Portland and plans to stay.

The 45-year-old McClellan has drawn national attention in recent months from media and concerned parents over a now-defunct Web site that featured photos he took of young girls in public places.

McClellan admits he is sexually attracted to young girls, though he said Wednesday he has not and will not do anything illegal. He said he won’t take pictures of children anymore because he now “sees it from the parents’ side.”

McClellan publicly announced his move to Portland via a Web site and in multiple media interviews. He said he wants to pre-emptively blunt efforts to “out” him by those who track his movements, adding that he feels media attention will help protect him from vigilantes and police harassment. He chose Portland for its “reputation as a Northwest haven for offbeat people.”

Really?  “Portland has a reputation as a haven for offbeat people”?
Also, what clued him in that parents might be see it as they do?
In other news of Internet usage…

Multnomah County sheriff’s office investigators are scrutinizing a corrections officer at the downtown jail for Internet postings made from his work computer in which he gloats about how fun it is to Taser people and brags about having crushed one inmate’s eye socket.

David B. Thompson, 30, recently wrote on an Internet message board that one of the more pleasurable parts of his job is when he gets to use his Taser, thus exposing people to the agonizing sensation of 50,000 volts of electricity pulsing through their bodies.

“Seeing someone get TASER’d is second only to being the guy pulling the trigger,” Thompson wrote on an Internet message board Aug. 25. “That is money. Puts a smile on your face.”

Asked by the Portland Tribune to review the posts and comment, Sheriff Bernie Giusto launched an internal investigation of Thompson that will examine, among other things, whether he lied while accusing an inmate of assaulting him as a way to justify having injured the inmate.

Well, Portland has a reputation for offbeat people, I hear say.

I am, of course, number one million to point us to this, but at times it just seems worthwhile to note these moments for a sort of record for poserity, the downfall moment a candidate, and where Bill Richardson lost me. 

Democratic presidential hopeful Bill Richardson said Tuesday that his comment about it being God’s will that Iowa votes first was off-the-cuff as he defended the state’s primacy in the nomination process.

Campaigning in south-central Iowa, the New Mexico governor faced questions about his comment Monday in which he suggested that there was a more serious reason for Iowa to lead the nomination process with caucuses.

“Iowa, for good reason, for constitutional reasons, for reasons related to the Lord, should be the first caucus and primary,” he said Monday. “And I want you to know who was the first candidate to sign a pledge not to campaign anywhere if they got ahead of Iowa. It was Bill Richardson.”

The Des Moines Register reported on Richardson’s comments to the Northwest Iowa Labor Council Picnic in Sioux City.

Asked about it Tuesday, Richardson said: “Look, that was an off-the-cuff comment where I said Iowa and New Hampshire should be first.”

When pressed further, he said Iowa should launch the primary calendar because “it’s a tradition in American politics that has worked.”

“Iowa scrutinizes candidates through a grass-roots state. They are very good at winnowing down candidates,” he said. “They don’t listen to national polls. Iowa voters are very independent and issue-oriented.”

I cannot quite figure out which part of the story is worst: the first part — God loves Iowa just as he (she? it?) loves every single sports team on the planet.  (Though its spot on the presidential election calendar is roughly as much a curse as anything else.  Yes.  I want to bump my elbow against John Cox the next time I eat breakfast at a diner.)  Or his later implications, which… well… serves as an attack at the other 49 states as much as it does a service to the greatness of Iowa…

Arbitariness in the now insane presidential process notwithstanding … I hear Iowa is a hole anyways.  And I say that because I want to burn any and all possible bridges to an American Presidency.  Maybe I should also solicit sex in the men’s room?

Earlier this year, I ran into someone from that era at the National Press Club in Washington, a reporter for a major network radio station, who quipped affectionately that in the 1980s I’d been the first person to introduce the press corps to the word, “Krasnoyarsk” (a city in the Soviet Union where work on missile defense was being done).

I had one of my worst bowel movements in Krasnoyarsk. Or, actually, just outside the city proper — Stolby, which — in order to conceptualize based on my experiences, I describe as the forestry of the Cascade Mountains leading to the rock formations of Southwest America. But that’s okay, Nick Benton probably was not referring to Krasnoyarsk anyway, as the closed area Krasnoyarsk-26, now the Uranium powered furnace for Siberia — which is secretive, so secretive that my brother can run off with a few photographs from his stint of teaching English.

As for my shaky bowels — and the horrors of that one outhouse, I am thinking it was probably some raw fish products. One probably should not obligingly eat anything their host shoves in front of them. Stick to crackers and jam with the tea, I suppose.

OKAY! Backward from there…

Moving to Washington D.C. in mid-1985 (to the present), I maintained my nominal affiliation with LaRouche’s so-called “National Committee” (NC) during that period primarily, and ironically, to keep his organization at bay with regard to me, personally, and my new wife. The affiliation provided me with just enough authority to tell LaRouche’s aggressive lieutenants to fuck off and leave us alone. This was particularly important in the case of my wife, who was debilitated by chronic fatigue syndrome, who I fiercly protected from intense pressures to fundraise out of the organization’s new national center in Leesburg. She was, as a result, spared from implication in the shady fundraising practices that eventually sent a lot of LaRouche associates to jail. While my wife and I are now divorced, she remains my closest companion to this day, now going on two decades after our disassociation from LaRouche. Also, once in Washington, I used my NC authority to mitigate severe cases of abuse against “rank and file” LaRouche associates, including one who’d come from Montreal where he’d been allocated $5 a day, along with everyone else in that LaRouche “local,” and I discovered was gluing in his dentures everyday with rubber cement. I saw to it that his dental needs were comprehensively met. Another case involved an associate suffering severe fatigue from what turned out to be acute food allergies, but only after I insisted he be let free from organizing obligations (you know, the usual 16 hours a day at an intersection, etc.) and that he receive comprehensive medical care.

In 1985, I began attending White House daily press briefings despite my refusal to use that opportunity as a platform for so-called “interventions” on behalf of LaRouche, as pro-LaRouche predecessors had done. Instead, I became respected by my colleagues in the mainstream press for my acumen and willingness to ask questions on subjects many of them were not privy to that I had gleaned through paying attention to intertnational press outlets, and so forth.[…]

All of the relevant events cited here from 1984 on are backed up by documents and other hard evidence, including eyewitness accounts from a practicing attorney, that would stand up in any court of law were issues of lies and/or defamation of my character to arise.

Sure, disassociated from Larouche. While with EIR, not the lackey of Larouche. Documented from 1984 onward. respected by the peers probably for anything that is not this, AP 1986:…

In Washington, Nicholas Benton, an aide to LaRouche, attributed the victories to “unprecedented disgust with leaders of both major parties” and “the new mood of the American people and their support for the kinds of remedies offered by Mr. LaRouche.”
Reading these posts and that odd matter has bugged me a tad, and really for no reason whatsoever — none of my g-danged business, even as I “study weird exotic growths of fungi” — but I think I will that it is something best left to acknowledge and resolve it as minor compromises one makes in everyday life, not the least when still somewhat connected with a cult.

The North Korean government’s “news service” never ceases to amuse me.  I am scanning the past several days’ worth of edicts to find out Kim Jong Il’s word on the breakthrough in negotiations — um… Feed the suffering Koreans his totalitarian regime is leaving derelict, and they dismantle their nuclear program, again– something which probably would have occurred a long time ago without the fingernails clutched tightly to the nearest immovable object in trepidation had we not delved into the sideshow of this “axis of evil” game in the first place.  There is nothing from the “news service”, of course.  That would violate the spirit of juche.  There is this, though.:

Pyongyang, September 4 (KCNA) — General Secretary Kim Jong Il appreciated a performance given by the art group of families of servicemen of KPA unit 963.
Put on the stage were chorus “Our country is the large family of Songun,” trio and story-telling “We love,” poem and story-telling “Legacy of soldier family,” quintet to the accompaniment of musical instruments “Blue sky over my country,” dramatic story-telling “Mother of soldiers,” chorus “General is the destiny of the motherland” and other colorful numbers of various genres.
The performers enthusiastically sang of their worthwhile life replete with the immense pride and self-esteem of acting as dignified women revolutionaries and optimism and joy and powerfully demonstrated the fixed faith and will and indomitable spirit of the families of the servicemen to devotedly defend the headquarters of the revolution and accomplish the revolutionary cause of Juche without fail while standing in the same trench with their husbands under arms.
Kim Jong Il highly appreciated the successful performance given by the members of the art group of families of servicemen of the unit, greatly pleased with their presentation rich in ideological content and high in artistry.
Among the audience were Secretary Kim Ki Nam, Department Director Kim Yang Gon and other senior officials of the WPK Central Committee and KPA commanding officers including KPA Generals Hyon Chol Hae, Kim Myong Guk and Ri Myong Su and KPA Colonel General Yun Jong Rin.
…………….

Iran.  From Kevin Drum at the Washington Monthly blog:
Is the Bush administration planning to launch a PR campaign after Labor Day to soften up the American public for an attack on Iran? I’ll be honest: Iran rumors make the rounds of the liberal blogosphere every couple of months, and they never pan out. So I’m skeptical about the latest round of stories .

The problem is the rumors tend to coincide with a Fox News lead ratcheting-up offensive.  I can never quite cut through this particular Kremlinological study.

I find myself watching the clip of the end of the game between Appalachian State and Michigan, which through one particular measurement is the biggest upset in College football history.  The only problem is that I cannot find a Vegas line off the bat, but these are the type of match-ups in college football where the trade-off is that the favored team gets what is usually a glorified walk-through practice session and stats inflation as they run up a 50 point victory.  The other team gets a check for their troubles, which they plow back into the football program.  The phrase “Any Given Sunday” does not proceed to College football and match-ups like this one, a Top 25 program versus a Division 2 school.  At least not until this game.
I have a theory that major upsets such as this one tend to fall into one pattern.  Somewhere nearing the end of the third quarter a certain “gut check” arrives for the underdog, as the clock proceeds to the end of the game, the pressure builds on them — where before, they had nothing to lose because they weren’t expected to be where they are in the first place, now they do — and it shows.  The favored team tends to pull ahead at this point — and that is the gut check: the underdog is either going to counter and come back, or they will just fade away.  So you can just plug in the sports commentary from a preprogrammed set, without much imagination.
Perhaps there is a political corollary.  The political story I find myself amused with is the news that Larry Craig may not be resigning after all.  The wacky Arlen Specter talked him out of it.  I like this move by Larry Craig, if he follows through on it I almost, but not quite, would offer him support in his endeavors.  I imagine the Republicans shoving him to something like George Constanza on that Seinfeld episode where George couldn’t be fired, but was shoved out of his office space, and took it up as a challenge of perseverance.  But it is a rhaspberry to the way these these thing, and maybe that is the college football comparison I can make here.

Blipping on the screen the other day, which I left unread, was the title to an article at lewrockwell.com entitled “FDR: Our First Fascist President”.  I thought nothing of it — (#1:)  Hadn’t they already declared Lincoln that?  (#2)  The CCC has widely been declared fascist.

The latest issue of Reason, behind the cover that posits the “4 Biases of Stupid Voters” toward an article that tend to tell us more of their particular brand of libertarian bias than anything else –  (“Anti Market bias”.  Really?) — is a review of a book on “3 New Deals” — them being Hitler’s, Mussolini’s, and Roosevelt’s.  Careful to note, of course, that to compare is not to equate — ie: oppositional democratic forces held.  Perhaps because… FDR was not a fascist?
My basic reading of the Great Depression period always leads to a certain starkness, and randomness of options.  I believe the writers at lewrockwell and Reason would have had the US head down a model set down by the presidencies of Grover Cleveland and Calvin Coolidge to handle the hardships of the Depression — ie:  nothing, let the Free Market work itself out, which is to say that whatever his faults — and there were any number of cynical lessons to be gleaned from Roosevelt (ie: the meaning gleaned from when the economy turned sour again in 1937 when Roosevelt tapered down federal spending), and whatever items from the New Deal we would be wise to never replicate — we’re better off than if we were in the hands of the contemporanious ideological idols of the lewrockwell or Reason staff.

It has been a long time since Economic Depressions have been considered a part of the natural economic cycle in the United States, and anywhere else in the industrialized (or post-industrialized) world, and I am weary of what would become of us if it did.  Just cite it as The age of Demagoguery, and move on.