So, Portland has more or less sucessfully curbed the Prostitution problem on 82nd Avenue.  There is a tad bit of NIMBY-ism in the celebration, only in as much as nobody really cares what happened to the prostitutes or the probably not cracked problem of Prostitution in general.  They’ve said to have dispersed into other neighborhoods a tad, been moved over to Seattle for different lucrative business, and on from there.  But the problem which arrives when a prostitute aggressively propositions you, and you try to walk forward and accidentally make an oral agreement by saying “Fuck you” is solved.

But I think I have spotted where the prostitutes have gone.  I was walking out of the Lloyd Center Mall when a couple of Verizon employees jumped out at me selling, obstensibly cell phones.  I walked past, and heard the selling point: “Would you like to be Serviced?”  What else could “Would you like to be Serviced?” possibly mean?

A few months ago, someone marked as “Anonymous” stuck up a blog at blogspot.com called “Larouche Watch”, which seemed to be evoking the “Anonymous” who had been going after Scientology.  They posted up a few posts — reprints of a few articles, I suppose most notably the Avi Klein piece for the Washington Monthly.  But it was all very sparodic, and the rss feed stopped.  Going over to the blog, I see a shift of sorts in editorial direction, deleted to a new first post with some feign of “balance” in the offing.  Go figure.  In lieu of waiting for something like that to materialize, I guess I have to continue to do some grunt work here (if you call cutting and pasting various items every so often “grunt work”.  Because the world needs to know when Ann Coulter makes a cutting seemingly antiquated Larouche reference?)

Um.  Exciting news about four untimely deaths?  First off, Jeremiah Duggan:

Among the scheduled participants are German Parliament members Hans-Christian Ströbele (Greens) and Gert Weisskirchen (Social Democratic Party), as well British lawmaker Simon Hughes. Also speaking will be former members of the LaRouche movement from Germany, the United Kingdom, France and the United States.

The forum is sponsored by Weisskirchen, who is representing the chairman of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe on Combating Anti-Semitism, and Ursula Caberta, the head of the focus group on Scientology at the Interior Ministry of Hamburg.

Prompted by the mysterious death of Jeremiah Duggan in 2003, Simon Hughes, Shadow Leader of the House of Commons, will travel to Berlin this Friday to attend a forum at the House of Democracy and Human Rights entitled ‘Does the LaRouche Group Present a Danger to Society and a Danger to the Individual?’

According to the parent’s of the late 22-year-old, the notorious right-wing organisation was responsible for their son’s death, an accusation that has so far been brushed aside by German authorities.While officials claim Jeremiah committed suicide, throwing himself into oncoming traffic on a busy autobahn, the Duggans attest they have forensic evidence to prove otherwise. […] Armed with what she claims is irrefutable evidence acquired by hiring her own independent forensic pathologists, Erica has made submissions to the Attorney General for a further probe into her son’s death. Her investigation revealed that he may have been battered with a blunt instrument and that there were no tyre marks or other signs on Jeremiah to indicate that a vehicle had come into contact with the body.Now, Hughes will add another voice to the family’s five year campaign. The MP told the Jewish News: “As a London MP I feel an obligation to support the family. I want to raise the profile of this situation. The fact is, the Schiller Institute acts with anti-semitic values and is very, very dubious. I am absolutely clear that there has not been a satisfactory explanation of what happened. We owe it to Jeremiah to make sure this is not swept under the carpet.”

But wait.  Just who is this Simon Hughes?

On his proudest achievement in parliament since 1997: “A young man called Jamie Robe was kicked to death in Rotherhithe in August 1998. Using my community links I helped break the wall of silence, encourage witnesses to give evidence, and secure convictions.” Hughes had to receive police protection following death threats linked to his advocacy for the family of Jamie Robe. The episode became an ITV1 drama, with actor Robin Kermode portraying Hughes.  AND

Simon Hughes was an important figure in the fight to grant a young gay man, Mehdi Kazemi, asylum so he would not be deported to his homeland of Iran, which had executed his boyfriend and almost certainly would have executed him. Mehdi Kazemi thanked Hughes in a letter to people across the world who fought to save his life: “I would like to say thank you to my local MP, Mr Simon Hughes, and his team who gave me the chance to live and made a miracle happen when he heard that my life was in serious danger and asked the Home Office to suspend my deportation in December 2006. I would not be here if it hadn’t been for his intervention. He was here for me then and he was here for me again when I was eventually sent back to the UK in April this year. I do not know if I would have been granted my refugee status without him.”

But that’s wikipedia.  Where anyone can drop positive or negative information on a politician.  It just so happens two moments from his career were stuck up by supporters of Hughes.  For the real lowdown on this Mr. Hughes, you have to go to the Schiller Institute page, and you will see the truth, which is: he’s also connected with a Friend of Israel.  Hint hint.   What is bizarre on the “Schiller Institute Page” is that the game of “Seven Degrees of Kevin Bacon” has one more person by way of Simon Hughes to this “Israel” than with the other five members of the British parliament who pushed a probe into Jeremiah Duggan’s death.

I do not see this going anywhere, with way too many road-blocks to proceed much further — the Wiesbaden Conference has been isolated away and shut off from the World at large for a reason.  Which is not to say I think any of it has been in vain.  The simple reality is that in the shadow of the Iraq War, Larouche had a hook with which to grow Version #2 of his cult.  That has stalled and crashed, due in no small part to easy awareness of Jeremiah Duggan. Though, also probably there is some natural turn-over (in this case turn-out) by the simple reality that the cult ceases to be any fun at a certain point.

As the cult settles into its current role of rambling on about the Worldwide Financial Crisis — and his take goes like this:  “The British are having fun; back to their roots in the time of Edward III; they’re going back to their roots, their Fourteenth Century roots. British economists return to Fourteenth Century roots, in the New Dark Age of the Fourteenth Century.“  “The only thing we can say about this,” he continued “which really sums it up, is that some people have a zeal to return to the middle of the Fourteenth Century. There’s no other way to describe it accurately.” — it should be noted that that does not hold a candle to the Perpetual Financial Crisis plaguing the Organization.

Looks like Bad Days at Black Rock–scanning recent “Ops Bulletins” (the ending sections of the “Morning Briefings,” in which LYM, or the “field,” or whoever’s out there these days, reports its activities) suggests that the LaRouche org is making even less money than it’s been making for years….

Squads of LYMers report making, oh, $4 on a “deployment.” ( —- Which is pretty interesting, considering the pamphlets have a supposed “$5 Donation Recommened” price-tag. —- )  I’m not kidding. When time permits, I’ll post the quotes……., as we all know, the real money (sic) doesn’t come from the field. Howsabout the phones?……

I don’t know, but they recently had one of those all-hands-on-deck Sunday “deployments” of everyone in Leesburg, rushing to the office to dial for dollars. Guess they’re feeling the pinch…….. And Barbara wasn’t always exactly the way she is now.

I had always assumed the evolution of the “Economic Model”, such as it was, which had schlepped expenses at Kenneth Kronberg and PMR and walk away scot-free from Printing Expenses, would have de-centralized the much thinner and oft-littered pamphlets to local Kinkos, after printing out a master copy from some student’s account at a University.  This is an exaggeration, but perhaps not too much of one.

If you look below we see something never seen before. The lit is being printed around the country if I am reading the expenses correctly. This means that there is no longer any central printing but local printing which places even more of a burden on the regions and their local business fronts. In this busines model, the downward spiral continues as the LYM and LYMettes are being moved from their free love ins at the campuses to hardball nickle and diming at card table shrines and carcinogen inhalation intersections.  The tweeners like a John Morris and others are being moved around the country to get the regional field income rising as you now have to pay for the paper delusions instead of just sponging off of PMR to the transfinite and beyond.

Here are some accounts paid. We do not know what the total bill is, however, I would not discount the cult building up credit and having a larger bill than what we see here in money paid.  I only looked at a few pages and pretty obvious printing related companies. What is amazing is seeing how much is paid out in rents and utilities for our “volunteers” and how the stipends may be getting interlinked with LPAC and the local corporations.

-RODGERS & MCDONALD $196,514 Carson, Ca
-MCARDLE PRINTING CO $102,092 Upper Marlboro, MD
-AUTOMATED GRAPHICS SYSTEMS $86,688 WHITE PLAINS, MD
-UNITED PARCEL SERVICE $85,512 for delivery
-TRI STAR OFFSET $67,071 Maspeth, N.Y.
-SILVER COMMUNICATIONS $43,999 Sterling, Va Graphics
-CPG CACI PRODUCTIONS GROUP $23,500 Chantilly, Va AV production
-GEM/LASER EXPRESS, INC $20,206 Dulles, Va Toner
-FEDERAL EXPRESS CORP $19,829 shipping
-ECHO $15,469 Leesburg, Va May be direct mail service
-WORLDCOMP $11,531 This could be the last payment
-POSTMASTER, LEESBURG $8,279
-AVALANCHE SERVICES $8,027 Kearneysville, WVa
-MARKET SHARE SERVICES $7,510 Burbank, Ca print/mail
-COLORCRAFT OF VIRGINIA $5,041 Sterling, Va

This appears to be only current to June of this year, so by the next filing we can see how much is being spent on printing. Without a PMR to be soaked, hard cash needs to be funneled into paying printers and suppliers instead of LYM and LYMette “volunteers”.

Well, the buck stops somewhere.  Either a shadow of Financial Obligations looms over Larouche — as it had with PMR — or he could brush it aside in his realm as a British – Zionist plot, or… it gets to be pushed down to the road to this moment.

Two items from a new page of obituaries for Gary Genazzio and John Morris, for what I guess would be the Org’s last words on those deaths.:

I didn’t know Gary well. My one vivid recollection is from the winter of 1984, working with Gary in a small, temporary, ad hoc local office in Cleveland. It was a Sunday, and our fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants budget was depleted. Incessant torrents of rain came down. I remember going to a freeway off-ramp with Gary, brandishing zip-loc bags of campaign literature at motorists until they opened their windows in the downpour in order to support our intrepid campaign. The memory of Gary’s unfailing good humor and esprit de corps that day has stayed with me through the years.  […]

Good bye, John, it was a privilege to be your friend, and we will miss you terribly. Arrivederci in a better world, a world in which there is no rain, gasoline never ends, and finally justice and peace prevail.

In case you do not recall, forgot, or never knew in the first place: they died on a rainy night, having run out of gasoline en route from one Regional Organization to another.  But don’t worry, folks.  Lyndon Larouche received another name drop on a Russian television show, and his supporters are sure to be hard at work at wikipedia to gain his props.  LYMers continue to wander in and through college lectures, to no real effect — en route to earning those $4.  And Carroll Quigley quotations are sure to appear in a blog comment near you — so watch for that one as well.

The debate swerved into the surreal as John McCain introduced the world to … what was his name again?  The rest of the debate was addressed to nobody else except this guy — the other quarter billion Americans may as well have just turned it off (which, I guess, would make it a win for Obama — Great Strategy there, McCain!  Though, too many of these(*) and maybe you want everyone but Joe to turn the tv off.).  Why?  Apparently he was a republican blogger celebrity for speaking his mind to Barack Obama.  Fair enough, but it is ridiculous that he becomes the focal point of McCain’s campaign — a strange inversion of the old tact of lining up personal anecdotes of hard scrabbled people met during the campaign with the candidate’s policies meant to alleviate just that problem.  I was hoping Obama would, about two thirds through the debate, just come out and say it “Screw it!  Here’s what I am going to do:  as president, I will confiscate ALL of Joe’s money and throw him into the poor house.  Then I will take away all of his guns away, just for kicks.  In short, I will make Joe the Plumber the National Scape-Goat.  All your problems are the fault of Joe the Plumber.”  But that wasn’t going to happen.  Maybe someone at the third party debate could do just that.  Unfortunately, Bob Barr has taken up the cause of Joe the Plumber, so I guess all is lost.

I think it is time to unveil a full blasted attack ad on Joe the Plumber.  I mean, did you know his real name was Sam?  Bob the Plumber ought to get right on that.

(*) No.  Really.  What is that?  Can I get video of it.  Maybe it’d make sense in context.

Note:  I had to edit this blog post because I am a bone-head who mis-spelled “plumber” to “plummer”.  This may or may not be fine, but I doubt it.

Before McCain’s arrival at a rally Saturday, a local clergyman delivered an invocation that instructed the almighty on his handling of the coming election.“There are millions of people around this world praying to their god—whether it’s Hindu, Buddha, Allah—that his opponent wins, for a variety of reasons,” said Rev. Arnold Conrad. “And, Lord, I pray that you would guard your own reputation because they’re going to think that their god is bigger than you if that happens.  So I pray that you would step forward and honor your own name in all that happens between now and Election Day. ”

Now THAT’S Desperation.  The Reverend has to appeal to Diety Pride to entreat him (er… “Him”) to get John McCain’s victory.  Lest the other Gods, such as that great God Hindu and that great God Buddha, Lord it over his God.  He knows he cares more than the Almighty, and the only way to get the Almighty to care is by pointing to how the other gods on the block are ganging up on him.  Hindu, Buddha, Allah… those gods.  Hindu the God.  Buddha the God.  Allah the God.

Reverend Arnold Conrad really needs to get together with General Boykin:  “Well you know what I knew, that my God was bigger than his.  I knew that my God was a real God, and his was an idol.”

But Boykin at least seems to know that his god is bigger, unlike the fretful Conrad.  No word on whether Boykin also thinks there is a god named Hindu, a god named Buddha, and one named Allah.

The New York Times has a little device, one of those maps you can click to turn red or blue.  They start it with their current calculation of “swing states”, one which various blogs of note have observed have a skew which has “leaning McCain” with states he’s narrowly ahead and “leaning Obama” with states he is ahead by double digits.  I note that the map has, within the last two weeks, ebbed New Hampshire from the thin “undecided” sliver to Obama’s camp, moving his total from 260 to 264 votes.  I also note how this effects the “random close states” function, which assigns states randomly to Obama and McCain — today, if you click that 50 times, Obama wins 48 out of 50 times.  Two weeks ago, I was not counting, but I am guessing it came down to something like … 40 out of 50 times.

But the map has shifed somewhat.  Sarah Palin made an appearance in West Virginia, and gaver her little ditty about Jack and Dianne.  This is a little weird — in the primary season, West Virginia together with Kentucky was Obama’s Sahara — arid beyond arid, he lost by over 40 points as the media descended upon the states and dredged up any number of voters whose answer on why they voted for Clinton was, quite bluntly, race.  But the stunning thing is that West Virginia is not Reagan Democrat Country — it voted for Carter in 1980 and Dukakis in 1988, two of the three elections which you have to say would define the term “Reagan Democrat” — or tied with Massachusetts.  When the primary season came to West Virginia, I looked back and saw the media right up for the state’s election.  It was something of a surprise and out of the blue that they voted for Dukakis, and was attributed to Dukakis’s late charge in adopting the languate of “economic populism”.  A bit forgotten, in the debate Dukakis asserted “I am a Liberal in the tradition of Truman and Kennedy”, to which Bush “burned” him with “Finally.  He comes out and says it!  Liberal!”  Believe it or not, this stabalized a floundering campaign somewhat.  Somewhat.  Enough to win West Virginia.  And nearly win the grand prize of California.  Which would have, if nothing else, been like getting a face saving touch-down to whittle a lost football game from 35-14 to 35-21.  Or something.

But Gore dared raise some regulation proposals for the Coal Industry, and then Bush went on to stiff up the tarrifs to protect the Coal industry, and so it ran him from 7 points a victory in 2000 to 14 in 2004.  The population continued to age, the best and brightest of the young fled over to North Carolina and Virginia for better opportunities as opposed to dying industry, and the seven points more per election cycle seemed to be where it was going for Obama as Clinton choked him out by 40 points.  Unless, my observation in reading the 1988 election reports, things somehow went really bad.

Though the “No Democrat has ever won without West Virginia” remains a little inoperable either way.

Food for thought: 

Considering America’s Depression-era politics in comparative perspective reinforces the impression that there may have been a good deal less real policy content to “throwing the bums out” than meets the eye. In the U.S., voters replaced Republicans with Democrats and the economy improved. In Britain and Australia, voters replaced Labor governments with conservatives and the economy improved. In Britain and Australia, voters replaced Labor governments with conservatives and the economy improved. In Sweden, voters replaced Conservatives with Liberals, then with Social Democrats, and the economy improved. In the Canadian agricultural province of Saskatchewan, voters replaced Conservatives with Socialists and the economy improved. In the adjacent agricultural province of Alberta, voters replaced a socialist party with a right-leaning funny-money party created from scratch by a charismatic radio preacher, and the economy improved. In Weimar Germany, where economic distress was deeper and longer-lasting, voters rejected all of the mainstream parties, the Nazis seized power, and the economy improved. In every case, the party that happened to be in power when the Depression eased dominated politics for a decade or more thereafter. It seems farfetched to imagine that all these contradictory shifts represented well-considered ideological conversions. A more parsimonious interpretation is that voters simply–and simple-mindedly–rewarded whoever happened to be in power when things got better.

Clearly we need now a fusion Conservative – Liberal – Socialist – Funny Money – Nazi – government, right?

Phillies up 2 to nothing in the playoff series.  This is good because I despise the Los Angeles Dodgers.   I have always hated the Dodgers, with a white hot passion, and have pumped my fist in triumph year in and year out when they’ve invariably been eliminated from post-season contention.

It is weird, because I don’t even have a team I root for.  I just root for the Dodgers to fail.  I think this came from my dad.  It really sticks with you, watching at the age of eight a ball-game with your dad.  I assume my father picked up his Dodgers – hatred from growing up near San Francisco, but he never rooted for the Giants.  Anyway, the Dodgers would cause him to rattle off, completely uncharacteristically, a string of profanity and bile toward their star players.

This spilled over into my brief woeful Little League career.  See, we were coached by this major Dodgers fan — this burly man Aaron Mantle, always wearing a Dodgers cap and asking “What would Tommy Lasorda Do?”.   He was interesting — something of the permanent little league coach and not a parent, and the norm for children’s sports’ leagues is that a parent of someone was the manager/coach.  But this did absolve some of the problems that come from that — preferential treatment to the coach’s kid, so maybe that should be the standard.

I wasn’t on that team too long.  The star of the team was also a big Dodgers fan.  He was a kid by the name of Mickey Ruth.  He started to tease me about this.  I didn’t have a leg to stand on, since the only reason I was ever pulled into a game was the “everyone plays” ethic which comes with Little League, and even at that I was always coached to bunt the ball.  But this intense confrontation eventually came to blows.  All I can say is that my parents picked me up, blood pouring out of my nose, and some raw skid marks on my arms.  I lied about what happened, and rattled off an incoherent and self-contradictory story, which at any rate went against the story as relayed later by Coach Mantle.  I only went to a couple more practices — even at that age, I could sense I was done.  My parents tried to gracefully exit me to something else and suggested I pick up Karate practice, which I agreed to but was never taken to.

The Little League team went on to win the World Series against a team from Taiwan, and Mickey Ruth became a major nationwide sensation.  Adding insult to injury, this was also the year that the Dodgers won the pennant.  My hatred for the Dodgers intensified.  A few years later, I experienced great schaudenfruede when it was revealed that Ruth was a ringer who was lying about his age and was actually seventeen years old, which also helped me feel better about him beating me to a pulp.  I cannot quite recall what happened to the rest of that team’s championship title, and now that I think about it it must have been shattering — but Hey!  I had no connection to that team, so what did I care?  And I never slackened off on my hatred of the Dodgers.  A group of athletically elite millionaire ball-players assembled out of free agency– how can anyone relate to such a team?

In order to acknowledge the Worst Financial Crisis since the Great Depression, and in order to evoke some nostalgia for past bad times, it may be time to implement a “Brother Can You Spare a Dime” program.  Simply put, if anyone comes up to you and literally asks “Brother Can You Spare a Dime?”, you hand over a dime.  It has to be those words, though.  The genius is that you should be able to recupriate the dime if necessary by asking someone (perhaps the same wise-ass who you just handed a dime) “Brother can you spare a dime?”