I am not a firm believer in the “Rick Emerson Brand”.  I am a firm believer in the “Tim Riley brand”, and as such sense that my listenership to “The Rick Emerson Show” is going to wane a great deal — whatever my “P” rating falling from “P-1” to “P-2” — or is it “P-2” to “P-3”?

This, of course, is a shame.  Emerson and Sarah Dylan are solid professional producing and hosting a radio program in the right way.  But the effect is similar to that era of the Rick Emerson Show where the program was clearly being stomped under the jack-booted consultants of Entercom and the nightmare of fitting into something called a “Max 910”.  I sort of felt lousy fading away and turning the dial — this was not Emerson’s fault and he certainly carried on the best he could under those horrendous circumstances– but I had no other choice.  It was with that that I always had a mixed reaction to the destruction of “Max 910” — on one hand Emerson, and Clyde Lewis for that matter — were off the air; on the other hand, this goddamned exercise in hyper dilineated market segmentation and insulting of everyone’s intelligence was dead.

So what do you do when the chief ingredient that made a radio program entertaining is taken out?  The figure whose looming presence made some diversions from Rick Emerson and Sarah Dylan relatively listen-worthy?  Inevitably my Core is just going to break down into Cum…ulative.  This time around I can’t even really lay waste to the Corporate Behemoth — CBS is not Entercom.  Oh well.  The one thing I can say about “The Rick Emerson Show” as it goes forward: it’s not like there’s anything better on the radio dial.

I was walking down the street one day, when a guy approaching me yelled out “What are your choices for bread?”  Confused and puzzled was I.  Then I looked down and saw I had a Viso bottle on me, and groaned silently to myself.  Once I safely passed, I provided the answer.  “White.  Wheat.  Sour dough.  English muffin.  Bagel.”  Does this make a radio listener community?  Who can say?

A reaction to a dismissive attitude to the Obama Birth Certificate Controversy 

wingnuttiest of wingnut lawsuits???????
Obama has NOT released an unaltered copy of his birth certificate. He has NOT released any hospital or doctor records that show where he was born and who the doctor was. (He has also NOT released other significant documents, like his college records or his thesis.) He has NOT released the records of his adoption or his Indonesian passport. He has NOT released even an altered copy of the long form of his birth certificate that would give the kind of information that would completely satisfy and silence the “birthers” (at least most of them). His pattern of hiding and obscuring and even lying about his past (like stating in writing in a formal document that he never went by or used a different name) is over the top and is one of the reasons why I do not trust anything he says and would put nothing past him.

For myself and many like me, until he answers these questions (which he could easily do if he just released the documents), we will not recognize him as the president, we will not recognize any legislation he signs as law, we will not view any orders he gives the military as binding, we will not view any judges he appoints or the decisions they make as anything other than bogus.

Obama is forcing the Country into a state of anarchy by his insistence on hiding key, essential documents. For this reason, he is the greatest threat to the state of the nation to ever hit the USA–worse than 911 and even than Pearl Harbor. He and he alone bears the guilt for this disaster. And NO, we will not “live with it”; this issue will NEVER die.
…………………………….

Yeah, you go do that.  Don’t recognize him as the president, don’t recognize any legislation he signs as law, don’t view any orders he gives the military as binding, don’t view any judges he appoints or the decisions they make as anything other than bogus.  Let’s see how far this takes you.

I recommend some plots of land in the mountains of Montana or the desert of Texas.  Get your food rations up, get your supplies, get ready…

I saw them set up at two locations last week, entreating passerbys to ask about Newton’s Fraudulent Credentials.  (Seen too by a few other people, putting them back into some Portland resident’s conciousness long enough to make a snide jab at Bill Sizemore.)  As a result of seeing them at two locations, I could verify for certain that that car was theirs.  And I surmise that the automobile was used back in the Carter Administration when the organization (led by the Youth Members’ forefathers) was hawking their “plan” to save the Detroit Auto Industry back then.  Which does dovetail to one of those random comments I saw posted to a “Hey!  Look Larouchies!  Yesterday’s version of Ron Paul / Ralph Nader / fill intheblank supporters” blog post.

“Don’t know how they’ll survive once their leader croaks, but they seem to be hanging on with all the tenancity and tenuousness of Castro’s Cuba.”  Or something like that.  I didn’t bother saving it, and I can’t relocate it in enough time to justify completing a search for it.

I was reading over some of the old — I guess we can call them”flame – wars”, though that suggests some form of a game I was never really interested in playing– with revenire, always having planned to go back and plaster together something into a file onto the sidebar — mostly by way of some observations from ex-Larouchies which pertain specifically to Wiesbedan (fewer of them than I remember… I myself offered relatively little of substance and can summise my favorite moment of his washes ashore as this exchange… Revenire:  Don’t ‘Um’ Me.  and Me: Um.  Ba de dum, be da bing, you’ve all been great!), but was generally struck by the ridiculousness someone so cock-sured on the viability of Larouche — there’s an odd paradox with a cult that you simultaneously want and think everyone is thinking about your man and nobody is.  Revenire did make a fairly interesting comment near the end of his last stay, to wit:

April 15, 2008:  you jumpers have been drive insane by the fact larouche has been right all along… and you have been wrong and his public record proves it
you have no public record, except your hearsay etc. from losers who could not stand the heat in the kitchen… cowards and fools, like rachel
duggan was a suicide and kronerg jumped… larouche is alive and doing quite well
you have tired old re-hashes of high times writers and mothers being used by people she has no clue about where is the new investigation into duggan?
THERE ISN’T ONE

Well, pooh.  There is now.  Or a start to one.  Somberly, it’s something worth noting more than “gloating”.  But does revenire’s statement count as one of those Larouchian forecasts?  Somewhere with the premise of Erica Duggan being “used” by former High Times writers on one hand, and Dick Cheney and the British Government on the other hand, she pushed it forward herself for the past five years.  I was going to simplify this quote, leaving what I highlighted in bold with a preceeding summary that goes [insults of various people, insult of Mrs. Duggan in the cloak of a sort of faux humanitarian sympathy — belated at that].  What fascinated me about revenire was upon his introduction, his interest was Jeremiah Duggan.  This was a little odd, as I’ve always felt I was just a little bit lax with the topic, always stating that legal issues notwithstanding the Organization was morally culpable for the death of Duggan — their best case on that regard scenario looking quite awful.  (Revenire also having a knack to disbelieve everything from the outside world.)

That “Justice for Jeremiah” conference was heavy on the anti-semitic angle.  Larouche is an esoteric enough topic that I have few foils to work with with differing thoughts on their activities, and that is why I once again have to go back once again to Alan Osler’s observations on watching the conference… and, I always come back to this because it really is a bizarre piece of commenting on his part… and Chip’s penis (link provided in previous postings, go down in this category).

Here’s a thought on why so many of there people in that room didn’t know what “antisemitism” means… […]

And “really anti – British”.  In traversing the Internet regarding Larouche, it is funny how I always come up against these things.  As though some neo-nazis on the furthest extreme of the “right” take that “code word” business seriously and see a sympathetic analyst for their position.  By accident, I suppose.*

The worst thing about this little shitfest was that the Duggans’s grief was hijacked. Wasn’t it supposed to be about reopening the investigation? But no one wanted to say “The police fabricated the evidence”, so were were left with 2hours of pure, undiluted bullshit.

“2hours of pure, undiluted bullshit”, and a re-opened investigation.  Which will either drag nowhere or gets somewhere.  And legal issues aside, the very least it will at the very least broadcast the organization’s culpability in something beyond a Simpsons punchline.

For what it’s worth, I thought about Larouche when I saw the headline London Times Reports British Tortured Obama’s Grandfather.  Good fodder for the Larouchian engine which insists the “British Empire” is out to assassinate our Presidents.  Sure enough, and skip to the end:

Lyndon LaRouche has recently stated that there is a battle royale around the Obama administration. Obama as a president and Obama as a candidate are two different things. As a candidate he was controlled by the British, by George Soros and others. But now he’s in the thrall of the institution of the presidency, which means the potentiality of dealing with what he is faced with is different, especially now, in the context of a new fourteenth century dark age.

Love that “Fourteenth Century Dark Age”.  No matter how bad things might get, an impossibly bleak outlook is made available for comparison’s sake.  Well, it puts him off of one crusade for a while… though, off I guess he’s off the video-game crusade and onto a Satanist kick.

* Mental note:  I need to compile a number of these sort of things.

Anh Joseph Cao, a little-known 41-year-old community organizer and GOP attorney, knocked off nine-term Democratic Rep. William Jefferson in a stunning upset in Louisiana’s Second District to become the first Vietnamese American elected to Congress.

In recent years Jefferson has been fighting scandals and a federal indictment for money laundering, bribery and misusing his congressional office, which he denies. Last year the FBI reported finding $90,000 in marked bills in Jefferson’s freezer.

This is rare bi-partisan good news.  The Republicans get a member of Congress to add to the “R” side of the ledger and aisle and another vote on most issues, as well they get another victory which, combined with Saxby Chambliss’s thumping in the Georgia Senate run-off race, gives them cause to attempt with a straight face to say that the Republican Party is in absolutely splendid shape.  The Democrats get to be rid of a corrupt politician who was caught with $90K in a freezer — imagine yourself in Nancy Pelosi’s position in 2006 of having to place Jefferson in committee seats lest you rid an especially vulnerable constitutency (post Katrina New Orleans residents) which just re-elected him.  And, as 2010 is likely to be a year Republicans make electoral gains, this represents one number scratched off the “Republican gain” number — it’s a Congressional District where Democrats outnumber Republicans by 26 percent–, which may look good psychologically if, say, this Democratic pick-up is the difference between 10 Republican pick-ups and 9 or 20 and 19, or… you get the picture.

So… we are truly in a post-partisan political world.  And a good year for Community Organizers at that!

From what I suppose we can call “The Right“:

Prohibition was the pièce de résistance of the early 20th-century progressives’ grand social engineering agenda. It failed, of course. Miserably.

From what I suppose we can call “The Left“:

The Temperence Movement of the 19th Century would look familiar to us today.  The movement, led mainly by pious women, opposed alcohol on moral grounds.  They weren’t just trying to stop their no-account husbands from drinking away the family’s nest egg; they wanted to stomp out alcohol altogether. Imagine a beet-faced Southern preacher imprecating gays, and shift the nown to demon liquor and you get the picture.

It’s not quite that we see what we want to see.

Anyone who has lived in Portland for any appreciable amount of time knows the story of Bud Clark.  Eccentric tavern owner, best known for this image which is the explanation for the joke “noted art critic”, in 1984 he decided Francis J. Ivancie was getting a free pass to the mayor’s office, so he threw his hat in the ring.  He was thought to be a joke candidate.  Or, he was thought to be a joke until he won.

The story goes that Ivancie felt his first sense of trouble he was in trouble when the two candidates were both in a parade.  The public booed him.  The public cheered Clark.  Ivancie’s campaign turned negative as it became apparent Clark was on path to victory, as he couldn’t quite believe such a thing was even possible.

Now, here’s an odd thing.  Go to the wikipedia article on Bud Clark to the section on that election, and you get this:

In 1984 he ran for mayor because no other candidate would come forward to challenge Francis J. Ivancie. Clark won in the primary with 54.6% of the vote. He was re-elected in 1988 after defeating 11 candidates in the primary and beating former Chief of Police Ron Still in the general.

There is no sense of the election as stunning upset.  But go to the wikipedia article on Ivancie and you get this:

In 1983, a coalition of progressive activists in the city, disenchanted with Ivancie’s politics, sought out a challenger to run against Ivancie in the 1984 mayoral election. This was a proposition that local political observers considered unlikely to succeed, given Ivancie’s strong political connections with local business interests, The Oregonian, and organized labor. They found an unlikely candidate in J. E. “Bud” Clark, a local tavern owner and former beatnik. Clark announced his candidacy less than six months before the May 1984 election, but was widely dismissed as a “joke” candidate who had no chance to win the election. However, dissatisfaction among Portlanders was running high – the economy was in recession and crime was on the rise.

In March 1984—two months prior to the election—Clark trailed Ivancie by 35 points in one poll. However, the Clark campaign put together a large number of volunteers who canvassed the city. After an early May poll by The Oregonian showed the race tied, the Ivancie campaign replied with negative advertisements questioning Clark’s religious beliefs (Clark has claimed to be a “born again pagan”). The ads offended Portland voters, who elected Clark to be the next mayor on May 15, by a margin of 13 points.

The story is told, though for the sake of wikipedia needs to be substantiated (easily done if one were up to such a task) and fleshed out somewhat.  But it’s told in one candidate’s bio and not the other one.  It seems rather significant to both people’s careers.

I suppose I should open up a wikipedia account, but good golly I have no interest in engaging in prolonged article-changing attempts.

While studies show that coverage of President Elect Obama far outweighs coverage of President Bush, coverage of President Elect Obama having a similar tinge to it as if he were indeed president,

The Bush Era is not quite over.  Leaving aside pardons and last minute de-regulating executive orders and procedual movements, witness this banner-ad I’ve been seeing around the Internet today, reduced to half its height and half its width:

It is, I guess, a last minute sell-off before this happens.  But really, it’s something of wistful nostalgia for the past eight years.

It will take a bit of time to adjust this point of impulse sales click through for a mocking Barack Obama banner ad market.  But it’ll come.  Everyone is just feeling the way around right now.  It took until Bush choked on a pretzel for people to learn how to laugh at Bush again in the post 9/11 world — Obama’s time enfused in banner ads topping general interest only tangeantally political Internet websites is coming.

There’s a bit of a symmetry between this (which I picked up via Andrew Sullivan here, and will thus just go with his pull-quote as a demonstration.):

I’m sure the comments section will fill with various conspiracy theories over Indonesian school records, Kenyan births, and so on.  None of it — absolutely none — has any real, solid evidence showing that Obama was born anywhere else than Hawaii apart from sheer speculation and hearsay, and even less evidence that Obama’s stepfather renounced Obama’s birthright citizenship, which he didn’t have the power to do anyway.  It’s a conspiracy theory spun by conspiracy theorists (Philip Berg is a 9/11 truther) who use their normal thresholds of evidence for this meme.

AND… this, where you see Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon and Senator Dianne Feinstein of California moving from an unequivocal stand on non-torture standards for interrogating detainees to a position loaded with equivocation and weasel words.

The “birth certificate” business is irresponsible and detrimental to a conservative cause.  We arrive at such a point, where it persists and becomes currency enough to inandate comments of Republican bloggers, due to current desperation.  Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, as one moves from the role of critic to the role of governing — some well-held positions become fungibleitems in which politicians end up moving to the establishment position of the administration due to them being on “their team”.  That is what is lost,  even as some conspiratorial obsessions fade from the mind of liberals.

Well, that birth certificate story ends today.  Right?  Or can Alan Keyes flog it right up to the next Senate race in Illinois?