If you’re like me, you always have your eyes peeled for when there is new news regarding new outbreaks of the Bubonic Plague.  Well, here’s what’s either some really good news involving the Bubonic Plague, or some really good government propaganda, or even more likely just kind of a slap dash of conjuncture thrown together that sells tabloid newspapers – depending on your want for the day:

At least 40 al-Qaeda fanatics died horribly after being struck down with the disease that devastated Europe in the Middle Ages.

The killer bug, also known as the plague, swept through insurgents training at a forest camp in Algeria, North Africa. It came to light when security forces found a body by a roadside.

The victim was a terrorist in AQLIM (al-Qaeda in the Land of the Islamic Maghreb), the largest and most powerful al-Qaeda group outside the Middle East.  […]

The al-Qaeda epidemic began in the cave hideouts of AQLIM in Tizi Ouzou province, 150km east of the capital Algiers. The group, led by wanted terror boss Abdelmalek Droudkal, was forced to turn its shelters in the Yakouren forest into mass graves and flee.

The extremists supporting madman Osama bin Laden went to Bejaia and Jijel provinces — hoping the plague did not go with them.

Ah, The Sun.  Where would the world be without The Sun?(*)  I suspect a little better tethered to something identifiable as Journalism, but Hell!  Bubonic Plague!  It has a sort of panache to it, don’t it?

A bit more skeptical inquiry here.

And for the record, this blog has reposted an item from the Washington Times, not the Washington Post.  One’s incredulity index must be raised higher with the Times than with the Post.

An Exciting Oppositional Force to the “Barack Obama Cult”:

“Not all young people are excited about the policies of President Obama. Who do you think will pay for all of this reckless spending? Who will fight and die in these unnecessary wars oversees? Our generation will,” says Jeff Frazee, Executive Director of YAL, in Arlington, VA.YAL’s event, Real Change Requires R3volution, seeks to peel back the marketing of Barack Obama and expose his policies for what they really are – not real change. Before taking office, Barack Obama has put forth an $800 billion economic plan, promised more troops in Afghanistan, and begun talks of reviving the draft.“YAL chapters will demonstrate that there is a strong opposition to Obama’s youth movement and policies. He does not have a monopoly on our generation,” says Frazee.Young Americans for Liberty (YAL) is the continuation of Ron Paul‘s youth campaign, Students for Ron Paul, and was officially endorsed by Congressman Paul on December, 2 2008. YAL seeks to recruit, train, educate, and mobilize students on the ideals of liberty and the Constitution. This is not a new beginning but a continuation of the over 26,000 students who joined Ron Paul‘s youth campaign just over a year ago.

If you say so.

In other news, the logistics of setting up the West Texas Compound of Paulville can be seen being worked out over here.  So, you know, the students recruited in the Ron Paul Youth Movement have a place to move.

I don’t know who supplied The Oregonian picked up their page of presidential pics, with a factoid about each one underneath each one, but I have to say…

Maybe the task of finding a single factoid gets a little hazy for all of them?  The factoids are a little uneven in their import.  For instance, under Jefferson, we find “Wrote the Declearation of Independence.”  Skip over to Wilson, and we see “Kept a flock of sheep on the White House lawn.”  And Hayes?  “Held first Easter egg roll on White House Lawn”.  I don’t see the import of that in either the reverential building of the nation seen with Jefferson’s phrase, or the “passing of time” seen with, for istance, Taft noted as “first president to own a car.”

Each president who was assassinated seems trapped in that role — Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy recorded as “first”, “second”, “third”, and “fourth”.  They all seem to deserve better than this, don’t they?

Bush the first is figured as “first vice president elected since Van Buren”, a reason cited in 1987 and 1988 for why the odds were against him becoming president — though that was always a little misleading somehow, though less so than the Clinton line “first Democrat to win re-election since FDR” — true, though Truman and Johnson both were re-elected to full terms while serving president, which always stuck me as having the same “Verdict:  Kee” public show of validition as what’s suggested in the technical meaning of “re-elect”.  At any rate, these seem purely political in their meaning, and I’m left grasping back to something akin to Wilson keeping sheep in their back-yard.

Too bad there was no notable “first” to note about the news president.

It’s interesting to see how people slash and dash pictures to songs for The Kinks’ “Catch Me Now (I’m Falling)”, a song which probably was tossed into some radio playlists about 9/11, and which the first non-concert and non-cover youtube I get is this — final image is a stock portfolio chart plunging, and the image that comes up with “Catch me now I’m falling” first plays is the World Trade Center in flames.

This brings to mind the commentary from the weeks following 9/11, as the site was being excavated, which drew the Flag being Raised at the WTC with the Flag Being Raised at Iwo Jima.  (Incidentally, posed after battle.)  The line this evokes from The Star Spangled Banner, “Gave proof through the night, that the Flag was still there.”  The “Star Spangled Banner”, and I would link the the Negativland rendition from youtube, but I can’t find it, so this will suffice  (Just $2.08, you say?).  It is a war song, regarding battered battleground, message being that even in the Face of Destruction, the “Flag is Still there”.  That message accounts for its spontaneous outburst on Election Day at Pioneer Square.  The message falls somewhere between this and this.

The first thing I heard when I turned on the radio this morning was a news item I guess I would have known if I were paying attention yesterday, as early as 4:00 pm at the Millawette Meek Mewsite. 

“And is the Mayor of Portland’s Career Over?  Later in the Hour.” 

So I did not know the news as of yet, and thus had to rumble through my thoughts to see if I can see what might possibly have happend to indicate any potential for Mayor Smad Amas’s career to be, quote – in – quote “Over”.  I had to weave back into cobwebs in my mind, and made one “OH.”  It’s… that thing, right?  The rumored sexual relation accused by that other gay guy who was thinking of running, right?  With the 18 year old Intern — Or, was it 17?

Actually I believe Mayor Smad Amas when he says it was past that age of 18, even as we’re in the “How can you trust”ville.  We’re in the realm of rationalizations here, and City council member Smad Amas would, in the midst of this, be able to rationalize 18.  But, there’s this thing one has to do when a rumor and allegation is made by a political opponent or potential opponent (as the case was here), particularly in the realm of Sex, which is to file it away for later and not be terribly surprised if its truthfulness comes to light — though, at the same time not terribly surprised if I never hear from it again (knowing full well that the Millawette Meeks and, as may be the case until corrupted by the hiring of the editor not experienced for her ‘Sustainability’ job of the mayors’ office — Portland Wercamy).  Hence I’m able to reach for that mental file between this teaser and the news to come to get to the “rumors are always true” (just ask Thomas Jefferson) not the least bit chagrined.

One thought I have regarding Mayor Smad Amas is that he might be breaking a Sacred Vow with his life partner if only there were a Sacred Vow legally sanctioned for him to have broken.

The answer to the question posed “Over?” — I doubt it.  Politicians have survived worst and more incriminating sex scandals, and Smad Amas has enough head of steam to blunt and suffer through the damange.  Should he survive?  Get back to me on that one.

Or, actually don’t.  I don’t much want to delve into Smad Amas, except perhaps to start scrambling around the letters to various city politicians’ names.

Going inito the archives of The New York Times with the phrase “first negro president”, and pushing past “first” for various institutions to the heart of “first” for The United States, I am a bit surprised at how late any reference to the hypothetical comes up.  Maybe I have the parlance wrong — was it “negroe” at some point until they dropped the “e”, was there a negroid in the last part of the nineteenth century? — “First colored president” doesn’t throw me anywhere until 1976 — at the end maybe I ought to just drop the “first” and I’d pull something there?

But here are the names of the first two “First Negro Presidents”, at least as recorded in the anals of the New York Times, the “Paper of Record”.

6-25-1962… Comic Turns Quips Into Tuition … by Paul Gardner

The Gaslight Cafe, a subterranean coffeehouse in Greenwich Village, is featuring a young Negro comic who is working his way through college by hurling verbal spears at the relations between Whites and Negroes.

He is Bill Cosby, a 24 year old physical education major at Temple University, here for the summer to polish his style, collect new material, and save money for the fall Semester. […]

Mr. Cosby may startle them with a bit of unorthodox poetry, such as “Roses are red, violets are blue, grass is green — and dirt is brown.”

Occasionally he may threaten an unsmiling patron with the cryptic order:  “You better laugh.  I’ve got a club that’s the opposite of the Ku Klux Klan.”

In a skit in which he impersonates the first Negro President in the White House, Mr. Cosby says to an imaginary friend, “Yeh, baby, everything’s fine, except a lot of ‘for sale’ signs are going up on this block.”

The article went on to say that Bill Cosby felt he was having trouble finding a distinctive delivery.  Also he may just get tired of show business anyway.

Continuing, in May of 1965 the Irving Wallace book The Man, which “concerned itself with the first Negro President of the U.S.”, topped the best-seller’s list.  This might be a good curiosity seeker’s read at the moment, something along the lines of looking over to youtube to grab ahold of Robert Kennedy on “Voice of America” saying that race relations were moving so fast that the US may find itself with the first Black President… well, eight years ago, but never mind that.

The novel was made into a tv movie, as shown in the 7-9-1971 headline “Jones Plays Black President for TV Film”.  Here we find the Second “first negro president.”  Skip forward in the article to a name:

He is James Earl Jones, who starred in “The Great White Hope” and other films and plays.  He is now making a two-hour movie about the first Negro to become the president.

So, for the record, the First First Black President was Bill Cosby, and the Second First Black President was James Earl Jones.  Barack Obama will just have to be content standing on their shoulders as the First Black President in Actuality.

I doubt that the search for the “first negro vice-president” would gent any sooner, as it is a less scintilizing prospect.  I know that columnists for the New York Times and other elite opinion-meisters speculated on it for the 1972 presidential campaign, dove-tailing with a Nixon dirty trick strategy with CREEP plotting to rouse up the rabble in “those neighborhoods” of the inner-city so they would DEMAND a black vice presidential candidate from the early presumptive Democratic nominee, Edmund Muskie.  A sure defeat for the Democrats would have followed, a landslide defeat and electoral stain that would have taken the Democrats a generation to overcome.

Anyway…