Reading through the Oregonian last week, I hovered onto the news article for one of the Portland School District’s “Little Miss” “Princess” winners.  I have a basic objection to these things, wondering why we’re awarding high school girls the title of “Princess”.  What caught my eye was in the bullet-point list of things:

News story she follows regularly: Last month’s arrest of singer Chris Brown for allegedly assaulting his girlfriend, singer Rihanna.

I don’t know if that qualifies as a real news story, but following that Celebrity Crunch is what tends to qualify as “following news” in the teen years, and I gather to poll a high school, selected down to those who think they follow the news, on what news story they are most following, it would poll ahead of, say, the Geitner Plan.  Chris Brown’s assualt on Rihanna does allow taking stock of societal attitudes, and it’s not pretty.  This sounds about right in terms of dynamics.

As a Boston teenager myself, I’ll tell you that, unfortunately, you’re pretty spot-on. I witnessed a conversation between an 18-year old guy and a 17-year old girl in which the girl insisted, “It’s not his fault, she started it…” and the guy kept incredulously repeating “…but he still beat her.” Girls won’t believe that someone they thought they knew could do something so horrible. I see it also when an instance of rape or sexual assault happens inside our own school – when it’s a classmate that we know, we don’t want to believe that they could be guilty. It’s pretty frightening.

 That it’s not pretty suggests it’s a “Teachable Moment”.

I may well note I know not from Chris Brown and had barely ever heard of Rihanna — who I most know from a radio commercial that urges people to vote on an Internet site to rank various pop songs.  I don’t hear that commercial anymore.  I know not what either sing.

Update from the North Korean News Service:

Let all of us further intensify the Three-Revolution Red Flag Movement and make a dynamic leap forward toward the eminence of a great prosperous and powerful nation under the leadership of the great Workers’ Party of Korea.

Rodong Sinmun Monday says this in an editorial.

It goes on:

The present stirring reality in which a new great revolutionary surge is being effected on all fronts of socialist construction calls for intensifying the above-said movement at a higher level.

The Three-Revolution Red Flag Movement is an all-people mass movement of the highest form for accelerating socialist construction by dynamically waging the ideological, technical and cultural revolutions as required by the process of modeling the whole society on the Juche idea. The above-said movement has been dynamically waged in all sectors and at all units over the past three decades under the leadership of the WPK to bring about astonishing miracles and changes in the Korean revolution and construction. The shining victory the DPRK has won in the Songun revolution by firmly defending socialism and ushering in a new magnificent era of building a great prosperous and powerful nation despite stern trials would have been unthinkable without the immortal exploits the WPK has performed by initiating and wisely steering such powerful mass movement as the Three-Revolution Red Flag Movement long ago.

Some new material from Master Bridge-Themed Beat Poet, Bobby Wolff.

The defense started in the same way against Zia, but as soon as East gave him the ruff and discard at trick three, Zia started thinking about a possible bad trump break. Why would East defend in such a way unless he was hoping to promote a trump trick? So at trick four, Zia played a low club toward dummy’s queen. West played low (a pardonable error), and now Zia had stolen a club trick and could run for home, making five hearts, four diamonds and a club.

Today’s Ziggy:

Upon Barack Obama entering office, Charles Krauthammer offered up a “warning” to Obama that he should “fix the financial system”, but not attempt to “refashion” the system because in that direction lay “the dustbin of history”.  A sly suggestion of Communism without having to put himself down in fearing Barack as a “Big Red Machine”.  Weeks later, perhaps chastined by Obama’s high approval ratings verus the Republican’s low ratings, Krauthammer offered up a more conciliatory note and framed “8 years of Obamaism” as “putting us on the same level of government as European countries”, notably being downsized as we’re up-sizing.  The final line in that column was something along the lines of “Here’s to a great debate!”  The allusion is downsized to a more manageable fear of Socialism.

But Krauthammer shouldn’t have too much to fear in Obama “refashioning” American society.  There is not a president who has ever stepped out of lines in merely “fixing” the (quote-in-quote) “system” to the benefit of the peculiar elite’s benefit.  This inludes the Franklin Roosevelt, and with him we can roll with that sort of liberal theory of him put in the place of “placating the masses” and damping down their populist uprising — an item which coincides with the old story about him meeting a group of activists (depending on who’s telling the story, either Labor or Black) and telling them he’s with them, but they need to “make me do it” — ie: push for the political space to make it the political expedient thing to do.

Currently we have a situation of mass public outrage over a few hundred million dollars in AIG bonuses — such a drip in the bucket that it means that either the public can’t differentiate between millions and billions OR there’s much more at stake as per attitudes.  The more at stake comes in the tension between the view that these executives have developed a sense of entitlement (versus Labor which have given up concessions for the common good through the current economic upheaval) versus the idea that they must be placated in general and to a deeper degree than this one instance in order to preserve them to wind things through the system and untie the knots.  Skip back to Franklin Roosevelt for a moment, at the very least his persona personified in these lines 1936 campaign speech:

I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master. 

The various detractors of Franklin Roosevelt gripe that “Roosevelt kep the Depression humming for a decade”.  It was a bit of a slow slog of not uninterrupted growth (the Recession of 1938), though the answer to the question “Are you better off now than you were four years ago” at each of the four year intervals (1936, 1940, and 1944) was “Yes”.  But the working theory goes along the lines of — it had to be in order to loosen a grip of the “Economic Royalists” (personified in 2009 by the “AIG Bonus Army”, I suppose — notably currently emeshed in a “Siege Mentality“), ushering us to and building what Paul Krugman terms the “Great Compression” through the next four decades.  In present conditions, you can sort through that period where a large group of people who’d ordinarily be in charge “Go Galt” on us and come out the other side in better shape.

Maybe that’s what Krauthammer was worried about, maybe not, and to what degree it falls into his two ledgers I can’t quite weigh.

Into Wiesbedan. *

Obviously I wish good luck with that — it gets its smattering of press news such as this, and .  and this, and the customary posting in the updates at the Dennis King website. 

It’s interesting to see a comment from the “Mikey Powell Campaign” on this site.  Must stick together, I guess you can say.
Go to factnet and you will see some former members expressing their frustration with, say for instance, the sponsorship of two people (rhymes with “Dertlet” and “Ring”) — long time “enemies” of the Larouche franchise who you might argue bring their own biases to the front, I suppose.  I suggest my incredulity in the comments section for the previous post — proofread it not at all. * — But to put some things into perspective, we have the inestimable “Howie G”:

European, why don’t you face it, you’re over your head. You are caught in the middle of disputes that will determine the future course of civilization.

Good god almighty.  Note to revenire:  The reason your supposed “jokes” ala “I’ve saved the world numerous times” are taken with a straight faced is because they bear no difference, and are actually rather tamer, than the straight-forward prose of the Larouche organization in describing their mission.  I suppose it would make for an Andy Kaufman routine, if it were not part and parcel of, for instance:

If we don’t get enough money in, I’m going to kill somebody. [laughs]

Ha ha ha!  It’s funny because… it has a ring of truth about… his sociopathology.  Ha ha ha!

Well, in all honesty this “Windy Hills Dialouge” is par for the course, and there is nothing new here.  I note that “Dialouge” is re-defined as “Monolouge with smattering of an ‘Amen’ Choir.”  But I see that “Howie G” has read that “Windy Hills Monolouge” and fully digested said.

I’m in the center of this. That’s my responsibility. Either we succeed, and I know that I’m crucial in this, or we go down. But you have these points. Essentially, you have Helga in Germany, as a key point of reference. It’s a reference for Russia and other places as well. Jacques in France, is in a fairly strong, relative position. The Four, the United States, Russia, China, and India, are coming into existence, and there are some meetings coming up now, which are these four! Hillary Clinton is playing a very significant role in respect to these four, as Secretary of State. Her meeting with Lavrov was highly successful, for its purpose.
So, we have inside the United States, our circle inside the United States, which is now focused around the Obama Presidency; Russia around an inside group in Russia, which is actually the leadership group in Russia; some influence in China, but that could be consolidated with the aid of Russia; and India. That is essentially what we have here, there. That is now the pattern. And what I’m doing, in terms of the question of economy is crucial, because if this were not done, if what I’m pushing were not to happen, there’s no change of avoiding a dark age. And what I’m trying to push through with Obama and Company, against all the enemies and fools and whatnot, is crucial.
That means, in the United States, that the LPAC operation is strategically significant, and will determine the future of civilization. So we are going to have a full-blast approach, politically and in fundraising, centered on LPAC. We have to get the $120,000 a week. {We have to.}
Nothing else is going to work, unless that works. Don’t talk about alternatives, or adjustments — forget it! It’s a fool’s errand.

The Four Powres Alliance, supposedly what the organization is working with, and it takes $120K a week from pestering your grandma on the phone to get it, and theoretically nickeling and diming from donations on street corner card table shrines with the latest ill-produced pamphlet thingamajing.  Well, anyway, the “4 Powers Alliance” is the pretend International Biggie they’re pushing.  The REAL International project can be found off of Parade’s Annual List of the “Top 10 Worst Dictators“.

Mugabe of Zimbabwe.  Al Bashir of Sudan. Khamenei of Iran*.  Abdullah (more to the clerics you can say) in Saudi Arabia.  And Muammar al-Qaddafi of Libya.
For Kim Jong Il, he takes credit for a rail-line (or hearlds one?), but really the Larouche — Jong Il “Economic Development” connection is more along the lines of this.

 The “International Economic Program” leads its way to this Canadian Constituion.  I post to the comments to point to something I’ve lost and will post here if I ever find.  In the meantime, translate this Hegla Zepp boilerplate anti-video game connected to violent crime item to English and read down the list of articles at the bottom — Most Illuminating to see the mileu we’re travelling through!
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** To tie up a loose end in that assortment of comments, while it’s true that he’s “more idiosyncratic” and probably better asserted as coming out of a “Stalinist Left”) here’s where I find “Hitler” specifically in the wide world of Larouche (beyond the various alliances at various times with neo-nazis and attendent items, beyond anti-semitism which I don’t know what to put down as)  — a quote from factnet:
First off, he certainly lacks any of the demagogic skills to attract any type of mass base, second, the West is not in the total debilitated state that Weimar Germany was in after the war (although that could certainly change given current economic condiations).

 It is, in Larouche’s world, the world situation is always in the state that Weimar Germany was in, and the paranthetical is what Larouche is going after in, well, theoretically the public imagination but in practice never really beyond the cadres — and I have never been able to read that (and before I em-meshed myself as fully in paying  the attention I have — independent curiosity-seeking) as anything than a mimicry of Hitler.  Surely the Communist Left have that ideology of worsening conditions for the proleteriat being preferable to “crumbs” thrown by the bourgeoise in order to “wake them up”, which always resulted in a same sort of Alarmist tracts of “15 minutes toward Armegeddon”, but the frames of reference throw this particular instance of Larouche over to Hitler.
But, yes, Hitler himself disappears and can’t be shoe-horned all over the place.

…………………………………..
And now for a run into the “leatherstocking challenge”, as per a wikipedia claim to just “look at how Larouche has been referred to” in news accounts in the past fifteen years, and use that.  He sort of played it through google news, a bad gambit because of the inclusiveness with which google news operates which farms in those “Executive Intelligence Review” items and gives it an undue weight as against , say, the Financial Times of London.  I refer to that because I’ll reference a story published there, January 31, 2009 — can’t find it with immediacy on the Internet: The profit of doom: George Soros may have predicted the global economic crisis, but how is the pioneering financier protecting his fortune and his legacy? Chrystia Freeland reports. 
where we see the reference made as “extremist pamphleteer”.  Would that work for wikipedia?

Hey!  ETSU!  Why couldn’t you beat PITT?  You “had them” — as your post-game quotes go–, you were ahead late in the game, then you crashed against the “5 minutes left”  and PITT pulled ahead to a 10 point win.  Damned you ETSU, you’re more damnable than the 16 seeds that get rolled to 40 point defeats, because you are what assures that history is not made — because the next time a 16 seed will be in earshot of winning against a 1 seed will be in, like, 5 years — and they’ll probably be just like you, ETSU, with a similarly insane abbreviation, and with the same  nearing the end of the game choking away when the win is in eye-sight (the sudden shift from “having nothing to lose” to “having this game to lose”).  Thus the old cliche “It’ll happen one of these days” — that a 16 will beat a 1 — will always be a cliche.

Interesting to note just how much ETSU f’ed this one up.  A win for ETSU would have meant that the record of 1-seeds over 16-seeds would have gone from 0-99 to 1-99 — poetically a pretty beautiful play on things.  But ETSU has now flunked Poetry.

If you’re like me, your relatively minor interest in the college basketball tournament pretty much dissipates completely after the first weekend.  And thus it’s all over for me.  It’s been fun seeing these young men try to put a round thing into a basket, but they will now carry on doiing so without my attention.

I see this new magazine, or what I guess is a new magazine, “Hollywood Teen”, devoted I guess to young HOT 17 and 18 and 19 (or 20, 21, 22 in that role) something Hollywood stars, cover with some actors and actresses or other with the blurb “So Young.  So Rich.  So Famous.”

This sub-dividing is, I guess, the equivalent of the various Dog Magazines you’d be amazed to see exist.  (Hollywood Dog is one.)  Or it might be a product of a side-line of magazines like “Cosmo Teen” or the not terribly successful “Men’s Vogue”.

Though most magazines and tabloids on Hollywood vaguries tend toward the young and pretty, I guess this one skips the market that’d be grabbed by an article on Paul Harvey’s Final Message.  (Which I don’t think is published, but probably should be.  This is a particular of story, aimed at an older demographic.)

In the coming years “Hollywood Teen” will cover National Enquirer’s ground and report on “best” and “worst” “Beach Bodies”.  They converge wildly in my mind, even the self-conciously tawdry and self-conciously gushing.

It may be absurd to note the innacuracies of an Onion Parody, but I need to point out that this “Sports” story about the NCAA expanding the Field of 64 to 4096 teams is wrong in one area:  that would extend the post-season three weeks and would not get it out of April, and not into the Dick Vitalle parody’s quoted “June Madness”, if we presume the same schedule of single-elimination games that wind it down from 4096 to 2048 to 1024.  From 1024 to 512 to 256.  From 256 to 128 to 64 (or, actually as the case is, 65 — but nobody cares about that weird game to decide which non-major will get thumped by the prohibitive Tournament favorite).  From 64 to 32 to 16.  From 16 to 8 to 4.  From 4 to 2 to 1.  I honestly just don’t understand The Onion’s error in writing up this parody — don’t they have fact-checkers over there?

I think it would make for a fascinating tournament, though, and hope someone tries something like that… just once.  Portland State is in good stead as one of the favorites, being that a 1012 seed has never beaten a 13 seed.  It also scoots Oregon State to its current pathetic but strangely followed by team boosters because the team doesn’t stink in the way it stinked in historic terms last season as coached by Michelle Obama’s brother third rated (out of four) tournament that exists for some strange reason — Oregon State has a 101 seed.

#1:  Chris Dodd is being battered about quite a bit right now, from what I can tell not really deserved — he not the culprit.  But he’s easily tagged by partisans who need a dirty Democrat to hang up as a poster-critter, really the rule is that if you want to find politicians with alliances to the financial industry you look over to the states of Connecticut and Delaware.  The problem with the current outrage at AIG is that I had pretty well extrapulated it as part of the rot of the bailout bills, the “threading of the needle” which was heavily justified in not getting to the problem with their Corporate Culture.  This sort of ticking time bomb form of outrage is getting annoying:  we jump from one outrage to another — Bernie Madoff to AIG — without fully assembling it into one package.

Chris Dodd is toast, and the model for a Republican take-down of Democrats in 2010.  But does anyone believe any of the Congressional Grand-standing?  Maybe he deserved to be toast, but I have little doubt that his allowance of the Big Pile of Bonuses would not have been alleviated if the current Republican Populists had been in his position — toastier toast they oughta.

#2 and #3:  One of those curious contradictory storylines I’ve seen is this conflicting analysis visa vie Hillary Clinton and Joseph Biden.  First I read that Hillary Clinton has usurped some power and role ordinarily afforded Joseph Biden, and Biden is getting less than he signed up for.  Then I read that Joseph Biden has usurped some power and role ordinarily afforded Hillary Clinton (a bigger name and star power, natch) and Hillary Clinton is getting less than she signed up for.  I don’t know if this is supposed to mean that we have a co-Vice-President co-Secretary of State combo.  And maybe some pundits are trying to stick them too fit into some pre-ordained box sizes.  Noteworthy is that Barack Obama passed on the annual GridIron Dinner, a passing I whole-heartedly agree with and hope will be continued by future administrations to tap down a certain chummy back-slapping with the press corp, and sent Biden instead.  At the very least, Joseph Biden has been inserted into a hefty ceremonial role.

One thing that needs be said about Hillary Clinton — the Clinton Problem was my general inability to sepearate the two Clintons and her likely administration, the chief point of departure for my basic weariness in her acceptance, reaffirmed as the nation wrestles with the current Financial Meelee, with large points of departure from policies enacted and signed into law during Bill Clinton’s Administration.  It is impossible to get ahold of whether Bill Clinton was a good president or not, and overall I’m glad Hillary Clinton is working for President Obama instead of Obama working for President Hillary Clinton.

#4:  Bill Richardson, the man who should probably be Commerce Secretary (Quick!  Give me the details of the scandal that derailed him from that position.  And don’t cheat by googling it up!)  has suspended the Death Penalty down there in New Mexico.  The suspension of the death penalty is the “Last Refuge of the Scoundrel” if you want to cite the example of former corrupt Illinois Governor (aren’t they all?) George Ryan.  In this economic climate, capital punishment is apparently the first item on the chopping block to trim the state budgets.  Or Bill Richardson was swayed by the examples of wrongful convictions, or his days of seeking national office are over.  Take your pick.

#5:  Dennis Kucinich.  I can take take two routes with him.  First, I see that in the trailer for the “Alex Jones” “Obama Deception” film (which I also associate with Walter Tarpley, though I know it has a cast of many another conspiranoid freak) there is a sound-byte of Obama referencing “Republicans and Democrats” who have come out opposed to the TARP bill — and naturally a flash of Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich.  (There are Republicans and Democrats a tad more mainstream than them.)  Secondly, Kucinich probably weighs closer to having some form of foundation underneath his Congressional Grand-stands that make it less absurd.  But that big “BUT” inherent in being the voice selected by your Alex Jones always hangs right over him.

#6:  That brief shining moment when this blog was bouncing around in the first two pages — between #4 at its absolute peak and #19 — in google searches for “Mike Gravel” — which spurred a furious blogging on the subject of Mike Gravel to see if I could maintain that honor.  I do think I did uncover some quasi-unsavory elements from Gravel’s long-gone Senate career — better to say a politician acting like a politician, which would be okay if it weren’t that Gravel was casting himself as a sort of anti-politician.  Last I knew, Gravel had signed himself up for this type of thing.  But otherwise his profile has been busted right on down to (#7) current John Edwards level.