There’s an interesting news story in today’s Wall Street Journal.  Apparently, IBM is currently in talks to buy The Sun.

Hm.

It’s an interesting acquisition to be sure, and practical at that.  Take a look at the business model:

Now, you can’t quite draw up a chart like that for IBM, but compatibility can be forced.  The Future is there for anyone who can monetize the Sun.  And the Sun is something whose value is based on the sands.  I say it’s a wise investment.

Apparently the “Bush in Calgary Story” is big somewhere — Calgary, I guess.  I am not one to pooh-pooh the pumping of “Big Notable” visiting this or that city into Major News — and at the moment Bush says he’ll say nothing about President Obama so no news is going to come out of “Bush in Calgary” (unless you want to analyze Bush and Cheney as engaged in a “good cop / bad cop” act.)  When Bush the President came into the city for a fund-raiser in 2002 it was a big story — the tv media fixated on Bush in town, if I recall right The Oregonian as well with the Portland Tribune running on the thousands in the street this occasioned.

But when George Herbert Walker Bush visited the sleepy little Eastern Washington center of Yakima in 1994(?) 1995(?), along with a few other distinguished people of World Importance and Dennis Miller and a location that former presidents, distinguished people of World Importance, and Dennis Miller don’t tend to track through (I’d say a lot less than Calgary) — it could not be categorized as “big news” in Yakima.  I wonder what is the difference.

None of this is terribly original, but contemplating the Seattle PI’s closing foreshadows our uncertain media / journalistic future. We’ll eventually find a good equilibrium where actual muck-racking can be unleashed as the old model of news gathering is dead, but it’ll be a difficult transition.

It was a decade ago when Matt Drudge crashed the gates and was invited to talk before the National Press Corps — an interesting little foray the trasncript for which I can find fairly easily.  He always spoke of “letting a thousand Drudges blossom.”  Hard to say if that happened — but seeing how unseriously his news compiling and gossip-hounding is, swerving to Washington as Hollywood for Ugly People, the Rise of Celebrity Gossip (absurdly running into the gamut of the lives of Celebrity’s Babies), he probably can be said to have prefaced such a thing.  The trick will be to get what’s necessary into the forefront beyond this manner of stuff.

The Seattle PI’s transition to a “web based” only artifact might also underscore the death of one more thing, what I keep referring to as “the Blogging of the Twentieth Century”, the Letter to the Editor.  (Don’t ask me what the “twittering” of the 20th century was.) The online edition has its own reader-feedback loop, but it does have essential differences in character to the sort of worked and paragraphical Letter of Opinion-Mongering.  The Oregonian is currently floundering about awkwardly.  But nonetheless it can enlighten us all with a letter such as — and I’m going to insult your intelligence by interjecting into it to draw attention to the alarming part of this:

Rosy view of Europe
Jacob Weisberg’s glowing picture of European-style democracy leaves out a few important details (“Really, is European-style democracy so bad?” March 15).

Not only do those countries have high tax rates, but their social problems far exceed what Weisberg would lead us to believe.

In France, strikes regularly paralyze both commercial and personal transportation. Also European-style medical practice, often thought of as a model for the U.S., has serious problems. Problems with the British medical system are becoming well-known, but even the Swedish system, usually presented as an example of how to do it right, is in trouble.
— I’m never going to cite any nation as a paradise or Utopia, and so far I’ll just suggest that things are Debatable.  But next sentence: —

European-style democracy also denies its citizens the freedom of speech, religion, and the press which we take for granted here in the United States. Expressing viewpoints contrary to government-approved dogma can lead to legal trouble.

— What, prey tell, “Government-approved dogma” does he cite that the people aren’t allowed to object toward?

In many places, church leaders are not allowed to speak their beliefs about homosexuality,

— An item of bigotry, sure, though I can respect the objection to something on this order on Civil Libertarian grounds.  He is at the very least in the land of Mainstream Viewpoints.  What else does he cite as “government-approved dogma”?

and the expression of some beliefs about the holocaust is illegal.

— Uh huh.

While we may agree with the official view,

— How very nice of him to allow such a thing.

suppression of free expression is dangerous.

— Agreed.  Better to have this objection to having to hold to a government – approved view of the Holocaust out in the open.

If Weisberg likes the European model, he is welcome to move to Europe. As for me, I like freedom, limited government, and self-responsibility.
HAROLD LILLYWHITE
Aloha

See, if this print outlet weren’t available, Mr. Harold Lillywhite would have to be trolling on an online forum at the largely defunct newspaper website and stringing out Holocaust Denial anonymously instead of offering up a candy-coating of it with his name attached.

This is a strangely drastic extrapulation of a basic premise.  Read through what Ezra Klein has to say here about how our system of government is equipped to handle immediate crises pretty well, but no so much with long term crises.  A pretty reasonable idea and agreeable.  And then read the comment.

Isn’t this similar to Amartya Sen’s analysis of China vs. India? In China, the autocratic form of government meant that they preferred to cover up and ignore mass starvation during agricultural failure, so that millions died all at once; but on the other hand, they put the resources required into building up a universal health care system (since abandoned) that improved the lives of the entire population over the long haul. India, on the other hand, and being a democracy, was good at reacting to emergencies, and has avoided all mass starvations since gaining independence; but has never yet figured out how to prevent/avoid the slow and steady starvation of millions that is the standard operating procedure in the rural background. Or something like that.

Yes.  It’s exactly like policies of Mass Starvation.

Hey you, players on the Xavier team.  You’re going down.  No way you’re going to beat the Portland State University Vikings.  You know why?

Because these players… They have No Fear.  They’ve seen the inside of a Mexican Jail Cell.  That gives them an Edge you can’t imagine.  You think they fear some stinking tall dribbling guy?  Jeremiah Dominguez, shrimp though he may be at, what 5 feet 1?, will look right up into your eyes and radiate a sense of Fearlessness as there’s nothing close that you can dole out that the Mexican Police haven’t already.

The other Northwest team in the Tournament, the Gonzaga Bulldogs — this is a frustrating program in many ways.  They’ve basically achieved their maximum level and aren’t ever going to punch past that ceiling.  A few years ago Sports Illustrated put them on the cover at the beginning of the season as predicted Champions — the magazine showing their gimmicky ways to be sure.  This year’s team kind of stinks.  To wit: they lost to the goddamned Portland State University Vikings.  Who loses to Portland State?  I saw an interview with the coach of Xavier answering a question of how far he thought his team would go by saying, “Well, first thing’s first.  We have Portland State.  Good team.  You know, they beat Gonzaga.”  Really, the coach of Akorn should be saying to his players, “They can be had.  I mean, they lost to Portland State.”  Also, acorns can bop heads of Bulldogs just as easily as bulldogs can bite into acorns, so the mascot contest is fairly equal.  (Oh wait.  Akorn’s mascot isn’t the Acorn?  Well it should be… the Akorn Acorns!)  To be sure, Gonzaga is commonly referenced as “the Zags”, which makes the battle between “Zags” and “Acorns” even more difficult to ascertain, as it becomes a rather abstract battle — does the Acorn win if it zigs more than it zags, and the acorn zags, how does that signify a defeat?

Well, go… um… let’s go to the bottom of the list… Go… GO … a final four made up of the 16 seeds, which are apparently: CHAT, ETSU, RAD, and one of two teams ESPN couldn’t be bothered to deliniate. 
ALL THE WAY, BABY!

If you go to wikipedia and look up Chuck Norris, the final entry in his “Political Views” is

On November 18, 2008, Norris became one of the first members of show business to express support for the California Proposition 8 ban on same-sex marriage, and he heavily criticized the gay community for interfering with the democratic process and the double standard he perceived of criticizing the Mormon Church without criticizing people of color.

This sort of hurts the image of wikipedia as being fully on top of matters — for instance, go to the Sarah Palin entry and you’ll see that her selection as vice-president was announced there before the media cut in to it, and I do recall some controversy or other where wikipedia “had it first”.  And yet, the last major point in the Political Activism career of Chuck Norris has yet to be added.  Just in case you weren’t aware of just how far the Republican Party has strayed from being “The Party of Lincoln”.

For those losing hope, and others wanting to rekindle the patriotic fires of early America, I encourage you to join Fox News’ Glenn Beck, me and millions of people across the country in the live telecast, “We Surround Them,” on Friday afternoon (March 13 at 5 p.m. ET, 4 p.m. CT and 2 p.m. PST). Thousands of cell groups will be united around the country in solidarity over the concerns for our nation. You can host or attend a viewing party by going to Glenn’s website. My wife Gena and I will be hosting one from our Texas ranch, in which we’ve invited many family members, friends and law enforcement to join us. It’s our way of saying “We’re united, we’re tired of the corruption, and we’re not going to take it anymore!” A modest mutation to the old “Rush Rooms” of the ’90s, I guess, the “Beck Bunkers”.
I don’t think adding the “President of Texas” item violates the rule of being careful not to tilt the article toward a bias of “Presentism”.  Interesting, go to conservapedia and we learn a few more facts that you don’t get at wikipedia, though no “Secession from the Union with cell group in waiting, and running for President of Texas” mention.

A ground report in the Ongoing War Against Newton:

Speaking of physics-related skeptical topics, have any of you seen the LaRouchians (aka the LaRouchebags) on campus? They’re a very politically oriented personality cult surrounding Lyndon LaRouche, and I think they prey on college dropouts. Among other things, they believe Newton, who may or may not have even existed, stole all his ideas from Kepler. Newton’s laws are plagiarized from Kepler’s laws. Joe tried showing them a physics problem involving friction, and asked them to solve it using only Kepler’s laws (which only deal with orbital motion). Their reaction was to question his credentials, and then promptly ignore him. They literally turned their back towards him, even while trying to talk to someone next to him.

They better send out reinforcements writing out more placards with the slogan “Newton Was A Fraud and We Can Prove It”.  There is even more evidence that this war is being lost.
……………………………………

A blog post called “La Rouche and God” (Strange title, even for this) runs into what itches the cult seems to provide scratches toward. This is an interesting summation of perception:
Their theory is to go back in time and review the great discoveries, then we could use that now to improve the lives of people on this planet. I agree that it needs improvement. We all hope for a better world.
For the life of me I cannot figure out whether that makes a sense “in theory” as one tool amongst many in Historic Inquiry, but as practiced by the LYM and its predecessor, the NCLC, it devolves into placing great discoveries into one or the other pile of fighters of the Dark Age or perpetrators of the Dark Age — seen in the long list here, and in skipping down to Part III of this blog entry, also in putting Larouche and his disciples as doing the work of Jesus and his Disciples.  xlcer, skimming these things, pops in with his rote response — a suggestion to xlcer: feel free sprinkle in a bit of targetted material such as that historical gem in that standard template — it might prove somewhat more effective.  BUT… good luck to this young Christian woman in offering up the Larouche recruiters your faith in God, I suppose
They invited me to a meeting to discuss these issues and hear more research and speeches on these ideas. I’m going to go. Maybe I can influence some to hope and pray to God for those things. The idea that we can change the world, its great, really. But more than the things that we could achieve, is the idea that all we truly need is faith, hope, and love, mostly love.
— but remember: they don’t believe in love… they believe in agape.  A distinction that would allow for (from evidence put forth in the recently historically reimagined Alexandria Trial, first box here):

The trouble with you people at the national center is you are too soft. You identify too much with people’s concerns and their problems. You have to have only one thing on your mind. That is getting the money. No matter what the person you are talking to says, get the money. If you are talking to a little old lady and she says she is going to lose her house, ignore it. Get the money.

Which reminds me — we can see the imprints of the Historical Revisionism regarding that trial here:

AND, more curiously, see where the most recent “Molly Kronberg Defeated Larouche HBPA in South Dakota” story found its way to.  This is a forum to a 9/11 Truth page, and while it is not terribly surprising to see a Larouche story provided by a Larouchian strolling around the “9/11 Truth”space, it is a bit puzzling for him to pluck out the story about Molly Kronberg.  A story I frankly don’t believe would register much for this spectrum of the political fringe, concerned more with measuring dust mites in frames of the footage of the second tower collapse than in assessing the persecution of this “movement”.  But maybe Jerry Pyenson is working off of auto-pilot.  (When I say it’s not surprising to see Larouche in 9/11 Truth space I point to this from a forum off of an Alex Jones site):

A Larouche Fan Says:
March 10th, 2009 at 6:59 pm
I see people saying alex jones is a shill, cia. etc. But compaired to the corporate media, he atleast tells the truth. Or if he dont tell the truth. its godamn close. and btw jessie did say fudge. He is a little respectable. basically saying they been f’n up. We are adults. You can say the f-word as much as you like. Lyndon Larouche told the truth during the 9-11 attacks LIVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!! You can keep being fooled, or you can just see the truth. I didnt sleep for a month. but such is life. Yes alex is a salesman, BUY GOLD NOW! etc godda make a dollah to hollah.. looken at the history of gold.. I would have to assume him.. correct.. The fed.res needs to go. Viva Revolutiona!
Lyndon Larouche , Ron Paul. = Real Change!!

An odd occurence happened with Mr. Pyenson… he popped into this Ground Report on the Lobbying for the HBPA Resolution, which I guess makes sense as he is a front-line soldier in the Cause:
“You were lied to by the economists,” Pyenson told the council as he warned that, without action, the U.S. would be up against something darker than the wrath of Hitler and Mussolini. He noted that Newark, Paterson, East Orange, Edison and Orange had all passed similar resolutions.

Five speakers down the line, fellow LaRouche supporter Adam Rodriguez addressed the council, railing against the “London-centered banking system” and warning that we were “heading for a new Dark Age.” As Rodriguez began his remarks, Jersey Journal columnist Earl Morgan sighed loudly and ambled across the room to chat with business administrator Brian O’Reilly.

Nary a council member responded in any way to Pyenson’s or Rodriguez’s remarks.

In consideration for Jerry Pyenson, it’s worth pointing to  this – a demonstration of the type of history gymnastics that he’s forced to pull here.
Can we plaster away these past prognoses on a dime?  Yes We Can!
……………………………………….

As well “yes we can” post this Malarky to a long dated American Prospect blog post:

I can’t take anything that Molly/Marielle/Ms. Kronberg says at face value, now that I know she has taken to fraternizing with Dennis King and Chip Berlet. Nothing that LaRouche has said or done, publicly or privately, could be so bad as to justify collaborating with those two soulless ladies of the night.
Posted by: Anonymous | March 4, 2009 5:09 PM

Presumably this latest item spurred by Molly Kronberg writing article to Dennis King’s website, but it’s in the blood — as seen by Leatherstocking at wikipedia here:
Dude, I know that you and Dennis are buds, but …
BUT… it don’t stop there, as “Howie G” asks this new blogger, of interest to those interested in this (which, if you’ve read this far down is probably you):

March 11, 2009 11:59 PM  How much are the friends of Smith Richardson and Mellon Scaife paying you? How does it feel to be a five-and-dime store version of Rush Limbaugh?

Smith Richardson and Mellon Scaife care… why?

In other news, Robert Dreyfuss is being kicked around a bit again (look it up). Larouche expressed outrage that Teriq Aziz was sentenced to prison time, and he expressed approval of a rail-line’s completion.  Also, Webster Tarpley, called out in the org for lying about the future, has his “Obama Deception” film with Alex Jones as the most viewed video at yahoo.  I see no posting at LPAC on Seymour Hersh’s comment about Dick Cheney yet, which leads me to question what kind of ramshackle outfit these guys are running these days — that should have been plastered up with a supposed comment from “American Statesman” PRONTO — I mean, at least with no longer a lag time than they got up the “Dennis King Suicide” piece… What, are the Internal buttressing matters more important than the External Show?

Right now I see the quite justifiable posting and reposting of Jon Stewart’s Inverview / Evisceration of Jim Cramer.  Probably more apt than his 2004 Crossfire appearance where he memorably said that “This show is hurting America” — because despite the basic firing line and stick to the Partisan approach to politics not being the greatest prod to reasoned and nuanced analysis of current events, I’m not entirely sure Crossfire was hurting America.  The encouragement of speculation that runs rampant on a network like CNBC, taking the place of sound investment advice and putting mortgaging long term investment, and Jim Cramer’s double-talk and dual role is more problematic.

Anyway, here.  In 3 parts from Jon Stewart’s site.  Part 1, 5 minutes and 47 seconds.  Part 2, 8 minutes and 24 seconds.  Part 3, a few seconds longer than Part 2.  It is that Howard Beele Moment that Rick Santelli’s Rant wasn’t.

In other news of more narrow interest, I direct you to this week’s Doonsebury storyline.  The matter of Geronimo’s skull popped into the news a few weeks back, somewhere in the middle of Page 11 of the dead newspaper, for about 30 minutes on the Yahoo front page for the mildly wacky news. A bit keyed to these events, the name Ramsey Clark figures into these proceedings — he is Geronimo’s Lawyer — not a good pick on the part of the late, great Apache Chief.  Anyway, the significance comes in that these strips offer more proof that Gary Trudeau must be required by the rules of Skull and Bones to run a series of strips whenever Skull and Bones pokes its way into the national news conciousness.  It’s one of the ways Skull and Bones wield power.

We have reached the half-way point of the magical “First 100 Days” of any Administration — informally called the “First 50 Days” — a key moment to assess how a new Administration is making progress in the First 100 Days.  And if you think that’s ridiculous, google “First 50 Days” and you’ll see that — yes, news sources referred to Obama “marking” his “First 50 Days” with, say, the Education Speech.  Look further around and you’ll see that Fox News pundits made a big hooley hoo in looking at the adminstration’s “First 50 Days”.

Not directly related to the “First 50 Days” but in the same genus, Fred Barnes wrote a fairly tedious little essay.  But, I don’t know that Fred Barnes is capable of writing a not tedious essay.  But even if we give him the allowance to write boiler-plate Republican propaganda, the basic planks for this are just kind of off.  He offers the judgement that Obama’s “don’t follow the gyrations of the stock market” is a gaffe, and plugs into the basic assumptions that overrate that as a measure of the Economy.  And then he names two “Obamaphiles” who have turned on him.  Who are these two “Obamaphiles”?  Well, one of them Jon Stewart is currently engaged in a feud with, the other is the truest exemplier of the “Chattering Class” in column writing, I’d guage just a few pegs less banal than your Maureen Dowd.

Obama hasn’t failed. He’s been in office less than two months. But he is sowing the seeds of failure, both economically and politically. He doesn’t quite own the economy yet, but he does own the stock market. It’s a bet on the future. And so far the stock market has registered a resounding vote of no confidence in Obama’s economic policies. Nor has Obama helped matters with his seeming indifference to the uninterrupted decline in equities since his inauguration.

The budget scared prominent Obamaphiles like David Brooks of the New York Times and Jim Cramer, the boisterous financial broadcaster. Brooks wrote that Obama “is not who we thought he was.” Cramer said Obama is causing “the greatest wealth destruction I’ve seen by a president.” Criticized for his comment by White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, Cramer responded: “If that makes me an enemy of the White House, then call me a general of an army that Obama may not even know exists–tens of millions of people who live in fear of having no money saved when they need it and get poorer by the day.” Moderate Democrats and Republicans were also shaken and said so publicly. The business community, which has tried to appease Obama, is growing fearful.

Here’s the point: These are the people who drive centrist opinion. And the key to building a center-right coalition is drawing them away from Obama. The right is already in full anti-Obama mode. But attracting centrists and independents is something Republicans can’t pull off on their own. Now they are getting help.

And then his take on how the White House played Rush Limbaugh, similarly … off-ish.

Democratic anxiety over the possibility of losing centrists–what there is of it–was reflected in the White House campaign to identify talk show superstar Rush Limbaugh as the leader of the Republican party. He’s not. Parties in the minority seldom have leaders except in parliamentary systems. But Limbaugh, though he may not appeal to centrists, is important. He and his followers are an indispensable part of an effective center-right coalition–a simple fact of political life that appears to have been lost on Republican snobs who would ostracize Limbaugh.

The second half of this paragraph may or may be true, but the first sentence — about this egging on from the Obama Administration to fill the current void of the opposition party with Rush Limbaugh is simply laughable.  But going back to the “Conventional Wisdom” Center — expressed by Barnes with Brooks and… Cramer … and, while I can offer a partial defense of Cramer’s very bad record if pressed (but only a partial), if Cramer is indeed Bullish on Obama, that appears to mean that it is time for you to BUY your Obama.   Fred Barnes is missing something key here:

CNBC’s audience is not a demographic cross section of America. If it was a cross section, the network wouldn’t make any money; CNBC attracts advertisers not with the size of its audience but with its maleness and its affluence. The network gets about a quarter million viewers a day, a tiny fraction of the U.S. population, but those viewers have a median household net worth of more than $1.2 million. Still, the financial pundits flatter viewers into thinking, as Rick Santelli put it during his famous trading floor rant, that they are “a pretty good statistical cross-section of America.” For these guys, investors are America. Jim Cramer asked at one point, of the Obama administration, “Who do they think owns stocks?” As if the obvious answer is, “Everybody!” Obama, Cramer complained, “seemed proud that he ignored the [market] averages, as if they’re some sort of distraction, and not a precursor of the economy.”
The next sentence explains better the problem with the infatuation with the Stock Market than I’d be able to formulate:
I’m not going to argue that the Dow Jones is irrelevant to the economy, but the fundamental problem of the bubble years was that the Dow Jones was growing and our actual assets were not. We weren’t really getting richer. We were just pretending to get richer.
The matter of the stock market is that the problem arises when it does not correlate to reality.  Hence its sour performance as of late is better than its previous — well, still tepid performance, for that reason.

While the Republican Fred Barnes fixates on supposed “opinion setters” of the Oracle that is Jim Cramer and the wonderer of the Simple People out of his Coastal climate David Brooks, Howard Fineman shows us the larger flickering from his fellow Chattering Classers:

Luckily for Obama, the public still likes and trusts him, at least judging by the latest polls, including NEWSWEEK‘s.But, in ways both large and small, what’s left of the American establishment is taking his measure and, with surprising swiftness, they are finding him lacking.

They have some reasons to be concerned. I trace them to a central trait of the president’s character: he’s not really an in-your-face guy. By recent standards—and that includes Bill Clinton as well as George Bush—Obama for the most part is seeking to govern from the left, looking to solidify and rely on his own party more than woo Republicans. And yet he is by temperament judicious, even judicial. He’d have made a fine judge. But we don’t need a judge. We need a blunt-spoken coach.

Contradictorily with the “seeking to govern from the left and not woo Republican” line (largely a falsehood, not entirely as the Limbaugh fiasco shows, but give me a break) — a list of items, which he prefaces by saying is “contradictory”.  This is a good sign of a complicated picture, and in these terms simply a matter that Obama Just Can’t Win.  I’m forced to say that Howard Fineman’s column is a bit of chattering nittery.

Incidentally, a useful response to a common sentiment as of late, since your Howard Fineman brought it up:

That is what a “Greatest Fiscal Crisis Since the Great Depression, but Nowhere near as Dire — probably not worth the comparison in the grand scheme of things” looks like.