In that genre of “Boring Supermarket Check-out Stories” I like to blog occasionally (though actually in an aisle):

Man to woman:  “Didn’t we just buy kitty litter?”

My thought:  “Your cat poops a lot.  Deal with it.”
Though, I recognize that the comment is basically proxy for, “I hate that cat.  Let’s get rid of it.”

“You don’t even know it.  Because you’ve been taken off the Soul Standard.  Just like Nixon took us off the Gold Standard.  You’ve been taken off the Soul Standard.”

And the word “Soul” is dragged out.  This was the final few sentences of one hour of that wacky radio talk show host, Michael “Savage”, and the entirety of the portion of his show I heard last night.  Savage being probably the most extreme of these hosts, until Glen Beck somehow managed to roll past him.

But my thought here was, “That was weird.”  Thank you Fredrich Nietzsche, you’ve all been great!  Like Nixon took us off the Gold Standard, we’ve been taken off the Soul Standard.  In context I’m pretty sure it meant no more and no less than that.

Okay.  So we have this story.

LONDON (Reuters) – Children who watch television for more than two hours a day have twice the risk of developing asthma, British researchers reported Tuesday.

Asthma affects more than 300 million people worldwide and is the most common children‘s chronic illness. Symptoms include wheezing, shortness of breath, coughing and chest tightness.

A study published in the journal Thorax may help link asthma, estimated to account for one in 250 deaths globally each year, to obesity and lack of exercise, experts said.

“There has been a recent suggestion that breathing patterns associated with sedentary behavior could lead to developmental changes in the lungs and wheezing illnesses in children,” Andrea Sherriff of the University of Glasgow and colleagues wrote.

All good and well — the dangers of television on the health of children.  But I have to wonder about the photograph, which exposes another problem with television not covered in the article.

The file footage is pretty old.  That character has long since been killed to death by Israelis, with his cousin — a Bee — swooping in to promise to avenge the Mickey character’s Death at the hands of the Israeli Land-Stealers — that is, unless the Bee has served the noble pursuit of Suicide Bombing — I admit to not being a regular viewer of this Hamas Children’s Program.

Honestly, the idea that the kid pictured might get one of any type of physical malady from too much television is the least of my concern in assessing the World Picture.  And I’m thinking there had to have been a better photograph available for Yahoo and the AP to use here.

I see this blog post regarding Sam Adams at “Real Oregon Reality”, a blog I am aware of simply because I’m linked there (admittedly a good way of making me aware of a blog).

I will make this one small comment which I can’t really reiterate enough.  I hear and see commentary from, say for instance KPAM’s Victoria Taft, that the Sam Adams situation is “turning Portland into a laughing-stock”.  This is an absurd statement.  There is no doubt in my mind that national name identification for Sam Adams is a rounding error, and Portland’s national identity remains essentially framed as a smaller version of Seattle — it rains a lot and studies show we’re depressed.

At any rate, Randy Leonard’s opinion of Adams has changed since that video… which, for some reason, the oh-so-eminant Portland blogging authority Jack Bog has ust discovered.  I personally don’t have too much use for “Candidates Gone Wild”, which seems to do some harm and some good but probably a bit more good than harm on the political process, but I’m a bit humorless in some matters.

In the latest wikipedia editing wars, we have a couple of new Larouche sock puppets.  Keinehexan, who I guess is actually an old sock puppet who had to add an “n”, and who apparently has a desire to violate some wikipedia protocol and good manners:

Do not post what you believe to be a real name of a Wikipedia editor who uses a pseudonym. If you do so again your account may be blocked.   Will Beback  talk  02:32, 5 March 2009 (UTC)

No, I don’t know the back-story here.  As a rule the identities of the Larouchian sock puppets are of some interest to me (though not so much names as role in the org) because it is a coordinated propaganda offensive.  The identities of wikipedia editors, by dent of being editors have earned their chops and also proven them into that relatively insane and uber-dedicated “Wiki Core”.

The current debate at wikipedia seen here show the attempt to slice the names “Jeremiah Duggan” and “Ken Kronberg” out of the article on “Lyndon Larouche”, in this case to sideline them to “Larouche Movement” — where, presumably, the Larouche Movement would swamp them with, for instance, the current on Russian television and Italian Parliament non-victories.  It appears they desire to do away with Kronberg in its entirety:

Color Me Mauve:  The other thing I would mention, having looked over the two articles (Duggan and Kronberg,) is that the Kronberg case got almost no press coverage, only a couple of minor papers

I am actually a little bit surprised that I haven’t seen two or three contrarian-wise eulogies to Paul Harvey — not fuzzy and warm memories but with some acid commentary that Paul Harvey was a bit of a cancer on our national discourse.

I’m pretty sure you could line up comments through the years that if spoken by a different figure would have, say, media matters compiling a long almost daily list.  Paul Harvey wasn’t apolitical, but he was non or a-partisan, and attach that with his non-threatening homesy delivery and his having long pre-dated the “Rise of Conservative Talk Radio” with Rush, and he pretty well flew under the radar for your “Liberal Watch Dog”s.  Also, his politics was basically regarded as having a sort of “Get off My Lawn!”  inconsequential tone.  So, looking at Media Matters, your “Paul Harvey” list seems to start and stop here.

This is why over the past few years, it has been a bit jarring to see anytime liberal blogosphere grabbed a hold of some Paul Harvey comments, in the same way they do on a more regular basis for Bill O’Reilly or Rush Limbaugh.  It’s happened a few times, and my sense is that these moments have added up and are the reason that Thom Hartmann says that “Paul Harvey became increasingly right-wing in the last five/ten/fifteen years” — a statement that is patently false and seems based on that brief compilation of material against a warm and fuzzy understanding of the man.  Reading “The Farther Shores of Politics”, published in 1968, I note that Paul Harvey’s commentary seemed to provide some easy material to fill out various long-gone publications which were full of anti-communism hysteria and John Birchite anti-fluoridation campaign material.  (And he popped into Reader’s Digests — a magazine that actually was probably roughly the equivalent of a a Paul Harvey News Hour.)  The bit of commentary (plucked from the radio, I’m thinking) was of that type of “Good old common sensical” diatribe against evils of taxes or trade unions and that sort of thing.

There is this Paul Harvey affectation that I like and that I have tucked away for use in conversing:  the phrase “For what it is worth.”  But the thing about “for what it is worth” is that whenever Paul Harvey (or his son) used it, what followed was almost certainly a lie or untruth, an urban legend tailor-made from and for the biases of the parochial-minded elder-tilting listenership.  When I referenced Paul Harvey as being a name inserted into email chain messages a few days’ ago, it occured to me that Paul Harvey is actually a pre-Internet pioneer of the Email Chain Message.  Fact checking that type of thing would be a pain for those media-matters types, so I guess that is just as well.  FAIR picked up a few, as well noted this bit of commentary.  (And “This bit of commentary” probably was more plentiful than anyone would care to note.)   The response at the end of the first FAIR link shows the precariousness of that situation:  “Paul Harvey don’t care.”

Well, as they say, GOOD DAY!

While the whole of the chattering classes and the whole of the blogging bloviaters disseminate through the mess of Rush Limbaugh versus Michael Steele, Michael Steele asserting that he is the de-factor leader of the Republican Party and then back-tracking to grovel at Rush Limbaugh…

… and if I may put in what might be an unlikely defense of Rush Limabugh in terms of the quotation that’s not the heart of the controversy but at the bottom of the controversy — “I hope he fails“  — I don’t particularly see anything wrong with it and don’t want to be in the position of thinking a policy goal from a policy maker is doomed and asked “What?  Are you rooting for failure?”  (See Iraq War.)
And opinion #2 in that spat:  Michael Steele should have provided a more politically-crafted and weasley non-answer.

… but while everyone’s dealing with that one, this weekend’s New York Times Magazine article on another concurrent “leader” of a Republican Party is being unfairly sidelined.  The Republican Party is lead at once by Rush Limbaugh, certainly, Michael Steele is somewhere in the Top 20, but up there too?  Newt Gingrich is Back, Baby!  I have to wonder about the gradiosity of this NY Times Magazine writer:

In unmarked office suites scattered across separate floors, some 35 employees divide their duties among a consulting group, two insurgent policy centers, a documentary-film production company and a public-relations firm with only one client. That client would be the man who sits atop this emerging center of opposition, the once-defeated revolutionary who, like Che or Tito, is best known by a single name: Newt.

Purple Prose aside, NEWT is here cast the “Idea Man” for the party, who “delivers 10 ideas in an hour” to all the Republicans who contact him.  And what Ideas they are!

There’s not really any unified, easily distillable argument in these and other proposals, no ideology that might be charted on a continuum and labeled accordingly. Rather, the new-model Newt seems to be pursuing a ruthlessly responsive, almost-wikified brand of politics. His goal is to turn the Republicans into what he calls a “party of the American people” by linking disparate solutions whose only real relationship to one another is that they demonstrate, in surveys, what he calls “tripartisan” appeal — the broad support of Republicans, Democrats and independents. Gingrich told me he has identified about 100 ideas and positions that command anywhere from 62 percent to 93 percent support among such a cross-section of voters: giving out tax credits for installing alternative heating sources in your home (90 percent); awarding cash prizes to anyone who invents a car that gets 100 miles to the gallon (77 percent); keeping God in the Pledge of Allegiance (88 percent). Gingrich’s vision — much more Clintonian than Reaganite — is to use targeted initiatives to create a kind of mechanized compatibility with the masses.

Tax Credits to encourage alternative energy is all good and well; when John McCain proposed the prize idea it was rightly derided as a gimmick, and as much as I fear the symbolic ventures into Culture Wars wedging up the electorate I do have to wonder about the saliency of Keeping God in the Pledge of Allegience.  But I guess these are #1s through #3s for the next “Contract for America”.  Item #4 for this next “Contract America” is getting more airplanes in the sky at any given moment.:

At our first meeting in November, Gingrich laid out for me his latest preoccupation, which, surprisingly, had nothing to do with stimulus or banking. “One of the projects I’m going to launch — we don’t have a name for it yet — is an air-traffic modernization project,” Gingrich told me excitedly. “You can do a space-based air-traffic-control system with half the current number of air-traffic controllers, increase the amount of air traffic in the northeast by 40 percent, allow point-to-point flights without the controllers having to have highways in the sky, and reduce the amount of aviation fuel by 10 percent. So it’s better for the environment, better for the economy. You have far fewer delays in New York, and by the way, you cut the number of unionized air-traffic controllers by 7,000.
“Our thematic is going to be — you’re going to love this — that if you have an air-traffic delay that’s not caused by weather, take the extra time at the airport and call your two senators and your congressman and demand they pass the modernization act,” Gingrich enthused. “Now, notice what I’m doing,” he said, leaning back and smiling. “I’m offering you a better value.”

Skip forward to items of comparison for the Democrats “In the Wilderness”:

I SPENT A LOT OF TIME reporting on the world of progressive politics after the 2004 election, and it’s hard to miss the nearly perfect symmetry between that Democratic moment and the one Republicans find themselves confronting today. Like Democrats after John Kerry’s defeat, Republicans now whine about their failed strategists or their flawed candidate or a media that refuses to expose the obvious deficiency of their opponents. The Democratic establishment in 2005 was under assault from online activists who demanded that the party modernize its message and appeal to voters in all 50 states; now conservative blogs like The Next Right and The New Majority are making the exact same argument daily. Wealthy Democrats got behind a policy group called the Center for American Progress because, they said, the left had no intellectual or rapid response “infrastructure” to compete with the likes of Heritage and Cato. It’s almost comical, then, to hear senior Republicans complain now that none of their policy groups have the capacity to compete with a liberal behemoth like the Center for American Progress.

Differences abound, of course.  There might have been a spurt of this or that Democrat in this or that Conservative district being demaned to say whether they agree with Michael Moore, and there was a Senate resolution passed about moveon,org.

I’m not going to take the concluding statements on Newt Gingirch’s Presidential ambitions too seriously — and Gingrich seems to know himself that even as he desires it he’s unlikely to get there:    — —- —- “I think I’m closer to Benjamin Franklin than to George Washington,” Gingrich told me. “I’m a contributor to my country and to my times. If it turns out that there’s a moment when it makes sense to run, then I’ll run. But if I end up never being able to run, then it won’t devastate me.” —- —- —-  Mitt Romney is sort of the defacto default Presidential Candidate, I guess the key figure — along with Sarah Palin – for what’s tended to be called the “Presidential Wing” of a political party, prepping for 2012.  Then he becomes, I guess, the Leader of the Party.  But for the moment… Newt and Rush.

(Note:  Title came from David Letterman in an interview with Katie Couric that riffed on Rush Limbaugh.  Google it.)

Have this dollar bill right now.  Someone stamped a quotation directed at George Washington so that Washington is saying, “I Grew Hemp.”  Placed over the Federal Reserve seal is an image of the Hemp plant, and the word “NOW!”

So someone stamped on all of their dollar bills a president saying “I Grew Hemp” and a stamped image of the Weed, before putting it back into the money stream by purchasing, um… maybe a half dozen Sugared Cereals?

It has convinced me.  I demand that all our currency be printed on Hemp.  NOW!

I wondered if wikipedia was keeping a break-neck pace with the developments of the 2010 Kentucky US Senate race — tied with the situation in Illinois as most dysfunctional item of political theater.

The answer has gone from no to yes.  The opening states the situation in a broad outline —

Incumbent senator Jim Bunning was re-elected with 51% of the vote in 2004. He announced his intention to run again, and says he will need to raise $10 million for his reelection.^[1] In 2010, Bunning will be 79 years old. National Republican Senatorial Committee chairman John Cornyn is pressuring Bunning to retire due to fears he could lose a reelection bid.^[2] Despite this, Bunning has reiterated that he is running for reelection.[3]

 some more details are found within the “Possible Candidates” section:

Kentucky State Senate President David Williams is likely to run for the seat whether or not Bunning does,^[6] as he is being actively recruited by the NRSC.^[7] This has resulted in a threat from Bunning to sue the NRSC and any potential Republican challengers,^[8][9] and a threat to resign, which would allow Democratic Governor Steve Beshear to appoint his replacement.[10]

A bit more background on why Jim Bunning is getting bum-rushed by his party: He’s Senile, and was increasingly erratic in that 2004 bid where he barely edged out Generic Unknown Democrat off of the coat-tails of a National Presidential campaign.

But the other two “Possible Candidates” are pretty interesting.  Tim Couch.  Is Kentucky ready to trade in a Hall of Fame Baseball Player for a failed NFL Quarterback?  The other “Possible Candidate”?

Apparently Ron Paul’s son lives in Kentucky.  And, like father like son, looks to be considering a career in politics (though only if Bunning doesn’t run).  I’m sure that would bring out the Ron Paul Republican Supporters in droves.  Ron Paul’s son’s name?

Rand Paul.
Rand Paul.
I said Ron Paul (and wife) named their son “Rand Paul.”

That’s a two-fer there.  Not only did Ron Paul name his son something that approximated his own name but he also put in the name of one of his ideological idols — Ayn Rand.

Is Rand Paul’s younger brother John Galt Ron?  Did Rand Paul’s conception take place with the Rush “2112” concept album blaring in the background, happening sometime in the seventh minute of hte opening clatter in “The Temples of Syrinx”, just before the belting out out of “We are the priests!  Of the Temples!  Of Syrinx!”

No, really.  Ron Paul named his son Rand Paul.

Sheesh.

In other news of the parties building up for the 2010 Senate campaign, historic Jeopardy conteststant Ken Jennings responds to having his name inserted into a poll.

Apparently Utah is such a red state that all you have to do there is not register as a Republican (I’m pretty sure I declared no party affiliation last time I registered there) and national polls will start running your name up the flagpole. I don’t even live in the state anymore and I’m still the second-most attractive candidate! […]

I don’t know if Kos knows this, but it is true that I fielded some phone calls from Senate party leaders in 2005, wondering if I’d want to run for Orrin Hatch’s seat. Why not? You were on a game show! I thought this was a pretty sad sign for American democracy, but did think it would be funny if I ran. I could announce, not on Larry King or Meet the Press, but on Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader? I’d hate campaigning, but just try to stump me with questions about world capitals or the last books I read, Katie Couric!

I honestly can’t tell if Kennings is kidding about being contacted, but it wouldn’t be entirely surprising.  It appears that there are three Democrats in the state of Utah:  Jim Matheson, former Salt Lake mayor Rocky Anderson, and this guy Pete Ashdown.  Matheson is one of the more conservative congressional Democrats, and I imagine the only way some less conservative Democrat would be sent to Washington is if the electoral map were drawn to have a district encircle Salt Lake City instead of how the Republicans in the state have crafted it for their advantage of slicing the city evenly.  Hence Rocky Anderson ended with his stint at Mayor, and that’s as far as he is going.  Pete Ashdown’s campaign made the cover of Wired and was endorsed by boing boing, but for some reason that great “Boing Boing” endorsement was not enough to persuade the state of Utah to push aside Orrin Hatch.  At any rate, Ashdown is coming off of a bruising imaginary governor’s race :

— so there’s nowhere else to turn.