“The paranoid spokeman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms — he traffics in the birth and deaths of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human value.”  — Richard Hofstadter.

“I go further than you do, for I question whether the Dark Ages in Western Europe from the fifth to thirteenth centuries were really as dark as the usual historian paints them.  It might be worthwhile to compare not paintings and arhitecture or literature of the Europe of the seventh century with the Europe of the eleventh century but to compare rather the state of civilization of the mass of the inhabitants of these far seperated ages.  […]  Another thought for you — the only “civilizations” which have really ended have been isolated islands like Yucatan and the Incas.  They, I fear perished without transmitting much of their gain to any other part of the world.” — Franklin D Roosevelt, letter to Theodore Dreiser, 10-5-39
…………………………………..

“Internal document usually means something which Chip Berlet or Dennis King claim that they have obtained through clandestine means and which cannot be verified.” — Leatherstocking, on this wikipedia page.

Leatherstocking knows better than that, of course.  After all, “Revenire” stated so naw justin, i don’t mind if you read/scan LPAC/”the” briefing/etc… you’re a nice enough person and just doing your thing so keep at it. (2/25/09)
Then there’s:
As far as I’m concerned, “conflict of elites” and “psychosexual political organizing” are esoterica and won’t be missed. The “economics” section is different;
Har de freaking har.
Really, I think this wikipedia entry should be shortened to the two sentence “Larouche views himself as a world historical person, and has proceeded on the basis of ensuring that someone somewhere believe it along with him.  He has a long line of opposition to this claim, mostly expressed with the question “Who?”.”  (An observation made right here   If I must, the wikipedia article may be expanded beyond that — but the central problem is always, as expressed by these conflicting Will Beback statements:

“Confidence in the dialog”? How do you expect me to have any confidence in the dialog when at least 15 sock puppet accounts of a single user have made 432 edits to this talk page? After that much deception it’s hard to have confidence in a dialog. This page is a monument to mendacity.  AND:
“in the interest of compromise“.

Which ensures that the larouche pages are the poster children for the limitations of wikipedia, as voiced recently by a “Cas70″ with:
I’ve always told my students not to trust everything they read on Wikipedia, and it seems I’ll have a cautionary tale from this experience to reinforce that warning. […]   To call LaRouche an econimist would be tantamount to calling a little child playing with a stethoscope a doctor just because he imagines he is one.

Though how can he describe this all as “Jabble-Wockey” when confronted with this opinion:
I was just totally mesmerized by it. I had never met anyone who spoke so eloquently as Mr. LaRouche.
……………………………….

The big question for Ryan James here:

Now usually any citation of Mr. LaRouche instantly puts me off the subject matter, as I am sure it does with you, for the reason that Mr. LaRouche and his followers have a worldview that tends to go down well with a certain amount of Kool-Aid. However, I bring this information to light so that readers can decide for themselves.

So why bother?   The given answer to that question  is:

While the report does not name any sources, other than party officials, it would still be in the interest of Gov. Beebe and Sen. Lincoln to disavow this report and deny that the White House is pressuring the Governor’s Office to “crackdown” on Mrs. Lincoln, even in the face of the White House and Democratic National Committee’s decision to run television advertisements against the senator in order to pressure her to vote for Obamacare.

There’s, I suppose, a formula being worked here for LPAC.  Obama is engaging in nothing more than standard politicking –truth be told, nowhere near as strong-arming as your Lyndon Johnson engaged in — if he weren’t putting pressure on Senator Lincoln, he’d be guilty of a sort of Political Malpractice.  That is about the sum total of the “nugget of truth” in this article — perverted beyond reasonable recognition by the Cult.  So from this we jump to:

But LaRouche, a student of both history and psychology, understood that someone suffering from an acute Narcissistic Disorder, has to be confronted—repeatedly, and with ever-growing candor—if he is to ever break free of the syndrome and return to the world of reality.
The man knows from Narcissstic Disorders, don’t he?

Slightly more than 100 days have passed, since LaRouche delivered his clinical diagnosis, that President Barack Obama suffers from acute malignant self-love. In the intervening period, the evidence of the President’s disorder has become so transparent that one prominent Washington, D.C. Democrat confided that the joke circulating around Capitol Hill and at Democratic National Committee headquarters is: President Obama awoke one morning, looked in the mirror and saw that his nose was bleeding. Furious at what he saw, he ordered aides to immediately bring him a new mirror!

Attention LYM members and assorted Baby Boomers: Who and where are these people that reach back to this reference to illuminate, casually at that, contemporary events?

Senior Democrats, speaking on condition of anonymity, have told EIR that they are astounded at the behavior of the President and his Oval Office aides. “They see the world as a zero-sum game,” one official commented.
Again. It is highly unlikely that anyone speaks in that particular idiom on capital hill.  Try again next time.  Or don’t — it serves its internal purpose, as well its middling external “now, Larouche is a nut, but –” purpose.  The other game is the defense of Ethics-challenged House members. (Conyers is a new figure to pop into such a list, but googling “Conyers” and “ethics”, I see a conservative group has filed a complaint.  Hm.  To be an elected official is to have that done.)

Some of the people on Emanuel’s Congressional hit list, among them Representatives with the greatest seniority, and the strongest “FDR Democrat” credentials, have surfaced as recent targets of relentless FBI investigation and a barrage of media leaks. Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), Chairman of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee; Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY), Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, perhaps the most powerful body in the House, responsible for all tax legislation; and Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, who has championed a single-payer universal health insurance plan, that was instantly deep-sixed by the President […].

Well, here Larouche fineses his way to a “left-plank” position*.  The standard liberal position being “Single payer is preferable, but at the very least a public option,” and the former is cut off the table from the outset due to the power of the Insurance industry.  The Larouche position apparently is, as suggested here (but probably if spelled out elsewhere not so much), “Single Payer, yes, and Obama’s public option is the Nazi program of genocide.”  The double-speak is that Larouche is dropping health insurance for his organization.

This morning Morrison & Foerster, a California law firm whose employees contributed heavily to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, is seeking to stop organizers associated with LaRouche Political Action Committee from campaigning against the President’s health care policy at Los Angeles area shopping centers. In legal papers filed in the Superior Court in Los Angeles, the firm specifically complains about posters and literature that document that Obama’s health care policies are identical to those personally adopted by Adoph Hitler in 1939.
A spokesman for LaRouche PAC stated. “This is exactly the way the Nazi’s behaved against those who resisted Hitler’s policy of eliminating lives deemed ‘not worthy to be lived. ‘ This is the United States of America 2009, not Nazi Germany 1939. Obama’s loyalists won’t stop LaRouche from exposing their Hitler-like plans.”

Exactly like the Nazis, this… this… attempt to stop the org from setting up card tables in front of various businesses.

I await to see how this q and a session is written up in LPAC, to see the fun-house mirrors in action:
Then we got another question from the LaRouche crew, tying the Holocaust to with government-run health care. The panelists were abruptly dismissive of the question, and good for them. (The weird thing, is the LaRouche person felt like she was helping them – like they were all on the same side.)

Well, I suppose this is a more mainstream cause than the continued grasps at the 9/11 Truth movement.  The comments suggest some general problematics:

Again, a Mossad backed mis-information campaign to move the attention away from the Israel-Mossad-9/11 link. Half-truths implicating the wrong people to steer the general public away from the real perpetrators. 
AND
I could only view two of the YouTube links before I got bored.
These people are seemingly more interested in How Larouche Got It Right than in formulating any coherent approach to the subject matter.  […]
The whole thing (or the two links that I saw before giving up) was pretty weird, and oddly amateurish. Mind you, who listens to Larouche folks anyway? …………………………………..
Howie G confuses me while stepping into the old “Fema camps” junkyard, and then returning to — I guess this?
Howie G:  Is this a typo:  that went on after the election of Jimmy Carter, in the December 1975 time period — or is the phrase “time period” supposed to be a weasel word?  (Suggested to a group tending to be hung up over a misplaced “Tri-lateral Commission“.)
………………………….

Mesmerizing power of Jeffrey Steinberg!!!
(Now, it’s true that from the libertarian perspective, Obama is fairly similar to Bush. It’s likewise true that, from the perspective of a die-hard Lyndon LaRouche supporter, Obama and Bush are also peas-in-a-pod, both ignoring LaRouche’s prophecies about the gold standard and the British monarchy and the like.) Jonathan Chait

Ah… but Obama can be fixed.  If he just realizes his Narcisstic Problem.  And then realizes the inherent “Institution of the Presidency”.  Which means following the road of the FDR — Clinton — Larouche Democrats!
That out is laid at the end of that “Narcisstic article”.  Clever game, they continue playing.

Okay. 
It’s been a while since I’ve heard anything about Lyndon LaRouche. Maybe since the eighties? I’m not sure.
If I remember correctly he’s a darling of the lunatic right-wing fringe. I’m dying to hear more about the “Anglo-Dutch financial oligarchy.” I wonder if it’s anything like the International Jewish Conspiracy to take over the world.
Oh, not particularly the “darling” of anyone  — “right – wing fringe” or otherwise.  I think this sort of popular-conception is where some former members get annoyed by the “experts”.
Michael R. Zaeske has been active in the LaRouche movement for the past 13 years. He and his wife live in Oshtemo Township with their three dogs.
I’m tempted to post a rather mean-spirited allustion to cult policy, but I can let it go.  Cryptically, I’ll just say that I trust they’ve walked their dogs today.

Hillary Clinton:  What we’ve seen is this constant demand for attention, and maybe it’s the mother in me or the experience that I’ve had with small children and unruly teenagers and people who are demanding attention. Don’t give it to them. They don’t deserve it. 

Kim Jong Il, or rather North Korea’s foreign minister (and somehow I don’t feel guilty about personalizing a dictatorial government like that), from right here:  We cannot but regard Mrs. Clinton as a funny lady as she likes to utter such rhetoric, unaware of the elementary etiquette in the international community. Sometimes she looks like a primary schoolgirl and sometimes a pensioner going shopping.

This exchange is probably about as insignificant in the grand course of things as the recent Ron Paul — Sarah Palin flap.  Not only that, but it appears that the comedic gist of it is more or less over — at least on Hillary Clinton’s end.  Which may mean, depending on how you grade these things, that Kim Jong Il “won”.  After all:

All the people can perform astonishing miracles and feats when they wage a high-pitched drive, fully determined to demonstrate once again the spirit of heroic Korea before the enemies by bringing about a great surge on all fronts of socialist construction.
Rodong Sinmun Thursday observes this in a signed article.

How can we ever hope to compete with that?

What is behind the Birther Movement?

Racism.  Mixed with Nativism.  Two different impulses, though perhaps the difference between the definition of the two words is a distinction without a difference.  But Barack Obama is Black., and comes from off the mainland.  And his father is from Kenya, and he extolls those roots.

A few days back, I heard a caller to a conservative talk radio show — the same sort of woman as the “I Want My country Back” lady who made famous a town-hall meeting with Mike Castle — made this concrete.  The radio show was, um, the Sunday morning I should have the radio on to NPR and “This American Life” but for some reason have it on here instead  Kramer and Abrams — which actually is, to be fair, a conservative and a quasi-liberal show with a a conservative listener and caller base…

The woman went off on Sonia Sotomayer, and demanded to know why they were not covering the fact that Sotomayor was an illegal immigrant who didn’t really have a Harvard Law Degree.  And then she asked why they weren’t covering Obama’s Birth Certificate controversy.  The two items go hand in hand, and are the product of the same premise, inextricably linked.

The best lines of comparison for the Democratic side on this fringe into mainstream movement are the “Stolen Elections”, (in particular 2004 and Ohio; I say that by way of lending my own credence to Florida and 2000), and the 9/11 Truth Movement — which is to say, Democrats and Liberals holding town-hall meetings uncomfortably squirm with audiences peppering them on questions over those matters.   Ohio 2004 can be explained by Florida 2000, directly.  9/11 Truth is a tad more complicated, but it comes in part from the manner people concoct fanciful conspiracies due to the fanciful conspiracies that actually exist, the less than stellar motives of people and institutions in power, and their not wholly democratic nature.

My point is “9/11 Truth” is a marginally more sympathetic cause than the “Birther’s”, because their underlying assumptions have more grains of truth than the “Birthers”.  The Birthers come from a simple distruct of black (and, as that radio talk show caller showed, brown) people.

To what degree does the Republican Party have a “Birther” Problem?  They have more of one than they might be willing to admit.  We have seen a rise in legitimizers of this “movement”.  There is, by dent of a large number of co-sponsors to a presidents must show birth certificate bill, a Birther Caucus in the House of Representatives — I suppose every constituency needs to be fed.  Rush Limbaugh has poked one step beyond his previous joke (which I defended on this blog) to a statement.  (And why not?  He cites World Net Daily with all seriousness, which is a source that is right there in “Birther Land”).  The “Fox Nation” website, a strange blunter version of Fox News, has a forum for discussion of Obama’s birth certificate.  And there are several conservative radio hosts, if you flick your am dial back and forth, who discuss this seriously.
As well Lou Dobbs.

The opinion journals should take the matter head on.  As a means of comparison, Eric Alterman for the Nation wrote an item a few years ago where he addressed the groups of 9/11 Truthers who always poked that question in his book and speaking tours.  This inevitably makes him a “Gate-keeper” for the conspiratorialists, and that is the point.   (As well Markos Moulitsas who banned that thing from his blog).  National Review gives us this, from David Horowitz (after some mild “raising of the issue” from Jim Geraghty).  I think we can say that “Birth Certificate Madness” is more extricably tied with the Republicans than 9/11 Truth is for the Democrats — so I suppose a brusk and regular mocking in the bullet-points section of those magazines might serve them well.

It is worth noting the blow to the “Military Industrial Congressional Complex”, as evinced in the vote to scrap the F-22 bomber.  And it’s worth noting the vote break down.

58 yes.  40 nays.  And voting nay — ie: for Defense Contractors:

The floor leaders of the faction in favor of more F-22s were Sens. Saxby Chambliss, a Republican from Georgia, where the F-22 is assembled, and Chris Dodd, a Democrat from Connecticut, where parts of the plane are built. Joining this strange couple were such erstwhile doves as Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein of California, which also hosts several F-22 contractors.

And returning to service, rushing off his hospital bed, a man who really, really, really likes Pork:

Senator Robert C. Byrd returned to Capitol Hill after a two-month absence to vote against stripping financing for the F-22 from the defense spending bill. […]
The senator said in a statement that it was “wonderful to be back in the august body where I have served for more than 50 years, and to see all my colleagues who have been so supportive of me during my recent hospitalization.”
The West Virginia Senator, 91, was hospitalized May 15 with an infection and developed a staph infection in the hospital. He was released six weeks later. Mr. Byrd last voted on May 13.
After the vote, the senator was wheeled away and helped into a mini-van. His office said he is expected to “ease back into” his role as senator, and plans to ensure he is well for votes on the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor, health care legislation, and climate change legislation.

Good to see the old man’s got his priorities right.

The voting map I want to see relates to the standard Military Contractor tactic:

The Air Force shrewdly spread the plane’s contracts to firms in 46 states, thus giving a solid majority of senators—and a lot of House members, too—a financial (and, therefore, electoral) stake in the program’s survival.

With that, it’s pretty much a given that the two Oregon Senators voted “yea”, and the two Washington Senators voted “nay”.  Oregon lags at the end, 50th, of this “Military Industrial Complex” scheme– hence, Wayne Morse of the two votes against the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, and Mark Hatfield — and probably one of the four states that had nothing whatsoever to do with the production of this “weapons system“.   The state of Washington is the province of Boeing, and the spirt of Harry “Scoop” Jackson.

The question comes with how strongly each state was tied to the contracts.  Is this a case where Connectict and Georgia in particular were strapped to this project, along with California and (I’d guess) Washington, and the other 42 states’ ties to the vote drift down a tad?

a Missouri, car dealer, is offering a voucher for a free AK-47 for every pick-up truck bought in August.
Auto sales have been absolutely clobbered–down 28% year over year–so the government, dealers, and auto makers are coming up with all sorts of inventive ways to attract business.
Mark Muller, owner of [look it up yourownself], said the program builds on an earlier offer where customers had a choice between a $250 gas voucher or a gun voucher of the same value. An AK-47 can cost twice as much. Muller calls the initial deal an overwhelming success. He also says it generates a lot of publicity and really angers “liberals.”

“Builds on an earlier offer”?  So we have an escalation going on here?

Supposing that the state of Iran has designs on a nuclear weapons program, they should go ahead and scrap it.  In a few of years, they’ll be able to pick up a nuclear missile with purchase of a pick-up truck.

In other culture war news, there’s this:

For the second consecutive weekend, about 100 people gathered to stage a “kiss-in” to protest the treatment of two gay men cited for trespassing July 9 after they shared a kiss on the plaza owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Both gay and straight couples exchanged kisses during the protest.
Demonstrators were greeted at the south entrance by a group of protesters carrying large signs that denounced homosexuality, prompting a heated verbal exchange.

[…]Matt Aune has said he and his partner, Derek Jones, exchanged a modest kiss at the plaza 11 days ago, but church officials contend their behavior was lewd.

“There was much more involved that a simple kiss of the cheek,” Farah said in a statement Friday. “They engaged in passionate kissing, groping, profane and lewd language, and had obviously been using alcohol.”
The men have said they were walking home from a nearby concert and cutting through the plaza on their way home.
A police report said they sat down for a kiss and were approached by a pair of church security guards, who asked them to leave because their behavior was “unwanted.”

40 years ago, a young Bart Sibrel sat in front of a tv set, mesmerized by the moon landing, sharing in Walter Cronkite’s mixture of awe on the landing and confusion over the “One Big Step” line.  Perhaps taht nagging feeling was there at the start, but in his telling that nagging feeling kicked in only later: was this even real?

So the numbers, the figures, the dots didn’t add up.  And he pulled together his conspiracy.  Years later, he would confront the great Fraud and Fakester, Buzz Aldrin, and Aldrin would punch him in the face.

As the times have passed, Buzz Aldrin has tipped his hand.  He urges that mankind avoid returning to the moon at all cost — better to bypass the Moon and travel to Mars.  What does Buzz Aldrin want to hide the Moon from all of Humanity?  We can only speculate.

Regarding Bart Sibrel: it looks like he has managed to corner the “Moon Hoax” conspiracy theory.  When you say, “Moon Hoax”, I think Bart Sibrel.  This is a way I don’t associate a single person with, say, “9/11 was an inside job” or with “Where’s Obama’s birth certificate?”  Quite a hat trick Bart Sibrel has accomplished — I guess he gets credit for advancing the issue he didn’t create.

I am amused by the new-found argument by NORML and assorted activists on legalizing marijuana.  Legalize it, tax it, regulate it, and it’ll pour in enough money to save a few of California’s programs — the specific argument made by the ad not allowed on some stations in that stumbling state.

It’s actually a reprise of arguments made in the early 1930s by the likes of Alfred Smith, du Pont, and various “wet” politicians.  Of course, in the case of Smith, repealing Prohibition was roughly the totality of solving America’s economic crisis.  A good idea, surely, the repealing of Prohibition, but it’s hard to view it as much of a pancrea to an imperiled economy.  At least the marijuana activists aren’t promising the world, but it does seem to be a rather random hook for the issue of marijuana legalization to be placed over — a rationalization, not an argument.  The regulation of alcohol and tobacco hasn’t saved California from bankruptcy, why would a third drug?

Nationally, the man Obama, who “inhaled, that was the point” — scooted away with a giggle the question on the youtube questioning, — though, I guess, strictly speaking his answer is correct — and appointed a Drug Czar who whatever his policy acumen retains the title “Drug Czar”.  Supposedly the “war” references are being clamped down, which would mark a departure from the vice-president’s political battles of the 1980s.

Ron Paul on Sarah Palin:

As for soon-to-be departing Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, Paul dismisses her supporters as “more establishment, conventional Country-Club type of Republicans.”

“I wonder whether she’s energizing the 15-20 year olds,” Paul muses. “That would be a question I would have. Because she doesn’t talk about the Federal Reserve and some of these issues. She doesn’t talk too much about personal liberties, civil liberties, getting rid of drug laws, attacking the war on drugs, punishing people who torture.

Worse still, he adds, Palinites are partisans: “If Obama was the only one who was guilty, they would be on his case all the time, but there is a lot of partisanship and I am probably less partisan and therefore she is going to appeal to partisan Republicans better.”

Sarah Palinite on Ron Paul’s statement:
I thought we were all a bunch of white-trash, trailer park, SoCon hicks who scare the living daylights out of the establishment, country club Republicans.

Different Sarah Palin supporter on Ron Paul’s statement:
“Ron Paul jumps the shark.”

And some mildly amusing statements at freerepublic.

Hm.
Oh, whatever.  Supposedly, Sarah Palin is flirting around and flirting around third party land.  Whatever gives her the traction she desires, I suppose.  Ron Paul?  He’s flirted around fifth party land.  So we at least have some ground level to proceed.