You know what “the Right” and the “Conservative Movement” needs as a sort of tempering force?  Their own fictional president.  Throughout the Bush Administration, your Democratic person would constantly point to President Bartlet and say “That’s My President!”  With that, The West Wing provided a sort of safety valve and equalizer as the nation’s attitudes, from their perspective, swerved off course in that long stretch where Bush’s approval rating stood in the 60s and 70s — some approximate Democratic Administration as opposed to someone approaching Nader territory in politics.

I don’t know that this Conservative version of the West Wing would work.  Think of the problem of the supposed antidote to the Daily Show — Fox’s “30 Minute News Hour”.  Something worth noting about Jon Stewart — his send-up on Acorn is receiving “pleasantly surprised” plaudits from conservative bloggers, which it shouldn’t — that has all the workings that Stewart would jump on.  “Half Hour News Hour” was not equipped to step out of its boundary lines.

The West Wing ended with Alan Alda’s character elected president, Republican.  Maybe Aaron Sorkin can just pick up the show from there and not .  But probably not.  My “temperizing force” theory will fall apart as he’s declared a “RINO”, and requisite bashing of Lawrence O’Donnell.

It’s almost a cliche to comment on Fox News like this.  They continue to commit crimes against legitimate Journalism or News gathering.  Three items

Item #1: In a curious twist to their habit of misidentifying the party of Republicans Behaving Badly, or occasionally stepping out of the Republican line (one might be a mistake, two is a trend, three is a habit, four is a network policy), they designated Max Baucus as a Republican.

Okay.  Item #2.  Obama gave a speech before students at the University of Maryland.  A news outlet can legitimately shun it aside — all Obama was doing, frankly, was pushing his agenda.  Frankly, though, in an arena where the goal is to fill up 24 hours a day, it’s probably better than the adjunct fourth hour of some radio talk host’s three hour radio program.  Fox News didn’t run it, preferring instead overhyping Acorn — worthy of attention, and probably even worthy of an outsized attention for a conservative biased news outlet, if they wanted to be that.  But the thing here is that Fox News would have jumped to any speech from President George W Bush on the drop of a hat.  It’s just what they are.

Item #3, and the real focus of this blog post.  Fox News bought a full page ad placed in the Washington Post.  “How did ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, and CNN miss the story?”  The answer is that they didn’t.  Frankly, from what I’ve surmised, they paid the gathering of 60,000 or so (Double that figure if you wish; it’s immaterial to me) a bit too much attention.  But what they didn’t do was lay into it as a promotional vehicle.  And why should they?  This was Fox News’s crowd.  Some signs focused against all those networks and praised Fox News for “Telling the Truth”.

What the Hell was the point of this advertisement?
I guess it is a two-fold equation.  Assuage their audience.  Fox “Fair and Balanced” News stands with YOU against those other lying liberal networks.  And, to referee some against the other media outlets.

For his part, Obama is doing a full court press on the Sunday political talk shows.  He is appearing on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, and Univision.  You notice a conspicuous abesnce there?

Conspicuously absent is … Telemundo.  Obama is snubbing Telemundo.

Hitler.  George Bush was Hitler.  Now Barack Obama is Hitler.  I’ve tried to figure out how Gerald Ford might have been Hitler, but I’ve come up empty.
Also it may well be interesting to explore the differences between the war protests (in 2002 through 2003 organized by Ramsey Clarke’s little outfit, eventually another group came to the forefront and butted them out) and the Tea Party (Freedomworks – Dick Armey.  Glenn Beck’s 9/12 Movement).  The former was larger and had more distance from either of the two major political parties — also generally part of the permanent Protest Culture of the Left and not in any way successful in altering any policy course; the latter probably succeeds in a sort of “murder — suicide” model — everyone’s poll numbers collapse, and probably works for the bottom line interests of the fund-raisings.

Joe Wilson here, along with Dick Armey and others, and see the amusing explanation of Larouche as a “former Labor Party candidate“, is dishonest there — see the video clip I mentioned in a blog post, and libertarian magazine Reason blogger in same for non-Larouchie Obama = Hitler-oids.  But basically Larouche has gone where-ever the “We have a new Hitler” people are, whoever they are at the time.  (Also see the Jon Stewart clip leading up to the Barney Frank confrontation for speakers at some early tea party events.)  I am partial to the “Other side did it” defense, to a large extent.

Now that I’ve gotten that little disclaimer out of the way, I can proceed.  But one last item from the attempted wikipedia edits as it settles into its humdrum stasis position:

Leatherstocking: I had never heard of “ego stripping” until SlimVirgin added the new section.
Once again, I don’t believe him.

The major story in the world of Larouche Politics (sorry, but I can’t take these pronouncements as terribly interesting — though, the phrase here that strikes me as particularly playing with fire is “Obama should back down or he might be hung.“) is the Edmonds, Washington man, a Holocaust Survivor, and his angry reaction to an “Obama – Hitler” sign.  (See also a post here, here, here, :
“I saw Hitler’s soldiers. I saw swastikas every day. To call Obama stupid, even criminal, OK, that’s politics. But Hitler? It’s hurting to anyone no matter who is president,” he said.)

There are over 400 comments left to this Seattle Times article, most of them uninteresting and unilluminating on every level, a lot of straw being burned and nobody has any interest in communicating, some partisan jabs here and there, some arguments I’m terribly familiar with having stared at this for long enough.  I guess this is the first semi-interesting thing I see:

The poster with Adolf Hitler slogan is a clear signal of the evil design of the people working behind the scene be they are political, secret foreign agents or fifth columnist working within the country to foment political unrest with sinister motives, needs immediate apprehension to stop further escalation of their evil designed destructive move.
I love a good conspiracy, don’t you?

They just hate anyone who isn’t LaRouche.
I think there’s a rhyme and reason to some things here.  In the late 1960s, Larouche formed an organization peeling off left wing student activists, where the recruits are.  In the 1970s he “flanked” the sort of liberal president Carter and moved to support some conservative and right-wing causes into the 1980s, where the money is.  In the late 1990s and early 00s, he found recruits where they were, somewhere in a sea of a liberal to conspiracy college aged student base.  And now he’s taken them where the money is, flanking the sort of liberal president Obama (they’re “for single payer”, supposedly.  And in a fictional land, taking control of a broader movement.)  One warning: there are a few glitches to this Grand Unified Theory.

To be fair, susan423, the LaRouche nutjobs that are waving around the Hitler signs are not members of the right or of the left, but are just simple visitors from Planet Crazy.

Do Mr. Gasparian a favor the next time you pass one of the LaRouche tables downtown, along the waterfront or anywhere else. Pick up a pile of their literature, walk away and deposit it in the trash where their messages of hate belong. It’s much more effective than getting arrested.

See also:
LaRouchians remind me of the nuts in Waco and the folks who followed Jim Jones and the tin hatters who thought the Hale Bopp comet was their true home. Where they’re different is that they shove their misguided, ill-conceived theories into the public dialogue. At least the other cults kept to themselves.

But The thing that interests me about this story.
I believe that the Larouche propaganda machine innoculated their membership for this sort of incident.  See the article I cut and pasted here.

At a literature table in the New Jersey region, an older woman was at our literature table, getting briefed on the LPAC fight, and looking at our signs on Obama and Hitler. She looked over the LPAC literature, and exclaimed, “You’re right, his policy is Nazi.” Then she pulled up her shirtsleeve to reveal the numbers tattooed on her arm, put there when she was a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp in Poland at the age of 9.

And so it goes…
Good for the larouchies that guy had no right to loose his cooll like that, and deserved to be arrested.
Any real organization would recognize this as bad pr.  Ah those LaRouche people; so damn classy!

The mindset is shown with what silverchild57 says (from earlier deployment onto a campus):  I am horrified to witness young people being so “politically correct”, thoughtless, and controlled by popular opinion, as to react to the LaRouche organizers in the same way stupid “liberal” and “right-wing” baby boomers do.
LaRouche has been fighting fascism his entire adult life, even when he was a voice crying in the wilderness, slandered by the rotten news media, unjustly thrown in prison by the George H.W. Bush Administration, etc. A courageous fighter for the truth no matter what was thrown at him. That is one of the things I most admire about him; he fights for what’s right, even if nobody else does! That takes some stones, something virtually nobody in Washington has anymore!

Bleh.  Obama was at the University of Maryland yesterday, rallying his base of youngsters.  One sentence describes something:  A solitary LaRouche volunteer stood at attention with a poster of the president depicted as Adolf Hitler.

In other news, Washington Monthly saw to it to repost their Avi Klein “Publish or Perish” article such that it now surfaces in the google news.  If anybody can illuminate what they did and what thought process went into that, please feel free to do so.

The prominent Montana liberal blog “Left In the West” once referred to me as a “Kelleher fan”.  It’s mixed.  I am one that takes an interest in perenial oddball candidates — those people who throw out their good money to put their name onto the ballot as a sort of hobby, maybe they have some ideas they wish to float out and maybe they don’t. Relating to Kelleher versus Baucus, I was something of a Baucus basher as much as a Kelleher fan — though, not in any major way, ala: I’m not going to seriously contemplate a Kelleher Senate victory.  It was what it was.

Bob Kelleher was an accidental Republican nominee, the vaguely familiar name out of a few no names with dented reputations.  It is probably unkknowable what motivated Kelleher to run as a Republican after fourteen runs as a Democrat or Green, but it worked out electorally for him.  He got himself a major party statewide nomination with it.  It is the same logic that worked for Max Baucus, who reportedly started his career by asking which party would get him elected.

The Health Care process is apparently one where several Senate committees create a bill, and these bills will through some unholy process just be smashed and collided together to form something.  Max Baucus is now the chief architect of one that is being summarily booed.  Instructive would be to compare it with the Bob Dole proposals of 1993 — 1994, and on to Bill Maher’s comments about the Democrats having moved right while the Republicans have moved into a bin, and Michael Steele’s comment that the co-op is a backdoor to that dreaded public option, interesting because the public option was always a back-door to Single-payer, leaving me to wonder what might be offered to gain Olympia Snowe’s vote which would fail to do so because of it being a back-door to a dreaded Co-op.

Curiously, Fox News went ahead and designated Max Baucus with the “R”.  It is a bit reminescent of this comment.  I am one willing to treat Fox News as something to study in a Sovietology manner — they have a history of designating unworthy Republicans with the “D” label.  This may as well mean some sort of cryptic support for Baucus’s Health Insurance Industry Protection Racket.

The question popping up in my mind: let’s say Mr. Kelleher had won this senate seat.  Then what?  We’d have a nutty and curmudgeonly socialist in the Republican party, probably ineffective as all gets out and with anti-abortion rhetoric that would forbid him from supporting anything the Democrats spit out on Health Care.  The Senate Finance Committee would fall to — quick: who’s the ranking member, Kent Conrad or Jay Rockefellar?  Might the addition by subtraction put us all in good stead?

There was a school bus fight a day or two ago.  The remarkable thing about this fight was that it made national news.  Drudge blared it and it reverberated through the AM radio dial and conservative blogs.

School bus fights should be something in everybody’s life experience, I would think.  They probably happen more in some places moreso than others.  I remember one time when I saw a rather inexplicable fight on a school bus.  It was a beating, not a real fight.  I nor any other bystander knew the background of this thing.  Police were called.  The bystanders were asked what happened.  Presumably things were sorted out, the instigator punished.  No national news was made.  No local news was made.

Then again, nobody cheered it on.  The cheering on was reserved for the school yard fights.  The school yard fights were interesting things — they occured in clusters at the beginning of the school year in September and toward the end of the school year in May.  A fight would break out.  Someone would shout out “FIGHT!”.  And a swarm of a crowd would rush in.  One of the school’s two security officers would rush over and break it up.  This was followed by a sort of generalized pooh-poohing by the teachers in the classroom and a short lecture to the effect that we’re all better than that, which obviously “we” weren’t.   (Maybe I was.  I came fairly quickly to not swarm.)

Given this sort of thing, this comment strikes a bad chord:

We just had one of those votes in the House, that sort of meaningless message vote which aligns into two partisan camps.  The Resolution in question:

Whereas on September 9, 2009, during the joint session of Congress convened pursuant to House Concurrent Resolution 179, the President of the United States, speaking at the invitation of the House and Senate, had his remarks interrupted by the Representative from South Carolina, Mr. Wilson; and

Whereas the conduct of the Representative from South Carolina was a breach of decorum and degraded the proceedings of the joint session, to the discredit of the House: Now, therefore, be it

Resolved, That the House of Representatives disapproves of the behavior of the Representative from South Carolina, Mr. Wilson, during the joint session of Congress held on September 9, 2009.

240 Yeas, 179 Nays, 5 Presents, 10 Absences.  The interesting ones are the party defectors.  7 Republican Yea votes, 12 Democratic Nay votes, and 5 Democratic Presents. 

Voting Present: Ike Skelton of Missouri, Carol Shea – Porter of New Hampshire, Bill Foster of Illinois, Eliot Engel NY – 17, and Barney Frank.  Barney Frank is the one getting a quote in all the news stories.

  “I think it is bad precedent to put us in charge of deciding whether people act like jerks.”

A good answer.  He knows about decorum and kitchen tables.  (As does Pete Stark… “I wouldn’t dignify you by peeing on your leg.  It wouldn’t be worth wasting the urine.”  — Pete Stark)  A pursual of the other four Presents web pages doesn’t reveal any light of any type, and I only recognize two of the names.

A look at the twelve Democratic “No” votes starts off with two members of what I’ll refer to as the “Liberal Fringe” of the Democratic Party: Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, and Jim McDermott from Seattle, Washington.  I expect to see some odd ideological combinations with these things, and perhaps to see a couple of the most liberal Democrats joined with a few of the most conservative Democrats.  I am surprised to see three names joining in the party-line vote, but I guess Rules of Decorum prevail for the bluest of the blue dogs.  Purusing the websites, Gene Taylor of Mississippi appears to be on the conservative fringe of the Democratic Party, though I will acknowledge to taking a liking to his press release headline “Americans for Tax Reform:  Lying Sacks of Scum”.  Gwen Moore, Wisconsin 4, appears to be the only black congress member to vote against the act — an interesting item worth some consideration.  Beyond those four, nothing pops out in the others’ websites.  Thera is, for whatever reason, a heavy contingent of New York state detractors.  Michael Acuri, NY 24, loves him some Lockheed Martin.  Daniel Maffei NY 25 may well be so much of a budget hawk that he went ahead and skimped on a web designer.  Maurice Hinchey, NY 22, doesn’t have much interest beyond district lines.  Eliot Engel, NY 17 and a DOMA repealer, and Eric JJ Massa, NY 29, round out New York.  Gabrille Giffords of Arizona believes solar energy will save us all.  Harry Teague of New Mexico wants everybody to drink milk.

With the Republican “yea” voters, we knew Joseph Cao of Louisiana would be in this list.  After him, I can’t really think of any obvious heavily Democratic districts with Republican congress members — those were kind of wiped out in 2006 and 2008.  Bullet point items from Joseph Cao’s website: “Cao Defends Obama’s Right to Address School Children”, “Cao Accepts Offer to meet with Obama, announces Health Care Town Halls”, promoted as “Collaborations with Cao”, and an “interesting” Rachel Maddow Appearance.  Compare that with Dana Rohrabacher, CA 46, whose front page has a video clip from the Glenn Beck show, and appears on a real Illegal Immigration tear.  What motivated Rohrabacher from not rallying behind the “You Lie” which entailed illegal immigration, leave that up to speculation — until you google it up for yourself.

Jeff Flake, a very conservative congress-critter from Arizona, front page tagged with the ACORN scandal, lays his reasoning out here.  I’m not surprised to see Walter Jones — “Freedom Fries” turned war opponent and lunch buddies with Ron Paul — on this list.  The only thing I can say about Jo Ann Emerson of Missouri is that her webpage’s front page soliloquy to high school football causes in me a sadness toward small town life.  Thomas Petri of Wisconsin seems to have no partisan edge.  And Bob Ingliss of Wilson’s very own South Carolina has another one of those bad pages.

After all this, Jimmy Carter jumps in and provides Obama a political headache, and rolls from the tea-bag thingamajing to Representative Wilson:

“I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he’s African American.  I live in the South, and I’ve seen the South come a long way and I’ve seen the rest of the country that shared the South’s attitude toward minority groups at that time … and I think it’s bubbled up to the surface, because of a belief among many white people, not just in the South but around the country, that African-Americans are not qualified to lead this great country.” 

At a town hall at his presidential center in Atlanta Tuesday, Carter also said Wilson’s outburst — the South Carolina Republican shouted “You lie!” at Obama during his health care address to Congress — was racially motivated. 

“I think it’s based on racism,” Carter said in response to an audience question. “There is an inherent feeling among many in this country that an African-American should not be president.” 

The quotations from the “Freedom Work”s spokes-people, organizers for the teabag thingys, are interesting in their “See No Evil” approach of the 60K person Washington DC rally:

Adam Brandon, spokesman for protest organizer FreedomWorks, said Carter’s comments were “absurd.” He noted that the protest featured about a dozen black speakers. 
“To say this crowd was racist is absolutely absurd when black speakers were probably the most popular speakers,” he said. 

… Don’t make me surf about for the signs again.

Anyway, I would have preferred Carter held my breah regarding Representative Wilson, Confederate Flag notwithstanding the matters are too entangled and bunched together for effective separation and it’s best to lay Wilson himself out with no racial points, but I don’t have much problem with the statement on the movement beyond him.  On that point, I gather Carter just reminded us that there’s a reason he slid away from the other presidents in that photo-op.

Let’s play Celebrity ASS – OFF.

Contestant Number One:  Michael Jordan.  From Jordan’s “Hall of Fame” speech.  Wherein Michael Jordan expounded on what spurred him on to Greatness.  A long list of people who dissed him throughout his career.  As well, various other sundry grudges that he decided to address.  Two key lines:

Jerry’s not here.  [Jerry Krause; Bulls owner] I don’t know who’d invite him. I didn’t. I hope he understands it goes a long way. He’s a very competitive person. I was a very competitive person. He said organizations win championships. I said, ‘I didn’t see organizations playing with the flu in Utah. I didn’t see it playing with a bad ankle.

AND

“Leroy Smith.  You guys think that’s a myth.  Leroy Smith was a guy that when I got cut he made the team on the varsity team. He’s still the same 6-7 guy, he’s not any bigger and his game is probably the same.

It is more or less a myth – A bit more to that story.

Contestant Number Two.  Kanye West:   Taylor Swift got a surprise when she accepted the award for Best Female Video at Sunday night’s MTV Video Music Awards.

After Swift, looking shocked, beat out Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Kelly Clarkson, Pink and Beyonce for the honor, she took the stage and accepted the award. As she was thanking MTV, Kanye West ran up on stage, took her microphone, and said Beyonce had been robbed for her “Single Ladies” video.

“Beyonce had one of the best videos of all time!”

Swift, 19, stood silently holding her trophy, cameras cut to Beyonce looking stunned in the crowd, and MTV then cut to break.

And ad naseum from there.  A profuse number of apologies.  And one off-the-record comment from the president that nobody should pay any mind to, frankly.  Though, I just did.

Good for all three’s career, I suppose.

Contestant Number three:  Serena Williams.  Poor Sportsmanship.  Common in Tennis.  We just noticed because of her gender.

Williams, 27, says she was “in the moment” and doesn’t really remember her now-famous outburst at a line judge who had called a foot fault. It was a 12-second verbal attack that that has played over and over for three days.

“It was a really tough point in the match and it was really close and, got a really tough call that wasn’t the correct call, and, you know, things got a little heated and I had a conversation with the line judge that didn’t go so well,” Williams told CNN.

Contestant Number Four.  Congress-critter Joe Wilson.  I, frankly, would not be inclined to throw him into the “Celebrity Ass-Off”, except that the “apology” is… um… a fund raising political message.  (Note: I would post a clean feed, but I don’t want to look past the first sure item that appears on a youtube search.)

Who wins?