And with this McConnell rallies the 41 Republicans to filibuster Wall Street Reform.
………………………………………………………………………………….

Luntz: “The single best way to kill any legislation is to link it to the Big Bank Bailout.”

McConnell: “We cannot allow endless taxpayer-funded bailouts for big Wall Street banks. And that’s why we must not pass the financial reform bill that’s about to hit the floor.”

Luntz: “Taxpayers should not be held responsible for the failure of big business any longer.  If a business is going to fail, not matter how big, let it fail.”

McConnell: “[The Dodd bill] gives the government a new backdoor mechanism for propping up failing or failed institutions…. We won’t solve this problem until the biggest banks are allowed to fail.”

Luntz: “Government policies caused the bubble and its ultimate crash. Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the Federal Reserve, and the Community Reinvestment Act all had a role in the catastrophe. The government inflated economic bubbles with easy credit policies.”

McConnell: “It also directs the Fed to oversee 35 to 50 of the biggest firms, replicating on an even larger scale the same distortions that plagued the housing market and helped trigger a massive bubble we’ll be suffering from for years. If you thought Fannie and Freddie were dangerous, how about 35 to 50 of them?”
…………………………………..

There is a bit more to this.  The other component is one of acruing that Obama shut out Republicans in the process, leading to the necessary 41 block Republican opposition … which, of course, in the New Age —

.

– though, naturally any compromises with Republican Senators has the effect of bringing it closer to McConnell / Luntz’s claims.  The Populist Campaign for 2010 is one to make out the Democratic Party as the “Party of Big Business” — somewhat appropriate enough in that to shade off that is to fall out of the constructed “Center” as amorphous figures have defined it over the years.

But seriously.

Actually it’s a surprise the bill has come out actually… with… relevant regulations… which actually strike against the Republican Party opposition line.  But then again, Blanche Lincoln faces a primary challenge.  It is a bit weird — in some ways this is a Defining Moment.  Consult again my (since mentally revised slightly) Presidential Rating System.  Why, getting this done would be like Chester Arthur getting through the then desperately needed Civil Service Reform– in the end, this is the Major Issue of the Moment, and the one that more than other sealed Obama into the Presidency.

In terms of Goldman Sachs and what the SEC’s prosecution of a relatively narrow charge means — you tell me.  Ever get the feeling some things are more symbolic than substantive?

Politically, it had long been believed that to come out full force against a process of Regulatory Reform would be a type of political suicide for a Republican Party — believed even now, kind of.  This is a bit of bumpkis – sometimes elections have a certain post-modern quality to them — nothing much matters except the Rage.

I am pretty sure I know who this “I Anonymous” writer is referring to.  Quite possibly you do too.  He works at a grocery store.  When I buy grocery stores with him clerking, I cannot say I’ve been offended so much as puzzled.  I half suspect a “Candid Camera” / “Punked” (Ashton Kushter still going with that one, or is that pretty well a product of the 00 decade?) situation — one of these days you will turn the television on and watch a sequence of customers fidgeting about nervously, tightening their lips so as not to ask the “What’s the deal with your mustache?” question and “It’s creeping me out” statement.

Really, I’m glad to see the commenters taking the Anonymous guy to task.  Clearly he’s not a neo-nazi.  To wit:
And that comment about reformed Jews is sure of a lot more insulting than facial hair…

Hitler ruined a perfectly good pattern of facial hair.  Perhaps it’s like something Bono does at U2 concerts before covering Helter Skelter.  “This song Charles Manson stole from the Beatles.  We’re stealing it back.”

In other news…

“When I read this stuff, it makes sense to me.”  — Michael Savage, reacting to the campaign of Summer Shield, the Larouche candidate for Congress against Nancy Pelosi.
“savage is a stark raving lunatic and that’s why anyone would have him on the radio: to get other people to become stark raving lunatics” — revenire
……………………………………………………

The following comes from the American Mercury in May 1938, the respectable first half of the magazine’s existence (though the  unrespectability of the second half of the magazine’s existence perhaps comes from it retaining these same attitudes, notched up in shrillness as it was losing the battle).  I probably could pluck up a less obscure example of age old casual attitudes toward Misceganation, and its status as a Communist Plot, or party to fellow travellers of a sort of cultural “slumming it”, but here is Mona Lale’s “The Brides of Marx”.

There was one wild-eyed lass, I recall, who would appear at regular intervals in one of the Village bars with four male Comradews in tow.  They would take a prominent table and proceed to get drunk on straight gin, which the girl would buy, and entertain the others with lurid descriptions of their weird design for living: the girl, I gathered, received $50 a week from her family to stay away from her native Milwaukee, where she had created a city-wide scandal, and now was the communal mistress of the shaggy-haired quatret, whom she supported.  It was her boast that three psychiatrists had prounounced her hopeless, and that she had come near to driving them crazy.  This strange band stopped coming to the bar aftar a while, and the bartender learned later that the Pride of Milwaukee, as this Amazon was wont to refer to herself, had dispensed with her prediculous entourage and had gone native, up in Harlem.  Miscegenation, of course, bears the official sanction of old Karl, though denounced by intelligent negroes, and the color line is regarded by latter-day apostles as being merely another instance of capitalistic Jim-Crowism.  This undoubtedly has fetched scores of depraved white women into the fold, but the colored brother has, in most cases, retained a stolid indifference.  He finds his own women vastly more enticing than the run of white lady comrades, and when he does consort with them, I dare say he does so chiefly to plume his own ego.

Now skip forward to Lyndon Larouche on APRIL 13 2008 — the shot heard round, well — a half dozen blogs I suppose — available here.

I mean: Obama is a racist. I mean, with an African father–he wasn’t much of an African father, but was an African father of Kenya. He was part of a British operation, which took over Kenya, through MI5’s operation. But this guy was away from Kenya, and he married a Margaret Mead type, a woman who had a number of successive husbands, like Margaret Mead did. Went out to the poor, brown people, in Asia, and had sex with them! It was called “Coming in Samoa.” [groans, laughter] And she wore through a number of successive husbands, and by them, had various children. And therefore, you’ll find Obama’s ancestry, if you chase his family tree, everybody’s climbing and swinging from the branches there–from all over the world! All parts of the world! This guy is the universal man. Every monkey in every tree, from every part of the world, has participated in the sexual act of producing him. And he works for organized crime–which is a branch of British intelligence.

And now David P Goldman –  who we well know for his membership in the org from 1968 to 1989 (are those the right dates?) — at “First Things”, a place where his fans refer to Obama as “Hussein Soetero” in the comments section:

Obama is the loyal son of a left-wing anthropologist mother who sought to expiate her white guilt by going to bed with Muslim Third World men. He is a Third World anthropologist studying us, learning our culture and our customs the better to neutralize what he considers to be a malignant American influence in world affairs.

John Podhoretz responds:

This is, not to put too fine a point on it, disgusting. In the first place, Obama is not responsible for his mother or her political views, any more than Ronald Reagan should have been be held accountable for the fact that his father was a drunk. In the second place, Goldman’s speculation about her sexual history is appalling in about a hundred different ways. I’m sure I’d hold no brief for Stanley Ann Dunham, but the idea that the lower-middle-class daughter of a furniture salesman from Mercer Island, Washington, would be awash in “white guilt” — far more a species of upper-middle-class Northeastern opinion — speaks more of Goldman’s inability to achieve imaginative sympathy with someone from circumstances different from his than it does anything about the president or his family.
Finally, there is Goldman’s description of Obama, who lived for less than a year in Indonesia from age 6 to age 10, as a “Third World anthropologist studying us.” Casting Obama as a malign foreign influence is a particular and unforgivable intellectual madness on the Right over the past two years. There is nothing foreign about Obama’s ideas or ideology, alas, which can be understood, in my view, almost entirely from the curricula and extracurricular ideas endemic in the American university in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when he was in college.
Goldman wrote a piece for First Things last year in which he revealed his history as a member of the bizarre and paranoid political cult around the extremist Lyndon LaRouche. Goldman intended the article to be an explanation of and break from his past. But thinking of the sort revealed in this blog item is in the direct line of descent from LaRouche’s vision of the world. It appears you can take the man out of LaRouche, but you can’t take LaRouche out of the man.

Let some debris float away — tackled here and here — and I’ll say something for Podhoretz.  A quick google search shows I’ve mentioned Podhoretz — whether John or Norman (who, for purposes here have similar enough views that I’ll lump together — I’d refine if I thought about them more often times.) — seven times.  All negative.  So that’s now seven negatives to one positive reference.
I doubt very much that John Podhoretz has come into contact with Larouche’s Monkey quote, so I guess I can say that he doesn’t know the half of it.

David Goldman seems to be getting the brunt of a lot of this:  Leaving aside for the moment the remarks of Spengler/Goldman (whose wide following has always baffled me, since it should have long since been obvious that he is nuts).  Maybe I should leave a break for him — what did I title that post?  “I Hope To Avoid Posting Anything Concerning David Goldman Following This Post”?
Here.  Dedicated to Lyndon Larouche and David P Goldman:  Bleh de bleh.

………………………………

A few notes on this thing from Cliff Kincaid  of “AIM“, and apparently something called  “America’s Survival, Inc” has released a youtube video that  exposes radio personality Alex Jones and his allies in the Lyndon LaRouche movement as behind some of the attempts to discredit the Tea Party movement.

For the love of gawd.  I guess I saw this snow-balling a tad.  I will add to my attempt to explain the Vinn Diagram of Larouche and Jones (ideas floating there, and they share some connections — past with one present with the other — with Webster Tarpley) that Alex Jones and his association with Ron Paul was there before the Republican Party.

One question: does Cliff Kinclaid read factnet and the posts of xlcer?

A former LaRouche insider and expert on the cult suggests that Jones and Tarpley are actually competitors for the same audience but have teamed up for common purposes. He, too, has noticed LaRouche material being posted on the Alex Jones and Ron Paul websites as well as various gold bug and tea party sites.
“Since Obama won,” he explained, “the cult is doing exactly what it did when Jimmy Carter was elected. It merely turned to try to be a parasite off of the right-wing anger and this time Obama is an easy target. This is the same cult that raised money and recruited among the left when Bush was in power and was being labeled a Nazi.”
This observer says that what the cult is doing is “carpetbagging” at any Tea Party or right-wing meeting or website it can find: “The idea is that they just abandoned the anti-Bush propaganda and are using the anti-Obama sentiment to raise money.”
They are also physically attending Tea Party meetings. He noted that the Tea Party movement in Massachusetts had a LaRouche cult member by the name of Rachel Brown address their meetings and go on their radio show. Indeed, Brown went on Tea Party radio to discuss “the British empire’s drive for global fascism.” It is typical of the LaRouche movement to attack the British, especially the Queen of England, for everything that goes wrong in the world. She went on that show with Harley Schlanger of the LaRouche political action committee.
“They just had a cult candidate named Kesha Rogers win a Democratic primary in Texas,” the former LaRouche insider said. “They will attend right-wing meetings to get some names to call back for more money. They will also feed more delusions which will backfire on the Tea Party.”

But Cliff Kinclaid is a hypocrite, isn’t he, on his concern about Larouche blurring into his precious political movement?  Note this headline posted by him on December 30, 2004.
AARP, LaRouche Oppose Private Social Security Accounts
… which I know because it was pointed out then by , um, me.

But, I support such an image as the bottom one here.  The video from Kincaid itself is… tedious.  I see him rolling from images of Obama Hitler to non Larouche (and non Jones) inflamatory signs.  Still, I’ll point to an Alex Jones listener.:
alfy1234 This Guy cliff is a shill. .He is a CIA plant. Watch loose change.
learn about the PRIVATE federal reserve and the IRS.
Learn about Rothchilds, Rockerfellers. and our fiat currency.Learn, Learn,learn.
You should never trust anyone 100% but learn whats going
It will be worth noting Alex Jones’s idea of Tea Party infiltrators.

……………………………………………………………..

Howie G says something.  Marielle Kronberg responds.

The LaRouche people have always invoked the national security argument, and screamed “witchhunt,” whenever anyone sued them, or whenever they were prosecuted.
Their view is that LaRouche’s policies and politics are so marvelous and life-giving that he should never be challenged on anything.

In other legal jurisdictions — we go to the front on Jeremiah Duggan.

Anonymous said…
Britain doesn’t have jurisdiction does it?

Maximillius said…
If we’re to continue this I’d like to know what your interest in the case is. Are you an interested observer or do you represent the LaRouche group in any way?  (I think we know the answer to that question.)
It sounds as if you’re attempting to dispute my comments on technicalities, when anyone with a clear mind examining the facts can see there are many, many holes in the story given by the German police.

Meanwhile, … no, really — Larouche has grave concerns over Obama — no animosity.  He wants Obama to avoid assassination.  Also thinks he’s swinging from every tree.-

Ivanov, The author is clearly confused. LaRouche is obviously trying to prevent the assassination of President Obama. Obama’s big ego is a strategic factor that would cause him to walk right into an assassin’s bullet. Also, it’s obvious the LaRouche has no personal grudge against Obama. If you haven’t noticed, about 3 in 5 Americans completely agree that Obama’s policies will result in genocide against Americans.

symsess If I told you to stop commenting on my blog because you are in danger of being assassinated you wouldn’t take that as a threat? LaRouche is not God; though many seem to think he is. I’m sure Obama is truly grateful for this warning. If only LaRouche had warned Kennedy too.
I beg to differ on LaRouche’s “grudge” against Obama. Slapping a Hitler mustache on anyone is the very definition of disdain and animosity. The problem with LaRouche is he lacks humility of any sort.

Incidentally, here’s some of La Rouche’s words on that topic.

“You have to take my judgment of this thing: To explain it to you, how this works, is too much, there are too many things. You’re not prepared to deal with this kind of thing, but let me tell you what’s happening. Take it from me, this is the situation. We’re now—and the President is an idiot! among his other qualifications. This guy is doing the worst thing possible, for a President who’s under target for assassination. I mean, they want to get rid of him!

I will state that this Media Interview is somewhat better than this.  Though he seems aiming about for the Michael Savage voters — or money.  BUT… a vote of confidence.:  If you ask me, the La Rouche people are no weirder than birthers.
They get kudos here.  I was glad to see the Larouchies out in force, with a dope-pushing queen in drag. There were also some plants with really ridiculous signs, which I don’t really think helps the dialogue.   AND  I kept finding their ‘literature’ in the trash cans on my walk from the White House back to Union Station last September.  Hard to read what they have to say when you have to dumpster dive to get at it.

Robert Bolivar DePugh, a forty-four-year-old businessman from Norbourne, Missouri, is the leader of the most publicized and perhaps the largest Minuteman group in the country.  The impetus for such an organization grew out of a duck-hunting trip in 1960 when one member of the party said jokingly, refering to the interational political scene, that if worse came to worst and the Russians invaded, they — the duck hunters — could at least take to the hills and fight as a guerilla band.  DePugh and his friends took the remarks seriously. […]

DePugh records that “it came as a shock to suddenly realize that in the seventeen previous years the Communists had succeeded in taking over seventeen soveriegn nations.  We were surprised also to learn that only one had been taken over by military conquest.  The other sixteen were lost to Coummunism by internal subversion or negotations.”  Eventually DePugh and the others came to the following conclusions.  […]

4.  A Pro-American government could no longer be established by normal political means. …
5.  The minority blocs, controlled labor unions and corrupt political machines so completely monopolize the American political scene that there is no chance for the average American citizen to regain control of his own destiny at the ballot box. …
6. … any further effort, time or money spent in trying to save our country by political means would be wasted. […]
Therefore the objectives of the Minutement are to abandon useless efforts and begin immediately to prepare for the day when Americans will once again fight in the streets for their lives and their liberty.  We feel there is overwhelming evidence to prove that this day must come.

DuPugh heightens this stark pessimistic view of the political situation by larding his rhetoric and prose with a deep strain of potential violence.  The most celebrated example, and the one that brought DuPugh’s Minutemen to national attention, appeared in the 15 March 1963 issue of On Target, the group’s newssheet.  The story was directed to twenty US Congressmen who had voted against an appropriation for the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and read, in part.:

… See the old man at the corner where you buy your papers?  He may have a silencer equipped pistol under his coat.  That extra fountain pen in the pocket of the insurance salesman that calls on you might be a cyanide gas gun.  What about your milkman?  Arsenic works slow but sure.  Your automobile mechanic may stay up nights studying your booby traps.
These patriots are not going to let you take your freedom away from them.  They have learned the silent knife, the strangler’s cord, the rifle that hits sparrows at 200 yeards.  Only their leaders restrain them.
Traitors beware!  Even now the cross-hairs are on the back of your necks. […]

Once the Communists have taken over, he sees a long internal struggle between the left and the right.  “In other words, this may be a long period of assassination and counter-assassination, of terror and counter-terror.  In this I feel we have one big edge because we feel that our knowledge of the left wing is far greater than their knowledge of the right wing, so far as identities are concerned.” […]

As for security, DePugh has many suggestions.  “Use deceptive measures,” he advises: subscribe to left-wing periodicals to keep an eye on your opposition (this, adds DuPugh, “will keep the postal inspector guessing as to which side you are really on”); use two envelopes in sending mail, never put a return address on the outside one, send the letter indirectly, perferably through a friend; place opaque material such as tin foil inside the envelope to keep the letter “from being read by infra-red cameras”; prepare telephone codes in advance; make sure a prospective recruit is not an infiltrator before identifying yourself as a member; undercover Minutemen should not fraternize with known Minutemen; do not write patriotic letters to newspapers; classify all correspondence “top secret,: “secret,” or “restricted”; prepare rendezvous points and mail drops and change them frequently; contribute money to Minutemen with cash; observe the “need to know” rule; keep records in code; avoid being followed, take evasive action if necessary; and so on. […]

When it comes to guerilla exercises in the woods, DePugh turns silent.  His reticence is due to a combination of factors: he no doubt revels in the mystery which he can draw, he quite justifiably fears legal reprisals; and finally, and most important of all, he fears ridicule that would destroy his group for good.

Hm.  From a review, or actually all of the reviews, of Conan O’brien’s opening Stage Show in Eugene, Oregon.

“Believe it or not,” Mr. O’Brien said. “This is the first time anyone has ever paid to see me. Don’t get me wrong: They’ve paid to make me to go away.”

Someone paid him about $10 for seats to see him back in 1988.

Three script writers from “Saturday Night Live” are sitting out the writers strike by providing an improvisational revue, “The Happy Happy Good Show,” at Victory Gardens Studio Theater.

The show features the three writers-Conan O’Brien, Bob Odenkirk and Robert Smigel-along with four other players: Rose Abdoo, Hugh Callaly, Debby Jennings and Dave Reynolds. Mark Nutter, of Friends of the Zoo, directs. One approaches the show with some measure of anticipation.

From another review of this long forgotten stage show, where Saturday Night Live writers killed time during during a Writer’s Strike by putting on a show…

“Happy Happy“ also gives Smigel and the six other comics (several, like him, veterans of the long-running “All You Can Eat and the Temple of Dooom“) the chance to try out stuff that may not fit the “SNL“ format or was rejected by NBC censors. ([…] Smigel: “Take our very theatrical finale, where we make wacky predictions about the year 2000; it uses dark silhouettes and a deliberate pretentiousness that just wouldn`t work on TV.“

As for the show in Eugene, guaging how Conan O’brien and his staff interprets the “Intellectual Property” rights — apparently there was an appearance from the (already predicted) Self Pleasuring Panda…  and they’re saying phooey on Triumph, able to claim him as he originated elsewhere.
Yet they won’t dare run to “In the Year 2000”.

A question about TBS, though.  Apparently promotions have started right from the gate.  Isn’t it overkill to roll through to November?

Here’s an interesting example of a group exercising their “Right to Petition”, and you may have heard about this.

Governors across the country, including Pennsylvania’s, have received letters ordering them to step down from office in three days — the first step in a quasi-religious, “freedom movement” group’s elaborate plan to disband parts of the U.S. government, according to the group’s website.

Interesting.  This was the copy found in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.  Note the inclusion of “including Pennsylvania”.  So…

Governors across the country — including Ohio’s Ted Strickland — have received letters ordering them to step down from office in three days, the first step in a quasi-religious, “freedom movement” group’s elaborate plan to disband parts of the U.S. government, according to the group’s Web site.

It is always good to insert the local angle into the AP copy.  Usually I see it in the headline, though.

The group, calling itself the Guardians of the free Republics, describes the plan as a nonviolent and legal attempt to “restore the true Republic.” Department of Homeland Security and FBI officials said there did not appear to be an immediate threat of violence.
Just a demand to quit within three days, in order to implement –?

“Everything is going to be orderly and no one is going to be harmed in this movement,” said Billy Ray Hall, a man who identified himself as a follower of the Guardians of the free Republics. “It’s going to be really good. There’s going to be funds enough for everybody.” […]

Funds enough for everyone?  What is this — the Diggers?

Guardians of the free Republics emphasize the peaceful nature of their proposed revolution, although their wording is at times opaque and foreboding.  The group believes that an act of Congress passed in the late 1800s effectively transformed the United States into a corporation, Hall said. Since then, the American people have been serving corporate masters.

The plan to restore America begins with the assembly of “de jure grand juries” in all 50 states, according to the group’s Web site. Followers were asked to sign a “covenant of office” and are described as “elders.” The group must act quickly to avert some impending enforcement of martial law, said group leader Sam Kennedy on his Internet radio program.

So you now have a choice between … oh, Christine Gregorie or Ted Strickland or Rick Perry or whoever – or these guys?

Kennedy, who said the group was attracting followers in droves from the so-called freedom movement, described this plan as a “revelation” and compared the coming events to “a time to parallel the storming of Jericho and all the great Biblical events of history.”

“Calamity is coming for this world,” he said on the radio program, adding that it would be peaceful. “We forgive all who repent for their crimes against mankind. You could also expect that many of those people will not repent, and if they are recidivists we will deal with them accordingly.”

Meanwhile, in Yakima, Washington:

Actually this has little or nothing to do with the Guardians of the free Republics — perhaps there’s something to be made in individuals guarding the free republic —  it’s just that I’ve always had a desire to tap in an incongruent “Meanwhile, in Yakima, Washington.”  I don’t know why.
The Stranger, the alternative paper in Seattle, has a beat reporter milling about the Yakima Valley — apparently in search for the whole energy of this Selah fellow…

A 63-year-old Yakima County man has been charged with threatening to kill U.S. Sen. Patty Murray over her support of the health-care overhaul.The FBI and local police arrested Charles Alan Wilson at his Selah home early Tuesday. Wilson was scheduled to make an appearance in U.S. District Court in Yakima, and he will then be transported to Seattle, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

According to the charges, staffers in Murray’s office in the Jackson Building in downtown Seattle had become concerned over a series of phone calls by an unknown man over the past several months. The calls came from a blocked number, and often were made in the evenings or on weekends.

Usually, according to a staffer identified by the initials “M.G.,” the calls were merely vulgar and harassing.

But on March 22, “the caller began to make overt threats to kill and/or injure Senator Murray,” according to the complaint signed by FBI Agent Carolyn Woodbury.

In that message, a man the FBI says it has identified as Wilson stated, “I hope you realize there’s a target on your back now … Kill the [expletive] senator! I’ll donate the lead.”

In several other vulgar and profanity-laced messages left over the next week, the caller repeatedly threatened the Democratic senator’s life and said he “hopes somebody kills” President Obama as well, according to portions of transcripts in the complaint.

We will see, I suppose an odd little connection between the conspiracy spewing Truther Tea Partier amped around the similar circumstances surrounding the Presidency of James Garfield and friends with Obama to the threatener of Patty Murray.  Maybe I should go ahead and defend the conspiracy Truther Tea Partier right here and now.  Or maybe I should wonder why I tossed the religous end times “Dissolve the Government” freaks into this picture.

Well, I suppose the Stranger article is all about Local Color.  A bit of background for explanation.

The tanks are still there, 177 in all, packed with 53 million gallons of radioactive waste. One million gallons have leached into the desert soil.
A decade from now, this byproduct of the atomic age at Hanford nuclear reservation was to be turned into 14-foot-long glass rods, loaded in steel canisters and shipped to Nevada, where it could sit forever beneath a mountain. An additional 2,300 tons of spent nuclear fuel would go with it.
But now the worst waste from the country’s most polluted place has nowhere to go.
The Obama administration’s recent decision to withdraw licensing to build a high-level nuclear-waste repository at Yucca Mountain leaves future storage of the Manhattan Project’s nastiest goop undecided. Some worry the move means waste could remain at Hanford indefinitely and that nuclear garbage from elsewhere might even join it. […]
“A lot of us were quite confident way back in 1995 that we would probably end up right at this spot,” said Todd Martin, former chairman of the Hanford Advisory Board, an independent, nonpartisan group that attempts to advise the Energy Department on Hanford cleanup. “I’m much more concerned about when we’re going to make our first teaspoon of glass.”

It’s the by-product of living in a Vast Nuclear Wasteland.

Alpha Broadcasting has a building downtown where its radio stations are represented as that posters plastered with three each of that type of silhouette Clip Art.  Freedom 970 has a man barbecuing, a Soldier Saluting, and a woman shopping — denoting that, apparently, this is the height of Patriotism.

And Bush said, “Go shopping” after 9/11.

It’s a conservative station — natch, recently revamped with the addition of Sean Hannity and (because he comes with Sean Hannity) Mark Levine.  This is too bad — Phil Hendrie — a hold-over from previous corporate control at a less ideologically-straitened station — they clearly have deigned to get rid of — has been bumped to the wee hours of the night — in wait for eventual dropping.

Freedom’s Just another word for …?

Down aways, at the Max Stop in front of the Courthouse, I’m not paying attention to much of anything when a suit security detail of one sort or other — not the bulky type, but a management sort — shouts “I saw that!”  I look over, and see that he is communicating to this sort of pan handling-looking — reasonably clean — 20 something, I guess.  He shouts, “What?  What?”  The security says, “That little transaction.”  “I was just giving change for a dollar.  What?  You gonna hassle me?”  Security points to a camera.  Life goes on.

I am confused by this scene.  Down from this lad is a woman, scuzzier looking, with a sign of that “Need Money to Pay off Ninjas” variety, more conspicuous than this guy — so it can’t be an outlawing of “Spare Change?” Did he exchange the marijuana, or security believe he did so?  The latter possibility is unfortunate — the guy’s not going to have the benefit of the doubt if this goes up further — and that camera had better show something definitive for his sake.  As it were, I’m inclined to view this as a sort of act of Intimidation — “You’ve been warned”.

Meanwhile, I look around, planting three quick figures for silhouetting purposes.  Something vaguely iconic about it.