There’s a realm of politics that comes out in the ease of a type of Populist sounding “Common Sense” political gimmick — ideas that are meant to be easily understood memes, and not really programmatic solutions to anything.  Think Sarah Palin and “I sold it on ebay”.

They are coming out

I.  Tim Pawlenty and the “Google Test”, in his “Better Deal”:

Pawlenty would in turn drastically cut spending, including some possible cuts or privatizations/eliminations of services that people have taken for granted. “Now there’s some obvious targets. We can start by what I call ‘The Google Test.’ If you can find a service or a good available on Google, or the Internet, then the federal government probably doesn’t need to be providing that good or service,” said Pawlenty. “The post office, the government printing office, Amtrak, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and others, were all built for a time in our country and a different chapter in our economy, when the private sector didn’t adequately provide those services. But that’s no longer the case.”

I am pretty sure you can find mercenaries on the Internet, meaning Pawlenty would have us do away with the Military.  “But that is not what Tim Pawlenty meant”.  I don’t even know how to go about explaining the absurdity of this statement — It does seem like the government needs to restructure the model of the Post Office (though it is of such a slight program that it is hard for me to figure how it’d be on my political radar — ie: if a politician harps on it, I’d wonder about their Priorities.)  We get a sense in Pawlenty’s simplistic framework of the shifting Creeping standard of a  ‘Creeping Socialism‘ .”

II.  Herman Cain and the Great Wall of China.

“I just got back from China. Ever heard of the Great Wall of China? It looks pretty sturdy. And that sucker is real high. I think we can build one if we want to! We have put a man on the moon, we can build a fence! Now, my fence might be part Great Wall and part electrical technology…It will be a twenty foot wall, barbed wire, electrified on the top, and on this side of the fence, I’ll have that moat that President Obama talked about. And I would put those alligators in that moat!”

Thank you, Pat Buchanan.  No, Herman Cain’s campaign isn’t going anywhere — though, it’ll excite some “Tea Party”ers in the meantime.
Also, isn’t that a rather expensive project — something which would definitely dwarf the supposed “Illegal Immigrations taking up services” budget?

III.  Herman Cain and the Three Page Bill Limit.

Engage the people. Don’t try to pass a 2,700 page bill — and even they didn’t read it! You and I didn’t have time to read it. We’re too busy trying to live — send our kids to school. That’s why I am only going to allow small bills — three pages. You’ll have time to read that one over the dinner table. What does Herman Cain, President Cain talking about in this particular bill?

As this points out, “one of the few bills” of that type was the much maligned TARP Act.  As further pointed out here, it is impossible to figure how that “Great Wall of China on the Mexican Border” bill can possibly be pulled in under three pages?
What Cain really wants is a bill that fits into a sound-byte.

IV.  Lest I forget, Newt Gingrich and his damned Ego-Mania, a Political Gimmick in its own right.

V.  The reason Mitt Romney’s acknowledgement of Climate Change — ie: Global Warming — is a gimmick is because his battle cry against it ends right there.  Romeny is guilty of a different genre of campaign annoyances — the buffoonish hyperbolic rhetoric — was on display with “We are only inches away from ceasing to be a free market economy.”  It’s nothing a good three page bill wouldn’t solve.

Hockey Conspiracy.  The conspiracies are coming thick and fast here in North America. First Chuck Blazer, Lyndon Larouche and the Knights of Malta have conspired to make FIFA’s corrupt, bribe-taking members to look bad. But more importantly Nike has forced CONCACAF to again stage a farce of a cup competition in order to sell Mexico shirts and force American soccer consumers to feign interest in a seemingly endless clash of the minnows.

Cincinnati Bengals Conspiracy:  ! (Linden LaRouche would be proud!) (wikipedia link)

British Monarchy Cannibalism:  Oh shit, Oh Shit, OH SHIT! PLEASE don’t tell the LaRouchies about this!

This is 21st century Britain. Not LaRouche Planet.

NOW THAT’S POETRY.

“Dark Metal” fans discuss Nazism:  In the western world, nowadays, a threat to what? I don’t think bands singing about SS occult shit, and keeping their blood pure etc. etc. is really a “threat.” Ideology limited to 10 copies, watch out!
Precisely. Stalinists or LaRouchies are regarded as merely cranks, but ‘fascists’ are somehow a threat.

“Primary Report”:  Announced Candidates:  Barack Obama, Randall Terry.  Possible Candidates:  Mike Gravel, Jim Hightower, Lyndon Larouche.  (We’ll see.)

Here are my Top 5 Dangerously Crazy Cults:
2. LaRouche (please don’t unleash your Secret Service on me)
5. AlexJones/Zeitgeist/911truthers (please don’t make me think I know more than 99% of the worlds population based on watching Youtube videos containing 0% facts.)
speaking of which — 9/11 Truth crap.

Most tea party protests against health care reform feature a standard cast of characters. Revolution-era patriots in greatcoats and tricorne hats; LaRouchies handing out pictures of Obama with a Hitler mustache; the people with the giant fetus signs; and some guy dressed as an actual tea bag. Then, there are the doctors.

When I was active in the Libertarian Party I always winced when someone claimed Larouche was a Libertarian, more because of his disagreeable supporters than his very non-libertarian philosophy. Usually no amount of denial could convince these know-it-alls there was no Larouche/Libertarian connection. (It must have been an aliterative association: Roger Rabit Republican, Donald Duck Democrat, Lyndon Larouche Libertarian. In fact he always ran as a Democrat.)

And no, Tony Dancer, there is no equivalence between Abbott’s endorsement of the CEC, La Rouchies, etc, this week and your evidenceless assertion of “the greens burning an effigy of Howard while chanting ‘die Howard die’”. Which Greens exactly?

The fact that Sarah Palin isn’t viewed and treated as some sort of lobotomized Lyndon LaRouche says that Americans are shallow because they show the MSM that this is what they want to see, what they call “news” and therefore whatthe ADVERTISERS wang.

Compared with Ron Paul — who is referenced as being on a radio show with photograph-cited White Supremacist teeny-bopper singers Prussian Blue.

Ron Paul as Lyndon LaRouche – No, I’m not saying that Ron Paul is anything like Lyndon LaRouche in his ideas or ideology. What I am saying is that he won’t get the nomination, but has an incredibly strong, if tiny, base of support.

did Paul inherit the Larouchies?

Fight between Ron Paul supporters and Ron Paul critic over Larouche comparison.

Oh yes, totally terrified of Palin. As soon as President LaRouche and President Ron Paul are done, there won’t be anybody to stand in Palin’s way.

I liked how he said something that happened was just like an historical event, and then he describes something that isn’t at all like what happened. But my favourite part is where he doesn’t shake his head and say ‘oh wait a sec, that’s not at all what happened’ but rather gets all serious looking and says ‘oh this is serious!’.

Commenting on recent Rand Paul comments:  Peoples concerns over religious zealots needlessly trying to murder U.S. citizens as they travel or do business are understandable. The Kentucky Senator was no doubt attempting to speak to those concerns. Having heard other groups such as La Rouche supporters, Communists, Racial separatists, Militia, and Farrakhan Supporters utter notions of overthrow is sickeningly disturbing. Often leading to questions as to why they should be allowed to enjoy the benefits of the U.S. while plotting and delighting in its potential downfall. This is especially true for radical Islamisits, who take cowardly cover behind the right of free speech to forward their repulsive ideas. In their own countries, they would likely be jailed tortured, and eventually executed.

David Lindsey, sometimes Larouche sympathizer:
Whereas any belief in “al-Qaeda”, or in any conceivable connection between the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and the Shia-persecuting “Taliban”, or in “the global terrorist network”, or in “Taliban” distinct from the Pashtun as a whole, or in any connection between Afghanistan and 9/11, or in any connection between Iraq and 9/11, or in WMD in Iraq, or in such WMD as a threat to any Western country even if they had existed, or in an Iranian nuclear weapons programme, or in such a programme as a threat to any Western country even if it existed, has always put those who held it on exactly the same level as birthers, or as truthers, or as those who liken Obama to Hitler, or as those who likened Bush to Hitler, and as the followers of Lyndon LaRouche.
All exactly as sane as belief in the Book of Mormon, complete with its quotations from Shakespeare because Joseph Smith thought that they were from the Bible. But all an awful lot more dangerous in practice.

……………………………………………………………………

THE POST OFFICE TOUR UPDATES!!!

Dateline Frederick, Maryland:  A representative of the LaRouche Political Action Committee waited through long discussions of city business June 2 to request support for a national banking resolution being considered by Congress.
If House Resolution 1489 is not passed by July 4, it will lead to another financial bailout and “a general breakdown crisis of most of the trans-Atlantic region of nations,” former presidential candidate Lyndon H. LaRouche said in a May 26 speech archived on his website,
Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, R-6th, is one of the co-sponsors of the resolution, which is sponsored by Ohio Rep. Marcy Kaptur, D-9th. The resolution is called the Return to Prudent Banking Act of 2011.
Aldermen did not take any action.

Dateline Santa Rosa, California:   The phone number the pair gave out was for a campaign by former LaRouche PAC organizer Summer Shields to unseat and replace Nancy Pelosi.
The women outside the P.O. had lots of literature displayed. Did I care to take along some to read?
Thanks anyway. If a campaign stoops to labeling its adversaries as Hitler, I already know all I care to know about it.

Dateline Maryland: So I was driving on the highway the other day, and some guy hands me some pamphlets and starts going on about gas prices and blah blah blah. I didn’t have time to really go over them because the light turned green, but they looked like some sort of Tea Party, anti-Big Government, lower gasoline taxes thing, and so I was like, “Sounds like my kind of thing,” and took it.
It ended up being a pamphlet from the LaRouche political action committee, which I had never heard of. But as soon as I read the first couple of lines, I ripped the papers up and threw them away.
The reason was that they started the article off, and appeared to continue with, the declaration that if their bills were not passed, humanity would be doomed. And I’m paraphrasing the words, but the feelings are not in any way exaggerated; this pamphlet would have had me believe that, if I did not join their cause and get this pushed through Congress, the human race would not survive.
Even though I may have agreed with these people’s political ideals, I absolutely will not put up with that kind of manipulation and demonization of the other side..

Dateline Marblehead:  It was a relief to see that the matter of the LaRouche people setting up at Marblehead’s post office had finally been addressed properly.
What I do not understand is why it took their second attempt to set up before this situation was dealt with responsibly by the Marblehead police or the Postal Service. The number of complaints that both these groups dealt with on the first occasion about two weeks ago should have been enough to prevent this from happening again.

Dateline Massachusetts:  The louche douche Lyndon LaRouche has young people circulating petitions at the Massachusetts Democratic Party’s annual convention.  The first is a call for restoration of Glass-Steagall – not such a bad idea, actually.  But it’s a lead-in for their call to remove President Obama from office, on the grounds that he’s “the same as George W. Bush.”
Uh, no.
These are the same weirdos who held signs in 2008 portraying Obama as Hitler.  Credible !

Dateline Michigan.  Fowlerville police asked Redford resident Nick Walsh to take down signs carrying the message “Dump Obama” during the funeral procession for former Fowlerville firefighter Alan Hale Tuesday.[…]
“We just asked him to take the signs down out of courtesy for the family, and he did,” Fowlerville Police Chief Tom Couling said. “There was no problem.”
Walsh confirmed what police asked him to do and he obliged. He was not asked to leave
the site, nor was he asked to pack up his literature, Couling said. […]
The LaRouche Political Action Committee is named after American political activist Lyndon LaRouche Jr., who unsuccessfully ran for president on eight consecutive occasions from 1976 to 2004. The goal of the group is to save the country’s economy, Walsh said.

Dateline Salem:  Members of Lyndon LaRouche’s political organization were back at the post office, according to the police report at 10:41 a.m., setting up a table and “taking up customer spots.” At least one person complained over their political posters — in the past they’ve depicted President Obama as Hitler. A caller complained “the situation … is escalating. … If they stay, someone will get hurt.” An official wondered if “they are trying to bait him into violating their rights.” The Postal Inspector Service confirmed to police that protesters are not allowed on federal property, which goes right to the street. Moreover, police told the LaRouche contingent they were not allowed to set up a protest across the street. “After a short discussion, the protesters decided to leave,” according to the log.

Datelinie Medford.  Therese Mallory of Landsdowne, Pa, carries a placard that reads: Dump Obama, Use the 25th Amendment” from her car to a stand outside the Medford Post Office this morning along Route 541 in Medford. Mallory and her husband Don are protesting President Barack Obama, and the bail out of Wall Street and London. They are part of the LaRouche Polictical Action Committee.

Dateline  Comédie du Livre, France’s second-largest book fair…
One bunch of very clean-cut revolutionaries set up a stand with a French-English sign, and I suspect they were LaRouchies, since they seem to be everywhere, ranting incoherently.

Pamphlet handed outside a post office. Read Up on Wikipedia.

Dateline Stockholm, LarouchePunkSE:  This week in Stockholm, Johan Rockström and his eco-fascist accomplices tried to ram through a new policy of global governance toward mass genocide. What failed in Copenhagen would now be done behind locked doors, without any open debate.
Luckily, this fraud was exposed by the LaRouche movement’s political organizers, who intervened outside the event.

………………………………………………………………

How History Will Remember —

That which he believes.

Representative William Dannemeyer backed anything antigay, including the ban in HIV-positive immigrants and Lyndon LaRouche’s Proposition 64 in 1986 to quarantine people with HIV/AIDS. In 1989, his book Shadow in the Land: Homosexuality in America was distributed by a slew of antigay organizations, including the Traditional Values Coalition, which also distributed the antigay video from which this excerpt is taken:.

OR MAYBE??? Saner heads contingency overcome currently if you have been to tarry 45 yrs drop of a U.S. economy. Since 1966, American Economist Lyndon LaRouche has been fighting for a lapse to American methods of domestic economy. Unfortunately a Austrian propagandize of mercantile liberalism has filtered down as well as depraved a suspicion processes of many. It as well was a product of Britain. Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations as well as Moral Sentiments were used to convince most to welcome British Liberalism aka FREE TRADE!!

… Just toss it in the meelee with infowars for Rothschild research citations.
… And again.  Try the Schiller institute next – they’ve actually got people inside the admistrations they criticize.
Read it at the lpac sites:  See here:   In a discussion with leading associates yesterday, Lyndon LaRouche laid out an urgent timetable for the unique action which must be taken in order to save the world economy from plunging into a New Dark Age, and removing President Obama from office: ramming Glass-Steagall legislation through the U.S. Congress. There’s no room for “maybe” under the current circumstances of increasingly violent weather, and financial-economic breakdown, LaRouche argued. We have to get this done now.

A LOOK AT THE FAULTINESS OF THE “LAROUCHE WAS RIGHT” CANARD:

Watching this video i realize that this has been going on for so long that out of 300mil americans only about 1mil of us even know whats really happening in this country.This video is so old but it seems as if what hes saying is exactly whats happening today.The plans he mentions for depopulation is precisely whats happening now.Think about what he said about mexico.I can feel it it my soul that martial law will be declared shortly after economic turmoil. FEMA camps are ready here in GA

Mr. LaRouch has a very great respect for his own opinion but I am uncertain if it is a deserved respect. Carter was elected. How did we avoid thermonuclear war?

Ok so he was wrong in 1976 and I love this guy. He was saying the same thing about the economy too but the Reagan fell in line after they tried killing him and bandaged the economy with war and drugs. Maybe he’s right this time because in the 70s there was no insane credit and a ridiculously uneducated population there way we have now.
Why should I believe him this time about WWIII?

(Any reaction to Imperialism:  The Final Stage of Bolshevism?)

THE MASSES SPEAK THROUGH YOUTUBE: 
Ebdan88 says on June 2nd, 2011 at 6:00 am :
I really had Hope for Lyndon LaRouche. I thougt that he was a reall man who was in the good side, not the EVIL side!!? Now more and more i am hearing he is a Globalist. Just listen to his Speech!!? He talks about dumping Obama and having a Global Economi!!??? isnt that The Globalists want!!?? Oh boy they are EVIL Clever, maybe that is why they have the power for so long time …!!?
noodoo19 says on June 2nd, 2011 at 6:32 am :
Lyndon LaRouche seems like a sweet man with honourable intentions, and goodness knows we need someone to lead us out of the veritable abyss we are sinking more and more deeply into, but he is not very eloquent. it might be the reason that his ideology has not “taken” after such a long period of trying. somethimes the visionary needs to acknowledge his weaknesses, and find the right people to fill certain roles in order to see that vision through to success. just a thought.
Sixalienasa says on June 2nd, 2011 at 10:57 am :
I am afraid that Mr La rouche sounds like a Recording Contract. Rambling. Boring. Confusing.
I am a little too old to be President of the United States, but if the people want me then I am ready.

PETITION!!!

Answer to lpac stuff on ecoli scare:
Put away the tin foil hat. The reason is that manure from cows treated with super antibiotics has been used to fertilize bean seeds. Just a few days before the bean sprouts were harvested.
No conspiracy, unless the cows did it on purpose 🙂

Obama claims that we can’t forecast natural disasters, but LaRouche precisely forecast the natural disaster of Obama and his policies in April of 2009. The disaster that would result from failing to remove this President

……………………………………….

WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE?

Matthew Benzor talks about Ex Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburton.  And the “Most far reaching operation into a U.S. citizen”.  Can’t call this self- so much as other-directed.
Interesting commenter, he.

@roylee13 Engdahl does not want to mention the British Empire. Take a look at what Lyndon LaRouche has to say. Reply. berlinbueso says: June 8, 2011 at 12:56 pm. This guy is a sell-out. He used to work with LaRouche, then went off to

“Screw Loose Change”:  Engdahl is a former Lyndon LaRouche disciple. — and questions.

How much crazier do you have to get in order to abandon Lyndon LaRouche?
suspect that LaRouche abandoned him, just as he dumped Webster Tarpley. LaRouche famously purged his group of most of the baby boomers in the 1990s, opting to go for a new generation of rubes.

Mystery Solved on William Engdahl, via Wikipedia…
(…)

Speaking from the vantage point of Lord Palmerston’s British Empire circa 1850, Schiller Institute U.S. President Webster Tarpley chaired the panel on “Lord Palmerston’s Multicultural Zoo” at the Schiller Institute’s conference on Feb. 20
Tarpley served as tour guide through the centuries, and as the “choral” backdrop to the historical drama, introducing each of the seven speakers in turn and concluding the panel. What follows is Tarpley’s introduction. Subtitles have been added.

This interview with Tom Weiss is 95 percent useless.  But I guess you should shift to find the 5 percent useful.

These are the people to turn to for studies on the Authoritarian Personality?
(…}

Dope Inc in “We Are Change Oklahoma” website.

Tarpley is Lyndon LaRouche’s mouthpiece…
I don’t agree with Tarpley’s socialistic spin on things (if he had his way, we’d all be collectivized workers, toiling for the state, in some August Comte wet dream), but I don’t think he can be equated with LaRouche.
Like Tarpley, LaRouche tells you a lot of truth on the anglo-euro establishment, but then he does ‘pragmatic’ things like the nonsense of backing these anglo-led color revolutions all throughout Islam. Tarpley is far more honest in his approach.

……………………

A youtube video was put up “Justice for Jeremiah — 8 Years Later.” Googling, I saw this — at first I glance I thought this was posted in 2006 — which would’ve made it completely surreal (a friendly note to “Spengler” before he disclosed his identity) — but it was posted in 2010.

The Larouche Movement has let it be known that they hate all of Manner of Human Decency by posting this tripe.  I am unsure if I want to recreate it here — there are both pros and cons to doing so — but it’s necessary to read it.  Click the link.

At first unrelated, but somehow still related, the figure who was in the Larouche movement and is still mentally of it — Xandafur — gives us this, a couple posts laer.:
Lyn is the the oldest new of the newest old, depending upon whether or not you’re new or old. If you think you’re new, than you might be old. If you think you’re old, than you might be new. If you’re new-old, than you’re old-new. Either way, you’re not an an old-new new-old, so go figure.

The most interesting series of posts in recent Factnet comes from “poe”, who a month or two ago expressed his raison d’etre as “Confronting Larouche and Confronting Dennis King”, a ludicrous expression of Equivalence which, even if given a 50-50 split on that score would amount to Larouchism.  All right, follow this through:

King:  Mrs. Duggan went in good faith to the former members in Germany, with awareness of the trauma they had experienced and a willingness to meet them halfway. She never called them Nazis. From most of them (the ones in a position to know, like Jonathan Tennenbaum) she encountered stony silence, hostility, and from a few, ludicrous excuses. She discovered that most of them really just didn’t give a damn what had happened to her son. They were too busy building up Solonline, their new entity based on LaRouche’s politics, and protecting their reputations.

poe:  Just what about Solonline’s politics do you condemn? I’ve been to their website several times and found nothing there worthy of attack. I’ve read LaRouche and his team attack them as being Anglophiles controlled by George Soros, and you and your team attack them as still being controlled by LaRouche, but I haven’t seen any evidence that they are controlled by anybody. Neither you nor Lyn seem to like to see ex-members free of control, though, do you?

The most pressing tenant of Larouchian ideology held by “Solon Online” that King and Duggan hold against them is the idea (expressed recently by Ace’s blog, actually) is the idea that they shouldn’t talk to Duggan about the Wiesbedan Schiller Institute Conference of 2003 –and so long as they hold to this idea it’s fair to call them “Larouchianism Without Larouche”.  Everything else is secondary, but I guess we await to see the use of the same header-image.

A couple years ago in the workings of this blog, I was a little puzzled by the Larouche Wikipedia Team’s interest in Mordechai Levy and the JDO and JDL, and AJ Weberman and through him Bob Dylan.  It was pretty quick to find the source of their interest — and all I could say was that “Leatherstocking”‘s ham-fisted “Yippie” references to King were amusing.  There isn’t a lot of “there” there — we have in Mordechai Levy a former “undercover Security Guard” who — well, I suppose we have the classic problem with the org and working with former associates — we could get some information from, who?, Frankhouser?

There’s not a lot of there there with this fracas — but the  snippets show how they fall into piece for the Org’s campaign :

The JDO is a split-off from the JDL. At the time of the Tupac-EZ shakedown they were still the same organization. Someone can correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think that principled opposition to running protection rackets and making death threats (oops, I’m sorry, Dennis, I meant “boycotts” lol) against black rappers was an issue in the split. I don’t like the ADL for other reasons, but I agree with you that the ADL has condemned both the JDO and the JDL. Actually, they condemn them a lot more than they do LaRouche these days, but that’s a

Then there’s, an attempt to weave the discussion of solonline to this business.:

The difference between the JDL and the JDO is pretty much the same as the difference between the ICLC and SolonLine. One split off from the other. But they used to be one. At the time of the Tupac EZ threats they were still the same.

poe:  Wikipedia disagrees:
Quote:
The JDO was founded in the early 1980s by Mordechai Levy after a violent feud with the Jewish Defense League’s former leader Irv Rubin, who was killed or committed suicide in jail in 2002.[1] It is one of two United States offshoots of the Jewish Defense League (JDL) after a breaking with the JDL’s former leader Meir Kahane.[2]

To quote Stephen Colbert from the other day — on the news that Sarah Palin supporters had flooded wikipedia to alter the Paul Revere article to include Palin’s history of events — “I get all my historical information from wikipedia, just as Beach Volleyball Inventor Albert Einstein did.”  The page about Engdahl refers to Larouche as an “American Statesman”, for Pete’s Sake!  For poe, I’m struck by the reaching for not a contradiction — they split in the early 1980s, and then… in the 1990s…  And I’m mainly interested in the wikipedia articles in discerning what relatively recent anonymous isp numbers were trying to do here.

To the current Wikipedia happenings:  the lede no longer as having moved to the “far right” but as having “allied with” etc etc.  A whole mass of material has been moved from “Views” to the man proper — the Earthean Conspiracy against the Org and Man.

The org itself is publishing articles along the lines of:  “LaRouche’s Galactic Battle To Save Humanity Aired on Mexican Radio” and “LaRouche Featured on Icelandic Blog”.

Finally, before departing factnet, Hylozoic Hedgehog brought to attention the date that could be considered the chief element that would turn his political clique into a cult — from the dusty corridors of the early 1960s Trotskyite Movement Debating Societies.:
On 2 March 1962, LaRouche (a/k/a “Lynn Marcus”) gave a talk entitled “Freud and Marx. Their Theories of Knowledge” at a Friday night Militant Labor Forum which began at 8:30 pm. The notice for LaRouche’s talk appears in the 26 February 1962 issue of the Militant on page 2 of the paper in the “Weekly Calendar” section.
Forming some variety of Hall Putsch, I don’t know what type of Hall.

…………………….

Witzshe v Larouche.
Larouche’s latest article “A Certain World Map” is an historical overview of the current situation mankind faces. I’d like to see what Rold Witzshe’s reaction is to it.

Calling out Joseph Potvin, damned Canadian.

The turn to Rolfwitz is complete.

Rolf has more websites than me… and that’s a rare thing.

……………………

So… Anthony Weiner.

I admit my first thought upon seeing an image of gray underwear with a sharply defined thing was around the realm of “Why do I care?”.  I admit to groaning at the name given to this — “Weiner-gate”.  I did not want to read certain elements of political hackery that draw a blank of other party’s sex (quasi-sex?) scandals and misdeeds in calling hypocrisy to Team Donkey, pre-emptive or otherwise.

Mostly I admit to feeling an element of trepidation when seeing the name “Andrew Breitbart” attached to the story, because the evasiveness of Weiner’s subsequent comment told me that this was probably basically true, and this would be a legitimate chit for Breitbart to add to his ill-gotten and undeserved chits.

Seriously, if I am counting this right, Breitbart is now 1 and 3 or 1 and 4 in the “accuracy” of his partisan gets.  Or maybe he’s un-defeated — the accuracy of the “wrong” ones are less important than that they got the job done — brought down ACORN, made Obama a fool for letting Shirley Sherrod go, brought NPR a hemming and a hawing– and the fact that in particular the ACORN story most Americans believe he actually had something and it’ll get played on Fox News and Conservative Radio for here to eternity.  The beat goes on.

I think I read the explanation for the problem for Anthony Weiner.  Weiner’s problem is that the use he has for his Congressional seat is two-fold: to position himself for Mayor of New York, and as a platform for Brash Blowhard Liberal Punditry.  I suppose the former is now more problematic, but I don’t really know — but the latter is done away with (even as its purpose was to work in service for the mayoral bid) — ’tis a game, and in the Cable TV “Cross-fire” yelling match, the other side would always have the fact that they’ve seen the shape of his underwear in his penis as psychological weapon.  He may have a future in politics, but his selected domain in politics will have to shift.

It could be said that to that old expression about Members of Congress being either “Workhorses” or “Showhorses”, he was a “Showhorse”, and therein lay his problem.

And I admit to groaning at some high five Internet comments that call Weiner “Jon Stewart’s butt boy”.  But that’s the domain of those things, isn’t it?

It seems to me that one of the difficulties that a Professor or Teacher has is the flow of popular cultural references, with each new year of students bumping a popular culture reference away from student’s point of reference.  There are odd variations of this — several years’ ago I read a piece about a college professor making a reference to the Risky Business scene where Tom Cruise dances in his underwear to “Old Time Rock and Roll” — the class was somewhat familiar with the reference, but they knew it from Alf.

Yesterday I witnessed a college Math Professor tutoring a student, and in order to explain a mathematical concept (I don’t know what the term was, but it involves density of mass growing when you shorten perimeters) by using the example of Danny DeVito.  The student did not recognize Danny DeVito and the Professor was in trouble.  So he jumped to a couple of things Danny DeVito was known for — “You know… Taxi… Throw Mama From the Train.”

I look over, having to wipe a smile from my face, knowing neither reference will be gotten from the typical early 20 something, and the student stares puzzled and says, “I’m not much for pop culture references.”     I interject, from my small distance, “The… uh… Second Batman Movie.”
“Oh.  The bad guy in that one?”
“Yeah, Uh… The Penguin.”
“Oh.  Okay.”
Me to the Professor: “Taxi… um… You can’t throw out a cultural reference from the late 70s.”
“The decades just sort of blend together here.”
“Yeah.  I know the feeling.”  Kind of.

It occurs to me, of course, that my reference to the Penguin in Batman Returns was only slightly more hit and miss than the 50-something year old Professor’s reference to Taxi (a chance some will have seen reruns on Nick at Nite?)  But they both trump Throw Mama From the Train (Was that ever run in loops on USA Network?).  But now that I think about it, I don’t know what I’d give to quickly identify Danny DeVito to anyone younger than I, and certainly not a bunch of them — To that list of Taxi and Batman Returns — I would definitely exclude Throw Mama From the Train — I guess you can toss in his part in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and the short physical foil to one or another Arnold Schwarzenegger stupid comedy.  After that, I’m kind of drawing a blank.  The good thing is, thought, the majority will be able to spot him as a celebrity and actor, and indeed I still think there’s a better than average chance they’ll be able to picture him without identification — it’s just that the lesser than average is not an anomoly in a way it wasn’t ten years ago.

Of course, skip a couple of decades, and there will be a whole host of celebrities of the “Reality TV Star and Sex Tape” variety you’ll be even more hard pressed to identify for the next generation than Danny DeVito and Throw Mama From the Train.

I had the misfortune of listening to a group of half-wits discuss an amporphous conspiratorial blob.  It was a blurry accumulation of every half baked conspiracy website and video and radio show you have ever come in contact with, assembled as non-linear stream-of-conscious answers to any question you might toss out to grab ahold of who did what to whom now.  Smashed in the whole apparatus were legitimate areas of concerns — somewhat lined up with the idea of America turning into a Third World Nation — but these weren’t attached to anything and were left dangling in the wind — if you could ground this to anything, you might be able to think through the problem and lay out possible ways out of it.  Instead, we have something about a North Carolina congressman whose lack of answer from higher government officials to a letter demonstrates the Secret Government, who have set it up so that the millions of people America has lost to Abortion over the years has to and is being replaced by Immigrants.  It is not a matter of IF, but a matter of WHEN the Amorphous Power Overlords will open up the Concentration Camps they have erected in the Forest Service Areas that we’ll be handing over to China as collateral when we default on our currency — and did you know Terry Nichols resides in an underground prison (the kind they’re going to be putting us in).
The near future will be one where we have to fend for ourselves.  Since there will be no agriculture, and since we will have wiped out so many species we’ve hunted for over millenia, we will be resorting to Cannibalism.

I could not quite keep everything straight, and I can’t really diagram the Conspiracy — if one were to diagram it, they’d be using a magic marker and smudging everything all over the place anyway — but that is the general idea.  I imagine a future where the American electorate will have absorbed this type of thinking, and vote for Fascism thinking the alternative is Cannibalism.

The redistricting efforts across the country effect many individual members of Congress, and bring to the focus various politicians — it’s here that we get news that Dennis Kucinich is thinking about moving to Washington, as Ohio is losing a seat and Washington has a couple seats to spare.  I see analysis of each new state’s plans in new posts on the dailykos, the posts interesting mainly because of links from various people with more specialized and localized knowledge who can crunch demographic numbers and see why the lines jig and jag where they do.

Naturally, Alex Jones’s “Prison Planet” website is only concerned about one individual.  Ron Paul.  From my far-side glance, I have a difficult time seeing the numbers — tossing some black people into Ron Paul’s district — add up.  If you’d asked me without the analysis, I’d have said that it seems to me more akin to diffusing and making more difficult a Democratic seat than hampering Ron Paul’s safe district.  But I can’t argue with analysis from people more attune to these things.  The other fact may be the powers that be are looking ahead to a post-Ron Paul world, not all that concerned one way or the other about him and doing what’s best for the Republican Party for the rest of the decade.

Naturally the Prison Planet comments are funny.

This might backfire with the increased awareness that Dr. Paul has done more for minority civil rights than any other politician on either side of isle, at any level of government. This was stated on Alex Jones Show by a leading member of the Austin chapter of the NAACP during the last presidential bid. Being Anti-War and Anti-Drug War might be just want these individuals in this widening district want. Ron Paul could win the district.

And of course:

It will not matter. He will not be Congressman Paul in 2012, he will be President Paul.

But then there’s this note.

And Paul’s not alone in this predicament: Michigan Rep. Thaddeus McCotter might run for president in part because he’s losing his district.

This is an experiment.  I have taken the brief passages concerning Lawrence Dennis — a rather eccentric person in American history, no?, as presented in White Protestant Nation, by Allan J Lichtman, and posted them here.  It’s a slice of the story of how Lichtman presents his view of the history of the “conservative movement” through nine decades, and by slicing out the obscure figure of Lawrence Dennis, I have a conspiratorial connecto that leads from Technocracy through Fascism, (and the internal war against Fascism as rationalization for McCarthyism as “fair turn-about”) on to acceptance of a “leviathan state” by Cold War Conservatism and ends in a carefully planned election of Ronald Reagan.
Is this a convincing story?  No, but I do find it amusing, and I trust somewhat suggestive of the way people can siphon off pieces of history to fit a narrative.:

page 78:  Political theorist Lawrence Dennis gave a sophisticated twist to right-wing thought in The Coming American Fascism, which argued that an Italian – or German-style corporate state was preferable to an otherwise certain communist takeover of the United States.  He said that the United States had better prepare for fascism and make sure that the “right people” ran the new order.  The technocratic movement that swept across America in the early 1930s, with appeal to both the right and the left, also influenced Dennis’s work.  The technocrats preached that with expert planning and direction America could efficiently utilize resources and labor to end the depression and create abundance.  Dennis claimed to have analyzed social trends dispassionately, but the very title of his book made him a notorious figure.

page 119-120:  In July 1942 the Roosevelt administration for the first time deployed its police powers against the right.  About six weeks after federal agents captured a team of German saboteurs in the United States, prosecutors indicted for sedition twenty-eight German agents, Bund members, and far-right activists including Elizabeth Dilling of the Mothers Movement, and shirt leaders Gerald Winrod and Joseph Pelley.  The indictment named the America First Committee and antiwar mother’s groups but no left-wing opponents of war.  The trial began in 1944 under new indictments that dropped the antiwar groups and added the alleged pro-fascist Lawrence Dennis.  Prosecutors charged defendants with violating the Smith Act of 1940 by conspiring with Nazi agents to overthrow the US government.  The trial dragged on through eight inconclusive months and the deaths of the presiding judge.  In 1946 a new judge dismissed all charges, ruling that a new trial would be a “travesty of justice”.
Conservatives charged the president with chilling free speech and tarring his political opposition as anti-Semitic and pro-fascist.  “The crackpots in the so-called sedition trial,” Sterling Morton wrote to Alf Landon, “were the victims of just what the New Dealers would have liked to subject you, Bob Wood, Lindbergh, myself and others if they hadn’t felt that we had too many friends, too much standing, and too many resources to make it worth while.”

page 133 (memo to RNC in 1942):  Dennis warned that eventually it would not matter whether Democrats or Republicans controlled the government.  To fight “Communist sin,” America had to build a bigger and more invasive government than ever before contemplated in its history.  Such a big government regime would strive to master the world and placate America’s masses at home with “New Deal boons.”  You couldn’t “plump for WPA projects for foreigners and none for the home folks,” he wrote.  A postwar crusade would keep Democrats in power for a while, but soon party would become irrelevant.  Neither Democrats nor Republicans could escape the iron logic of the leviathan state.  The antimcommunist campaign would be of “such cosmic magnitude and such indefinite duration that the national undertaking could only be rationally carried out by a single and necessarily, self-perpetuating regime.”  Moreover, postwar government would have to deal with the contradiction between lingering imperialism abroad and Jim Crow at home.

pages 145-146:  Maverick conservative analyst Lawrence Dennis saw his 1942 predictions of Democratic victory and a leviathan state fulfilled in the Truman Doctrine.  “Truman should win in a walk in 1948,” he wrote.  “The Republicans, having accepted the internationalist doctrine in the bi-partisan foreign policy, now lack a basis for a successful opposition. … Accepting the Truman doctrine for a holy war on communist sin all over the world commits America to a permanent war emergency. … The executive has unlimited discretion to wage undeclared war anywhere, anytime he considers our national security requires to blow to be struck for good against sin.”  Why start with Greece and Turkey?  “Answer:  the Standard Oil monopolies in mid-east oil.”

page 203:  As analyst Lawrence Dennis had predicted in 1942, the crusade against “Communist Sin” meant adjusting conservative ideas to accommodate big government.  An early warning came in 1952 from rising conservative star William F Buckley Jr.  “We have to accept Big Government for the duration,” he wrote, “for neither an offensive nor defensive war can be waged, given our present government skills, except through the instrument of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores.”  Conservatives had no choice but to embrace “the extensive and productive tax laws that are needed to support a vigorous anti-Communist foreign policy.”  Moreover, if “[conservatives] deem Soviet power a menance to our freedom (as I happen to) they will have to support large armies and air forces, atomic energy, central intelligence, war production boards, and the attendant of centralization of power in Washington.”

page 276 :  The “growth and development of a thought-control system,” including “the press, radio, TV, movies, book publishing, and education kept either party from challenging the liberal state.  Echoing conservative analyst Lawrence Dennis’s warnings from the 1940s, Jones wrote that neither party could resist the lure of leviathan government.  He wrote that if Republicans won in 1968, with $200 billion a year to blow, with no real accountability,” they too would exploit “not only the power, but the money of the Federal Government.”
William Baroody, president of the American Enterprise Institute, offered a similarly grim prognosis.  He said that if a liberal malaise swept Democrats from office, conservatives still lacked the ideas and infrastructure needed to turn electoral success into policy change.  Conservative reform “requires a well thought out set of ideas concerning policy if it is to achieve its purpose.”  Instead conservative thinkers were “a lonely lot, supported by only a few. … The alliance with men of affairs must be made now.”  For Richard Ware of the Relm Foundation, which provided financial assistance to conservative scholars, conservatives had to use their resources to “change the tone of academic orthodoxy” through a long-term process that “prepares a climate of thought, ultimately, in which the election of 1980 may be, for a change, uphill-going for the left.”