The Republican Presidential hopefuls are simultaneously out-hawking and out-doving President Obama on Afghanistan.

In an interview Monday on NBC’s “Today” show, Mr. Santorum, long among the most hawkish Republican candidates on Afghanistan, signaled that it was time to review America’s options. One option, he said, was to leave even sooner than called for in the timeline laid out by the Obama administration, which would turn over security to Afghan forces by 2014 and end the leading combat role for American troops by next year.
“We have to either make the decision to make a full commitment, which this president has not done, or we have to decide to get out, and probably get out sooner,” Mr. Santorum said.”
One day earlier, Mr. Gingrich, who had previously voiced concern over the direction of the Afghan war, declared on “Face the Nation” that it was time to leave the country.
“We need to understand that our being in the middle of countries like Afghanistan is probably counterproductive,” Mr. Gingrich said. “We’re not prepared to be ruthless enough to force them to change. And yet we are clearly an alien presence.”
He added on “Fox News Sunday” that he feared the mission was one “that we’re going to discover is not doable.”

The phrase that pays here, from Mr. Newt Gingrich “We’re not prepared to be ruthless enough”.

And cue this item:

The comments by Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Santorum came after news that a United States Army sergeant was suspected of walking off his base in southern Afghanistan and killing 16 Afghan civilians, many of them children.

This is one of the components to Obama’s sudden slide in approval numbers — so perhaps he has a point on the American public psyche opinion.  If American opinion could be tied to approve or accept this — Newt would be all “Full Speed Ahead”.
It bears mentioning, Obama’s Afghan policy has always seemed in part an effort to out-hawk flank against his out-dove visa vie Iraq and the “Dumb War”… politically speak-wise.

There are several news magazine covers worth looking at.  There is this cover for The World Today for this article “Why Greatness Eludes Obama”.  There is the cover for the Weekly Standard feature, against the “Rehabilitation” of Bill Clinton’s image.  And there is the Washington Monthly — “The Incomplete Greatness of Barack Obama” — which, I suppose does dovetail with the other two.

Clinton disclaims the news reports that he was obsessed through his second term with “Legacy”, and that was the subject of conversations he had with Dick Morris — “How can I snag a spot as ‘Great’ President'” — the kind history will get him snagged onto dollar bills.  If you read through the World Today article, you do get the sense that just about every president behaves like Richard Nixon in his final days — talking to presidential portraits.  See:

As Teddy Roosevelt said of Lincoln, even as he lamented the absence of his own momentous crisis:  without the Civil War “no one would have known his name.”

These things go on and on.  We further see the suggestion in this article that “Jefferson, Jackson, Teddy Roosevelt, Wilson, and Truman” don’t make the cut with Washington, Roosevelt, and Lincoln — because of the lack of crisis.  Which would be news to a Wilson throwing his dice in the World War, a Truman off into the Cold War, and a Jackson who faced down Calhoun’s Nullifiers.  And everything here becomes a little arbitrary.  In the categories of what makes these presidents “Great”, a line is thrown out — the category “Character”.  Franklin Roosevelt was a duplicitous two-faced figure — you’d have to define “Character” oddly to get him in there.

A question for Eric Alterman:
People conveniently forget that the now nearly sainted Bush I

I understand Alterman as “setting the record straight” — he does this same remarking about Barry Goldwater’s historiological turn in the popular imagination.  But where are these people who have sainted Bush I?

And now we end up with the odd realities.  The Washington Monthly feature venetrates Obama as a completion of Clinton (see, those swarming advisors who tend to have liberals in a tizzy).  A lot of things depend on public relations — there was an article in the paper about Obama strategy team which has a lot of careful consumer selecting that makes the Joe McGinnis “Selling of the President” book about Nixon ’68 laughable.  The list of Obama’s accomplishments has a good deal of “small bore” things — which is good and well: as the World Today article asks, “Why do we want ‘Great’ness?”  A question which leads to the simple answer: actually, this is your game — the rest of us are content to state that a Bush I or Clinton are… imperfect figures in a dreary system– moderately agreeable or disagreeable after the tumult of their time ends.

Jim Rogers’s political career is not over!
Along with the delegate, Terry also won twelve of Oklahoma’s 77 counties. However, he was not the only challenger to win counties; the 2010 U.S. Senate nominee for the Democratic Party in Oklahoma, Jim Rogers, won three. He finished in third place overall with 14 percent, one percent short of the threshold required to qualify for delegates. Progressive activist Darcy Richardson was fourth with six percent.
Damned!  If I had known he was on the ballot, I would have urged and endorsed his presidential run, and swung my considerable weight behind his candidacy, thus earning him that extra percentage point in the polls, and getting him to the delegate threshold.  What this delegate would do in North Carolina this September — I don’t know.  Poke the eyes of all the Obama delegates, I suppose.
<p>Reasons given for Jim Rogers’s showing.   
The Rogers surname always gets votes in Oklahoma elections.</i>  Sure.  Blame Will.   Don’t give Jim any credit for his outstanding campaign tactic and reaching the people with his message of Hope and his wardrobe choice on the hustlings. 

Hey do ho.  From Nate Silver.

All of the states that Rick Santorum has won so far — North Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Tennessee and Colorado — are contiguous with one another, forming a belt that stretches north-to-south through the midpoint of the country.
Although it is aesthetically pleasing to look at this on the map, most of these states have relatively low populations. Mr. Santorum has so far not been able to expand map eastward into the industrial Midwest — although that will change if he pulls out Ohio. He has also been blocked by Newt Gingrich so far in the Deep South.
A state that would appear to be within the Santorum Belt, Kansas, holds its caucuses on Saturday. And Alabama and Mississippi, which vote a week from today, are on the southern frontier of it.

Sigh.  The Santorum Belt.  Dan Savage jokes notwithstanding… this is either “The Real America” or a stretch of America a coastal elitist will go ahead and consign to the fifth circle of Hell.  Not wanting to debate who would make a better president or the repercussions of political decisions, I would just as soon walk into a Ron Paul belt, if one could exist.

This book amounted to Betsy Pryor’s promotional bid on behalf of selling Kombucha — in the mid 1990s.   Leafing through his sort of bullet-points of vaguely clamied health benefits (a whole lot of “Doesn’t hurt!”), and I land to where I am interested.  The bullet points on the history.  Item number one is some “first clues” of its existence in not easily documented historical mentions in China.  Item number two amounts to its origin myth.  A Doctor Kombu administers aid to the Emperor of Japan.  And so, either with Dr Kombu or with a seaweed Kombu, we have the name Kombucha.

And item number three is the one and only reason I maintain an interest in Kombucha.  Here, Kargasok is singled out.  It ends up being an important historical way station in the propagation of Kombucha Tea.  We have mention of trade routes taking it up there, which is all good and dandy, but Kargasok ends up tied to the substance.  From the book:

One of the many local names given to Kombucha over the years grew out of this experience.  A woman traveling in Russia saw that many villagers in Kargasok lived to ripe old ages in good health and she searched for their “secret”.  It turned out that each hut had one or more pots of this amazing tea brewing, and the tea was given to all members of the family as a normal part of their life.  Reports of this miraculous “Kargasok tea” spread the use of Kombucha even further.
Olya in Virginia tells her personal experience with Kombucha when she lived in Russia.  “I was born and raised in the former USSR, and I remember visiting my aunt and being treated to a very special sweet and sour tangy drink.  I just loved it.  My aunt kept a glass jar bottle on her windowsill with a guage covering the top […]

The next bullet point here is Stalin drinking it and being lied to that someone was trying to poison him, and then the liars being exiled or something.  Yes, it’s that kind of book.

Explaining the travel of Kombucha into America, I think we can spot it starting off in popularity in the early 1990s in a place like Berkeley.  Kombucha started being sold, and reached its plateau of sales.  The next logical step is selling the tea, bottled.  And so we get the next surge of popularity in the 00s.  And now it enjoys brisk sales in “those spots on the map where Al Gore won in a landslide and Ralph Nader came in second,” with suggestions of Tibet floating around the packaging and marketing.

Meantime… Kargasok.  I long ago had a page on the Internet about my brief drinking of Kombucha Tea in Kargasok.  I became mildly embarrassed by it.  There’s a modest exaggeration of its basic location in “Nowhere”.  The trip had an airy experience to it, but I’m pretty sure some things would have been more grounded had we (my parents and I) spent any amount of time there, and I do have this counter-game: someone from across the globe comes in to my small hometown for a couple days — we do what?  (Go on a picnic with the mayor, I suppose.)
I can easily spot locations of nearby note.  Kargasok is up-river from Tomsk, which is the higher education center of Siberia.  The Brotherhood of Joseph, by a Brooks Hansen, describes travelling into Tomsk to complete an adoption, and being agog by it all — imagining that the child is the product of a professor getting too close to a student or disposing of an accident that stalls a professional career path.

Kargasok is just… a rather random depot here.  I want to know why.  Something that makes it less random.  Either it was somehow quarantined into this spot — roughly — for cultural (not unlike my Berkley explanation) or climate reasons, your explorer slid into it precisely here, or Kargasok is symbolic along the lines of Peoria (see the “travels to see my aunt” anecdote).

Dateline …?

These people remind me of the group I saw on the street today. There was a huge sign with a picture of Obama with a little Hitler-mus­tache painted on and “Impeach Obama” to one side in large letters. When I approached I could see this was set up by the La Rouchies.

Dateline Holden

“It’s all about the British financial institutions,” said the female Lyndon LaRouche supporter. She was talking with a woman in front of the Holden post
office.  The male supporter was talking animatedly about the First Amendment to another
visitor. On the side of their table was the now-familiar poster of Barack   Obama with a Hitler mustache. “It’s about my freedom of expression.”  Every few minutes, a passing car would honk in apparent support.  When the visitor speaking with the male supporter left, I stepped forward   and introduced myself as a local blogger. I asked how business was going.  Good, he said.
[…]He asked if I wanted to sign a petition. I said that I was here as a reporter, not as a supporter. He got quiet.  I asked a few more questions, wondering if there’d been any repeat of the  trouble that had occurred in other towns and of plans to go to other towns in the region.

Dateline Milton

The two men, who requested not to be identified, were on the street corner representing Lyndon Larouche’s Political Action Committee (LaRouche PAC). They offered reading material to Post Office customers about the LaRouche PAC’s federal slate of candidates for the upcoming election.

While none of the LaRouche candidates are running for a Milton office, the men in Milton referred all questions to Rachel Brown’s campaign.
Brown’s Campaign Manager Jennifer Kreingold. “We’ve been campaigning with the mustache on Obama’s face since 2009,”

Dateline Foster City, CA
At the City Council’s March 5 meeting, Councilman Herb Perez called the display an “embarrassment” that “bordered on hate speech” but acknowledged that it was allowed under free speech rights. He said he had received “a bunch of phone calls” about the incident.
Police also received calls that day, according to Foster City police Capt. Jon Froomin, the department’s public information officer.
“Our main thing is keeping the peace,” said Froomin.
When asked about the pictures of Obama with a Hitler mustache, Yule said, “the truth hurts.” He described LaRouche as an “FDR-Lincoln-Hamiltonian democrat.”
“We’re definitely thinking of coming back to Foster City at some point,” said Yule, who has volunteered for the Bay Area LPAC movement for about 10 years. “ A lot of people wanted us to come back.”
Uh huh.

Dateline Belmot, California

A fringe political group headed by a right wing activist who has openly supported accused Nazi war criminals, among others, held a signature gathering in support of impeaching President Obama in front of the Foster City Post Office earlier this week under a doctored poster of Obama wearing a Hitler mustache.
And despite his ties to extremist groups – Lyndon LaRouche has gone to bat for accused concentration camp guards and hired Klansmen as political consultants – a North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA) official suggested that the controversial former presidential candidate’s group isn’t peddling the Hitler comparison in a good way.
“What we’re saying is that Obama is a tool of the British Empire and that he was put in by the British to carry out a genocidal policy, no different than Hitler,” NAWAPA spokeswoman Angela Vullo told Patch in a telephone interview on Tuesday. […]
Vullo dismissed the notion that playing the Hitler card might offend Holocaust survivors or relatives of those who’d been killed in Nazi Germany.
“I’d say that they don’t understand history and they don’t understand the policy of Obama and the British Empire,” Vullo said.

Dateline Lynn
State Police moved two protesters affiliated with nationally known political extremist Lyndon LaRouche, a Lynn public school graduate, from the Lynnway this morning after the local police received several complaints of the youths carrying posters of President Barack Obama with a Hitler mustache.
“They think this brand of sensationalism is productive, but it’s highly offensive,” City Councilor at Large Daniel Cahill said.
Cahill said he saw the protestors illegally affixing a sign to a city light pole and called the city. […]
“We’ll give them my name, not you,” one replied when asked if he did not find it disingenuous to ask residents to sign their name to receive campaign information when they were not willing to identify themselves publicly with the materials they were distributing.
Angela Vullo, a LaRouche PAC spokesperson reached by phone in Leesburg, Va., said volunteers and were working on a campaign to impeach Obama. She said Obama was a puppet of powerful banks of the British Empire, taking orders from the Queen of England and trying to get a World War started with Russia.[…]
[Hey!  A local connection!]  LaRouche, an eight-time candidate for U.S. President — seven times vying for the Democratic Party’s nomination — graduated from Lynn English with the Class of 1940.

Dateline Melbourne:
9 out of 10 experts agree: the LaRouche kvlt is one of the most entertainingly batshit political kvlts around. […] But even if I did, I doubt anybody would pay attention. After all, their track record is — quite frankly — appalling, the CEC’s candidates coming last in almost every ballot they’ve ever contested. In fact, the contrast between the CEC’s electoral performance and its financial status is one of the more curious features of the micro-party’s history.
As for averting nuclear war, LaRouche’s followers have documented their efforts to do so on the streets of Melbourne last weekend. As if to confirm The Royal Family’s control of the world drug trade and plan for total annihilation the British consul refused to meet with the protesters and to explain why The Queen’s puppet O’Bama behaves as he does.

Ignite Houston with Ian Overton.
Mass extinctions happen roughly every 62 million years. Yet every ecosystem that emerges is qualitatively superior to the one which came before. What does this mean for the way we organize our economy, and choose our political leaders?

The first Occupy camp I went to was in Los Angeles at City Hall. On the corner there were communists standing next to Ron Paul supporters next to vegan activists next to those LaRouche people (who always seem to show up) — hanging out with some union guys all carrying signs saying they were the 99 percent. Yes, it sounds like the set-up to a political joke. I asked my guide, Cheryl Aichele (they had guided tours for the first couple of weeks at Occupy LA), to explain how this was possible. She said, “We’re not going to fight over what’s not the problem.”

On the corner there were communists standing next to Ron Paul supporters next to vegan activists next to those LaRouche people (who always seem to show up.

STORY NUMBER FOUR:  COMPARISON TIME

Rick Santorum going for the Larouche voters………………….

Compared to Santorum I’d take Lyndon La Rouche anytime.

Wikipedia edit attempt:  The LaRouche movement is generally seen as a version of the Ron Paul movement aimed at individuals with limited mental capacities

Souix Falls, South Dakota Mayor Huether is starting to sound like Lyndon LaRouche.
I used to call LLR’s supporters “LaRouche-bags”, but these days I can’t seem to find any.

Ron Paul and his followers are the Birtchers and the LaRouchies of our time. They should be treated that way.

App idea: real-time location of pamphleting LaRouchians, Jehovah’s Witnesses, etc… Super-useful for both avoiders and confronters!

There will always be crackpot fringes who wish to associate themselves with mainstream parties for the legitimacy they represent; even the Democrats have the LaRouchies. The problem is when the crackpot fringes become the party; imagine if Democratic presidential hopefuls had to philosophically and politically position themselves to get the LaRouche vote in order to capture their party’s presidential nomination.

Michael Billington on the Vinny Eastwood Show.
if you had told me even as much as  a year ago I’d be promoting Lyndon Larouches alternative news outlet I would have told you you were nuts but here I am

STORY NUMBER FIVE:  WEBSTER TARPLEY NOTATION
Definitely worth mentioning:  xlcr4life, this week’s edition of World Crisis Radio starring Dr. Webster Griffin Tarpley features a breakdown of why Occupy Wall Street’s gone down the tubes: therein, the guest commentator tells Tarpley that it was “LaRouche activists” who infiltrated the Demands Working Group last October. (I can imagine what Tarpley was thinking at the time; he did not venture an opinion on the matter.)
I’ve been thinking I oughta bring in more of a focus on Tarpley with the Larouche Challenge.  An important conduit, that guy.

CLASSIC MEMORABILIA AND MEMORIES

1986 and Janice Hart holds a rally.
“Could’ve had a career ini the theater.1986 caricature of famed Illinois candidate.

You can’t outcrazy…

Larouche important in history of the word “douche”
Lexicographer and Slate contributor Ben Zimmer points to a 1987 taping of The Morton Downey Jr. Show, during which an audience member taunted Lyndon Larouche with the phrase “Larouche is a douche.” The 1991 Anthrax song “Startin’ Up a Posse” includes the lyrics “You’re a douche, you’re a douche, you’re a douche,” in apparent reference to record executives and/or government censors.

MISTY WATER COLORED MEMORIES  As for spotting a LaRouchie in New York,it reminds me of being on long road trips as a kid and desperately searching for the fabled Unicorn — a Hawaii license plate. Still I have to confess running into two of them outside my local post office many years ago. They were manning a card table filled with LaRouche tomes. I walked over and pretended ALMOST to buy one of LaRouche’s screeds.
I also remember they had a big sign demanding that Bill Clinton issue a pardon for LaRouche’s conviction for fraud and then appoint LaRouche the new head of the Federal Reserve.
A convicted fraud artist not long out of the pen running the Fed? In a strange existential way, it somehow sounded right.

Ah, La Rouche. My first encounter with his people was in 1998 (?) when they set up a table in my neighborhood and surrounded it with posters calling for “saving our President.” I was against impeachment of Clinton and I was ready to sign whatever they wanted me to sign. However, something didn’t feel right. The people looked somehow out of place. Holding the pen, I looked around and noticed a table with literature (La Rouche said this or that). I expressed myself. I also learned my lesson and now check what I intend to sign.
Now. Isn’t La Roche behind OWS?
Speaking about the posters with a star of David and Rothschild’s name next to it? Where did I see it? Where did I see it? Ah, I remember now. OWS (not true, Francis Fox Piven?) Just in front of a group of “Jewish” intellectuals. Educate your “intellectuals,” America.

Back in 1969-70, Lyndon LaRouche, under the name “Lynne Marcus” gave a series of classroom lectures at CCNY for people from the Socialist Workers or Labor Party. Very boring, but it all sounded so intellectual. The Obama with the square mustache poster can sometimes be see in the custody of one of his current minions who likes to sun herself on the corner of Park Avenue and 86th Street in Manhattan.

So, a coordinated event happened on February 29th.  Occupy’s various city affiliates did the whole “Shut Down the Corporations” activities and…

… As we can see, it was a huge success.  All the corporations have now been… shut down?

Not to be too cynical… you kind of have mixed feelings with … ninth guy down here.

The other side of the whole “Superpac not coordinated with the campaign” technical angle is this classic…

When asked by reporters this afternoon if President Obama’s speech to the United Auto Workers union was a campaign speech, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney denied it.
“No at all,” said Carney, “The president was speaking to American Workers which he enjoys doing.”

Yeah.  Yeah.  Really enjoys it.  Particularly when he is introduced with a whole “Four More Years!” chant.

When asked if the president was directly challenging Mitt Romney when he mocked critics who said, ‘Let Detroit go bankrupt,” Carney would only say that a “number of critics” said that phrase. (A New York Times op-ed by Romney at the time was titled ‘Let Detroit go Bankrupt.’)

La de dar.

“I got to sit in a Chevy Volt, even though Secret Service wouldn’t let me drive it,” Mr. Obama said, to cheers. “I enjoyed sitting in it. And four or five years from now, when I’m not president no more and I can drive myself, I’m going to buy one.” For that, he got a chant of “Four more years!”

This was Tuesday in the state of a big primary, with elliptical references to his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney.  I kind of don’t get what the point of pretending this isn’t a campaign speech is, with a knowing wink and nod.  Of course, a President has just about every speech having to be a campaign speech (it’s the only way to get things done, the whole “bully pulpit” thing.)  Franklin Roosevelt in 1944 never campaigned, you understand.  He just made a round-trip inspection circuit through all the swing states of that year.