Curiouser and Curiouser.

There’s an update to this Big Story behind this hack job at CBS News sites.

On Saturday, supporters of conspiracy-loving, eight-time presidential candidate, and U.S. Labor Party inventor Lyndon LaRouche somehow commandeered the Twitter feeds of 60 Minutes and 48 Hours, leaving behind a message reading, “Exclusive: Terror is striking the #USA and #Obama is Shamelessly in Bed with Al-Qaeda,” along with a link to a blog post on LaRouchePAC.com expressing that same idea. No comment from Alex Jones on whether this tactic is more effective than keeping your thoughts to your own Twitter.

Which is…  your identity of your supporters of “US Labor Party inventor”… The Syrian Electronic Army.

The Syrian Electronic Army, a group of pro-regime hackers, reportedly took over the Twitter account of CBS’ 60 Minutes as well as other CBS brands yesterday, saying the U.S. is ‘in bed’ with terrorists.

This is the second Twitter take-over in the last week for the SEA, which often attacks publications for their coverage of the situation in Syria. The group took responsibility for the hack on its website and in a YouTube video, according to AllThingsD, which shows screenshots of the 60 minutes Twitter as well as new SEA Twitter and Facebook accounts (the social media giants continue to take down SEA accounts.)

The statement on it’s website reads, “The Syrian Electronic Army hacked today several Twitter accounts of CBS-American Network and published thought it the truth.”

In this weekend’s hack, the SEA tweeted fake headlines that accused the U.S. government of helping terrorists with money and weapons of mass destruction. It then linked to a number of websites. What these websites contained — and whether they were malicious — is unknown, though they reportedly serve malware.

Also worth noting the “CBS News Denver” site… global research dot ca crap.

In the comments sections of the news sites that have picked this story up… we get a lot of jabs and snarks.  Also I note that Alex Jones seems to get top billing quite a bit — meaning Lyndon Larouche is now just an Alex Jones underling.

Wait til he starts Instagraming artsy pictures of his lunch.
That guy is still around?
Here I thought Lyndon LaRouche existed solely for two brilliant golden-age The Simpsons jokes. Didn’t know he still had supporters.

Yeah, do not worry – I have never heard of him either

Alex Jones dominates the dicussion section here.

For the most part, after this initial burst, the larouche connection is dropped out of the coverage.  We see it in the (Glenn Beck Media) Blaze coverage that reposts the tweet message sans larouche.  (And what a loopy amusement the comments section is here.)  And after that,  It is lost in the ensuing flood of twitter messages.

A “David Icke” auto-matron has dumped a few spam comments, the url for which directing to some website unrelated to anything David Icke would be interested in or is associated with.  (Ie:  no lizard figures are associated with the website being attempted link-dropped.)

But, here’s a message relayed out of spam.  Do with this “Bilderberg information” what you must.

In other items… I see from the stat page that people want to know Chris Christie’s Skull and Bones status.  This is apparently speculation that came out of the subtle movement of his tie.  The nickname you’ll hear out of Bush’s mouth does not derive from any Yale fraternity, a university he never attended.

South Carolina:  Comparing the “anvil toss” at the sex scandal figure of Mark Sanford with the attempted resurrection of Anthony Weiner after his sext scandal.   (“t” important to note).   Of the two, Mark Sanford is the more likely to win his next race.  But Weiner is more likely to be chalked up as having staged a remarkable comeback.   A step down for Sanford from governor to perhaps narrow victory of a congressional seat — his dirty laundry being aired.  And Wiener is looking up at what he once seemed to have a glide-path toward:  the mayorship.
It’s not too hard to imagine that Mark Sanford’s primary opponent is hoping Colbert Busch wins this race, so he can win next time out.  Interestingly, looking over to the Senate side, thoses races I tend to look at only becauses it’s always easier to gauge, I imagine that polls probing possible match-ups may as well just insert “Elizabeth Colbert Busch” in them — before inevitably an Alvin Greene or Bob Conley wins the Democratic nomination.

And the tiresome figure of Lindsey Graham will march onward.  Yes, I know… it is as Alan Dersowitz posits (from memory when discussing the civil libertarian stakes here) “he stands accused of placing exploding nails in front of an eight year old, and that will trump everything.”  But that’s all the more reason to be annoyed by political figures thumping their chests on this for, like, water boarding for the sake of water boarding.

Kentucky.  Oh, that wacky Mitch McConnell.

But enough of that.  I imagine that McConnell will be using all the ammunition he can from a quasi-“meh” recording of his strategy sessions — revealing what everyone knew already on how McConnell would’ve gone after Ashley Judd — to keep himself from a Primary challenge.  “The Democrats are firing up their ammunition against me” — using Nixonian tactics.

Georgia, South Dakota.  A bit of a trend and a basic tendency we see here.  You’re the Democratic Party.  You’re looking for a candidate.  Who do you turn to?  Perhaps the Daughter of the last Democratic Senator!

As Democrats wait to see if Rep. John Barrow will take the plunge for Georgia’s open Senate seat, Jim Galloway mentions a brand new name: Michelle Nunn, daughter of former Sen. Sam Nunn, who for four terms held this very seat before retiring in 1996. Nunn is CEO of the non-profit Points of Light, a volunteer service organization; she hasn’t run for office before, but obviously her family name would open doors. Local reporter Lori Geary says that Nunn is indeed considering a run.

Say… does Zell Miller have a son or daughter they can find?

And South Dakota… who else but…

On the Democratic side, the two major contenders are Johnson’s son, U.S. Attorney for the District of South Dakota Brendan Johnson, and former Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin, who lost her seat to Republican Rep. Kristi Noem in 2010.

Alaska:  Always dicey with the “Tea Party” — not good for the “Overton Window” — but this would be fun.

Joe Miller, a Tea Party candidate in Alaska who lost a bid for Senate in 2010, is forming an exploratory committee and considering a run against Democratic Sen. Mark Begich in 2014.

“For several months now, my wife and I have engaged in serious reflection about our family, Alaska, and the state of our nation,” Miller wrote in an email to supporters, Roll Call reports. “After consultation with our political advisers, trusted friends, and many of our 2010 volunteers, we have decided to test the waters for a 2014 US Senate run.”

He continued on his website, referencing his 2010 run: “Though I was labeled an ‘extremist’ by the likes of Lisa Murkowski and Mark Begich for telling the truth, both of our sitting senators now routinely engage in such “extremist” rhetoric with respect to federal overreach, government spending, and entitlement reform. Yet they are still unwilling to tackle the tough issues.”

Mississippi:  You know.  No offense to Roger Wicker.  But when the ricin was mailed to two people:  Barack Obama and Roger Wicker.  I’m guessing that the authorities could pretty much limit the search for the culprit to the state of Mississippi.  Becauses… um… Roger Wicker?

Roger Wicker once hired the Elvis Impersonator who sent the ricin.

Arkansas.  I suppose if he were to jump into the Republican Senate nomination fight, he would get a few more votes than comfortable.  We watch as Mark Pryor shuffles out of gay marriage and gun control.  And I guess Tom Cotton, one term Representative and immediately assuming the mantle of “New Hero of Current Right”, is… is he the front runner?  As always, we have that flanking to the right going on against the Club for Growth Conservative — though the premise is not right:  Pryor feels the need to shore up the vote by declaring this thing; Cotton don’t.

Michigan.  Well, Justin Amash may go one step further than Tom Cotton’s “don’t much care, but no”.  But then we’re just back to the economics.

I.  Once again, we have that Larouche / Jones / Beck confluence.  Larouche has always claimed an “I Got there First” on 9/11 Conspiracy.  He was on the radio in Utah when the attacks happened, on one of his big media validators, and he threw out “Mossad!”  Whether this can credit him as first or not, when numbskulls all over the place were doing about the same, I don’t really kno.  But from somewhere, the rightwing source of “AIM” picked up the phrase, “Intellectual author of the 9/11 Truth Movement” to describe Larouche — more in the ground of the logic othat pulls the conspiracy world together than the conspiracy theories themselves.

And, wait, I thought this was Tavistock.  Or… Columbia University?  He also called MIT, where the suspects reportedly killed a police officer, “mind control central.”

For the Boston Maratahon bombers, we have Alex Jones able to claim “FIRST!”  Because, apparently, he jumped in to tweet right as it came about, complete with the hash-tag “FALSE FLAG”.  When we throw in the fact that the first question asked in a press conference from Massachusetts Governor Duvall Patrick was for Jones’s Infowars — something to do with a supposed glitch in the timeline — there we have it — Alex Jones is here cornering the market on “Fill in the Blank Latest Tragedy” Truth Movement.  Not to say the mainstream and particularly 24 Hour News Channels are particularly useful in relaying information at a time like this — just because they have 24 hours to fill doesn’t mean I feel obliged to “stay on top of the moment” — and we have here basically Fox News speculating on Islamic Terrorism and MSNBC speculating on McVeigh — which, naturally, beats Alex Jones which tosses up all the Internet speculation concerning a reworked Family Guy episode hoax, a random Guy on the Roof that left corners of the Internet buzzing, and all manner of useless crap.  And after all that, his site has the galls to “demand” an apology from those whose speculations steered over toward “patriot” groups.

POINT:   OTOH, Jones and the Infowars crew on my shitlist now. Not even LaRouche is that fucking stupid, or runs such a shit cult org. (Yes, you just heard me call Infowars a cult.) Sure, shock jock gotta shock, but there are limits and AJ & Company fucking moonwalked over that line.

COUNTERPOINT:  Especially if you’re going cite sources from the LaRouche Loons. Those people make Alex Jones look totally mainstream.

For the record, the word from Larouche himself…  So, I would  say: Well, somebody wants to make a mess. And I would say, the present administration, Presidential administration, becomes one of the first areas which you have to look at. Can he prove that he was not in some way
involved, either directly or indirectly in some of this? Or that people who were working so-called in his interest might not have been doing it?
I think what we have to do as a nation, is simply realize that this pattern of incidents, coincides with nothing, except somebody being clever and popping off terrorist effects in various parts of the United States, all in the same short time. Who has an interest in doing that? The question is out there to be asked. But the question remains.
Because, as he told Alex Jones last month… and as we see Massachusetts’s own perenial Congressional candidate Rachel Brown reiterate… Obama’s out to kill 6 Billion people for the love of the Queen of England.

Glenn Beck has called for the President’s Impeachment because of — well, see it yourself— and the good news for Larouche’s cause of rattling for money, Benghazi gets thrown into the mix.   For whatever reason, Alex Jones thinks Beck’s beck and call to “come clean by Monday” is worth relaying.  Naturally, Beck slides more mainstream and partisan than Jones, and moreso than Larouche, but there’s a tail chasing a dog somewhere that becomes fascinating to slice apart.

What say Larouche favorite Vladamir Putin?  Oh wait… this works well with his war with Chechnyn Rebels.  It’s a little difficult to align the causes to fit Putin for Russian TV exposure.  In waiting for a line, the Larouchies fell back to this for Iran’s Press TV.:

Acts of terror are often rooted in social and financial problems and the U.S. should “create a road toward prosperity and hope for all people” to stop acts of terror from happening, says Bill Jones of Executive Intelligence Review.
“Creating again a road toward prosperity and hope for all people should be the long-term goal and unfortunately this is not the goal today of the present administration and the measures that are being taken are simply defensive and not positive,” he added.

And they don’t get to Obama yet with this:

“Whether it [the bombing] be internal, domestic in the United States or whether it be some kind of an international operation, it was obviously sending a signal on a very important holiday for Americans and for Bostonians specially,” said Jones in a phone interview with the U.S. Desk on Tuesday.  “I think it [the bombing] is a continuation of a general threat which the world, not only the United States but the world, is living under now because of the very unstable international economic situation,” he added.

Hard to tell if this had ANYTHING to do with the “holiday”.  But I suppose we’ll still see the sign slogan “Glass Steagal or Die”.  They’ll take it even more literally.

II.  A bit of “Comparative Cult Studies”.
I note that Bob Avakian showed up out of nowhere on a telephone pole.  Kind of.   Hard to figure the meaning here.  But this one stray photocopy… is more a literature dropping than I’ve seen from the Larouche Movement for quite some time.  But I guess they’re running around gun shows and what exists of Tea Party — and the Occupy Wall Street.  (Note:  Links mixed up for the Hell of it.)

More worth watching… the current state of Team Fred Newman, post Fred Newman’s death.

As the reflections of the mayoral term of Bloomberg come in — national focus will always be on the soda ban attempt and gun control — this will always be tucked right in as we close in on New York media.

Not to pile on the mayor, but there really is more. So we have the strange tale of the Independence Party, a bizarre amalgam of right-wing populists married to black leftists and once led by Fred Newman, a Marxist therapist who, The Daily News reported, advocated “friendosexuality” — translated as having sex with patients.
Whatever. Mr. Newman controlled a party line and Mr. Bloomberg all but purchased it. He gave the party more than $400,000 over the years and promised to support nonpartisan elections.

And, aha… Bloomberg Remarks for 2012 IPNYC Anti-Corruption Awards.

And they march on to the next mayoral election.

Pressed by the News about criticisms of the party by people like Manhattan Media Publisher — and Democrat-turned-Republican mayoral hopeful — Tom Allon, who has characterized past statements by IPNYC figures Fred Newman and Lenora Fulani, as grossly anti-Semitic, Carrion responded forcefully.
“Anybody who knows me — I’m a Puerto Rican kid from New York City who’s practically half-Jewish by virtue of… by birth and association here in this city,” he said. “So give me a break!
“You know, I would never be associated with anything that’s anti-Semitic. I can see it a mile away,” Carrion said. “Every Jewish leader in this town and in this country knows I’m a friend of Israel. I’ve been there five times. I’ve fought for all their causes, and I will continue to do that.”

Surely ye jest.

Always worth lobbing the Jackie Salit in there…  And we seem to have that Post Modernist Marxist Multidirectional Centrist Independence, what Salit and company can glue in on is a media friendly item that seems to pop up with a different name each election cycle.

A No Labels a ha movement, eh?  Never had one of those.  But they’ll give us this “social innovation” through destruction of partisan fighting.

ITEM NUMBER THREE:  PO TOUR UPDATES

Dateline Seattle:  Anastasia Mares, a Seattle-based organizer for LaRouche PAC, laughs freely as she hands out anti-Obama and anti-bailout literature outside the Coos Bay post office Wednesday afternoon. LaRouche PAC seeks to advocate public policy based on the ideology of 90-year-old Lyndon LaRouche, a perennial presidential candidate  who was convicted of mail fraud and conspiracy in 1988. LaRouche  contends the bailout is an attempt to reduce the world’s population by starving the poor.

Dateline Hudson Valley:  I went to a militaria show here in the Hudson Valley, NY on Saturday. As I was pulling into the parking lot, I saw a huge “IMPEACH OBAMA” sign on the corner. Now, as someone who is not a fan of the President, I approached the table where the sign was with great interest. My disappointment grew as I saw the sign next to the big impeach sign, which was an ad for LaRouchePAC.  That really would suck.

BURN!  I wonder how often you stand around your local county annex trying to collect money for Lyndon Larouche.

Dateline Chicago0:

Frank Mathis, a LaRouche PAC representative from New Jersey, said they were touring the Panhandle. “This is where (U.S. Representatives) Jeff Miller and Steve Southerland are,” Mathis said. “In 2011, Miller said he would not support restoring the Glass-Steagall Act. We want to know what he thinks now.”  Sounds good so far as it goes.
Monday in Chipley, the PAC was taking money from new members. “We need to spread out the organization’s support,” Mathis said. “I’m from New Jersey, and there isn’t much support or awareness of what we do. We’re trying to get the message out.”  Yeah, sucks to be them.
“The people that support us suspect that Obama and the government are not on their side,” Vullo said. “The people who don’t support us are in denial.””  Hm.

Dateline Chipley:

The City Council was not happy with the LaRouche Political Action Committee’s visit to Chipley.  Must be an Obama Police State Town. […]
“Our ordinances don’t really have the teeth in them to let us enforce them,” said Police Chief Crews. “Normally, when we arrest someone, we use the state statute, and we’re dealing with criminals.”
Miner said toward the end of the day, he and Crews had decided that arresting the LaRouche representatives was really the only way the city could respond, and that had the potential of opening the city up to a lawsuit.  If it’s any consolation, I’m not sure they want to deal with their lawsuit either.  If it’s any grief, I’d be siding with the Larouchies… I think.
“When she finds out what can be done, I think we should bring this ordinance back to the council and fix it,” said Councilman Kevin Russell.
And the basic problem.  Councilman Reed said he saw one person write a check to the LaRouche people for $200. He asked for a copy of the membership form that Mathis was having donors complete, but was refused a copy.  Yeah, you can get people to throw two hundred dollars away down the toilet.
“I was there for about two hours, and every time they got a donor, he would fold that form up and put it in his hip pocket, then he would put the check in his front pocket,” Reed said. “Then they would laugh about it.”

Here’s a quasi-supporter.  Won’t defend his lifestyle of the man, apparently, but is for mass transit.   I won’t comment further — I haven’t taken a time to a’listen.

ITEM NUMBER FOUR:

If Glass-Steagall is not immediately rammed through both houses of the US Congress, get ready to do just that.  […]  Call your US Senator and demand that he or she stop acting like a British subject or Wall Street slave, and introduce and pass Glass-Steagall now.

Be there or be Square.  They should use that phrase, actually.

ITEM NUMBER FIVE:

Selling for Philipino sympathy.   Noted election results.
Gerald Celente EXPOSED — and … compared to … well.
BTW American has a Socialist Party, did you know that? They always try to compete on the ballots. There was one guys called Lyndon LaRouche who had some money and every election time he would buy TV time talking and talking and talking! Sometimes he gets a few votes.
Why couldn’t we have someone like him as President? Scratch that, I know why, we don’t vote for anything, the “Powers that Be,” would NEVER put someone like Mr. Larouche in, he would do too much good.
Lawrence Freeman of EIR on Syria on RT.
Michael Billington regarding WW3 and Korea.
Harley Schlanger on Dr. Deagle.
Harley Schlanger blog talk radio — John J Mazzone.
The Daily Tribune references Iran’s Press TV appearance by Mike Billington, noting him with Larouche, which is something worth watching — when the validators mention Larouche and when it doesn’t.
And we see the reaction from the paranoid peanut gallery … “Let the Fight Begin“.  yes.  World War 3.
Lunatic Outpost posits a grand debate between the Larouche Movement and Bill Still as an epic Hamilton versus Jackson debate.
Sure, whatever.  Lyndon Larouche is BRILLIANT!!! Why couldn’t we have someone like him as President? Scratch that, I know why, we don’t vote for anything, the “Powers that Be,” would NEVER put someone like Mr. Larouche in, he would do too much good for this country.
Mike Billington of the LaRouche movement in an interview with Iran’s Press TV had this to say: “There has been a concerted effort in the Western press… to falsify the warning coming from China … Xi Jinping… in a forum yesterday said no country should have the right to create a regional or even global crisis for their own self-interests … That was recorded in the New York Times this morning adding falsely the words in front of that speech that no ‘Asian country’ should have the right to do that.”

ITEM NUMBER SIX:  Your neo-nazi corner.  A bit of fun.

VNN FORUM.   We must beware of Zionist disinformation. The jew, Makow, apparently maintains his view of Holocaust Veracity.
Previously, another kosher club, perhaps the LaRouchies, alleged that there’d be a ‘war’ between the Rothschilds & Rockefellers.
Now, it seems that Makow, Fulford et al. are promoting the allegation of a split between western & eastern drug & money mafias in regard to the “inoculation of diseases” mentioned as jew policy in The Protocols.

And then there’s the “swept into a Larouche Conspiracy” corner:

For MN GunTalk.  The Larouchies claimed (and do yet today) that I was an agent of MI-5. At the time of the small window war over Obamacare, I was denounced by Kurt Nimmo.

The Wenzel trying to get web traffic conspiracy.  No, this is all kind of … dopey?

And this is just mean.
For the record, Kinsella is a very sleazy, dirty fighter.  His personal attacks against me don’t seem to stop, as bizarre as they might be. I am not going to spend the rest of my career going over every one of his attacks. This is just a blanket warning to all about the sleazy tactics used by this guy. I will provide only two examples to show you what I mean.
There’s this:  ” Wenzel is a shadowy character. Who knows where he came from. Some former Lyndon Larouche type? Who knows.”

Notice the question mark after the Lyndon Larouche quip. He knows full well that I have never been affiliated with Lyndon Larouche. He’s afraid of a lawsuit and throws in the question mark. Sleazy. No facts, total innuendo. I have been a libertarian since the early 1970s when Harry Browne’s first book came out. I said so in an interview back in February.
There is a Robert Wenzel that did contribute to the Lyndon Larouche Political Action Committee in 2007. He lives in Spring Lake, New Jersey. I have never lived in Spring Lake, NJ and I don’t think I have ever even passed through it. It appears this Robert Wenzel was85 years old, when he made the contributions. I am not quite 85 years old, even now, 6 years later.
It’s a total Kinsella smear. As was this slimy move by him during the debate, in the same cute way, discussing me and Scientology, where it’s not really clear whether he has facts. Total smear.
For the record, I will pay anyone $250,000 if they can link me with Scientology. Good luck. I have never as much stopped to take one of their sidewalk stress tests. Come to think of it, I will offer $500,000 to anyone who can link me to Lyndon Larouche.

Well…

 Look into it.  Connecto ameutuers.

 Did you know that Glencore once had a secretive hedge fund called Asteri Capital, and that its senior managers had weird past connections to Lyndon LaRouche? Did you know that the guy who ran it ended up at J.P. Morgan, presiding over Bruno Iskil, the trader implicated in the ‘London Whale’ scandal? Questions need answering, so check out this secret history of Glencore’s hedge fund.

meh.

Per Dr. Webster G. Tarpley, former long-time associate of Lyndon LaRouche, his organization is a CIA operation for many years now. This was the reason for Tarpley’s departure after 20 years of collaboration. There are strong links between LaRouche’s NCLC and Cantor-Fitzgerald in the N. America and LaRouche’s Schiller Institute and Dresdner Bank in Germany. The two are tied to CIA money laundering, and LaRouche’s people provide “intellectual cover”. LaRouche has always denounced strategic threats to the drug trade, such as Hugo Chavez, while letting the real kingpins off the hook. Tarpley is among those who claim Tower 7 of the World Trade Center was deliberately destroyed by the CIA because it held all Cantor-Fitzgerald’s records pertaining to its funneling CIA drug money into the markets.

Finally.  Comedy Relief.  Slack!  That’s the old time Internet stuff.

In lieu of gun control, Mike Enzi has the answer.

“There is no doubt that we need to do more to curb the senseless acts of violence that continue to occur in this country,” Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY), an opponent of the underlining gun bill, said. “One of the things we need are parents, parents to be more careful and more repetitive at telling their kids that it is not right to kill people. It’s not even right to bully them. And it’s definitely not right for them to kill themselves. Until we can get that message across to our kids, I hope that we don’t rely on a few votes by this body to make everybody feel comfortable that all the problem is taken care of.”

Worst “More We Know” public service announcement ever.

Getting into the supposed politics of that last gun control bill.

Sen. Joe Machin (D-WV) told the Wall Street Journal that enough senators could be persuaded to revive and pass the gun background check measure defeated yesterday. He claimed that 70 lawmakers would have supported his amendment with Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) if the NRA hadn’t warned lawmakers that it would include their votes in its influential rankings.

Said Machin: “If they hadn’t scored it, we’d have gotten 70 votes. They made a big mistake.

The theory of this is that this bill will come back up and it will be tougher.  Frankly, though, I align with the gun control “sour grapes” contigency of “just as well this didn’t pass”, but for different reasons.  Whether or not something pops up that is more meaningful — we’re trapped in a noxious political cycle where the Senate map is unfriendly for Democrats in 2014 and stuck at the “other issues” pop up — I would rather have no bill come out and no pretense that something just happened than a bill come through with the illusion that something just happened — when it didn’t.

The bigger issue on the Senate bill defeat is how it is recorded — a whopping defeat — by a measure of 54 to 46.  54 voting for it.  46 against it.  As in… the majority voted for a bill that is defined as a whopping defeat.  (I see a snarky comment along the lines of “Ha ha!  Obama said all he wanted was a vote.  He got one.”  No, the bill kind of didn’t get a vote.)

And for the record, the Republicans switching to yes and the Democrats switching to no…

Collins, Maine.  Kirk, Illinois.  McCain, Arizona.  Toomey, Pennsylvania.
Baucus, Montana.  Begich, Alaska.  Heitkamp, North Dakota.   Pryor, Arkansas.

And so it is…
When reporters asked Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) why he voted against an amendment to expand gun background checks on Wednesday, he replied, “Montana.”

Hm.

The big question that Justin Bieber’s comment at the Anne Frank House’s guestbook raises… and you know the comment:

Truly inspiring to be able to come here. Anne was a great girl. Hopefully she would have been a belieber.

Creating awkward paragraph juxtapositions such as this one:

Adolescent and teen girls obsessed with the Canadian singer are known as “beliebers.”
Anne Frank died a teenager in a Nazi concentration camp in 1945.

So, the big question this guestbook comment leaves:  would she have?

The best you can do is extrapolate her attitudes from her book, and the answer one comes to is… No, Anne Frank probably would not have been a Justin Bieber fan.  As much as the Anne Frank House is trying to cover for him.  (For his part Justin Bieber is brushing aside the controversy with a shirtless photograph and a sarcastic retort of “so very crazy” in the “stop the presses” mode.)

Is there a lesson to all this?  Hm…  Yes and no.  No and yes.

Actually I kind of want to dig into the realm of stormfront and the neo-nazi (and holocaust denying) web forums to see their take on the controversy… but … I don’t know… I’m afraid to.

Looking over the bits and pieces of commentary on the bombing blast of the Boston Marathon, and naturally no one heeds this comment from President Obama:  “People should not jump to conclusions before we have all the facts.”

And I get the feeling with this “Who’s behind the Boston Marathon bombings? 4 theories” carp… and the inclusion of #3 “The Government” — in a case where I can pretty well safely say that … it ain’t “the Government”  … this is something of a victory for Team Paranoid Fruitcake.  Note, for the record the first question lobbed to the Governor of Massachusetts was for someone covering in the Alex Jones Media Empire– certainly now on the trail to get to this moment in a Persecution Complex.  Currently the reason would be to advance a gun control bill, I suppose, and then further measures advancing into the surveillance state.  [I look over the prison planet website, I see they fixate on a Family Guy episode, the equally pointless to speculate but just as feasible as Islamic Terrorist “Tax Day protest” nutcase by Christ Matthews, “roof guy” image that even if it turns out to be nothing will become conspiracy fodder for generations to come, and Yep!  Pride that their guy got in the first question Patrick Deval’s press conference!)

The bloviaters of the Fox News ilk, for some stupid reason taking issue that “Obama didn’t use the word ‘Terrorist’!  Terrorist has a specific, if probably broad and not pin-point, meaning.  (Ie: “Terrorism Experts” do not put Ted Kaczynski as a Terrorist somehow deciding that his stated political purpose amble away from political purpose too much; I tend to regard him as a Terrorist).   Your initial statement has to peg it to “tragedy” — clearly is (unless you want to nitpick and go to the Literary definition of the word, and I can assure you no one is in a mood to do so — and by now we’ve gotten to evolving definitions from word usage.)  [More to the point I’m always shaking my head with the word ‘cowardly’ is used in moments like this, but I know that arguing that is atonal against the backdrop of a tragedy.]

We can not preclude #4 “a criminally insane lone wolf”.  Indeed, from the hallmarks of the tragedy that seems to be what this — somewhere mixed with “2. Right-wing militia types” — but most likely astray from being actual right wing militia.  See 1996 Olympic bombing, which is what this resembles.  And my hazy speculation lands about here.

As for number one… landing over to “Does Peter King know something we don’t?”  He is a Congressional figure on the House Intelligence committee, after all. And he’s also an ideologue that will fit facts into his War on Terror.  The reason he gives is specious.  He notes al Qaeda writings on targeting American Sporting Events.  (I myself sort of slept through the fact that there was a Boston Marathon going on).  This is where we land back to people who like to point back to early reports of Muslim suspects in conjunction with the OKC not as grounds not to jump to conclusions, but as an salvo in the War Against Islamo-Fascists the Government is hiding for politically correct reasons — or something like that.  (I can never quite make out the reasoning.)  Specious reasoning, until there’s more known or unless Peter King can offer something more than “had to be done by experts”, as the reason Islamic Terrorists would go for a bombing at the Boston Marathon is the same reason anyone else — the criminally insane lone wolf or the right wing militia types (or, I suppose, hypothetical Left Wing Revolutionaries) would:  you get the images that will replay on the teevee in perpetuity.  As it goes, one hallmark of Islamic Terrorists organizations seems to be their desire to quickly claim responsibility for their acts — so we’ll see if someone breaks off from this early declamation.

By now we’re taking a better gaze at the 2012 landscape.  We see that Presidential Democratic vote trailed the Senate Democratic vote  and the House Democratic vote trailed the Presidential Democratic vote.

The Democrats won the majority of House votes.   Far comfort, when the Republicans maintained the House.  Politifact feels the need to clarify the words spoken by a Democratic house figure that the Democrats won a majority of the House vote.  Apparently they might’ve won only a plurality — the classic 49.9 or thereabouts, with a few points lobbed to various third parties.  And, as I see noted happily in the National Review, the Republicans have gotten to an advantageous position at the state legislative level.

If at first blush we slide into the realm of Grover Norquist’s sour grapes but probably apt for his purposes “Redistricting has us controlling the House for the next decade”, things get even worse.  Redistricting isn’t all that tilts the map.  Demographic spreads mean an urban district controlled by the Democrats will tend toward a possible 75 to 25 advantage as against a rural spread for a Republicans at 60 to 40, and like that.  (The numbers… Democrats represent 47 districts with a partisanship of more than 70-30 percent in their favor, while Republicans represent only 23 such districts. Of the 16 districts with a partisan split of at least 80-20 percent, Democrats represent 15.)

So we land on some fun fact such as this:

A Quinnipiac poll shows that if the election were held today, 43 percent would support a Democratic House candidate, to 35% who would support a Republican.
That 8 point lead for Democrats is significantly more than the GOP’s margin of victory during the 2010 Republican wave election (6.6 percent) and even more that the Democratic margin of victory during the 2006 wave (7.9 percent) — when Democrats were bolstered by both an unpopular Republican president and a failing war in Iraq. And yet, if Democrats succeed in maintaining this substantial lead through next year’s congressional election, they will likely emerge with a tiny majority of just 5 seats.

So, staring at this dilemna of proportional angst, you see the understandable urge by liberals to come up with new ways for proportioning Congress.  See this In These Times article.

The best way to remove the structural unfairness inherent in the current House of Representatives is to get rid of winner-take-all elections. FairVote has a plan to do just that, grounded in our Constitution and American electoral traditions. The first requirement is an act of Congress. The more ambitious plan would be for Congress to prohibit winner-take-all elections in all states that elect more than one House Member. A more modest step would be to repeal the congressional mandate for states to use single-member districts that was established in a 1967 law.

These voting methods have already proven their effectiveness in our local elections and, in their one sustained use, in state legislative elections in Illinois. Choice voting, our preferred system, has been used in more than two dozen American cities and is currently used for at least one local or national election in Australia, Ireland, Malta, New Zealand, Northern Ireland, and Scotland.

 Fair voting and multi-member districts are fully constitutional. For the first half-century of congressional elections, at least one state—and usually many more—elected House members in statewide elections. The movement to single-member districts was ironically driven by the goal of partisan fairness, avoiding distortions from the use of statewide winner-take-all elections. We know today from the experiences of fair voting systems at a local level, in Illinois state legislative elections and in most democracies around the world that fair voting methods provide a far more reliable means of accomplishing that goal.

Of course, solving the problem that there is “democracy” afoot in voting — fixed lines seem to have allowed the Democrats to pull ahead in the Senate this last election… and it is interesting to note that while the liberals dream of this voting idea, here’s what comes from the “Tea Party” set:

Tennessee legislator to take up nixing popular vote of Senators.

This throws us back to pre-Progressive Era voting.  The state legislator would vote for the Senator.  Because –?  What?  The current ahistorical 60 vote threshold for any Senate movement isn’t enough?

I imagine this hypothetical world where this “multi-member district” House comes into fruition and the state legislative Senate.  Then it’s a more democratic House and a more lordly Senate.  Actually moving past what the Founders had envisioned, I suppose.