Showing that the Green Party knew what it was doing in not jumping over to the gimmicky campaign of one celebrity candidate Roseanne Barr, we see that…

Roseanne Barr endorses fellow celebrity candidate Donald Trump.

And the fruit of her campaign comes to bear.  She has a movie out about her 2012 presidential campaign, which I saw at the time rightly described as neither relevant for a career comeback or a pertinent commentary on the political process.  I suppose the movie displays the theme of the rogue candidate traversing America, searching for America’s soul.

For what it’s worth, meet this year’s nominee of this political party.  Doesn’t have the name value of Roseanne Barr, but is a veteran of various marxist parties.

If you’re in three states, you can vote for the Prohibition Party candidate — a party which, evidently, has heeled its riff after some deaths amongst some factional leaders.

“I’m 78. The other fellows in the Prohibition Party decided it was my turn,” Hedges said. “If I don’t do it now I may never have another chance.”

And, sure, we’re rolling deep down in the decimal points, and not getting us back toward figuring the Libertarian and Green Party votes, who will make up the lion’s share of the paltry returns for third party candidates.  (Throw in the Constitution Party, which I guess you can consider the third third party — not much happening past that one).  I’m pondering how much support third parties will get in this presidential election — it’ll surely surpass 2012, but not significantly.

What will it take to get up to bring the Democratic — Republican Duopoly down to 95 percent, and the fringe-fest of third parties up to 5 percent total?

ITEM NUMBER ONE:  Larouchie proves King-Maker in Texas

Just call Craig Holtzclaw the most powerful Larouche Member in American Politics.

On Saturday, Houston lawyer Shawn Thierry effectively won a state House seat by a vote of 13-11, with the deciding vote cast by a card-carrying organizer with the Lyndon LaRouche PAC, a fringe group whose politics are all over the map.

They print out cards?

There were supposed to be 27 chairs at Saturday’s vote. A few days earlier, one chair, another acolyte of Lyndon LaRouche, was stripped of his position after party officials determined he resides outside of the district he was representing. Lee Carter was thought to have a slim majority of the remaining 26 chairs.
But when the campaigns turned up to the center, personal crises had kept two of Lee Carter’s chairs from turning up. With 24 chairs remaining, things got off to a shaky start, presaging difficulties to come: When the chairs attempted to elect one of their own to preside over the meeting, the two candidates both got 12 votes, precipitating a literal coin flip. […]

But what is it Holtzclaw believes, exactly? “I am a LaRouche Democrat,” he said, as in yet another acolyte of the infamous semi-cult leader who thinks Obama is Hitler, has argued that the Queen of England controls the global drug trade, and who wants to colonize space. Ah.
Holtzclaw said he had voted for the candidates who communicated to him that they were willing to take elements of the LaRouche platform to Austin, namely, telling all those tea-party Texas Republicans that we need “big government investment in infrastructure.” That’s what LaRouche calls “the science of physical economy.”
Blackmon and Thierry, he said, had seemed to embrace that line more than Lee Carter. And that’s why she lost, in part.

We await to see if there was some “corrupt bargain” as that which was historically alleged to take place when Henry Clay swung Presidential the election of 1824 the way for John Quincy Adams.

ITEM NUMBER TWO:  Australia Votes…

In the system that brought a member of the “Motoring Enthusiasts Party” into parliament… the Citizens electoral council remains … right at the bottom

Jeff Davy — Citizens Electoral Council — 159 votes.
We now wait to see how the four candidates do in the Northern territories.

Hm… The fertile soils of Kingaroy which gave us Sir Joh also gave life to the Citizens Electoral Council which, in the 2010 federal campaign, issued a press release insisting that Prince Philip collaborated with former Nazi officer Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands to establish the World Wildlife Fund specifically to reduce global population.
More than 2000 Queenslanders voted for the CEC in the 2013 federal ballot and it was their democratic right to do so. It is also a democratic right to politely pose the question: “What on earth were they thinking?’’
And yet … is there method in this madness? Perhaps the behaviour of modern political parties is such that the electorate’s only rational response can be irrationality.

More results?

The first preference vote count to Sunday put Labor’s Damian Wood in third position with 12,160 votes, followed by The Greens’ Carol Vernon on 5,756, Christian Democratic Party candidate Wayne Lawrence on 3085, independent John Arkan had 2979 votes and Michael Gough from Citizens Electoral Council on 616.

ITEM NUMBER THREE: Tarpley and Spengler weigh in

“Accuracy in the Media” and Cliff Kincaid take on Webster Tarpley at the LeftForum… And here, it is interesting to note the direction Webster Tarpley has taken with this presidential election.  It shadows pretty well some typical Bernie Sanders supporters as they slump over to nudging Hillary Clinton support against Donald Trump… though, losing a bit too much anti-Hillary grounding.

… From hosting a cartoon on his twitter account showing Bernie Sanders as a “gate-keeper” keeping wayward leftwingers in line for the eventual corruptible Clinton… to grumbling that Bernie Sanders isn’t really going after Clinton as the corporate-ist (did he say fascist there?) she is… to now?
Twitter feed:  Morally insane #GreenParty #pseudocandidate #JillStein openly embraces #Trump #Fascism to boost her gate receipts!
Twitter feed:  #Psychotic #JulianAssange spook limited hangout operative for #British- #Chinese bloc backs #Fascist #Trump 2016
Twitter feed:  #BernieOrBust lack realism-#FeelTheBern failed to educate them in #Fascism & #Psychosis of #Trump, threat to #Civilization- #subjectivists

And here Tarpley is at the conventions.

Not far from where Guerrero stood in the slim bars of shade next to the Visitor Center were two signs, both of which compared Trump to a Nazi. These signs were held by members of the Tax Wall Street Party, which formed two and a half years ago and has run candidates both in New York state and in California.
Washington, D.C.-based historian and author Webster Tarpley, wearing a shirt and tie, explained that the inflammatory nature of the signs was necessary to promote his party’s goals — and goal No. 1 is to stop Donald Trump.
“The basic idea is if you’re going to fight Trump, you have to tell the truth about him,” Tarpley said — including about his potential psychiatric problems. “Trump says he suffers from a mild form of Obsessive- compulsive disorder. That would imply he’s seen a psychiatrist. We need to see his medical records, as well as his tax returns.”
Tarpley mentioned Trump’s onetime biographer, Tony Schwartz, who has lately been speaking out about Trump’s personality issues, as well as Justin Frank, author of Bush on the Couch.
“It’s an ethical dilemma because we don’t like to psychoanalyze someone from a distance. But this is the politics of life and death and needs to be confronted.”
Tarpley has taken his dim view of Trump to Jewish groups, including the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), some of whose members questioned Tarpley’s analogizing Trump with Nazism.
“At AIPAC, people said the Holocaust is sui generis. Fine, but you have to get the lessons from the death and suffering. Of course you don’t want to throw ‘Nazi’ around, but this is an emergency.”

Meantime, David Goldman, aka “Spengler” is backing Donald Trump.  (Spengler received some interesting bit of citation from Webster Tarpley in his 2008 anti-Obama book.)
Sooo...

Trump is vulgar, ill-informed and poorly spoken. He has no foreign policy credentials and a disturbing inclination to give credit to Russia’s Vladimir Putin where it isn’t due. But he has one thing that the fifty former officials lack, and that is healthy common sense. That is what propelled him to the Republican nomination.

So, there you go.  The two most larouchian of the post-larouchians weigh in for opposing candidates in the coming election.  Where does that leave Larouche himself, and the Larouche org?

This can’t be right, as the analysis of webcasts pour on… One questioner wondered out loud why he hadn’t heard any support for Donald Trump. […]

ITEM NUMBER FOUR:  Blather

Over the last five weeks the world has changed. Events combined with willful interventions, especially those of Vladimir Putin, have created a new global dynamic and transformed the potential for real and total victory in the immediate period ahead. Success now depends first on the adoption of LaRouche’s ‘Four New Laws,’ […]

What is urgent is the requisite creative pre-emptive action, rather than the repeated failures derived from Newton’s systemic fraud of action-reaction—a fraud that predominates in the neurotic impulses of the political and financial class of the trans-Atlantic today, and a fraud that Einstein so brilliantly exposed. Such pre-emptive action, as required by LaRouche’s Four New Laws, is the very foundation for the preliminary steps by which we eliminate the unnecessary burdens and debts of this failed system.

ITEM NUMBER FIVE

French journalist and founder of Agora Erasmus, the Belgian LaRouche movement,

Not enough attention is paid to Belgium’s Larouche organization.  But there it is, an appearance in Russian media.

And, sure.

ITEM NUMBER SIX

The Democrats have had to deal with firing Lyndon LaRouche many times over the years. But sometimes, the LaRouche Democrats win!

AND… Then came AIDS. In 1986, when right wing extremist Lyndon LaRouche launched his Prop 64 initiative calling for mandatory HIV testing and quarantining HIV-positive people in camps, Weinstein and his best friend Chris Brownlie started the Stop AIDS Quarantine Committee. They distributed more than 60,000 fliers and organized over 4,000 demonstrators to march on La Rouche’s headquarters in Atwater Village, according to gay journalist Bruce Mirken. That march and the No on 64 campaign helped defeat the measure by a whopping 71% to 29%.

It’s a goddamned shame that Lyndon LaRouche isn’t running for president this year. Based on the accuracy of his predictions over the years and his intensely cult-like following, he’d stand a pretty good chance.

Hm.  After being hired for my first outdoors job I was chatting with the human resources person and somehow the topic turned to why Bill Clinton deserved a second term. So of course I calmly stated I was going to vote for Lyndon LaRouche. She stared at me as if walrus tusks had sprouted from my nostrils, paused, and then wryly asked if I was simply “stirring the pot.” I surely was, though I didn’t let on. Nor did I reveal the fact I didn’t have a clue about LaRouche’s politics, or anyone’s politics for that matter.

………..

Pat Buchanan whines about the seeming coming defeat of Trump.

And under this logic, there’s something fraudulent and exposed in the election where George McGovern failed to beat Richard Nixon.  I mean, the two major candidates who showed some serious mojo in the Democratic nominating fight — George Wallace and George McGovern, pretty well stomped the corruptible middle establishment of Edmund Muskie and Hubert Humphrey.

Actually, George McGovern spent the nomination fight with this notion that the Wallace vote was “gettable”, the “two sides against the middle” “we see the angry vote here” idea.  It’s a logic I heard a while back from this guy — early 20s, big on Bernie Sanders, disenchanted on this election and not voting in what he considers to be essentially George W Bush versus George Wallace, and at least then (who knows now?) believing Trump would eke out a victory, suggestions from anecdotal offerings by his conservative parents who expressed positive words on Bernie Sanders’s integrity…

There’s a thing I grow weary of in listening to political analysis, armchair and professional, where the analysis becomes nothing other than a reflector of the political biases and beliefs of the analyst…

And surely Buchanan jests.  Protests and oppositions springing up from people unhappy with Hillary Clinton as president, from the political faction he aligns with as opposed to the political factions (“privileged ivy league students”) he doesn’t?  Sure.  Never happened before in previous Democratic presidential administrations… and wherefore does this abandonment of a politician come from, with the politician insulting them, where the other politician in the race is…

(sigh) courting John Negroponte and (her long-time favorite) Henry Kissinger?  [I didn’t mean to suggest that all those privileged ivy league protest majors would not be protesting in another political universe parallel to Buchanan’s angry tea party frustrates.)

Radio host Hugh Hewitt trying to offer Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump the conservative interpretation of what he means by calling Obama the “founder of ISIS”, and Trump… not able to take it.
I can imagine a similar scenario where a sympathetic voice in the media is giving a Democratic politician the interpretation for some heightened rhetoric about George W Bush.  Would, oh, Alan Grayson take it, instead of waiting around to declare “SARCASM”?

Later, in an interview with the radio host Hugh Hewitt, Mr. Trump was given an opportunity to clarify, but did not budge.“You meant that he created the vacuum, he lost the peace,” Mr. Hewitt suggested, leaving Mr. Trump an opening.
 “No, I meant he’s the founder of ISIS. I do,” Mr. Trump said. “He was the most valuable player. I give him the most valuable player award. I give her, too, by the way, Hillary Clinton.”
Mr. Hewitt replied, “But he’s not sympathetic to them,” referring to President Obama. “He hates them. He’s trying to kill them.”
“I don’t care,” Mr. Trump said. “He was the founder. His, the way he got out of Iraq was that, that was the founding of ISIS, O.K.?”

I suppose it comes when you’re arguing for a Fortress America model, making jabs at Isolationist sentiment.  And it comes when your big foray into political discourse in the past decade came in challenging the President to show his birth certificate, and so you’re working that base.

This is all very annoying, Gail Collins’s ultimatum that Republicans who are running away from Donald Trump…

… cannot slide over to “write in” or to the Libertarian candidate…

Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska, an early evacuee from the Trump train, said he was going to wait until October to deal with the problem. Senator Lindsey Graham said he might “just pass — I may write somebody in.” Mark Kirk, who’s generally regarded as the Senator Most Likely to Be Defeated in November, gave Illinois voters an excellent example of his leadership capacity when he announced that he was going to write in David Petraeus or maybe Colin Powell.

In 2004, then Republican Senator from the state of Rhode Island, Lincoln Chafee, wrote in “George H W Bush” for his vote.  The electoral college configuration makes the import of voting for Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump a moot point for all but a handful of states, and so I’m all in favor of symbolic votes.  Gail Collins… er… isn’t…

Here’s the bottom line: There are only three things you can do when it comes time to elect a president. You can stay home and punt; you can choose between the two major party candidates; or you can cop out by doing something that looks like voting but has no effect whatsoever on the outcome of the race.

But at least she rephrases my supposition.  It’s just that I have a broader understanding of when your vote has no effect whatsoever on the outcome of the race…

The Libertarian ticket is pretty interesting this year… and well note the Marxist “Jacobin” Magazine’s unveiling that the Libertarian Party is (gasp) not Progressive in any way.

Susan Collins said she could support the Libertarian ticket if only it had been reversed, with vice-presidential candidate William Weld on top. You can’t totally dislike Weld, who once told me that being governor of Massachusetts was pretty much a walk in the park.

William Weld was a controversial pick for this anti-statist party, who this year for the ticket if not the platform have waded as far into the mainstream of politics as they ever will.  Johnson’s mainstreamishness they could swallow, but Weld — got just under 50 percent in the first ballot, and just over 50 percent on the second ballot.  The “If only Weld were at the top of the ticket” sentiment seems to be where a lot of Republican office-holders trying to squirrel away from Trump land.

I suppose the take-away from all this…

Right now we live in a world that’s been messed up by the bad decisions George W. Bush made about invading Iraq. He was elected president in 2000 thanks to a few hundred votes in Florida. A state where Green Party candidate Ralph Nader got 97,488 votes.
Most of the Green voters undoubtedly thought they were showing their disdain for both Bush and the deeply imperfect candidacy of Al Gore. And Nader is a man of fine principles. But look where those 97,488 votes got us.

… is to demand who Marco Rubio is voting for.  Trump, as so happens.

The rejoinder to recent “unfiltered” sputterings of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump…

Hey!  Look who’s behind Hillary Clinton at a campaign rally!

And while Seddique Mateen didn’t kill anybody, he’s kind of a weird guy for a candidate to associate with. Though he has condemned what his son did as an act of a terrorist, he also has praised the Taliban and claimed to be president of Afghanistan, has condemned homosexuality and even said that Pulse, the gay nightclub where his son gunned down 49 people, was partly to blame for the shootings. And yet, there he was, sitting behind Clinton and clearly visible to TV cameras.

There are two possibilities here. One is that Clinton’s campaign staffers were, to coin a phrase, “extremely careless” in whom they let on the risers behind her while she spoke. That’s basically the campaign’s story: They say that it was an open rally for Democrats, and that anyone could show up. (Mateen is a Democrat who has endorsed Clinton.) So they just didn’t know. “The rally was a 3,000-person, open-door event for the public,” said the campaign. “This individual wasn’t invited as a guest, and the campaign was unaware of his attendance until after the event.”
This is hard to believe. Campaign events are tightly scripted — the parts that show on TV even more so. That just anyone who wandered up might be seated right behind the candidate where whatever they did would be on TV is unlikely.

So.  What is the answer?

The other possibility is that they knew and were OK with it.  As the “Hillary PR Team” Twitter parody account said, “Seddique Mateen is just one of the many Americans who have lost a loved one to police violence and realize Hillary will stand up for them.”
Well, maybe. But what other message could they have wanted to send? Nothing that they want to stand by now, I guess, since they’re claiming they didn’t know he was there.

Can you please finish the thought, dark as it may be?  It basically makes some sense, Hillary Clinton’s claim… they vetted whoever sat in as to whether they were an immediate threat, carrying weapons, and nothing else… you have to do a zoom in lense to spot the faces in the crowd.
I suppose the meta-narrative may be a certain naivete — she can’t handle the optics here, she can’t handle the emails?

This is what Senator Jeff Sessions, big Trump supporter from Alabama, blasts away at media bias in not focusing on this one…

Even when Secretary Clinton was in the midst of her worst week — as it was revealed by FBI Director James Comey that she mishandled classified information, and later when the Taliban-supporting father of the Orlando mass killer sat behind her in her recent Orlando speech […]

Meanwhile, onto Donald Trump’s latest…

“Hillary wants to abolish — essentially abolish the Second Amendment. By the way, if she gets to pick, if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know,” Trump said.

Secret Service are aware and have spoken with Trump and…

Cue the defense.  Obama used a violent metaphor and quote from popular culture, “bring a gun to a knife fight”… Hillary Clinton and the “RFK” precedent…

Clinton got a bit of flak on that score and was frankly in some ways in the same sort of flailing Trump’s campaign is in, Obama’s is clear in context… um…

And then we go back to some conservative rural Congressmen suggesting Bill Clinton better not show up in their neck of the woods because… oh boy… and, all right here it is…

During an interview in 1994, then-North Carolina Republican Senator Jesse Helms said President Bill Clinton “better watch out if he comes down here. He’d better have a bodyguard.” The Senator was referring to Clinton’s ability to lead the military and said the President would need protection if he visited North Carolina’s military bases. Helms later said the comment was a “mistake.”

Interesting, the next item is what I thought about when I heard– without any of the details– of the flak regarding Trump.  The phrase “Second Amendment remedies”, used by one Sharron Angle in running to deal away the “Harry Reid problems”.

The one thing for Donald Trump.  It diverts from his problems with babies, and perhaps with his newly revealed economic program solves a problem in showing to Republicans that he is, after all, a Republican after all.

“Hillary Clinton is an astoundingly thick concentration of all the evil in this world,” journalist Dmitry Olshansky wrote July 23 on Facebook. “Against that background, the simplicity, rude jokes and fun of (Trump) is like a fresh breeze.”

Hm.

“For Russia it’s better to have something new than the well-worn old,” said Konstantin Osokin, a music teacher. “We already know that (Clinton as secretary of State) led a policy of weakening Russia and creating a negative image. Trump is a businessman, so he is more pragmatic. Also he is a man.”

Sure, he’s a man.   Like the man you have in Russia.  But he hasn’t been photographed shirtless running around in the mountains.  At least not yet.  That we know of.

The National Enquirer is in the bag for Trump, so if such photographs come to light, they’d have to find some other outlet.  Wikileaks?

By comparison, Edward J. Snowden has been much more careful about how leaked documents were published. He recently criticized Mr. Assange, noting that WikiLeaks’ “hostility to even modest curation is a mistake.” […]

For many of those who know him well, Mr. Assange is afflicted by what the police call “noble cause corruption,” a belief that noble ends justify reckless or immoral means. In a world awash in new information — and misinformation — context, motivation and trust are crucial when weighing the importance of leaks and their accuracy. Mr. Assange still claims that WikiLeaks is a beacon of transparency. We should no longer take him at his word.

All of which I’ve just linked is just CIA propaganda to turn you against Trump, Russia, and Assange.  But such is the way of things…

Kid with father in tow.  Father walks to me, asks “Okay.  Tell me this.  What are the two things in life that are inevitable?”

I stare, blanking.  “Don’t know.”

Father, impatiently sighs.  “It’s Taxes and –”

Me:  “Death”.

Father looks to kid.  “There you go.  See?”

Valuable lesson to teach this expression to your kid, right?