A little bit of piling on here where in ticking off a litany of bad behaviors defined as beyond any pale you characterize behavior shy if that threshold as beyond any pale.

The headline: Marjorie Taylor Greene vandalized Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s guest book and taunted her in a deleted 2019 video.

Question: what does it mean to “vandalize”?

Members of the group filmed themselves vandalizing the congresswoman’s guest book with pro-Trump messages and insults, and demanding that the congresswoman “come out” and “face” them. Greene wrote “you’re a traitor” and drew a picture of the US-Mexico border wall in the book. She also called out to Ocasio-Cortez through the mail slot in her locked door.

Greene and her associates taunted Ocasio-Cortez and her staffers, calling the New York lawmaker a “baby” and referring to her office as a “daycare” and a “college sorority” because of a wall of Post-it messages left outside her office door by supporters.

Greene also encouraged her followers to travel to the Capitol and confront Democratic lawmakers.

I have no idea if every congress critter on Capitol Hill has a “guestbook”, but if they do, open to the public, I don’t see how they wouldn’t be inserted with inflammatory partisan messaging. Maybe Marjorie Taylor Greene rips them out of hers?

The rest arises to some levels of concern — open to debate the nature of it all — but we do have that basic”decorum” issue. But I fail to see this 2019 yeared “vandalism”. Or does vandalism have a secondary meaning of which I am not aware ?

The funny thing is that Liz Cheney really oughta have been Senator. Lurking below the surface of this 2014 article on her dismal run and flame-out is the sense that Enzi was set to retire — signs along the lines of lack of fund-raising pointed to it — until Cheney wounded his pride by noisally jumping in with her primary bid.

Her Congressional career saw an immediate opportunity to jump to the Senate, but for Republican House lobbying.

Some Republicans tell POLITICO privately that Cheney is their preferred messenger — even more so than House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) — at what feels like a low point for the party after a brutal midterm election cycle that decimated their ranks of female lawmakers in the House. Others say they can envision her becoming Speaker Cheney one day.

That’s why it would sting to lose Cheney to the Senate. And the blow to the House GOP would come sooner than 2020; Cheney would have to step down from her leadership post if she seeks higher office because of new party rules that took effect this year. […]

While climbing the House leadership ladder could be an attractive option for Cheney, a high-profile Senate seat would put her in the national spotlight — potentially catapulting her to become a future secretary of Defense or even president.

Today we run into the line of thought by Republicans now dropping her from her “3rd Most Powerful Republican in the House” position. A “we’re not obsessed with Trump — you’re the one obsessed with Trump” line shows up. And for the political purposes of winning seats in 2022, they are probably correct. As against Cheney, and the mass of media positioning and opinion meistering — and the idea that you can’t sweep Jan 6 away and place it on ignore — Trump no longer has a Facebook or Twitter page, but he does have a sparkling new blog!

Fascist, you say. Confront the mayor, you sayl. Yeah, that turns out well.

I don’t get itll. What is the angle? What is the reference point? We’re one minute to power and the day of Truth is over? Makes sense? A deeply cynical take on when you become the power you once spoke truth to… Truth antithetical to power. Is that what they are getting at?

Bill Maher defends aged President Biden as paradigm of wise experience and railroad against youthful folly.

And… 2013 … Bill Maher says we have too many old people in politics.

And maybe it is not entirely contradictory. The two positions of one old guy at the Executive branch demonstrating wisdom and experience against a whole pile of old people in Congress showing senility and out of touch disconnects can easily be rectified.  Still, I sense your partisan situational value judgements at play.

Say for example,  Off in a debate over Washington DC statehood, the idea from the likes of Susan Collins of moving the place into Maryland gets poo pooed with the quite right claim — “Republicans just don’t want 2 new Democratic Senators”.  Surely you jest, as though that isn’t a good enough reason to oppose — and never mind it accomplishes that which is at issue on the license plate — ” Taxation Without Representation”, even if it isn’t popular move amongst DC residents who can quickly point out “What about Wyoming?”. Sure, but then… Say you don’t annex DC into Maryland and give it statehood…  What about Seattle?  See my point there?

Actually maybe Cleveland would be better, as Democrats would not want Seattle statehoid as unless the rest of Washington is annexed into Idaho, it is just 2 Democratic Senators offset by 2 new Republican senators.

Working theory on Biden as untouchable versus Trump’s coming sooner or later…

I have been compiling — for my own amusement — a batch of pages from Archie Comics which saw the editors of the company make small alterations years later in reprinting in digests, particularly amused by somewhat arbitrary changes for anything inferring something sexual.  A little less interesting but perhaps more profuse is the manner they have, over the years, changed references to current years — tending to look badly — so I recall an instance with everyone dressed in high 1970s polyester outfits supposedly now (or then) set in 1991.

Now here is an interesting 1983 issue from Archie Comics where the wacky gang in Riverdale see the encroaching totalitarian government squashing them at every turn — now set in 2018.

It appears that this title — Archie at Riverdale High — became the go to place for the company to dump turgid “serious issues”, comics as public service announcements — and lessons that belong in after school specials.  So we get the obligatory “don’t smoke” propaganda, and the discovery that that dumb lunk head Moose isn’t dumb — he just has dyslexia.  This issue of the series, I guess, is your Afterschool Special about the encroachment of Big Brother.

A little bit of kudos to the editors of the digest in reprint selections, as pre facing in the same issue is a more lightheaded allusion to Orwell which, I guess you can read as an earlier chapter to the story where it is shown that these civil liberties issues are swirling around in Archie’s head for when things escalate and things get serious and Mr. Weatherbee’s ego-maniacal tendencies explode into a power grab.

Actually the whole digest has stray political and civil liberties themes woven in from all directions — a story where the kids protest against a parking lot inspired by a student hippy girl sits along with a story where Archie “narcs” on a misguided delinquent kid who claims his “School Stinks” graffiti is a political statement– why, he’s right out of Dostoyevsky’s Demons! Mind you, the stories aren’t interesting in and of themselves but together it gets clever. (For the selection of ‘Archie 3000 stories, the editpr was probably kicking themself for having reprinted this too recently.)

But just as a reader of Archie digests are left wondering what polyester and huge collars doing in 1991, or a crude redrawing of a walkman playing “The Go-Gos” into an MP3 player playing “The Britney Spears” in the oughts, the change from 1983 to 2018 leaves to a simple problem: all very quaint, the 1983 surveillance system. If only we could go back to that! Today we have much more intrusive manners to monitor and affect behaviour of the student body — as we have seen stories of purchasing the service of an nsa-esque minitoring agency to folliw students’ social media accounts and stories of school laptops that can record students as they use them — wherever. So what is the point of retrofitting the year to 2018 when the technology does not follow apace?

And I will leave it to someone else to decide whether the change from 1983 to 2018 counts as “Orwellian”. I don’t think so — at any rate, we’ve seen worse.

As for the rest, I can’t help but note that Dilton’s hacking of the ATM and receiving gobs of money would not get him thanks from the local bank president for exposing the limits and errands of technology, so much as get him a felony prison sentence. And the manner in which the buteacratic red tape from a series of government regulations from, successively, an arrogant Pentagon, Labor Department, and EPA leaves Mr. Lodge in a Kafkaesque bind is moderately amusing.

From the comments section of a National Review online article here, in places the argument holds, buT then a situational what about is m smashes it .

C’mon man, after all they live in the same pseudoreality as Conman-in-Chief Biden who also claims the 6Jan2021 riot at the Capital was “the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War”, overlooking, ignoring, or plan ole having lost memory of:  10Nov1898, Wilmington SC; 2Jul1915, Captiol Bldg, Washington DC; 7Dec1941; 1Mar1954, Capitol Bldg, PRNP, Washington DC; 2May1967, Sacramento CA; 1Mar1971, Capitol Bldg, Washington DC; 29Jan1975, State Dept, Washington DC and Oakland CA; 30Mar1981, Hinckley, Washington DC; 7Nov1983, M19, Capitol Bldg, Washington DC; 19Apr1995, McVeigh and Nichols, OKC OK; 11Sept2001; 2002, John Allen Mohammed and Lee Boyd Malvo; 15Apr2013, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Boston MA; 14Jun2017, Hodgkinson, Alexandria VA; as well as a year-worth of vandalism, looting, arson, and murder perpetrated in numerous cities and States throughout most of 2020 and continuing unto today, including at the time he asserted his delusional prevarication.

To be sure, the 6Jan2021 riot at the Capital was a bigger threat and bigger deal than Benghazzi 2012.  The reason it jumps ahead of some of them — particularly that last reference — and perhaps lies on a different plane where we study it as a separate thing with different problems 

— even if, sure sure, you would rather be at the Washington Capitol than at the OKC Federal Building on that day in 1995 BUT – 

— lies in it being a sanctioned act by Trump to overrule a democratic process of elections and transfer of power.

We are in definitions here.  No, 6Jan2021 riot was not as bad an attack on our democracy as 7December1941, or 10Nevember1898 — though some will insist on comparing it more closely to that one than this random National Review online commenter – 

But we are in an interesting realm of argument, one which probably sits more easily with the hyperbolic claim of voting restriction measures as “Jim Crow on Steroids” — with that one by definition — no, and it is a wash to me on whether the hyperbolicism of the charge focuses on the equitable problems or can get laughed away in its absurdity leaving no room to convince the unconvinced.

But this historical overview leads to a feeling of nitpicking.  “Hey.  We’ve had worse!”

I. Larouche Org Declares War on Oprah.

Cloret Carl Ferguson has a call to action to the citizens of Brattleboro.

Who holds the Oprahs, Bezos, Gates, and Soroses to account, boasting of their trillions gained in 2020 – the pandemic year – knowing their mass of wealth is built on the corpses of so many millions of people?

Reader, will you act?

Oprah?

Ron Wieczorek writes to his editor … a chilling vision of coming doom.

Because you didn’t listen, we are now at the brink of a third world war, as the NATO allies conduct an intensifying policy of containment and confrontation against China and Russia. Should such a war occur, it would rapidly escalate into thermonuclear extinction of civilization. Instead of geopolitics, LaRouche proposed a dialogue of cultures, and a World Land-Bridge of development corridors.

These are the stakes: Oprah must be stopped.

II. Kanye West. Bernie Sanders, Gus Hall, Pat Buchanan. DSA. Chris Christie. Trump’s finance chairman is Lyndon LaRouche. Tulsi Gabbard. Kris Kobach. Lin Wood and Krakens. “neoconservatism”. (Positively) Caitlyn Jenner. John Cox. black hammer as “Larouche / red guard Austin” thing. jd vance. Trump supporting facebook protests.

One query — Mike Gravel — did he “become a Larouchite” after his time as Senator… Or after his run for President? Important distinctions in finding meaning here. (His alliance here perenial subject, with sometimes unclear reference points.)

III. Dateline Australia

A group representing post office licensees has defended links to a fringe political party accused of racism, anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories.

Licensed Post Office Group copped bipartisan criticism at a Senate hearing on Tuesday over links to the Australian Citizens Party.

LPO Group executive director Angela Cramp said it was great to receive support from the party.

“I have no understanding of what the citizens party represents. They are citizens of Australia. They are aligned with us,” she told the hearing.

Liberal senator Sarah Henderson asked why LPO Group’s campaign to phone ministers’ offices urging for former Australia Post boss Christine Holgate to be reinstated was aided by the party.

“I am questioning why you would be working with an organisation known to be anti-Semitic, racist and also with many of its policies’ foundation in conspiracy theories,” she said.

Cramp believes Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s furious rebuke of former Australia Post boss Christine Holgate in parliament was a “calculated set up” rather than an overreaction.

Twitter reaction: party that is over 30 years old and is far different to when it first formed. So ideological change is not allowed in your world? Is any party the same now, as what it was 30 years ago?

Rebutted with: LoL Are they or are they not still affiliated with the international LaRouche Movement? And the policy of re-establishing a government bank would hurt the LPOs and their Bank@Post deal.

also out of australia … and…

IV. So many memories…

Hands up who misses the “how to tell if your neighbour has been brainwashed about Lyndon LaRouche” page?

Remember the LaRouche crackpots staked out at the Tax Assessor’s office on Lake Front?

What’s the most awkward date y’all ever been on?

say da This one time I came up on a guy handbilling near a community board meeting. Another dude was screaming at him calling him a communist. I told mad guy to fuck off and go back inside. It turned out guy #1 was a fascist with the Lyndon Larouche cult. Told him to fuck off too.

Deleted: In my college years, being curious about politics, I got a LaRouche book. I tried to read it. I considered myself a reasonably informed and intelligent person. I could not for the life of me figure out what the movement was about.

I went back and started reading about it the other day and, same

heh. No joke, would consider it. such fond memories of arguing w/LaRouchie who hung out outside my bank on Vermont Ave in Los Feliz & insisted Bertrand Russell wanted nuclear war; I’d say “no he’s *describing* it cuz he’s against it” and we’d just repeat ourselves until I got tired

gonna lie, I kinda miss seeing these goofs around, from 2001-2016 they were everywhere in L.A., Philly, NYC

Say Da I remember the Lindon LaRouche people walking with signs of Obama wearing a Hitler Moustache calling him a Nazi in 2009 as I was driving, my wife started yelling at them for the fascists they were.

Oh yeah – There were LaRouchites, pushing that garbage, outside my local post office in 2009.

wish Lyndon LaRouche was still around terrorizing northern Virginia

There was a LaRouche acolyte who used to come hand out pamphlets and wear sandwich boards outside Yeshiva University. He was always mostly cordial, which struck me as incredibly odd for a Holocaust denier.

Really? Everyone finally found out about Gazi and LaRouche. The other weird-ass founders of orgs people tried to recruit me into in 2016 will become memes soon enough

Point: A big reason I never even flirted with 9/11Truth was that by 9/13, LaRouche ppl were on campus insisting it was an inside job bc only US military pilots would know how to disable transponders & navigate expertly through NYC to hit those targets. Their certainty, just 2 days later, based on such clearly wrong assumptions pretty much innoculated me.

Counterpoint: What was your introduction into the “Conspiracy Life”? 9/11 did it for me.. but I used to read/listen to my dad read Lyndon LaRouche when I was a little kid. He used to get a newsletter, and tell me all the good conspiracy sItories. #LaRouche #GoodDadMemories

hm. such fond memories of arguing w/LaRouchie who hung out outside my bank on Vermont Ave in Los Feliz & insisted Bertrand Russell wanted nuclear war; I’d say “no he’s *describing* it cuz he’s against it” and we’d just repeat ourselves until I got tired

ok. Boyle talking about Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss i feel like I’m 15 years ago, in the streets of Washington, spreading Lyndon Larouche’s “Children of Satan” pamphlet.

I once wasted an hour on the LaRouche drones. Never again. 😂❤️

I nearly missed a flight out of Houston Hobby (i.e., cops offered me option to return my husband in the bar or be detained) in the early 80s for picking a fight with Lyndon LaRouche followers.

I also ran into LaRouche folks at a table in front of City Hall in Monterey, CA about 4 yrs ago. They remain crazy as ever. (No police intervention was needed that time

and… i went to a cadem convention in college. grim affair. however there was a literal choir of larouchies sing-protesting outside

V. LORG makes friends and influences people.

Bunch of lies! They have been against the green movement because it was the late prince Phillip who wrote it not AOC. The eat babies comment was to mute AOC! Not a real comment, but a distraction to green polices that will limit the relative potential of all humans. Go be Amish

What you’re dealing with in this situation, is a victim of mass-brainwashing by the U.S. media, an individual who has taken his opinion from a mass media.

Sure. That time LaRouche wrote the introduction to a book collaborating with an Argentine colonel (guess what side) wherein the argument is made against victims of torture seeking justice in US courts

Fishing for Larouche recruits… Q Assist. Is the Larouche Organization trying for qanoners by way of subterfuge now?

Intrigued by this: Breitbart promotes Newton trap against Science and hypothesis! Lyndon LaRouche is correct about British Agent Newton, which suggests Breitbart is mirroring a Larouche narratve, I google what it is Breitbart has on Newton… Oh, chiding some collegiate reframing of Newton’s “white privilege”. Other bits of names dropping conspiracies… Personally, I can never recall if Nicholas de CUSA is on the friend, foe, or moved from one to the other list.

So it is… Larouche is like a kitsch American gift store retailing all the wares of European thought in distorted and warped forms. Trotskyist critiques of the Soviet Union become theories about how the Soviet Union was created by MI6 and Financial Capital tied to City of London etc … If I had spent years in the American SWP I’d write books about how Trotsky was a British agent too. Truth be told, if intelligence operatives weren’t involved in organisations like the SWP, what were they doing with their budgets? Those organisations are all shit for class struggle too. I wouldn’t be surprised if the entire western left is Larouche-lite compromised today.U

Daniel Burke sees someone quoting Confucius and Mao, reaches out. As the old Millennials give way to the next “Youth Movement” the big push happening now, the question is — Is there a mass of Zoomer Maoists for the taking?

Mike Billington does McDuff Lives and garners a This guy really likes China.

Curious response to Schlanger : I am Jewish and even I can see the manipulation.

Meantime, over in lpac-land, Putin, like Trump, RULES. Biden sucks; Giuliani rules.

In as much as politicos are ever discussed, if they want to deal with Matt Gaetz, they can possibly hit hard the medical marijuana angle even if before you get there you are staring at Roger Stone. Probably best to change topics to Mozart and Trains — even though the latter topic is Biden – Buttigieg complicated.

A sign of revulsion from he target market on China.

VI. Electoral Digging.

HEY! is it acceptable to put a Lyndon LaRouche bumper sticker on my car?

Digging into voting data as to the Democratic nomination race in Arkansas 2000 and 2012. See here a dissection of Larouche’s 1984 Presidential vote — and this map spotlighting his best counties where he cracked 2 percent.

 

Noted, this accused Mondale in ads of being ”an agent of Soviet influence” controlled by a Swiss-dominated ”international grain cartel.”
. Watching the Mondale bahing clip again, I notic that even though I had been placing that “Swiss Grain Cartel”, he never mentions Swiss. I think I have been spreading a falsehood, picked up by multiple figures online, including “mill”…

… Who now also has a pretty awesome map for third party winners by candidate in the 1988 election.

Forgotten merchandise.

I miss Lyndon LaRouche pasting a Hitler ‘stache on the incumbent and calling it a presidential campaign.

Interesting quotes from Lyndon, suggesting a heretofore unknown love of Presidents Garfield and Mckinnley, and… a similar phrase as that used by  Jesse Jackson at the 2000 DNC Convention.

Matthew Yglesias gives out a Roschach Test.

“Ruthless”.

VII.  The Mass Strike is elsewhere.

Dateline somewhere or other: Seeing LaRouche people outside the post office is so surreal dude

Daniel Burke fights it out in Peapack, New Jersey … And thermonuclear war never had a chance!  (Had De har)

The hordes gather for an alternate “Mars Day”, because ” Earth Day — Feh”.  The Bullhorn Revolution carries.

Date line East coast:  Does setting up your LaRouche movement stand in front of the post office count as “touching grass”?

AND… There’s this Larouche freak who angrily comments on every lecture uploaded to Robert Brandom’s youtube channel. LORG or LPAC?

VIII.  Mapping disinformation

Commented around here.  Matthew Sweet looks at another Russia TV conduit.  And here if you want to pay for it is a dash of a Podcast feature.

IX. Tarpley.

Let the record show, for those observing the machinations of Webster Tarpley and trying to find a conspiratorial plot — under the tutelage of the Larouche movement, he defended Bill Clinton from a vast right wing conspiracy beginning at least in 1994, opposed Obama!a and supported Hillary Clinton in the 2008 primary (wrote an anti-Obama book and for a time maintained an anti Obama positioning more consistently than Larouche –  they briefly explored the dark side in December 2008 — but managed to slide into the anti Republican positioning with a new anti Romney book in 2012 which merged to an echo of Democratic politics by the end of the Obama years.  (I am not sure where his pro Putin, exemplified by his ” Putin for Nobel Peace Prize” rally — moved off the table.)

Another blast from the past: Recall Lyndon Larouche’s female African American running mate 4 U.S. president, saying on a TV show, paraphrasing..”Populism is the way to go”. Her clothing was not typical 4 U.S. politician.. Who is that?