I missed the “Duck and Cover” training of paranoid yesterday. Apparently, I was just a couple of years off from the redux retro-version of this classic organization of a more orderly Cold War Nuclear fall-out freakout… was there even a watered-down version during the early 80s? Whatever… my parents enjoyed it the first go-around… Bert the Turtle working to hammer a fear of Kruschev into them.

In the last two years of high school, we did have two varieties of interesting, somewhat contradictory drills. We learned that in case of a school shooting, everyone should walk en masse to the Track field. There, the principal would make a few comments about the necessity of these things, citing recent news of some kid in Idaho who nearly pulled something off. The two or three times we went through this, it was, indeed, some kid in Idaho that he referenced — why some kid in Idaho, I do not know, nor do I know if there really was some kid in Idaho.

The other procedure? We practiced school lockdowns… generally if I wasn’t told that the school had been locked down, I can’t say that I’d notice, but I guess it’s good to know that in case of emergency, if the school authorities don’t decide that we run en masse over to the track field, everyone’s safely in the classroom while my nutso peer is running around in the hallway with a sawed off shotgun… ready for the security guard to tackle, I suppose.

I’m going to have to think hard into the past to figure out if any of my schools implemented a drill in case of gang violence. The tide of gang – presence in the public schools (or, better to say — wannabe gangs) ebbed dramatically in the middle 90s.

The watershed moment that posited the next formation of school drills came when that kid flew an airplane into a skyscraper down in Florida… impressionable kid, he. Bill Maher posited that at the time that if this were three years ago, he’d be seeking to shoot his students… and he’s right. That fad is over. Media space has moved on completely to other … things.

These are the days where we read about Russian terrorists taking hostage a batch of young students… attempting to further their cause for Chechnan Separatism.

Thus, here are the drills that are being practiced in schools these days, in small town America:

Dressed in camouflauge, helmets, bulletproof vests, and armed with special weaponry, Grandview’s Special Incident Response Team fall into stick file behind a shield and enter Harriet Thompson Elementary School to confront a parent who’s barricaded himself in a classroom full of children.

At least once a month, the police participate in training that helps them prepare for situations that are “outside the typical law enforcement realm” here locally, says Detective Mitch Fairchild. A subject barricaded inside of a classroom is not at all typical in the area. It falls under the umbrella of high risk special circumstances and it’s those situations that the SIRT team must practice in order to identify the team’s strenghts, as well as areas they need to work on.

I assume that the actual students of Harriet Thompson aren’t involved here. They might become a little scared.

Here’s part of Gordon Allen Pross, candidate for the Republican Nominee for US Senate from Washington,’s plan for managing the salmon in the Columbia River:

AS THE SALMON MAKE THERE WAY FROM THE OCEAN RUNNING UP STREAM AS THEY APPROACH THE NEW BYPASS THEY WILL BE COAXED UP THE BYPASS BY THE PLAYING OF RECORDED AUDIO SOUNDS OF THE FORMER SALMON BEING FEASTED UPON BY THE BIRDS.

THEN WHEN THE SALMON ARE RUNNING BACK TO SEA, I SUGGEST AN ELECTRONIC FIELD UPSTREAM, PLACED AT AN OBLIQUE ANGLE SO AS TO DIRECT THE SALMON THROUGH THE BYPASS, MUCH AS A CATTLE RANCHER WOULD USE A CHUTE TO FUNNEL LIVESTOCK FOR BRANDING, SEPARATING, OR TRANSPORT

An interesting proposal. Scare the salmon with noises of birds eating them, driving the salmon in the other direction. It’s bears a striking resemblance to the overall Bush / Cheney campaign strategy:

“It’s absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on Nov. 2, we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we’ll get hit again and we’ll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States,” Cheney told about 350 supporters at a town-hall meeting in this Iowa city.

Vote Gordon Allen Pross / Dick Cheney!

The thought jumps out at me as Rasmussen points out the flaw to the Newsweek and Time polls, and the other polls generally show something like this:

Bush’s two-point convention bounce is one of the smallest registered in Gallup polling history…Bush’s bounce is the smallest an incumbent president has received.

The Bastard’s gonna beat the Asshole. Kerry’s campaign might appear a little clunky, but somehow or other…

John Kerry’s campaigns are always clunky. That’s the other side to the storyline that Kerry is a “Great Closer” (his key political victories: his second go around at a House seat, his first Senate race, the 1996 Senate race, and the Democratic Primary Race) — what does he have to close for?…

… which leads me to suspect the inner-workings of “Skull and Bones”… and when I invoke “Skull and Bones”, I don’t mean “Skull and Bones” per se, but the more vast all encompassing conspiracy– The Grand Mechanized Outdoor Snark.

Jump back to the Democratic Primary season. Dean becomes the presumptive nominee, to the chagrin of the party hierarchy. The “people in the know”, the insiders are bracing themselves for Dean. Kerry is left for Dead.

At the height of the Dean campaign, the voices that said that Kerry will be the Democratic nominee? The conspirarcy theorists! Michael Ruppert and Alex Jones and Lyndon LaRouche. If you go by predictive behaviour, that means that Ruppert and Jones and LaRouche have more credibility than the pundit class.

Powerful interests saving John Kerry from himself over and over again, dragging him toward the victory line?

In the case of the Democratic Primary, Edward Kennedy swooped in and gave Kerry his campaign staff. In the case of the General Election, the Clintonistas are jumping aboard, steering the ship.

I picture James Carville, watching the Swift Boats attacks, screaming — chomping at the bit, knowing exactly how he would deal with the Swiftees.

There’s another, less spectacular way of looking at the bizarre trajectory nature of the Kerry races. In the case of the primary race … there’s something the Dean partisans did not know: the largest sector of voters, even primary voters, even caucus goers, are not really paying attention until right near the end.

… which was when Kerry’s campaign ads outshone the lackluster Dean tv ads. The Kennedy people came in at the right time. That the Vietnam Veteran (symbolism for some mightier things) as central piece in campaign wears in the general election doesn’t matter. (And, I begin to suspect that the Swift Boat Vets attack was timed not only for the natural money-flow problem of Kerry, but at a time Kerry would move away a bit from Vietnam, reinforce the idea that he’s running on his service, y’see.)

In the general race: the “Undecideds” are not paying attention until… NOW! Meaning? The Clinton people are coming in at the opportune time.

What do I make of the now exposed as patently absurd Time and Newsweek polls, then? A need to create the storyline. Truman would not have won had he not been so far behind, if that makes any sense. With the 1996 race against William Weld, my reading of old usenet files from 1996 suggests that the storyline that he had his back against the wall is a bit of a mirage. But… it’s best to create an impression of a nadir, the “Left for Dead” that the Kerry campaign punches back from. I’ll need to see if Newsweek and Time are owned by Bonespeople.

Now I’m tripping out.

#1: Arnold Schwarzenegger.

When I was a boy, the Soviets occupied part of Austria. I saw their tanks in the streets. I saw communism with my own eyes. I remember the fear we had when we had to cross into the Soviet sector. Growing up, we were told, “Don’t look the soldiers in the eye. Look straight ahead.” It was a common belief that Soviet soldiers could take a man out of his own car and ship him off to the Soviet Union as slave labor.

My family didn’t have a car — but one day we were in my uncle’s car. It was near dark as we came to a Soviet checkpoint. I was a little boy, I wasn’t an action hero back then, and I remember how scared I was that the soldiers would pull my father or my uncle out of the car, and I’d never see him again. My family and so many others lived in fear of the Soviet boot. Today, the world no longer fears the Soviet Union and it is because of the United States of America!

This entire story is a lie.

Schwarzenegger, now a naturalized U.S. citizen, was born on July 30, 1947, when Styria and the neighboring province of Carinthia belonged to the British zone. At the time, postwar Austria was occupied by the four wartime allies, which also included the United States, the Soviet Union and France.

The Soviets already had left Styria in July 1945, less than three months after the end of the war, Karner noted.

The defense?

“Never in there did the governor reference that the tanks were where he grew up. It was a reference to visiting Soviet-occupied Austria,” she said.

When the Schwarzennagers made their cross-country roadtrips once a year?

Sayseth Schwarzennager:As a kid I saw the socialist country that Austria became after the Soviets left. I love Austria and I love the Austrian people – but I always knew America was the place for me.

Yep. That’s a lie. But Martin Polaschek, a law history scholar and vice rector of Graz University, told Kurier that Austria was governed by coalition governments, including the conservative People’s Party and the Social Democratic Party. Between 1945 and 1970, all the nation’s chancellors were conservatives — not Socialists.

What’s more, when Schwarzenegger left in 1968, Austria was run by a conservative government headed by People’s Party Chancellor Josef Klaus, a staunch Roman Catholic and a sharp critic of both the Socialists and the Communists ruling in countries across the Iron Curtain.

No “third way” politics there.

More from the Governor that Enron Built: I finally arrived here in 1968.I had empty pockets, but I was full of dreams. The presidential campaign was in full swing. I remember watching the Nixon and Humphrey presidential race on TV. A friend who spoke German and English, translated for me. I heard Humphrey saying things that sounded like socialism which is what I had just left. But then I heard Nixon speak. He was talking about free enterprise, getting government off your back, lowering taxes, and strengthening the military. Listening to Nixon speak sounded more like a breath of fresh air.

Apparently, in the California Governor campaign he made explicit what he’s learned to make implicit here: that he was watching a presidential debate between Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon. There were no debates between Nixon and Humphrey; Nixon nixed them because they’d damper his uber-safe strategy. (As an aside, it’s interesting to note that Hubert Humphrey very nearly “pulled a Truman” — even with the same circumstance Truman had of having two wings of his party deserting him… had he had one more week, he probably would have pulled it off.) But, the networks did air half hour question and answer sessions with each of them, so it’s possible to give this Austrian some leeway here. But, a correction has altered his storyline subtley.

Except for the fact that… Schwarzenegger did not leave a Socialist country. Perhaps Austria had nationalized medical care like most industrialized countries do… but …

#2: Zell Miller

In 1940 Wendell Wilkie was the Republican nominee.

Shortly before Wilkie died he told a friend, that if he could write his own epitaph and had to choose between “here lies a president” or “here lies one who contributed to saving freedom”, he would prefer the latter.

It’s a little ironic that Zell Miller picks out Wendell Willkie as the Republican hero … Wendell Willkie was the very epitmoe of a political party picking out a candidate for pragmatic reasons, to paraphrase Howard Dean “Democratic Lite”.

The situation is described here, and I quibble with just one piece of it.

My quibble would be merely to point out that Wendell Willkie himself was actually a Democrat right up until he started seeking the Republican nomination… so it’s even worse than a matter of pre-aligned politics of selecting a member of the Liberal wing of the party… the Republicans were in such desparate shape that they essentially nominated a Democrat. But the point stands…

The point, at any rate, is that it’s very easy to put party aside for the sake of national unity when — like Willkie in 1940 or Miller in 2004 — you don’t actually disagree with the other party’s agenda.

Other than that, I tend to view John McCain’s recent comments about Vietnam rearing its ugly head in the election as another example of the powers that be trying to defeat “Vietnam Syndrome”. “Vietnam Syndrome”, you see, is an ugly eclipse that blocks the sunny disposition that comes with “WWII Syndrome”… we end up ignoring the lessons of one of them, and not taking heed of lessons from both of them.

#3: George W Bush

America has done this kind of work before and there have always been doubters. In 1946, 18 months after the fall of Berlin to allied forces, a journalist wrote in the New York Times, “Germany is a land in an acute stage of economic, political and moral crisis. [European] capitals are frightened. In every [military] headquarters, one meets alarmed officials doing their utmost to deal with the consequences of the occupation policy that they admit has failed.” End quote. Maybe that same person’s still around, writing editorials. Fortunately, we had a resolute president named Truman, who with the American people persevered, knowing that a new democracy at the center of Europe would lead to stability and peace. And because that generation of Americans held firm in the cause of liberty, we live in a better and safer world today.

Interesting. Apparently Bush ripped the paragraphs out of context.

The president distorted the columnist’s dispatch. (download a PDF of the original column)The “moral crisis” and failure she described were in the British and French sectors. She reported that the Americans were doing better because of their policy to “encourage initiative and develop self-government.” She wanted the U.S. to commit more troops and stay the course – not cut and run.

Also notice the date. 1946. The Marshall Plan had yet to be proposed.

Added to the beuracratic struggle facing Europe at the time and Iraq now, not seen in Europe: guerilla fighters…

…

Other than that, their version of the events leading into Iraq tend to blur 9/11 into it, and … I may as well add this to the list:

#4: George Bush sayseth: After more than a decade of diplomacy, we gave Saddam Hussein another chance, a final chance, to meet his responsibilities to the civilized world. He again refused, and I faced the kind of decision that comes only to the Oval Office a decision no president would ask for, but must be prepared to make.

The inspectors were on the ground…

My first reaction upon seeing Bush’s twelve point Time Magazine Poll lead was “outlier”, an anomolie. It was amongst a sea of polls that showed Bush with a four point lead. Then, there it was: Newsweek with the same twelve point lead. Therefore, it’s not a polling anomolie. It’s, somehow or other, a real result that shines light on reality somewhere and somewhen and somehow. The chattering classes love this poll bounce, and it’s all over the place.

But then I get this posting from Joshua Micah Marshal. The Bush and Kerry campaign both have Bush ahead by four percentage points. Bush working conservatively and Kerry in a case of wistful hope? Don’t know. But, since they both have that result and both are working as if that is where the election stands, and since it happens to comply with a lot of other polls… It’s, somehow or other, a real result that shines light on reality somewhere and somewhen and somehow.

My working theory goes like this: we have a viewer of the conventions, eight percent of the electorate, a male chugging beer and dipping chips into cheese dip while he watches. He high fives somebody when The Terminator says “Don’t be ecomonic girlie men”. He raises his fist when the bullhorn moment is invoked by Rudy Giuliani. He’s ready to kick ass!

But, this eight percent of the electorate sleeps on it. He goes to his part time job at 7-11 the next morning, after waiting for five hours by the phone to see if the job he recently applied to after being downsized at the local factory. Then it dawns on him, “Did Schwarzenegger call me an economic girlie man?”

And all of a sudden, he envisions the image of Zell and thinks “Wow! He’s worse than Dean!”

We can toss in a few of those phantom “Security Moms” in that eight percent of the electorate — this is the desired transformation that of voting patterns that the Republican Party hopes from from the old “Soccer Moms”. Egad, politics is littered with faddish fifteen minutes of simplications.

The anniversary of 9/11 is right around the corner — the reason that the Republican Convention was scheduled so late in the first place, to segue a momentum from the convention to 9/11… bullhorn imagery is much in vogue.

Never mind though. I think the Republican Party might have opened up a sixteen point lead in Time had they had Lynne Cheney read some of her descriptions of hot girl on girl action! Perhaps it would alienate some of the religious right base — but they were pretty well placated by the platform. This is about getting to the male demographic… perhaps they could’ve scheduled it for that halftime show Peter Jennings had during that Monday Night Football Preseason Game.

(Note: curiously enough, the name of the book does not appear on the official biography page for Lynne Cheney.)

I’m reading this post, and I realize that it is horribly written, and the message that I was trying to get out does not come through.

So I’m redoing it, and updating it.

John Kerry’s campaign took off when he selected John Edwards as his vice presidential candidate. He toured the nation for a while, received a good deal of good press, and saw his fortunes rise in the polls.

This lead us into the Democratic Convention. Despite all protestations to the contrary from the denziens of talk radio and such who continue to this day to point to the one poll that served their purpose out of several polls that didn’t serve their purpose, Kerry received a “bounce”.

Kerry continued the momentum from there with a successful post-convention tour, and it is at the high point at the end of this successful tour that we can guage the far-perimeters of Kerry’s potential victory.

There was a controversy back in June about the possibility that Kerry might delay to September acceptance of his nomination. A fluke campaign finance laws that stops a candidate from fund raising to his campaign stash when he accepts nomination… or something to that effect. Since the candidate needs to keep a bulk of campaign money for the stretch club, Bush had the funding advantage through August. You will notice that the Kerry ads you saw in August were from various 527s (and the Democratic National Committee) and not from the Kerry/ Edwards Campaign. (They ended up reluctantly releasing some campaign ads for theirownselves to respond to a certain well-coordinated Republican 527…)

It is in this atmosphere that the Swift Boat Veterans for Obfuscation released their advertisement attacks. And it is here that Kerry got stuck in a morass of goo. The natural flow in momentum toward the Bush campaign going into the convention was probably bumped up by roughly a week with this advertisement and ensuing controversy. How large a negative this has inflcited upon Kerry remains to be seen.

The convention is over, and we now get a good glimpse of the outer perimeters of a Bush victory. There are a series of polls out, and the Bush partisans have a couple of polls to support them, and their Kerry partisans have a few polls to support a contention that Bush’s “bounce” is modest.

In the meantime, the conventional wisdom amongst the arbiters of such have shifted from a tight-50/50 type race, started peaking toward “wow… it kinda looks like Kerry” — despite his inherent weaknesses, and is probably about to be set to “Bush victory.”

Charles Cook has continuously contributed the contrary view… when it was starting to look like Kerry, he posited it toward Bush, and when the swing started going toward Bush, he remarked on the fickleness of the arbiters of conventional wisdom who have their finger in the wind, he’s moved toward Kerry.

Is Kerry’s campaign in trouble? This is the natural ebb point to his campaign, but beyond that… I don’t really know. I see what looks to me like inherent weaknesses in his campaign. Also, I must say, if I were Kerry I would not have capitulated to John McCain on the anti-Swift Boat attack ad that used his image (McCain saying to Bush at a debate when the camera was off “Why are you doing this to me?”, Bush replying “Hey! It’s just politics.”) to drive home the greatest truth of the Swift Boat ad. It should be noted, after all, that John McCain is a Bush partisan. On the otherhand, there are limits to what some of the Kerry partisans want: “go on the offensive”, sure, but there is a line that the partisans sometimes just aren’t fully aware of.

And, on yet another hand, you can stare at his primary fight. Written off for dead, you will remember… the latest in a long series of campaigns where he earned the label of “strong closer.”

The horse race dynamics of the Reagan – Carter race, it should be said, was middling all the way to October. Not that anyone can seriously expect anything of that magnitude. Some convention notes from 1980: Carter’s convention speech belies the belief that he needed to tear down Reagan, and should Kerry win, history will record Bush’s speech in the same breath as Carter’s.

Remember too that through 2002 nobody could make heads or tails of the Senate race dynamic until the weekend before the election — when it became clear the war in Iraq would corral a modest, but easily construed as major Bush-coattail effect. Laura Bush has just said that the war wasn’t popular when Bush made the decision — the story of the Bush decision with Bush fretting over it is a lie, mind you. But hold on a minute there! That was the storyline of the anti-war faction: the polls showing an even split for the idea of a war in Iraq until it became clear that it was inevitable and “support the troops” became paramount and the media loves it, you know? At the time, the hawks would argue that America knows they need this war. I guess the storyline changes by convenience to fit into the “steady leader, won’t waver in the face of any trouble” storyline.

Never mind.

We’ll see if Bush successfully makes Kerry unacceptable to the one exurban underemployed Ohio resident who is the elusive swing voter. Bush has largely mailed in domestic affairs — all go to the base — and is selling himself on the “War on Terror”, shouting into a bullhorn, and the idea of “steadfast leadership” versus “wavering and flip flopping”, meaning “even if you disagree” (and polls tend to show an increasing slim majority believe it to be a mistake) “you know where I stand.”

Gordon Allen Pross, the 1998 Democratic nominee for the fourth Congressional District of Washington State, a 2000 and 2002 Republican candidate challenging the throne of Doc Hastings, has shifted his focus to new and bigger challenges in 2004: he’s running for the Republican nomination for a US Senate seat.

As expected, his campaign website does not disappoint.

Where does he stand on salmon?

TODAY THE COLUMBIA HAS BEEN TAMED NOT UNLIKE OUR AMERICANIZED CULTURE WITH A FORMULA CREATED WAY BEFORE THE FAROS HAD THE BLUEPRINTS TO BUILD THE GREAT PYRAMIDS. MIND MASS AND SOCIAL CONTROL, IT WORKED THEN AND IT CONTINUES TO WORKS TODAY. […] LET US TOGETHER INTRO INTO RE-COMPLEX-ING THE COLUMBIA RIVER, SHALL WE? […] MY RECOMMENDATION IS TO CREATE, UPSTREAM, BEYOND THE REACH OF THE HAZARDS PRESENTED BY THE DAM, AN ARTERY OF WATER 30 FEET IN CIRCUMFERENCE THAT ACTS AS A SO CALLED “CORONARY BYPASS,” AND CHANNEL IT BACK INTO THE COLUMBIA SOME DISTANCE DOWNSTREAM FROM THE DAMS OVERLY OXYGEN RICH SALMON TRAP. AS THE SALMON MAKE THERE WAY FROM THE OCEAN RUNNING UP STREAM AS THEY APPROACH THE NEW BYPASS THEY WILL BE COAXED UP THE BYPASS BY THE PLAYING OF RECORDED AUDIO SOUNDS OF THE FORMER SALMON BEING FEASTED UPON BY THE BIRDS. […]

Where does he stand on the… power issue?

I will introduce the new department of

The one and only nuclear reactor that mother earth cannot live without, our brilliant star that humanity calls “The Sun!”
The (DOLE) “Department Of Lunar Energy” will provide for a clean and perpetual resource to flood America’s electrical power grid with an ergonomic user friendly none toxic means to generate low cost electricity needed to rejuvenate our “Made In America” logo!
Turbine generators will line our American offshore boarders providing yet another layer of defense from the open sea. DOLE will be a fine vehicle for home land security to sink their teeth into. SOS saved by the tide. America’s west coast borders will be secured at sea level, to include all the way from Maine to our distant neighbors in Mexico.

Where does he stand on… watershed?

NOW IF YOU DO NOT BELIEVE THAT THE QUALITY OF THE SURFACE WATER WITHIN THE RIVER IS NOT A DIRECT BAROMETER AND INHERENT INDICATOR OF YOUR PRESENT HEALTH, THEN YOU ARE WRONG MR. AND MRS. SCIENCE!!!

And what is his overall philosophy?

MAKE WAY FOR A REAL PEOPLE’S REPRESENTATIVE THAT IS OVERFLOWING WITH LEGISLATIVE TOOLS TO FIX AND BRING BACK OUR AMERICAN DREAM OF OUR LIVES BEING LIVED AS AMERICAS DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE PROVIDES! ELECT GORDON ALLEN PROSS CREATOR/POLITICAL RENAISSANCE IGNITED VIA THE RESURRECTION OF HUMANITIES WILL TO POLICY GORDON O4 UNITED STATES SENATOR.

I GORDON ALLEN PROSS AM NOT AN ENABLER, FOR I AM A LIBERATOR. GOVERNMENT NEEDS DO ONE THING WELL. GOVERNMENTS ROLL MUST PROVIDE THE BARE ESSENTIAL NEED FOR ITS PEOPLE. SO HUMANITY MAY HONE THE PROPER TOOLS FOR BECOMING ABLE TO CREATE THEIR OWN WISH LIST, WHILE NURTURING THE MEANS AND WAYS TO RESURRECT THOSE WISHES INTO REALITY SO HUMANITY HAS A VENUE TO PURSUE HAPPINESS.

There you go. Join the Revolution now, one Senator at at time…