Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) today released a list of the most egregious pork barrel projects spilling over in the Fiscal 2008 House Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies (THUD) Act. One section of the bill alone – – Economic Development Initiative (EDI) grants — has $78.2 million in pork spread throughout 480 projects. The purported purpose of EDI is to increase economic development and revitalization, but it is too often used as a pork depository.

Pork is one of those things that is a little hard to dissect.  Any number of congress critters rail against it, and then slice up all they can for their districts — thus having it both ways.  The pork meisters, in the Senate, are Alaska Senator Ted Stevens and West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd — who have wisely staked out their Seniority chairmanships to best enable them to take their jabs at the Federal Budget.  But there is a situation that arises where one dismisses Stevens’s infamous “Bridge to Nowhere” as a farce, and then thinks for Stevens’s somewhat non-descript highway appropriations that it is difficult to see how West Virginia couldn’t use those highways.

CAGW could use a better acronym.  How do you pronounce “cagw” — specifically the dangling ‘w’ at the end?

— $250,000 for construction of the Walter Clore Wine and Culinary Cente in Prosser, WA, in the district of Rep. Doc Hastings (R-Wash.);

— $200,000 for sidewalks, street furniture and facade improvements in Tamuning, Guam, in the district of Del. Madeleine Bordallo (D-Guam)

Maybe the Walter Clore Wine and Culinary Cente will bring in industry and tourism beyond its quarter of a million fund — and usually when I think of any Congress critter and the federal funds he brings in, I stall at the amount that Hanford requires.  But it is maybe a little startling to see that the Representative of Guam — who doesn’t have a vote — is in on the action.  One doesn’t think much of the power that Guam’s representative delegate brings to the picture.  A fifth of a million dollars for sidewalks, street furniture, and facade improvements?  What the heck is street furniture, and how much of the $200,000 is going toward it?
And could Doc Hastings get some funds for rodent removal — Prosser, of course, having had that nationally noted Humongous Marmot problem a year or two ago?

Last week’s article and blog entry from Scott McLemee (which I passed right on over over here) had me taking another gander at the strange review from Bronfenbrenner — which (shrug) I can send off to anyone who asks, in pdf form — as well that book Dialectical Economics. Bronfenbrenner wrote the only review of a Lyndon Larouche book to appear in an academic journal. The story behind this happenstance appears to have been given in one of the comments at McLemee’s blog:

Bronfenbrenner’s essay is, quite simply, a joke from beginning to end. The Journal of Political Economy does not often publish long review essays even about books its editors would consider important, but it often does (or at any rate did then) publish something funny or of quaint historical interest – usually much shorter than this one – as an end-piece. The JPE is, in addition to being one of the leading economics journals in the world, the house organ of the Chicago school of economics. In the early 1970s, Marxian economics was taken seriously by small but significant minorities in many leading American economics departments – but not, ever, in the Economics Department at the University of Chicago. Bronfenbrenner notes LaRouche’s dismissal of several leading contemporary Marxian economists, but it is not such serious contenders Bronfenbrenner has come to discuss: it is LaRouche, a clown, for the entertainment of the Chicago faithful. The nature of his audience is clear when Bronfenbrenner finds that he must drop his light tone to do serious business in one footnote, because LaRouche has actually landed a blow on hometown favorite Milton Friedman’s simplistic view of deregulated markets; the professor parries with Friedman and Schwartz’s rather more sophisticated Monetary History of the United States – a cheap move, for reasons that Paul Krugman spelled out well in his obituary of Friedman in the New York Review.

One footnote, however, does not a review make. That may leave the number of serious independent assessments of LaRouche’s theories at exactly zero, which would be evidence either of a previously unfathomed lower bound for standards in the diverse community of academic editors and referees (barring that one mercifully unnamed commissioning editor from DC Heath), or a supremely powerful conspiracy, I’m not sure which.

Just as well, it still stands there, confoundedly, for people like me and Scott McLemee, and probably Avi Klein and Dennis King, to pull up when engaging in relatively rudimentary research. A paragraph from that piece:
Marcus has apparently had the advantage of more private-business experience than the great majority of academic economists. One can guess that, blackballed by his radicalism from academia and civil service, he has turned to business in something like like desperation — and been rather good at it. Certainly the range of his experience, as reported here, is broader than the ordinary economist’s — including specifically mine. It is accordingly interesting to notice triple interactions between Marcus’ business experience, his philosophical background, and his policy conflusions.

I now accept this paragraph as dripping in sarcasm, a reading that suddenly allows it to make sense. But then comes this, and I am startled that I did not recognize the implications of what this is telling me.

Much of Marcus’s business experience, as he reports it, has been at the exploitative frontier of “white collar crime,” bordering on fraud both in the inducement and in the factum — a circumstance that I should imagine pushes one to one or the other end of the ideological spectrum.

Any other self-described Marxist and I could pass this off easily as someone regarding all of Capitalism as defacto exploitative “white collar crime”. Indeed I did when I read this. But Larouche is no ordinary Marxist, so now I’m stuck at a subject I once professed to be through with (and to a large extent am) — the life and times of Lyndon Larouche. His biography gets a little hazy up to 1967 or thereabouts, and I had assumed everything was on the up and up, Larouche was an erstwhile Marxist as he pursued business opportunities in a couple of fields, and then sometime just shortly before 1967 developed a more active interest in his politics and started haranging the Trotskyite bulletin boards with his loud, angry polemics. I note for the record that The Nation published a letter from a Lyndon Larouche in 1959, or thereabouts. Out of left field, there is this. I am weary of because I am infringing copyrights left and right by popping up. But one may do with that whatever one may.

Marcus’s experience extends to the speculative overcapitalization of capital values, creating “fictitious capitals” which cannot later justify themselves by earning capacity in the normal course of events. Observation of the overcapitalization process confirms Marcus in an overcapitalization theory of depression of the sort associated in America with [blah blah blah] Marcus has also been involved with inudustrial engineering and management science, including “rule-of-thumb” decision rules which appear to have soured him against bourgiois economics generally and reinforced his methodological biases. On the technical side again, Marcus claims to argue from the inside as well as the outside that the “US economy, viewed with some knowledge of the ABCs of technology, is one horrendous mess of waste, redundancy, obsolescense, and managerial incopetence.” Likewise, he believes the living standard of the representative fully employed US worker has fallen since the end of World War II.

At this point, we pause and reflect on every meaning of “Fictitious Capital” that one possibly could conjure, up to and including that which leads to a Felony Prison Sentence. Simply put, in other hands I would consider it a fair enough interpretation of economics. But, here, after scrambling in vein to find relevant material from his 500 page book on what he had to say about his past on the edge of “white collar crime”, we come to a question posed briefly on the FACTNet board: SO JUST WHAT WAS LYNDON LAROUCHE UP TO IN THE SHOE INDUSTRY?

As for the idea of being “inside” and “outside” of the US economy, flipping through Dialectical Economics, and right at the beginning, right there in 1974, he claims something he still claims today:

In fact, to a considerable extent, it is the exceptional efficiency of this dialectical mode that has enabled the author to become, alternatively, influential or bitterly vilified among most leading governmental and labor circles in North America and Europe today.

The component memes of his cult have always been in place. Back to the review, and one can check off just about everything.:

Marcus recaptures neither the confidence of the Communist Manifesto in a socialist future the day after tomorrow nor the confidence of the pre-1914 Social Democrat that socialism in itself would be a step forward whenever and wherever it came. His vision of the immediate future in America is of fascism not significantly more appetizing than the Nazi variety. His vision of socialism however, includes along with social ownership of the means of production a regime where most […] He appears to be what my late Wisconsin colleague Selig Perlman called an “efficiency intellectual.” That is to say, Marcus believes all rational men of goodwill accept his own technocratic design for the planned economy with minimal need for repression. All this is relatively standard, and Marcus also accepts a standard radical view that freedom today (in economic matters) is less than we believe it is because we have been narcotized by advertising, by salesmanship, and by the planned unavailabliity of goods we really want at prices we really can afford. In addition, like any other dialectic philosophers, Marcus sets off freedom against necessity in a fashion well adapted to rationalize almost any measure of dictatorship. Admitting that freedom requires the recognition of necessity, who is to draw the institutional frontier between the two domains? Judging perhaps unfairly from controversial manner, Marcus impresses at least one reader as a Me-for-Dictator type to whom it would be dangerous to entrust the task of drawing any boundary between the domain of freedom and that of necessity of order.

The criticism of consumer culture as giving one a false free will has struck me as a particularly powerful force in the realm of why a few hundred youths have joined up with LYM. I do not see the sense of rambling through the 500 page Dialectical Economics book (the body is 400 pages, but the footnotes and glossary are clearly just as self-important), densely written and with pseudo-knowledge that does not enlighten human thought in any way. One can leaf through it easily, and pick out items — the pooh-poohing of Adolf Hitler’s “peculiar psychology” as to why he set up those “work camps” (and what, pray tell, is this “peculiar psychology”, and what, pray tell, are these “work camps”?). Otherwise, I discussed matters on the book here and here.
Bronfenbrenner has a short wikipedia entry of some note, but I notice a new Larouche-feed entry includes the phrase: the notoriously unreliable, LaRouche-hating Wikipedia. ‘Tis a closed circuit, a cult.

Stumbling through the comments:

His Executive Intelligence Review developed a fixation on my dad at one point, thus resulting in the headline – ‘Martin Palmer: High Priest of Evil.’ (My dad was Prince Philip’s religious adviser at the time.) Such paragraphs as –
One of the more revealing expressions of the oligarchical strategy is the unwholesome symbiosis between Britain’s Prince Philip (Duke of Edinburgh) and his satanic religious adviser, Martin Palmer. Out of his oligarch’s pure hatred of Christianity and the modern nation-state, Prince Philip has resurrected the ancient satanic cult of Gaea, and has proposed to eradicate Christianity by means of superseding it with a mish-mash “world religion,” the latter incorporating all those degraded features of sundry religions which are consistent with Olympian hostility to science and do not promote the dignity of the individual person as “made in the image of God.”

used to give my family great amusement,

Actually I just find hilarious the sentence “His Executive Intelligence Review developed a fixation on my dad at one point”, which probably any number of people can claim.
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moderate update: Stupdified am I: Leftists describe the factional sectarian conflicts Larouche traveled through the 1960s. What amuses me most is that Larouche still today finds the 1957-1958 Recession a watershed moment in American economic history, that it has all been downhill since then — and one can pull this out of his literature still today, in the year 2007.
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Another update: Phil Ossifur sez: This is unbelievable idiocy. It’s why the good aspects of Bucky Fuller and Lyndon Larouche are not being employed to turn the world around. It’s unbelievable idiocy. Sheer idiocy. Idiotic idiocy.  UM.  Urm.  Huh.  Bucky Fuller and Lyndon Larouche are not particularly compatible in any measure.  Start with what one does with the environment and go on from there.

STOP THE PRESSES!  Jim Gilmore is OUT of the horse race!
Now we just wait for John Cox to give up the ghost, and we can finally get this thing narrowed down to the real contenders…

… you know… so we can all decide between Duncan Hunter and Tom Tancredo…

The Administration, he said, would not allow him to speak or issue reports about stem cells; emergency contraception; sex education; or prison, mental and global health issues. Top officials delayed for years and tried to water down a landmark report on second-hand smoke, he said.[…]

“Anything that doesn’t fit into the political appointees’ ideological, theological or political agenda is ignored, marginalized or simply buried,” Dr. Richard H. Carmona said Tuesday in testimony before a House committee. During his 2002 to 2006 stint as surgeon general, Carmona said he was also ordered to mention Bush at least three times on every page of his speeches.

There are news stories that just sort of fly by, so saturated are we in news that some relatively stark items just sort of fly by.  The basic problem with a frequently updated blog is that its dual duty as a report of important or quasi-important events and a ledger of commentary clash: Here is an important item that I have no particular comment to make which everyone else has.  Unless I happen to stumble onto some other piece out of the zeitgeist where the whole of the two pieces are greater than the sum of the parts.
A group of Christian protesters tried to shout down a Hindu clergyman who was invited to give the opening prayer during yesterday’s session of the Senate. Capitol Police say they arrested three people after they stood up and started yelling “this is an abomination” when guest chaplain Rajan Zed invited the Senate to join him in prayer.

The protesters’ concerns, according to the website of a Mississippi group that was trying to mobilize opposition to Zed’s appearance, were based on the fact that Hindus worship multiple Gods.

“It was a shocking event for all of us Christians,” the Rev. Flip Benham, head of Dallas-based Operation Rescue/Operation Save America, tells The Hill. “For all of these years we have honored the God of our Founding Fathers. It wasn’t a group of Hindus, Buddhists or Muslims that came here. It was Christians.”

The protesters, two men and a woman, face misdemeanor charges of disrupting Congress, according to the Associated Press. “We are Christians and patriots,” one of the men told a reporter before he was dragged out of the Senate gallery.

Benham issued a press release that criticizes Congress for allowing a Hindu chaplain to join them in prayer. “Not one Senator had the backbone to stand as our Founding Fathers stood. They stood on the Gospel of Jesus Christ!” he says.

I do not exactly know what to do with those protesters, but after a quick spell I realize that these two stories are indeed related.  Start with the political current that results in the demands for a Surgeon General to abandon stem cell research or sex eduation — and as the case is with the Surgeon General appointee under the microscope right now — that the Gay is an abomination — and then move to the more stirring similarity of their immediate demand.  Bush had that surgeon general mention Bush at least three times a page, the Invocation of Bush’s name was that important to float into the ether and enforce the word of George W Bush.  For the “Christian” “Patriots”, the invocation of Jesus’s name was of utmost importance, the reason they needed to attempt some feeble groundswell of opposition to the Hindu ecumenical prayer (of which nobody much anywhere could give a rat’s butt) to enforce the word of Jesus Christ.

Now I better understand Bush’s evangelical appeal.

Every so often, a new batch of material from the Nixon tapes is released.  And we get a chance to focus on suddenly relevant topics which would have slipped through unnoticed at a different moment, such as Nixon ruminating on Fred Thompson and his belief that he is “dumb as a rock” and probably outwitted by the Democratic half of that investigation looking into Watergate.

And then, it always seems, that the news media reports that the new tapes “reveals Nixon at his most crass”, which does not make sense to me unless each new tape release shows a crasser side than the last, which it doesn’t — it’s always about the same.

For instance, we now have Nixon balking at the idea of hiring a token “house Jew”– and determing that Leonard Garment was “the House Jew”.  This is shocking!  Who knew about Richard Nixon’s rampant anti-semitism?  Surely this hasn’t come out in the previous tape releases!

……………..

And then there’s this:

The documents span a wider period and include a memorandum that may intrigue students of Nixon’s character. In the document, written in December 1970 to H. R. Haldeman, a top aide, Nixon expresses both anger and pain that his aides have not been able to establish an image of him as a warm and caring person. He makes several suggestions about how this could be accomplished, warning frequently in the single-spaced 11-page document that it must appear that the examples of his warmth were discovered by others and not promoted by White House aides.

With regard to the “warmth business,” the memorandum says, it is important to emphasize to anyone who may write an article that the president “does not brag about all the good things he does for people.”

Any number of professional prostitutes have gone on record to the effect that their weirdest clients — the ones who need to get dressed up in chicken suits, and so forth — are prominent people in politics.

Probably not a Pinkwater passage he would ever figure would be quoted in much of any context, but what are you going to do?  It is stuff like that that explains why that particular book’s has been allowed to lapse into “out of print” status, FSR not letting it into the 5 Novels compendium.  But I am sure somebody else somewhere made that point just as succinctly on paper, that just happens to be the most immediate source for a quotation like that I have available.  (I would think Kurt Vonnegut would have had to have written as much.)
But the word on the street is that David Vitter, Senator from the great state of Louisiana, wore diapers during his stays to one of two brothels.
I wonder what is wrong with me that an ad campaign which makes prominent use of a politician’s family repels me, while apparently not repelling significant proportion of the (ever dwindling) electorate.   But then again, I live in a state where a candidate that uses the phrase “[State of Origin] Values” does not wash — a phenomenon most common below the Mason Dixon, but also common throughout the midwest.  Oh, they’ll use their family, which is interesting because it flies in the face of the rule that in any legal proceeding a family member is not considered a reliable character witness — for obvious reasons — so why should I pay attention to this man’s goddanged children?
The New Orleans Madam has gone on record that David Vitter was a great client, treated his sex workers well, and it would be a shame if the electorate of Louisiana puts this against him.  But the New Orleans Madam should not be speaking and broaching the privacy of her clients.  She doesn’t even have the reason the DC Madam did so — which was an attempt at blackmail to stop the legal proceedings against her — release the records to show up powerful individuals.  (And shorten Larry Flynt’s investigative process, as the case turns out to be.)

I wish there were a magic wand that could be waved with this phone number cache, which would automatically remove all the numbers of figures out of public eye, and those figures in the public eye who make no political hay out of “Family Values”.

One more thing: a primary opponent apparently made the claim that Vitter had relations with a prostitute.  It was dismissed as a slur.  I think Vitter should resign and be replaced in the interim by that primary opponent of his (Treen, I guess his name was), who — what do you know — was basically correct.  (Or, reading that article, his surrogate was.)

To make a very narrow point about Michael Moore…

… which has nothing to do with the accuracy or intellectual honesty of his politics and work…

I hear reference to a “standing offer” of 50,000 dollars to anyone who can find an inaccurate statement in Fahrenheit 9/11.  And I hear chest-thumping that nobody has claimed it…

…as though that means anything.

As a suggestion of why this is meaningless, I invite you to look over Kent Hovind, “Dr. Dino”, Creationist Scientist Extraordinaire, and his $250,000 (upped from $100,000!) for any evidence supporting Evolution.  Lo and behold, nobody has managed to get past Hovind’s committee of experts looking at the submissions to win the claim and take home the quarter of a million dollars.

And, yes, a few Fundamentalist Christians have trumpeted this fact in playing up the veracity of “Dr. Dino”.

I have never seen Fahrenheit 9/11.  I suspect it’s mostly true, and I assume our politics align closely enough.  I have seen and heard enough to know a couple areas of disagreement, largely in terms of what different events signify.  But this is all irrelevant.  My point is simply that nobody should be blathering on with this particular Michael Moore stunt, and if you do so I will wince and shake my head.

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The first few paragraphs of the cover feature on Moore in the latest issue of the Nation are as good a summation of the contours of Moore the Personality as I have seen.