I note that the idea that Ron Paul might pull of a shocker in New Hampshire and/or Iowa is becoming one of those conventional unconventional wisdom.  Joe Scarborough has come out in saying “He is going to shock a lot of people in New Hampshire” — a bold enough prediction, and thus this conventional unconventional wisdom has wormed its way into establishment types (Cable mcnews?).  I will keep half an eye open to see if this bit of conventional unconventional wisdom floats forward from here.
It’s a prediction for people who want to be cleverer than thou, and it will either make the prognosticator of such an idea come across as absolutely brilliant, or will lead them to be complete dunderheads in a “What the Heck were they thinking” way.  You will note, if you go back to “You Read it Here Third”, that I set myself up to be truly brilliant in the case of such a thing happening, with the “no big deal” if he stumbles to that small percentage point slumber.

I do not know what these things will get him.  Perhaps he will be able to ride his way to the end of the debate season (if those in charge of the debates can get back to stomaching the idea of including him) as did some moderately impressive third place showing for Alan Keyes allowed him in 2000.

In the realm of the vaunted National Journal rankings  — I think I would insert Paul as #5 — behind the fledgling John McCain, who — embarrassingly enough has raised less money than Paul and embarrassingly enough has a much higher burn rate– can still trout out the line on where Kerry and Clinton were at this point in the campaign, roughly stumbling just as he is.  But even that is a tough call.  As for the figures National Journal has stuck between the “Rudy McRomnpson” beast and our erstwhile buddy Ron Paul — the knock on Ron Paul, particularly from National Journal, is that his support is “Internet Support”.  I suppose maybe and perhaps, but granted that, but that’s more than can be said for those four others.

………………..

One more note to Ron Paul supporters: I hate to say this, but as I see still floating out in cyberspace the mean-spirited list comparing Paul supporters to Larouche supporters, and I see the news about Ron Paul’s fund-raising prowess: in the 2004 race at a comparative time, Lyndon Larouche either lead the field or was second — right behind Dean — I do not quite remember and will have to look it up.  (It’s what you get when all of your supporters send you the $2000 maximum, dedicated to you as a God-like being.)  It’s an interesting enough dynamic, and probably only worthy of the loosest of loose parallels — dedication in terms of ultimately a minority.

Scott McLemme wrote something. And then he wrote some more things.

A different phrase from that review of Dialectical Economics stayed with McLemme than stayed with me. So it is “one man party” — of which the world is out of step — where I keep using from that review “‘Me for Dictator’ type”. Either one, a remarkable insight from a very puzzled reviewer who did not quite know the nature of what he was reading.

I get the feeling things are off course in Larouche-land right about now. On Sunday, I sat down, looked at the latest posts on FACTNet, and thought the story of Susan Bowen — an otherwise anonymous “wacky” stray person featured in a photograph posted at flickr– was worth passing on. I am very much tempted to just cut and paste that part of the entry and stick it to that flickr page (though I guess I would have to register with flickr first)– it is a sort of pause that humanizes some individuals one otherwise dismisses out of hand as sort of autotrons, and autotrons with no back story — out of place and out of time.
As I was getting ready to log off, I refreshed the factnet page, and read that daily briefing. And I knew immediately I had to repost it here. Later, Jeff Steinberg provided more comments. It strikes me as a rather significant item on where Larouche and his “movement” is at this precise moment in time.
Lyndon Larouche is sweating hard right about now. Now, I take Larouche’s personality to desire crises more than anything, so it may well be for the best for his perverse sense of pleasure. The briefing came from maybe a week he posted a barrage of materials linking everything and everyone to the BEA Scandal, and hyped the BEA Scandal to world historic impressions. What is the BEA Scandal? Well, there are non-Larouche news sources that have covered it– it appears to be a blip. It’s a minor British government scandal, and that is about all I have to say about it. But, I took this frenzied assault to be an assault on the senses of the Larouche faithful — crisis mongering to whip them into lock-step behind a mission — a clouding of the mind. I have come to learn — and came to learn rather quickly– that this a tactic that Larouche has employed for the past three decades whenever he is facing outside scrutiny and/or inner turmoil from within his organization. (Or, in one infamous case — and a supposed origin of where Larouche turned completely bonkers and swerved his organization off course, but I have my doubts about such an analysis– in his personal life.)
Dissension, or at the least weariness, within the ranks to be exploited for generational-conflict, naturally.

So he brow-beats the “Baby-boomers”, ostensibly for their refusal to recognize the Historically important webcast on BEA. It’s part of a pattern from these baby-boomers who dared to be less than infused at his calls of crisis leading up to, and probably leading right past, his Y2K warnings of imminent stock market collapse — which I guess manifested in what any sane person would accept as standard boom and bust cycles of the Tech Stock bubble bursting.

But really, their mind is set more toward the haunting death of Ken Kronberg, or if it works toward the economic situation — the current economic situation of Larouche, Inc — which can’t print anything anymore. (I would say that I would like to get a copy of the transcript for that “historic webcast” in the next Larouche pamphlet, but dagnabit — the “Internet Strategy” gets in the way of hard copies — printed by PMR?) Larouche cannot acknowledge this, so he goes back forth to their supposed perfidy in dismissing some of his predictions.

The baby-boomers’ body language are all wrong? I will have to take his word for it. And I will have to suggest that this is a good sign. I ought to revisit that mildly ponderous, and probably misfiring in terms of actualities, post of mine “How to Dissolve a Cult”.
I do not know from Jeff Steinberg. I would not be able to spot him in a line-up, but if everyone has come to the conclusion that he is currently setting himself up for the intermediate future of Larouche’s passing, where he will pick up some pieces — old and new — and carry on with a Steinberg-ian cult, all I can say is that that fits Oscam’s Razor in terms of reading his response. Tied to the Larouche party line, but needing to find where he can soothe the needs of tired and worn out baby-boomers, he offers a couch to lie down for psychiatric sessions with Gerry Rose.

I often wonder how some things read to the non-initiated. I throw out weird references. 1974!, I post, as though that could possibly strike anybody as meaning anything, and as though I can offer up personal remembrances from several years before I was born. Well, there is a history of some less than stellar psychiatrics in the organization, and it doesn’t come out well. Reportedly there was an exodus of membership right about then. As there ought be right about now — good and bad news for Mr. Larouche — anyone fleeing the ship can be accepted in true-ex-Larouche fashion as being simps who “Didn’t Get It” and didn’t have the stomach for Changing the World.

History repeats itself.   I can’t say that in terms of Larouche that “it repeats as farce” because it was farce the first time it happened.

I have had sort of half an eye out toward news reports relating to the disturbing formation of a consolidated “Youth Movement” around Vladmir Putin. This blogger brings me to this.
To Nashi, young people are neither the lost generation of the turbulent 1990s nor the soulless consumerists of Generation P (for Pepsi) imagined by the writer Viktor Pelevin in 2000. They are, as Nashi’s own glossy literature says, “Putin’s Generation.”

“Why Putin’s generation?” Nashi’s national spokeswoman, Anastasia Suslova, asked at the group’s headquarters. “It is because Putin has qualitatively changed Russia. He brought stability and the opportunity for modernization and development of the country.” […]

Nashi’s platform is defined by its unwavering devotion to Putin and by the intensity of its hostility toward his critics, including his former prime minister, Mikhail Kasyanov, the former chess champion Garry Kasparov and a nationalist writer, Eduard Limonov. Nashi’s members denounce the opposition leaders as fascists with a fervor that can be disquieting.

One of Kuliyeva’s applicants to Nashi’s summer camp – two weeks of sports and ideological lessons beside Lake Seliger outside Moscow – noted that in Russian the first two letters of each man’s name spelled out the past tense of the verb to defecate.

[…] Although Kremlin officials have tried to portray the groups as independent players, Nashi and the others owe their financing and political support to their status as creations of Putin’s administration. They are allowed to hold marches, while demonstrations by the opposition are prohibited or curtailed. Their activities are covered favorably on state television, while the opposition’s are disparaged or ignored.

More ominously, opponents say, Nashi has conducted paramilitary training in preparation for challenging those who take to the streets to protest the Kremlin. Ilya Yashin, the leader of the youth wing of Yabloko, the liberal political party, said the goal was “direct intimidation of opposition activists,” citing an attack attributed to Nashi supporters against the headquarters of the banned National Bolshevik Party, led by Limonov.

No. I’ve got nothing.

I admit to being somewhat nonplussed that Senator David Vitter of Louisiana was uncovered on that “DC Madam’s List”.  There are times when I do not really know how to access American politics, and am never quite sure if the legions of “Family Value” voters who pumped Vitter into office really believed Vitter with some of his rhetoric on the sanctity of marriage, more importantly the sanctity of his marriage.  Exposed for seeking the services of a prostitute, he gets around to stating that he apologized to God twice and to his wife, and God accepted the apology twice and his wife did so as well.  And I don’t know if I care.  I suppose a big part of his constituents should by dent of their professed values, but I don’t know if they truly care either.
But then, this quote is tossed out at us from his wife from the era of Bill Clinton and Bill Livingston (whose seat he won after Livingston’s extra-marital affair torpoeded his credibility in his anoitation of Speaker of the House leading into the Impeachment of Bill Clinton over his extra-marital affair), spoken by his wife:

“I’m a lot more like Lorena Bobbitt than Hillary.  If he does something like that, I’m walking away with one thing, and it’s not alimony, trust me.”

Hell-O!

I would say that “That’s what they all say”, but I don’t know that to be the case.  It is the type of bridge one crosses when they must, and all plans and statements of what one would do in her situation end up meaning nothing, for good or ill, when confronted with the situation in realities as opposed to hypotheticals.

The DC Madam and Larry Flynt shall be providing us with much gutter-level amusement to our political class, and that’s about the extent of observation.

If you would like to shift through the numbers to attach them with Senators, Congress-critters, high level lobbyists, or white house officials — well, you already have the website if you are so dedicated.

I saw a bumper sticker which read:

“Support the Troops
Find the War”

The message confused me.  Until I realized that the bumper sticker was cut off at the bottom as the window bent out of site.  It would read “End the War”.  Still, “Find the War” brings with it a bit more unease, which may be something someone prone to use bumper stickers may want.
I regularly see a particular car with this other bumper sticker, which is interesting enough sitting next to another bumper sticker.  The bumper stickers are from the Ron Saxton campaign for governor in 2006 in his unsuccessful campaign against incumbent Ted Kulongoski.  So we have one saying “Where’s Ted?” and another with the “Ron Saxton for Governor” or something to that effect.  I really want to tap the shoulder of whoever owns this car and reply “Ted is in the Governor’s Mansion.  Now, where’s Ron?”

You know, I never did hear a fairly obvious observation when Vladimir Putin came for a visit with the Bushes, our current president and his parents, last week.

It is a meeting of the CIA and the KGB.

And there is something akin to post Civil War get-togethers with Union and Confederate generals, something that some cynical figures (Frederick Douglas) looked askew at and saw something amiss.

Oh, sure, George Wallace Bush was there too. But he would be the equivalent of the child who just graduated from the kids’ card-table and now has the opportunity to listen in to the grown-ups…

… the KGB and the CIA.

Actually, for an interesting observation of American standing in the world and what it is motivated to do. During his presidency, Jimmy Carter visited Poland, talked with Polish leaders, and then made the cursory press conference where his words on wanting to “learn about the Poles’ desire for freedom” was misinterpreted to wanting to learn about their “Carnal Lust”.  Bush can’t even really attempt that soft-sell of demanding to learn about the peoples of different nations’ carnal lust these days.  The Chinese included, the Russians included. Too many market openings.  (Meanwhile, we do the Hard Sell to learn about people’s Carnal Lust in, say, Iraq.)

Somebody at redstate.com linked to the entry about the Ron Paul — Rudy Giuliani debate skiffadle. It was probably not a “front pager”, and it was a quick hit of a few links, not deeply dissecting any of the three blog posts, with the title “Far Left Self Parody”.

Which is within anybody’s purview.

Robert Schrank wrote a good book about life in the “Far Left” — Wasn’t That A Time? He shifted away from his dogmatic past at some point in time, no longer a Communist.
Another interesting book about life in the “Far Left”: The Prophet’s Child, which ends up describing a mess of sectionalism as groups of a few dozen peoples argue over which of them is the rightful heir to the intellectual movement of Trotsky.

In a gray areas between a line dissecting “Left” and petty liberal is I.F. Stone. In a sense, the definition depended on who was his foil: if confronting Adlai Stevenson and the Democratic Party hierarchy — LEFT; if having to argue against 1960s Student Radicals besieging an anti Vietnam war Senator — Liberal.
Our language is bastardized a bit, and I am forced to work this way forward with the divisions we have been handed. There are two types of Americans, you see, and we proceed accordingly.
Then there’s the opening salvo to a quasi-defense of the Scooter Libby commutation:

Like all good liberals you’re a day late and a dollar short.

To his credit, he swerved off the script and didn’t land at Marc Rich. But his focus might as well run toward a pissing match between the virtues of Clinton’s pardons of an assortment of unknown convicts and Bush’s pardon of a bootlegger, which almost would be a refreshing change of pace.

But he loses ground at sentence #1. “Like all good liberal”.

Save that line for when public approval is not with liberals. Polling date from American Research Group: Democrats: 76 percent disapprove; 13 percent approve. Independents: 80 percent disapprove; 19 percent approve. Republicans: 47 percent disapprove, 50 percent disapprove.

I have evolved my response of “BUT Clinton” with the retort of referring to him as the “17th Greatest President in American History,” which is as much a response regarding one of those dregs of the two party system that I was wandering around on with that post on Libby. I can quite easily thread that needle of why Bush’s commutation — in lieu of what will be the 11th hour pardon — aggravates me where I have no strong interest in the pardon of Marc Rich (Or Eisenhower’s record thousand pardons, for that matter) — which is… you know… what lies at the center of the periphery journey out toward the investigations that lead to the obstruction of justice verdict on Scooter Libby… um… THE IRAQ WAR.

… currently enjoying the approval of probably the same percentage as the approval for Libby’s commutation… and eventual 11th hour pardon (and there will be plenty of Marc Rich types I will have no choice but to shrug at lest I feel the wrath of cries of HYPOCRISY for not treating it the same manner as the 17th Greatest President in American History).

#1: What can I possibly say?  Am I to infer that the cast of Star Trek: Voyager was a group of sex crazed maniacs?

#2:  It dawns on me to wonder: did the “European Leadership” quit, were they fired, “You can’t fire me — I quit”, “You can’t quit — You’re fired” or…?  Tangled webs.
#3:  Everybody has a story.  The story of the woman photographed here — who did not a’know who the heck Patrick Fitzgerald was, something I assure you anyone at, say, a moveon.org meeting trying to figure out how to impeach Cheney would know.
The person at the card table shrine may be a long time member named Susan Bowen according to people who have viewed the picture. Sue was recuited more than 30 years ago to the LC. This picture looks like it was taken in Chicago. In the briefing it is reoprted that a “flying squad” was sent from Detroit to reopen that city for money and bodies. Chicago used to be a big deal for us and was run by a couple named Cheila and Terry Jones. [few paragraphs all very interesting, and describes the cultural surroundings of Susan Bowen.]

Susan Bowen I would guess is over 50 years of age by now. She went from being a field hand to a phone team fundraiser for many years. Susan’s husband is a big guy named Bob Bowen who now runs the Detroit LYM. Since he too is a boomer, that is only a temporary title in the cult. One of the worst comboa a married couple could have is being a “power couple” where the guy is a local or regionla leader and the wife is a fundraiser. For some strange reason, men in the LC prove how good they are by how much money their wives raise. I should have paid attention in those early Beyond Psych classes to figure that out. If your wife did not make the bucks, then the local NCs would go after the spouse, who in turn would go after their wife when they got home. This is on top of a very late night meeting with the local NC with the female fundraiser about how her blocking in raising money may casue Lyn to get assasinated and humanity wiped out. By the time this all ended, a woman like Susan may be finally getting to sleep at 3 AM and have to get up the next day for another 9 AM to 11 PM fundraising gig.
No none has mentioned anything which Susan did which can be construed as abusive. I have a soft spot for her predicament as I was reminded of a special meeting she may have been at in 1981 or there abouts. This was a special meeting Lyn had with the local field membership in the NYC/NJ region.
It was held at Lyn’s townhouse on Sutton Place, a few rows down from E 58th street. The locals were all being starved and money was all being sent to the National office . The talk was about the upcoming campaign by Lyn and one exchange always sticks out by members who were there. After Lyn came down stairs he rambled on about how important the field work and fundraising is by the regions. All sorts of intitiatives were announced and how we running the globe. At the end of this, one member asked if this means that most people (including the person asking) were ever going to stop being at card table shrines. Lyn responded that of course you will because that is how we change history. A few people looked at each other with a puzzling look while trying to show a good face. Many people who were there eventually left, except for Susan Bowen.
So here we are, a QUARTER CENTURY later, seeing a Susan Bowen at a card table shrine on a Chicago street.  […]
Looking at that picture of Susan Bowen, I wonder if she ever thinks about that one morning on New York’s fashionable Sutton Place where Lyn finally told her the truth about her life?

Many people also wonder if Susan Bowen ever wondered how Lyn could testify under oath in his trial that he has no idea of where the money for the town house, armed guards, food, utilities , transport, clothes and other expenses came from? This truly is a Bizarro moment for Susan Bowen as she and others were patted down and searched before being allowed to enter Lyn’s classy townhouse. Lyn appears in front of her and says that she and others have to raise the money and work those phones and card table shrines even harder. One of the phrases Lyn liked to use was that because of all of the assassination threats against him, he was a prisoner in the townhouse and only left for travel. Each night the NEC came by for a NEC meeting which included the daily income totals . The cult’s expenses and budget was discussed nightly and Lyn has the final word.
Yet, he claims to not know how he got to Sutton Place , the Penthouse, the Riverdale condo, Ashburn or Club Ibykus, or how how the money came about when he was prosecuted for tax fraud. Most people would call those addresses pretty expensive places to live. During the trials we called them safe houses and then later said they were open to the whole LC to merrily wander through and park you butt on the sofa when you felt like it.
A QUARTER CENTURY later, Susan Bowen is parking her butt at a card table shrine, just like Lyn forecasted. Then again, based on the people who tell me that she was a regular at being browbeaten by the leadership, maybe it is more peaceful outside for her.

#3A: From the Harvard Crimson, 1984:

Three members of a radical political group were evicted from a University of Pennsylvania classroom after calling economics professor Lawrence Klein a Nazi and accusing him of promoting genocide.
“This man’s model is Adolf Hitler!” cried one of the three supporters of the Lyndon LaRouche presidential campaign who disrupted the class.
“This is an outrage–a Nazi on campus. He is currently plotting the destruction of Israel. This man is an anti-Semitic genocidal butcher,” he added.
Students in the class were not amused. “How can you come here and call him a Nazi? He’s teaching an introductory economics class,” said one of the students to the demonstrators’ claim.
Klein said, “I insist that you are a bunch of screwballs and will please get out.”
According to LaRouche supporter Susan Bowen, Klein served as an advisor to the Monterrey business-financier group which she claims was responsible for destroying the Mexican economy by forcing the country to cease government industrial projects and social services.
Bowen and another group of LaRouche Campaign members demonstrated outside the building where the class was held, toting signs reading. “Stop Klein’s Racist Nazi Genocide” and “Feed Africa.”
#4: Regarding Dianne Bettag, a quick google search shows sometime after popping up here, she popped up there with, oh-so-importantly “Out in the Streets Organizing” (uh?):

We don’t just expose, we’re out in the streets of the nation organizing to destroy Gore, so that the Democratic party will not be distracted from impeaching or otherwise giving the boot to first Cheney and then Bush… so that the nation can ally itself with Russian, China and India in creating a new monetary system modelled on the old Bretton Woods system, to develop industry, water, energy, agriculture and transportation projects all over the world. […] Gore with his bs on Global Warming, profiling the party to react on that issue instead of taking care of the collapsing economy a la their FDR tradition…

The response I find amusing, but is unrelated…

I visit the LaRouche site though LaRouche should forus more on Huey Long style Democrats than that FDR who sold us out by letting Prescott Bush and the Boys remain at liberty on American soil.

Actually there is an odd contingent of Huey Long supporters out there, I have noticed.  But then again he modeled his corruption after a previous Louisiana governor, and also had a bit more windfall to the poorest.  FDR’s slide from bad to good came with his change from Marxist to erstwhile Democrat, but what I have always found interesting is that at all stages of his game, Harry Truman gets to remain an Enemy.  I think of Harry Truman somehow as akin to Einstein’s old “Cosmological Constant”, at least in terms of Larouche’s jabs at contemporary American politics.  (Later referred to by Einstein as his biggest mistake, wasted years and years working with something that he determined to be an artificial artifact.)  Interesting to note, Einstein is now on Larouche’s “Good list”, which is a very swift whip-lash.
#5:  Because the world is demanding more internal briefings from Larouche?
MESSAGE FOR AM BRIEFING
FROM LYNDON LAROUCHE

As our own experience of the results of such cases has shown us, such forms of hysterical denial of reality can be deadly.

Such types of reactions are almost always associated with certain clinically significant kinds of hysterics in manner of speech, facial expressions, and “body language” generally. These usually
have forms of body-language and related expressions we would associate with efforts to “shout down” anything which frightens the victim of such pathological incidents. Sometimes, literal
shouting occurs; but, as we know from experience, there are other varieties of this, such the kind of bare-faced lying which Hartmut Cramer showed in his broadcast lie in defense of Uwe’s
complicity with Fernando Quijano, in resigning from his post of treasurer. The case of the not-always-candid, money-grabbing Uwe Friesecke’s essentially habitual practice of such bare-faced lying, is also notable as among clinically relevant typical expressions of witting lying as an habituated form of denial of obvious reality.

The important thing is: never capitulate to such forms of denial. Do it compassionately: “I am sorry to learn that you are too frightened to face reality in this matter. We can discuss this
later, when you have thought over the reasons for your denial of this reality.”

Somewhere or other, the matter of John Kerry’s Skull and Bones involvement came up.  Specifically, the annoying clinging to the rule of Skull and Bones that thou shall never say a word about it — Bush and Kerry both belonged to a secret society that they refused to talk about.

So Kerry sat there on Meet the Press, and did this.

That tight-lipped “Can’t talk about it”, followed by a moment of awkward silence as it went on, and then the awkward shift of topic with “I’ll tell you what’s not a secret” to the cursory jab at Bush.
It was a disorienting moment, and at a certain moment I wonder if a margin of Kerry’s defeat could not have been made up if he hadn’t done this.  The appropriate answer is pretty easy to conjure up, to the effect of: “It was a good experience in college, met lots of friends, had a lot of good times, good memories.  And, yes, a few of the traditions  were sort of silly.”

BANG!  A percentage point and a half the queasy feeling one gets in staring at two candidates who seem to be in a perpetual inside-joke that they refuse to let go, and continue on with when in Powerful Places.  (Bush pulled the same thing on Meet the Press.)  KERRY WINS!
But then again, perhaps the all powerful Skull and Bones hierarchy would have destroyed him right then and there.