#1:  There is a way that election results are this sort of lagging indicator of societal and cultural trends.  Old people vote and young people do not vote.  The checks and balances of government and bureaucracy avoid trends.  I note, for instance, that all the measures pertaining to “decriminalizing” marijuana to some degree or other (mostly by way of allowing for medical marijuana) passed, long a piece of toxicity which voters send drug warriors to election victory, and where we as a nation probably were years ago.

#2:  That said, this is the first measure relating to gay marriage on the ballot where the defeat for the, quote-in-quote, “Gay Agenda” was basically tactical.  I do not think there was a single thing that could have stopped the 2004 ballot measures from passing; I do think this one could very easily have swung differently.  The “No on 8” team was clueless and deficient in various ways: late in mounting an attack due to early positive poll numbers, a bit timid in asserting the issues at stake and afraid of their own shadow.

#3:  It is worth mentioning that “Domestic Partnership” is set in stone, and on a national scale would probably be what would be forged in law if congress were forced to vote.  This is a shift — what was radical yesterday is conservative today.

#4:  Fault-lines in the electorate have been bluntly drawn.  For instance, isolate the religious vote of the most churched part of the electorate and something becomes clear: the numbers swing rather drastically as election day approaches.  Pastors are quite influential and start increasing the rate of “Sodom and Gomorrah” sermons, laying down their law of God.  The racial dimension, while troubling, is not surprising and somewhat matter-of-factly should be factored into the voting percentiles of putting together an electorate, even as a “No on 8” campaign works toward bringing the margin down.

#5:  Isolate down to a single issue, or single cluster of issues, generically the “Gay Issues” — and assess which you would rather have: President Obama or a defeat of Proposition 8, and there is no contest.  President Obama makes the court appointments.

#6:  Arkansas banned adoptions for non-married people, a proxy for the gays but not exactly confined there.  So, California takes one step back and Arkansas takes about four steps back.  Not much of a silver lining, I suppose, but there’s a reason it’s a “silver lining” on a cloud.

I would suggest something about the “arc” of something or other (is it “time”?) “always marching toward justice”, but I am sick of hearing that quote.  The victory for Measure 8 “in California, of all states” is currently being cited as a sure sign that this is a “Center Right Nation”, whatever that means.  We are not a “Center Right Nation.”  We are a Left-Center-Right-Forward-Backward-Up-Down-Diagonal-Round-Square-Sideways Nation.

Hey now.  This just floored me.  From The Guardian, on the long-going determination to re-open the  Jeremiah Duggan case.

The power of the attorney general to make decisions free from the scrutiny of courts came under renewed attack last week, in a challenge by the family of Jeremiah Duggan, a British student whose death in Germany five years ago has been described by lawyers as “disturbing and bizarre”.

The attorney general, Lady Scotland, who is said to have considered the case personally, refused to consent to the Duggan family’s attempt to seek a fresh inquest into his death, stating that it had “no reasonable prospect” of succeeding.

The family are challenging her claim that the attorney general’s decision is “immune” from judicial review, the process by which the courts scrutinise the decisions of public officials, and the “long-standing practice” of providing no detailed reasons for such decisions.

Simple and straight forward so far.  But then there’s this.:

The family are challenging her claim that the attorney general’s decision is “immune” from judicial review, the process by which the courts scrutinise the decisions of public officials, and the “long-standing practice” of providing no detailed reasons for such decisions.

The case, which the high court last week allowed to proceed, could be the most high-profile challenge to the role of the attorney general since the House of Lords considered the controversial BAE affair earlier this year. In that case the court scrutinised the role of the then attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, in advising prosecutors to drop the investigation into allegations of corruption at BAE, following threats from Saudi officials. “It is a logical progression from the decision in the BAE case that our government should be more transparent and answerable,” said Frances Swaine, the lawyer representing the Duggan family. “This case could have wider ramifications. If it succeeds it would be a way of opening up our constitution.”

Good golly.  The BAE Case.  This is actually jaw-dropping.  I know next to nothing about the details of the BAE Scandal, except the manner that the Lyndon Larouche organization used it in the months after Kenneth Kronberg’s suicide.  It was a heavy handed flurry of distraction to get the members of the National Committee, in Leesburg, to quit thinking about what had just happened with Kronberg and get back to the matter of saving Human Civilization.  Perhaps it will be worthwhile for me to reconstruct this for precision (from things I posted on this very blog), but in general the events followed as thus.:  #1:  Lyndon Larouche “revealed” that Molly Kronberg had donated money to the George W Bush re-election campaign, and demanded to know “What more needs be said?”  #2:  A flurry of reports came out of the Larouche-pac site about the BAE Scandal.  #3:  The Internal Daily Briefings relayed the suggestion, from Jeffrey Steinberg, that History has changed due to the implications of Larouche’s most recent web-cast on the subject of the BAE Scandal, and thus we all understand how everyone is under such distress at the moment because of this history changing web-cast on the BAE Scandal.  #4:  The topic of the BAE Scandal was summarily dropped and never mentioned again and the organization moved on to other matters.  (Not quite in the proper chronology, so indulge me for this one:  #5:  a Larouche troll posts a comment informing me that I am an “empty husk of humanity”.)

All of this is sort of tangeantal and either demonstrates an element of irony from the fates, or is a hidden message from the British — relayed in the Guardian which, as we established five years ago for reporting on the death of Jeremiah Duggan — is a tool of the British Oligarch in its aims for war in Iraq, and the coming… Dark Age?

Actually, Larouche is on a bend saying Obama is not going to be president — which seems to swerve somewhere between a statement of Assassination and to the “birth certificate” story-line.  (But that one’s tipped off from one follower, the … um… cryonics guy).  Witness, and to get away from serious matters of manslaughter for a little bit of levity — if darkly tinged:

Obama is not going to make it to the presidency on jan 21– so all these morons like Emmanuel who think they’re going to be “in power” will be surprised to learn that there is a true american underground that will likely invalidate Obama– and at the same time “educate” the Obamatrons– about what the american constitution says… that yuo have to be natural born citizen of the US which Obama is nOT.

I thought the British were going to stop him, as opposed to the “True American Underground”. Which is… ?

To finance the Real American Revolution– against tyranny– invest in the Larouche organization! Start a Larouche Club in your town

Yeah, I’ll get right on that.  (And yes, I am here just reposting this.  The more pertinent and important press release from Erica Duggan and “Justice for Jeremiah” precedes that comment at the end of this here.)  More pertinent to this case, Larouche is now beating the drums against Gordon Brown… a proxy for the Queen of England, I suppose.

Meanwhile, back to that imporant matter:

The new evidence submitted by Mrs Duggan included reports by three crash investigators and a forensic photographer.

The coroner’s pathologist, who carried out a post mortem examination on his body on its return to the UK, said his injuries were consistent with being beaten around the head.

AND, I have some mixed feelings about the comments left to this here, but I guess it’s understandable where they come from.

I note that factnet is down as their funds are low, which is where I would have dumped a probably briefer comment perhaps stating simply “BAE?” and assumed everyone knew where that came from.  As is, I had to spell that one out.

A family — dad, mom, baby in stroller, four year old boy — walk into the street car.  I am sitting on one of those “loner” seats.  The boy calls out, “I Wanna Sit down!”  I begin to pivot over to rise up and offer the boy a seat, before edging back and correcting course.  The dad tells the boy, “No.  We’re standing.”  With that I remain seated, never mind I am getting off in two stops — this is an important life lesson for the boy.

The boy whines a few more times that he wants to sit down.  The mother scolds him, telling him he was the one who wanted to ride the street ca.  I get off a stop after I meant to, my way of accomodating the situation.  Had I stood up, the kid surely would have become a juvenile delinquiet as a teenager and gone on to be incarcerated as an adult.  As it were, I have put him on the path to an advanced degree and a six figure income.  On the other hand, there is no telling what the baby in the stroller picked up from the seventy-year old stranger grandma figure who was waving and making smiley faces at him/her.  Nothing but trouble for that kid.

A few months ago, I walked past a house somewhere in North Portland when someone, I believed a black teenager maybe 17 in a good old fashioned Family Unit, waved and I waved back.  He jumped up and shouted “Hey!  Registered to vote?”  I nodded and said, “yes.”  “Check this out!” he said, and ran over to a clip-board he had nearby, “Sign this and you can join a new party — the ‘Peace Party’.”  I declined, and walked on, a little puzzled by the offering.

A few weeks later I learned that it was something of an open secret that the creation of a “Peace Party” was a mechinism to get Ralph Nader ballot access.  But it was either closed off to me or enough of a secret that I did not know.  I do not know how I would have responded if the seventeen year old (I’m guessing there) boy had asked for me to get Nader on the ballot, though I’m guessing I would have balked.  It is interesting to note that he did not fit the stereotype of a Nader supporter — roughly, twenty and now thirty something year old college white kid OR maybe aging hippy.  (Though, 2008 is a long way from 2000, so I don’t know what the stereotype for a Nader supporter today quite is.  Curmudgeonly self-styled iconoclast?)

The election has come and passed, and Nader did worse than he did in 1996.  A few comments have lead some to declare Ralph Nader’s career over, a statement that sounds like a joke right about now — when did Harold Stassen’s career end? — but I suppose his days of announcing his candidacy on Meet the Press are over.  He is free to continue his performance art stylings — the one word answer press conference, frankly, missed the mark in criticism of what was wrong with the 2008 presidential election.  (Better off is he writing an article, as he did in 1999, excoriating the demise of the Glass – Stegall Act as a cause of future Economic Calamity.)  I imagine a left of the Democratic Party third party candidate will emerge as a significant force in 2016, but it will not be Nader.

I note that there was a pretty healthy amount of Nader campaign presence in Portland — a sticker on every every telephone pole.  But that may just have been the work of one person.  I also note that Nader seems as uninterested in growing the “Peace Party” as he was in growing the “Green Party” after 2000.

It looks like Virgil Goode has been defeated, the man who railed against Keith Ellison’s inauguration on his faith’s Holy Book — the Quaran, and who gave this rant.  One pleasant defeat for what I guess can be called “Bachmann Caucus”.  I suppose this means there will be one fewer source of amusement from out of Congress, but now that I come to think of it, this is never true:  Dennis Kucinich does some goofy things sometimes.

On the negative side of dangling elections, Darcy Burner has been defeated.

The Omaha – based electoral vote has been called for Obama.  This will compound every cartographer for the electoral map, who now need to dab a slab of blue onto the red Nebraska.  Missouri remains in flux, though seems to be tilting toward McCain, and with no reason anyone cares will probably simply settle to McCain.  Good news: a supposed “bell weather” which has never voted for the loser except for a “good wishes to Truman” in 1956 since time immemorial has falled by the way-side, joining Maine when it became similarly irrelevant back in 1936.

Turning to the Senate:  MINUS ONE.  The Joseph Lieberman question.  Let us say you are Joseph Lieberman.  The question is: where can Joseph Lieberman wield the most power?  From a lesser committee, or sub-committee, as offered by Reid in the majority Democratic Party, or in the minority Republican Party Caucus?  Mull this over and ponder its permetations for Joe in the media circuit.  I think both spots fit him okay in placing him as a “critic of the Democratic Party” and “Uber-Independent fellow” on, say, the Sean Hannity program.

The Democrats basically have to hold to their stated position.  This is a meta-narrative.  There were theoretically good points to be made for leaving Lieberman around, but not after the deal / ultimatum was put on the table.  See, the Democrats have a reputation for being easily pushed over.  And to relent is to prove this right.

PLUS TWO:  Jim Martin has a new ad up, as he catupults to the run-off election.  He shows footage from Obama’s victory speech for half the commercial.  It explicitly ties him to Obama’s coat-tails.  This is a little weird, as he just came off of Obama’s coat-tails, and it got him to 46.8 percent of the vote, or roughly the exact same percentage of the vote that Barack Obama received.  On one hand this seems to be Martin’s ceiling here; on the other hand this appears to be his floor.  So, Saxby Chambliss has come out with an ad which shows scary footage of President Elect Barack Obama, and stating that Jim Martin and Barack Obama will raise your taxes.  I guess the extra component ad in Martin’s campaign is that he, as a member of the majority party under the Majority Party President, sits closer to power than the member of the minority party, and this is supposed to pull away those extra couple of percentage points away from Chambliss.  Either that or Obama’s approval rating has risen enough to carry Martin through in the post-election honeymoon?
And John McCain is coming down to campaign for Chambliss.  Which is good, because McCain doesn’t have anything better to do.

Minnesota:  I suspect Al Franken is going to end up winning this.  Call it a hunch.  First time voters scribble too much, and the scribblers edge toward Franken.  A 300 vote deficit for Franken will thus be overcome.

What’s great here is that this will forever be thought in the minds of Republicans as having been a tainted election, stolen by Franken in the middle of several nights with new ballots being furnished out of thin air.  Which is just as well, because Republicans didn’t consider Al Franken a legitimate Senate candidate in the first place.  But, if it is any consolation to Franken, Lyndon Johnson was forever thought to have stolen the 1948 Senate seat in Texas against Coke Stevens — and he ended up becoming president.  Of course, he did.  But that was only because his 1944 attempt to steal a Senate seat was thwarted by the other side, who out-manuevered the Johnson team in the art of stuffing and removing ballots.  The “other side” were Alcohol Interests who wanted to ship a “Dry” politician out of Texas and to Washington, so they fooled Johnson who thought they, as “Alcohol Interests”, would have been helping him.

ZERO SUM GAME.  Alaska is really the Twilight Zone of politics, isn’t it?  The results are fishy, but a little hard to get a hold of what happened, precisely.  In the absense of anything but conjecture and conspiracy theory and crude off-handed jabs, we just have to shrug the whole game off and pretend that nothing looks weird.  Ted Stevens looks like he’s on the road to re-election, or maybe not, (early votes skew toward the Democrats, but are evenly distributed through this hyper-Republican state, so who knows what to make of this?)  — and then immediate expulsion.  The question everyone has is: How does Sarah Palin thus become Senator?  Well, she resigns her gubernatorial post, and has the new governor and current Lieutenant Governor appoint her for the next two years, at which point she’ll be up for a special election.  And that is Palin’s clearest path toward continued national relevance.

When a Republican wins a presidential election, namely George W Bush winning in 2004, there is an outcry among liberal Democrats of “That’s it!  I’m moving to Canada!”  The main alternate country is France, but that brings us to another language.  I think there’s a common understanding about Great Britain that it’s not all that great, and their Health Care Delivery System is only good when compared to America’s.  The biggest jokers on this accord are various celebrities who get easily lampooned in making these assertions — there is never any follow through.

A similar effect seems to be at play with the election of Barack Obama.  Except it is a little bit different.

Franklin Gun Shop outside Nashville, Tenn., sold more than 70 guns on Tuesday, making it the biggest sales day since the shop opened eight years ago. Guns & Gear in Cheyenne, Wyo., also set a one-day sales record on Tuesday, only to break that mark on Wednesday.

Stewart Wallin, owner of Get Some Guns in the Salt Lake City suburb of Murray, Utah, said he sold nine assault weapons the day after Obama was elected. That same day, the gun store Cheaper Than Dirt! in Fort Worth, Texas, sold $101,000 worth of merchandise, shattering its single-day sales record, store owner DeWayne Irwin said.

One Georgia gun shop advertised an “Obama sale” on an outdoor sign, but the owner took it down after people complained that the shop appeared to be issuing a call to violence against the country’s first black leader.

AND

The Denver Post reported that by midday Wednesday, the Colorado Bureau of Investigation’s “InstaCheck” background check — which is required for the sale of a firearm and typically takes about eight minutes — was jammed with waits lasting more than two hours.

This is similar to the news that came after Election 2004 that Americans were jamming the system of the Canadian Immigration websites exploring the possibility of emigrating.

AND  “The day after the election, I had many more calls than usual from people looking for semi-automatic rifles,” said David Greenberg, the owner of the Second Amendment Family Gun Shop, in Bisbee, Arizona, who sold out of AR-15 rifles in recent days.

It is a brave new world.  I imagine the Milita Movement, which sort of waned away as 9/11 subtley brought them into the mainstream of “hyper-patriotically defending the nation”, might be on the march again, such as it was.  They better stock-pile those guns.

You gotta love those gun shop names, though.

From a Letter to the Editor in The Oregonian (Letter Writing is the, um, twentieth century precursor to Political Blogging):

You have to wonder how many of these dancing, cheering Barack Obama supporters have a clue as to what he stands for.

What a sad indictment of our electorate that some are so eager to overlook his many flaws — his radical roots, his extreme liberalism, his socialist economic policies, and his utter lack of experience or achievement.

After 16 years of inching our way toward socialism, Obama, Reid, and Pelosi will blast us like a cannon toward it.

Our founding fathers must be spinning in their graves.

— Scott Robertson, West Linn.
…………………………………

Yes, but aren’t “radical”, “liberal”, and “Socialist” basically synanoyms for Mr. Robertson of West Linn?  Also, why doesn’t this reign of Socialist terror drift back to, at least Bush I — who I’m guessing if he was around back then with political thoughts Robertson would have deemed as betraying the Reagan Legacy.

In other news, “Joe the Plummer” apparently grew up with his parents on welfare.  I recall the House debates over the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, as Clinton endorsed it in its third try.  It was highly personal, with Congress critters on each side digging into their childhood experience of being poor and either watching the Welfare Safety Net help them out during tough times or with their parents proudly riding roughshot and being True Independents.  In the course of Politics, you can pluck out any number of honest lessons to different directions: The “son of a poor Immigrant” Al Smith swerved rightward because he viewed Roosevelt’s New Deal program as a detriment to the capitalist system that allowed him to succeed in life and work his way up to — well, losing a presidential race in 1928.  Roosevelt, growing up rich, had a sense of noblese oblige.  Both positions make sense, as well the poor supporting a robust safety net and the rich opposing it.  In Oregon’s most recent Senate race, some mileage was achieved with reports that Gordon Smith bought some golfing equipment for a million dollars.  I never understood why I was supposed to care, though I understood the purpose: more confusing was the RNC’s ad on behalf of Smith that had Merkley eating a hot dog — which reports are surfacing that Smith’s initial reaction was a sort of “NOOOOOOOOO!”

But Joe the Plummer’s 15 minutes are at an end.  I guess he’s going to punt a book out — watch your Remaindered shelves.  The Country album appears to have been an Urban Legend of sorts.  How he compartmentalizes his curious philosophy remains a sociological study, probably not worth driving at.  I am still lost at his “Natural Law Party” membership.

Good god, Wikipedia can be dumb sometimes.  Look down the list of cultural references to Casanova.  This is a pointless list, as Casanova is an iconic enough figure in culture referred to constantly and by everyone sooner or later that to point to a reference made on, for instance, That 70s Show in a list of a dozen items seems rather trifling.

I suppose all of this demonstrates a bias of a certain type — the ” in the pop culture” section is infected by twenty-somethings who refer to a Beanie Baby with the name “Casanova” (might as well refer to various teddy bears heavily marketed for Valentine Day with the name) — presentism, I guess.

Punting over to the wikipedia input for “Lyndon Larouche”, and you see the constant battle from Larouchies to pull out every input from Chip Berlet and Dennis King, and (as I’ve already mentioned), reference every recent appearance on a foreign television network as a Major Development in International Relations.  Some conversation gets somewhat interesting — Mark Rudd probably devotes no mind space to Larouche, but Larouchies devote some mind space to Mark Rudd, and it is touchy to deliniate Larouche’s off-to-the-side place in the student New Left mileau of the late 1960s.  A little easier is to cut to size Larouche’s fantasy role in SDI, which the alertness to is, I believe, a renewed effort from the Larouchies.  Something else I notice here, an attempt to cut this out, found here:

In 2008, LaRouche commented on US Presidential candidate Barack Obama, “You’ll find Obama’s ancestry, if you chase his family tree, everybody’s climbing and swinging from the branches there–from all over the world! All parts of the world! This guy is the universal man. Every monkey in every tree, from every part of the world, has participated in the sexual act of producing him. And he works for organized crime–which is a branch of British intelligence.”ref:[http://lyndonlarouchewatch.org/larouche-obama.htm “Look up the Principle Which Generates the Concept: Saturday Dialogue with LaRouche, Pt. 1”]. 13 April 2008

The two problems, “Not found on Larouche’s website” (HA!) on to “Dennis King’s personal website is not credible”, and “How is this relevant to anything?”.  I don’t really know how a wikipedia article should approach what is relevant to a topic of a cult leader and how you slice his history in moderating with his true believers to something approaching reality, but I can note that “every monkey in every tree” is the most widely seen comment from Larouche of the past year, and that I saw it before Dennis King posted to it (factnet, obviously), and — hell, only by a fluke might have posted it to this stupid blog (which I always jokingly refer to as being “read by a half dozen people) before King posted it.

Related is something I see spouting up — various bloggers, the leader of the Larouchian Cryonics Movement for one, are linking to Larouche’s current line that the British Empire are plotting to Assassinate Barack Obama.  (And I never quite know what to make of blog/message board entries like this.)  And this looks like a reprise of these couple of “PUMA Movement blogs I saw which kept posting Larouche crap, except Hillary Clinton’s name has been scrubbed and replaced with “Mitt Romney”.*)

But the thing about the “assassination of Barack Obama trope” is that it is old news.  Not published in Larouche websites, to be disseminated by supposed Mitt Romney fans, but but I found it interesting enough to post it here, linked to from its original factnet spot.  Brush aside, perhaps, the timeline (Obama is not going to be the next president, which suggests that the British would have assassinated him by now, instead the apparently are going to assassinate him before he is inaugurated.)  So I’m not entirely sure why it’s now being posted around now — why wait?  Further, the reliability and predictability of its existence in pre-published form to its new existence as the current Larouche publication approved conspiracy theory fodder shows the “Obama miscegenation” quote is reliable — they came from the same stupid source.

Then again, the new appearance of the “British Assassination Plot against Barack Obama” has been cleaned up.  Witness the line:
You know, one of Molly Kronberg’s friends’ll probably kill him or something like that—and put the blame on us! [laughs]

And, meanwhile, back in Britain — I suppose right there at the seat of the British Empire, the Inquest into the Death of Jeremiah Duggan has opened up again, previously shunted evidence newly admitted.  They, I guess, count as “Molly’s friends”, but to dissect the intersections between the Persecution Complex and the British Empire and Obama is to entangle myself in a spider web I don’t care much to entangle myself.  The answer to this question is, of course, yes.  And I suppose they can keep some of their supposed “Heroes” (nothing wrong with FDR – though his record is as always open to dispute and complicated as Heck… in Larouche’s case it is a matter of projection, largely), they really do need to readjust their enemies list:
The LaRouche organisation says Mrs Duggan’s campaign is inspired by US Vice-President Dick Cheney in order to discredit them.

But so do all Conspiracy Theorists.  Watch it, though: Obama’s new Administration is going to fill up, at least in part if not in major part, by Clinton retreads — and you are supposedly a Clinton Democrat in factional Democratic Party disputes.
*Puzzling claim.  Obama is supposed to be assassinated by the British and never see office, right?  That would make Biden president.  Biden was a major Drug Warrior, particularly through the 1980s.  So where does this Soros control come into the picture?