Archive for April, 2009

6 political youtube videos you’ve probably never thought to look up

Friday, April 24th, 2009

Father Coughlin newsreel

Father Coughlin speaks, and is a tad scary..

News events of February 20, 1964

Ronald Reagan stumps for Harry Truman and Hubert Humphrey.

Grover Cleveland: Exactly!

Charles Lindbergh and his America First speech

In defense of the Republican polling numbers

Thursday, April 23rd, 2009

I keep seeing stuff like this being batted about in the liberal blogosphere.

Yes.  Republicans.  Less Popular than China.  Or Venezuela.

Leaving aside that we’re left assuming that this as meaning the Chinese government as opposed to the rich legacy of Chinese culture — if nothing else, you gotta love your chow mein, right?  Also, Yao Ming appears to be a nice enough guy.

… Assuming we can correlate the numbers exactly to the Chinese government, as against the Republican Party, we are left with the simple matters of apples and oranges.  When asked for an impression of China, the baggage that comes with it is various policy measures as to what to do with the odium.  To answer an unfavorable impression with China is to suggest that something needs to be done with it to loosen the grip of the Chinese government on either their human rights records or with regards to economic and military might.

Meanwhile, we can do something with the Republican Party: keep them out of office.  Hence, a quick answer of unfavoribility is more apt when asking for impressions on the Republican Party than on China.

I don’t like this game, and I feel the need to state my objection.

continued “neo-nazi activity”, such as it is, watch

Thursday, April 23rd, 2009

Hm.  I’ve reported a few times on seeing some “White Supremacist” stickers plastered about, and a couple instances of public restroom graffiti.  And I’ve stated that it makes for rather lame “neo – nazi activity”.  Most recently, I saw the sticker affixed to a ghost of a public phone, which I immediately tried to plaster off, but it was good and stuck.  That night it rained.  So the next day I was able to snap it right off.

The message was fairly simple, and whatever area “Run in the dark of night to stick these things up” knuckle-heads are doing this will do so again, and remind me what the specific slogans are that I do not recall right now.  (I think it was the the HIV rate of Blacks and warning against miscegenation, to, um “Preserve the White Race”.)  But they are fairly basic, as they would have to be to .  Which brings me to a question for this news item:

A neo-Nazi group led by a man recently released from prison has been distributing fliers across Southern Oregon that call for white unity, deny the Holocaust happened, and demand that illegal immigrants return to Mexico.

Andrew Lee Patterson, 29, identifies himself as the state leader of the National Socialist Movement, Oregon Unit, and said he has been a “storm trooper, first class” with the movement for about six months.

Assuming the flier is printed off a legal sheet of paper, 5 by 8.5 inches, how do you get those three disparate messages across in large enough print?  Imagine “WHITE UNITY!  MEXICANS OUT OF USA!  HOLOCAUST NEVER HAPPENED!”  across the paper, at the bottom “message brought to you by lame neo-nazi org”.   It’s incoherent messaging.

Explain the last 16 years to us all, please.

Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009

Hm.  Canada seems to be sucking out our lame Presidents.  On May 29th, these two will be apparing together in Toronto for a “Discussion”.

Okay.  A list through the comments to determine who’s more hated:

anti – Both: 13
anti – Bush: 3
anti – Clinton: 1
pro- Bush: 3

Now I just need to go back over the lot and figure out the “pro – Canada” to “anti – Canada” margin.

“Raising Money the LPAC Way”?

Tuesday, April 21st, 2009

I’m having some trouble with this one, the Daily Briefing for March 16.  My question is: What is “the LPAC Way”?

Because: If we continue with the present policy of practice this organization will go out of existence in two weeks. Therefore, there will be no deviation as a matter of policy or practice from what I’m about to say. And the $120,000-$125,000 is key. Don’t say you have to achieve something else first. That’s what you have to achieve {first}. Otherwise, you’re not going to solve the problem. Anybody who thinks you can solve the problem in another way is an idiot and needs some kind of care.

Look: Our influence is not based on people doing heel and toe in the street. Our exposure in the street in some cases, is relevant. But that’s not the way we raise money. We raise money with the LPAC way. Now, what’s the LPAC way: If you want to raise money, you don’t talk to a member of the Senate or a member of the House of Representatives. That’s a stupid move. We have people who talk to these people, and we call them trained toads—that is , the people who talk to these guys, who call these Senators and Members of Congress toads. Because they can’t swim any more, since they crawled out of the swamp. They can only run around rhhuhh! rhhuhh!

It’s a strange admission.  Apparently observed as much on the streets as in the conference table at Leesburg.  Observe:

Item #1:  Far be it from me to advocate pouring a lot of money into it, I’m just suggesting they use a permenant marker and get somebody with good handwriting to letter it.
Item #2, and I’ll link to a Tea-Party friendly forum that linked to this Seattle Times article, to take note of the follow-up plug to “Obama Deception” — notable because, of course, Tarpley, and there’s a certain irony in a pooh-pooh of Larouche next to an embrace of Tarpley: 
Liz Monta, 69, of Ballard, a retired bartender who said she was upset with bank bailouts, “nationalizing health care and Obama’s socialist agenda,” did take one of the 3-by-3-foot signs the LaRouche supporters were handing out.
But she folded the bottom part that had LaRouche’s name, so she was only waving a sign that said, “End the bailout. Dump Pelosi.”
Finally, something the Larouche Organization is good for.  Eventually your political enemy will align with their political enemy, see here.  They’ll produce a bunch of pictures of unflattering photographs of that individual for your own use.  If only the Larouche Organization could figure out a way to monetize that, they might have something going here, and have a different way of “making money the LPAC Way”.

Just as well the deployments at the “Tea-parties” are down-played.  Observe:

The April 15th Tea Party anti-tax actions were not a “mass movement”—they were an orchestrated operation of George Soros and his Twitter operations backed up by Sir Rupert Murdoch’s Fox media empire. Forget the so-called organizers like Newt Gingrich, Fox News fascist Sean Hannity, and Congressional has-been, Dick Armey. They are just frontmen—the real organizers were the cyber-zombies of Twitter, Facebook and the like. […]
This whole thing is being orchestrated—that’s what’s important. What you have is the control of so-called popular opinion, which is a bunch of zombies! They’re like a bunch of zombies, like 14th century zombies, marching en masse. Don’t treat it as credible: this is not mass protest. This is not spontaneous protest. You’ve got zombies out there, who will move at the hint from that fascist drug pusher, George Soros.”
“And a lot of this stuff which is called mass protest, is Soros’s zombies—which come in many varieties, because he’s paying for them. Many of them are drugged. They’re out there doing mass protests, not because they know what they’re talking about, but because they are just being told to go out and shake up the Establishment.”
“They have to be compared to the lunatics known in the 14th century New Dark Age, known as the Flagellants. Call these guys the New Flagellants.”

The “Tea-Baggers” were … 14th Century Zombies.  Yes, taking rim shots at the words of Lyndon Larouche is easy sport, though noted is that “Howie G” didn’t get the memo.  I suppose if I say that I nod in agreement with Gary Trudeau’s thoughts It’ll be like an imaginary conversation taking place between him and James Galbraith.  Beyond this, I will echo the thoughts of one Tony Papert, from that briefing:
TONY: Don’t discuss what? I didn’t understand what you were just saying a second ago.
Though, in Tony’s case, the answer can be found with a few simple words spoken:
What we’ve been doing, it STINKS!

Looking through this, does this mean we have a two week bunker-session manning the phones followed by a season where the Larouchies will be taken off of “cardtable Service”, providing a tad less amusement to the public, and put to work sticking videos on their website?  And how is the website going to be “monetized”, anyway?

But the key thing is: Think about what the mission is. Think about what this business is, on method of operation: We’re doing mass organizing in the way I’ve described. Not massive, saying we need 50,000 people; you don’t need 50,000 people. You wouldn’t get anything done with 50,000 people that you couldn’t get done with 500 people. Really get done, in net effect. With 50,000, they’d trip over each other’s feet.
What you do, is you use the vehicle we have: We have an effective website operation in terms of the way it’s designed. It merely has to come up a little bit more in terms of performance, and it {has to be supported!} so it can do the job. We have to have more people on it, doing the work. And we have to produce more product, which means, some of this product is going t be one month, three weeks, two weeks, and so forth, to produce as it comes along. Some stuff is ready to go. So but you have to have a net effect of more than three a day. […]
But we have to produce the stories, and we have to do it in the audio/video form. The audio/video form is the type that gets across. And the other thing will work: because if they accept you on the audio/video lead, then they’ll accept your written report. Because it’s information, especially short.
So that’s what we do—and we go like hell with that. And we get the impact immediately, because we need, in the next two weeks, we need to get the cash up! And this is the only way we’re going to do it. And we’re going to go full tilt! No apologies, no guessing games, no college tries. Burn down the universities, we don’t want any more college tries. We want results, not college tries. A college try is a guy struggling with a condom. [explosive laughter]

The “Obama Deception” was the number one video on yahoo, beating out “1932” by a country mile, I’m thinking.  Supposedly the next two week’s of phone harranging is going to produce more web material ala “1932”.  (New up-take of new material apparently coming up quickly.  The money is being raised for more of this quality, I guess.  I see they’ve found the great “Hydrogen Monoxide Kid“, but after cribbing that gag it’s all downhill.  I guess this means this is one of the kicks they’re on , and it along with “Goldman Sucks” don’t fall into the category of bad issues… which, strictly speaking I don’t see what’s wrong — have to throw a wide net in order to get money out of, say this guy‘s Hamiltonian Crusade.)

Actually, the real story of “Raising Money the LPAC Way” is shown in the scrippings for savings.  This “to all points” memo shows health care for the central org being dropped.    Which apparently is leading to a Run on final Health Care Check-ups.  The tradition of “raising money through scrippings” is long running, as seen in this memorial to the John Morris.

I don’t know what he and Gary were driving such a long distance at that hour for. I don’t know whether they were coming from a long deployment (standing at a small table selling subscriptions and literature, collecting names and phone numbers to call later), or driving back from an event. But I do know why they ran out of gas. They ran out because there wasn’t enough in the tank, and there wasn’t enough in the tank because there was never much gas in the tanks of LaRouche cars when I was in the group, when the stuff was well under $2 a gallon. I can only imagine that the problem was only more pronounced last summer when gas was $4 a gallon in many parts of the country. Gas tanks were never filled because cash from deployments was a precious commodity. It was always better to bring cash back to the office than spend it all to fill up a tank. Usually, there was only enough gas in our cars to last a day. At the end of a long day of selling literature on the streets, we’d put a few gallons in, at most. Enough for tomorrow.
The cars were never
in very good condition. Though these cars were used every day for driving over long distances (sometimes for 50 miles or more each way) they were rarely maintained. I remember a car or two in Los Angeles that didn’t even have a working gas gauge. We always had a can of gas in the trunk of the car. If the driver of the car ran out of gas, he’d have to pull over and re-fill out of the can. I’ve heard that it was a common problem elsewhere in the country as well. Given that John and Gary were trying to refill their tank on the side of a highway, I think there’s they may have had a car in this condition.

 I gather that comments like the one found here are wrong, and can be checked against experiences such as that one:
As to what is motives are, or his credibility, I can be sure that you can never really know, any more than you know what goes on by those in power every day. what you can be sure of, is that a significant portion of those in power, in the U.S., in outher nations, and throughout history, have done, and continue to do, really, really bad things to keep things in their favor.

  For instance, something that’s popped up in my mind regarding “Howie G”‘s sex obsession at  “European”‘s blog.  The line about leaving the cult because it doesn’t provide sex seemed to derive from European’s comments on the proposed Canadian Constitution and its homosexuality ban.  Which is about what harm the org did in their two California Initiatives, as seen by this commenter.
I remember what the LaRouchies were doing 20 years ago. May your leadership be reincarnated as garden slugs for adding to my friends’ stress levels during the darkest years of the HIV pandemic.

Well… anyways…

Blazers — Rockets Game One ReCap.

Monday, April 20th, 2009

In October of 1995, walking with my brother and my mother in Seattle.  I bring up a lawsuit brought against (depressingly enough) Disney for Jim Henson Productions from Hormel Foods, as my oft-worn shirt at the time would tell you were the producers of Spam.  At issue was a Muppet character for the up-coming ABC show, Spam.  Interestingly enough with regards to the copyright issue at hand, within its legal documents Hormel accused Disney of defaming its fine project — something I imagine would pale against what would come a couple years’ down the road when the word Spam would come to be synonomous with Penis Pumps, scams centraled around deposed African governments, and computer viruses.  The felt character for the Muppet equivalent of “Here’s Lucy” is the least of Hormel’s concerns.

And so I say, “But appeals are expected.”  And so my brother responds, “Ah.  So It’s Not over yet.”
To which, a stranger overhears and says the lop-sided score for the Mariners — Indians game, which would push them out of the playoffs.  It was, indeed, Over Now.  And the Stranger wanted us all to push aside the silly notion that it wasn’t.

Saturday, after a great build-up for the Portland Trailblazers team — a tad overdone, I’d say — the Houston Rockets hammered the Trailblazers.  This brought a couple of thoughts to mind.  #1:  I am reminded why the Rockets were the last team the Blazers would have wanted to face.  #2:  After every loss to a good team through the season, I would mutter to disappointed Blazer fan “The team’s not there yet.”  There weren’t too many surprises through the season — the team won what I’d become accustomed for them to win, and they lost what I’d become accustomed for them to lose.  #3:  I may just be forced to contract expectations back to what I’d thought through the season:  win a couple games in the playoff, come back next season.  I”d wish the Hornets would have made a free throw in their final game of the season so the Blazers might have a better match-up, but watching grown men throw balls in hoops and rooting for them to do it better than another assortment of grown men throwing balls into hoops doesn’t always bring the desired conclusions.

Sign of the Times

Monday, April 20th, 2009

Anyone else see that guy in a suit and tie at Pioneer Square holding a balloon saying “Give Me A Marketing Job”?  I don’t know if that was self-promotion or promotion for some marketing biz or other, but it holds to the current double-digit unemployment rate poor economy zeitgeist regardless.

Fascism. On the March.

Monday, April 20th, 2009

The term “socialism” increasingly being accepted by many Americans and not having any punch as a line of political attack…

… We move on to “Fascism”.

“Rhetorically, Republicans are having a very hard time finding something that raises the consciousness of the average voter,” said Saul Anuzis, a former chairman of the Michigan Republican Party who recently lost a bid to became national party chairman.
Workaday labels like “big spender” and “liberal” have lost their punch, and last fall, Senator John McCain of Arizona and Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska gained little traction during the presidential campaign by linking Mr. Obama’s agenda to socialism.
So Mr. Anuzis has turned to provocation with a purpose. He calls the president’s domestic agenda “economic fascism.”
“We’ve so overused the word ‘socialism’ that it no longer has the negative connotation it had 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago,” Mr. Anuzis said. “Fascism — everybody still thinks that’s a bad thing.”

This man, this man who would be the RNC Chairman but lost the vote to Michael Steele, may want to be careful.  The Republicans’ use of the word “Socialism” as a slur against something that strictly speaking ain’t socialism has, polls show, turned Americans toward “Socialism”, of some stripe or other.  If they move on to “Fascism”, it stands to reason, Americans will cease to think of that as a bad thing.  That’s not something I much want to see happen.

Of course, this is Fascism with carefully marked clarifications.:

The practical question for Republicans is how best to reach political independents, 60 percent of whom now approve of Mr. Obama’s job performance. As his policies sink in, said William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard magazine, “I think ‘big-government-liberalism’ is good enough.”
Mr. Anuzis remains unconvinced. He notes that he does not call Mr. Obama himself a “fascist.” Rather, he applies the “economic fascism” label to government tax and regulatory policies that seek, in the words of one magazine’s definition he cites, “to achieve the utopian socialist ideal.”
“It’s politically very incorrect only because we’re not used to it,” concluded Mr. Anuzis, who recently joined American Solutions for Winning the Future, a group led by Newt Gingrich, a former House speaker. But he acknowledged, “You’ve got to be careful using the term ‘economic fascism’ in the right way, so it doesn’t come off as extreme.”

Seeing that nobody is attempting to “achieve the utopian socialist ideal”, I guess that makes Obama not a Fascist, by Anizus’s definition.  The problem comes in with that strange belief that changing the regulatory process to affect a better outcome or a better process seems to be inflated in Anizus’s mind to “Utopia”.  Utopia always seems to be defined downward.

I’ve referred to Dick Cheney as Fascist from time to time, and probably will in the future.  It’s an item of invective, and Dick Durbin explained why I’ll toss it out as an item of invective a few years’ back.  Time will tell if Anizus can stick to his “Economic Fascism”.  I suggest he drop it.  Go back to “Socialism”, or some blur around with liberal and big – spending.   Eventually it’ll become invective-working again.