From Joe Scarborough, former member of Congress from Florida and current talking head, in a Time Magazine piece about how to reconstruct the Republican Party.

We should erase the shabby standards of financial oversight that have weakened us all in the age of Bernie Madoff. Corporate bailouts need to end — but Republicans must be determined to never again adopt a laissez-faire approach to Wall Street. After Black Monday, the Asian crisis, Long-Term Capital Management’s meltdown, the Internet bust, the Enron scandal, WorldCom’s collapse and the subprime crisis, there is nothing conservative about turning a blind eye to reckless speculation and greed.

Surely you jest.  (Though, I jest on one or two of them myself.)  What Republican Party would this make?  Heck, the Democrat with the most credibility on this score was drummed out on a sex scandal.

Late my Senior year of high school, the school ushered everyone into the gymnaisum to watch a motivational video — I guess you can call it that?  I was privy to parts of the planning, which is that I overheard the decision to see how this video went over at a neighboring town, and the decision to play it for us.  The theory was that this film would forcus us all, a drifting and directionless student population, to confront our stark reality and begin to make choices in our life.

It had a production style that I’m sure would date badly — still frames of intervals of some seconds’ worth of time.  They played out some scenario or other through the lyrics of popular songs — the one I remember most integral is this song, Fastball’s “The Way“.  Along with the Wallflowers’s less than stellar cover of David Bowie’s “Heroes”.  I’m pretty sure something from Foo Fighters.  Mind you, it’s bizarre that I can even recall this thing.

The story was mostly framed around “The Way”.  A song about Aimless Youth.  I didn’t quite identify with the scenario put forward.  A teenage girl going out on a day trip to the beach with her friends one sunny day.  Just going to hang out, as the case was.  The father watches flat-footed as she grabs his credit card for this under-taking, worried expression, and also helpless to the days’ wandering events.  Car runs out of gas on the way home from a lazy day at the beach — lyrics displayed between freeze shots.

I suppose that particular scenario may be less likely now, what with our “Greatest Fiscal Crisis since the Great Depression, but nowhere near as dire” credit crunch.  The father would snap the credit card out of the daughter’s hand, right?  Also gone today are the descriptions of “today’s youth” in the news magazines in the years 1998 through 2000 as dripping with consumer branded logos and having particularly “fat allowances” (these stories having a subtext, if not text, for what was wrong with our children of that their culture could incubate mass killers.  Those always made for a depressing read.  Today’s Moral Panic Stories have a less glummy feeling to them.)

But however you can slice the adolescent aimless and directionless of the crowd, I was hard pressed to see this “ripping of the credit card out of father’s hand” as part and parcel to my particular low-income economically stagnant town.  The song they really needed to frame a situation around might have been The Offspring’s “The Kids Aren’t Alright” — though, that might have been too blunt and edgy.

The teacher for my class following this assembly bemoaned the students’ bad behavior.  The ASB gummint instructor teacher bizarrely held the opposite view of how the students reacted.  I was sitting next to that teacher, and I wasn’t sure what he was seeing — wishful thinking on his part, I presume — I side with the other teacher.  Maybe they picked the wrong pop song.  Or the premise was wrong in subtle ways.  Or, maybe the students were too aimless and wandering.

Utah Governor Jon Huntsman, Jr. — Republican, as though there were any Democrats in Utah — has joined the Obama Administration as envoy to China.  Policy wise, I suspect he’s more than competent for what is probably the most important ambassodorial job.  But it pretty much puts the kibosh on his plans for running for the 2012 Republican Presidential nominee — who, incidentally, didn’t even make my list.

… in part because his words that the Republican Party “wasn’t there yet” in terms of having a policy message that works for the moment was quickly alienating his party base, and his suggestion that the social agenda, visa vie gay marriage especially, was not going to get the party anywhere was as well.

The conventional wisdom is that the Governor’s chair is not a seat anyone wants to be in right now for sheer political future-dom — the ails of the economy reverberate too strongly.  Janet Napolitano’s jump to the Obama cabinet in perticular seemed suited to avoid a heady and unpleasant near-term future as governor.

Huntsman seems to have judged his Republican party as “not there yet”, or not where he is at any rate, probably without any presidential fortunes to speak of for 2012 (even as Obama borrowed Carter’s forgotten phrase), and either thrown out his presidential aspirations or is biding his time for a different political environment.  But this begs the question for 2016:  has there ever been an opposition party member of a cabinet who has gone on to win the presidency?

Also, the next governor of Utah will probably be insane.  Seeing as they just plucked out the sane governor…

In comparison with my handy image of the “16 faces of the Republican Party Right this Minute“, Time Magazine provides us with their flow-chart progressing from Olympia Snowe to Rush Limbaugh, Charlie Crist and Newt Gingrich next, John McCain and Sarah Palin, Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney.

I don’t think Cheney found his way on it.

Meantime, time to worry about the future of the Democratic Party? (taken in total from Andrew Sullivan’s blog.)

To me, Pelosi’s denial (and accusation against the CIA) lays bare a deeper truth about the Democrats.  Without Obama they’d be nearly as big a mess as the Republicans.  Most of them are complicit in the Bush torture program and the wars.  The party is almost headless without Obama – led by the fickle and hardly inspiring Reid/Pelosi duo.  After Obama, if conservatives learn anything over the next eight years – yes, I’m predicting it will be eight – unless the Democrats get some sort of order and discipline and more importantly, some grander vision, then I think the GOP should have no trouble at all coming in and cleaning up.

The lackluster Reid / Pelosi pair.  As opposed to Frist / Hastert?  Lott / Hastert?  Dole / Gingrich?  Mitchell / Foley.  Now Mitchell / Foley — that one was one that ROCKED!

Another one bites the dust. Okay to speak ill of the dead?

During his life Frankhouser had been convicted of an international fraud scheme, allegedly involved in assassination plots against U.S. government leaders, acquitted of a stabbing a rival Klan leader, lost an eye in a bar fight and waged a battle to get his white supremacist show on public access cable television, according to just a few of the dozens of newspaper clippings in the Reading Eagle archive.

The longtime Klansman and former member of the American Nazi Party was convicted in February 1995, following a four-day federal trial in Boston stemming from allegations he advised a white supremacist’s mother to destroy evidence linking her son to the desecration of synagogues in Randolph and Brockton, Mass., as well as alleged assaults on black Brockton residents.[…]
On February 17, 1988, Frankhouser was sentenced to three years in federal prison and fined $50,000 for advising political extremist Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. to obstruct a federal grand jury probe into an alleged fundraising fraud scheme.
During the trial, Forrest Lee Fick of Stony Creek Mills testified that he and Frankhouser were asked by a member of LaRouche’s organization to kill former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger during a flight to Europe.

When asked to comment on the life and his association with Roy Frankhouser, Jr. Lyndon Larouche had this to say:

“This is straight Nazi stuff,” Larouche elaborated. “It’s not a quibble; it’s not an interpretation. This is a direct copy of the philosophy of the Nazis. You cannot duck that issue. This is Nazi stuff.”

While I’m on the subject of recently deceased associates of this cult leader, I bring to attention this weird bit – funny in a disturbingly sick way (as all these things are)– on 1992 vice presidential candidate James Bevel, a career fall from Martin Luther King, Jr to Larouche (at which time he had an “educational program” going on with his children and was committing incest) one of those things you shake your head at:

In 1993/1994 I remember that I sat together with some youngsters from Sweden and Poland. He spoke about sex. The basic idea with what he said to us youngsters, was to say that one had to control once sexlife and sexual instincts in order to become a good political organizer. He said that he used to have sex with cows (!) as a kid, as all other kids had (!), and that almost all young people today (!) have sex in in the same “unscientific” and hedonistic way as he used to have sex with cows (!). “And we did not care if the cow (!) was male or female, as long as there was a hole to stick it in”, I remember he said… Bevel appealed to us young people (I was 24 at the time) to make a revolt against the sexual habits of “today”. Homosexuality, and sex when dating, SEXUAL ATTRACTION, etc, was “unscientific” and a way for the oligarchy (Yes, he spoke about them too!) to control people… Off course, Bevel said that he was “scientific” when he wanted to eradicate lust from sexuality…

“When you grow up on a farm in Georgia, your first girlfriend is a mule,” as the radical anti-abortionist Neal Horseley once said.

Or, it puts the constant references to “Bestial”. And, in what the cult hopes to consider a big historic expedition, Larouche spoke at Central Connecticut State University and asked the question Larouchies have asked me on this blog — DO YOU KNOW THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MAN AND ANIMAL? Luckily the LPAC site bullet-points this for me:

The Difference Between Man and Ape: Fire

As simple as that. He could have condensed the lecture to just that one thought. Also that is why he doesn’t have to dwell on his supposed task of the Middle East situation.

From the moment he was invited to deliver the lecture as part of the Middle East policy series, chaired by the distinguished Middle East scholar Prof. Norton Mezvinsky, LaRouche contemplated how best to use the limited time allotted, to deliver the most thought-provoking message.

As you will read below, LaRouche stepped outside of the rigged game of the Middle East per se, to deliver a message, intended to reverberate in the Obama Administration as it prepares for an urgent round of diplomacy, and within governing institutions around the world.
It was in this spirit that Lyndon LaRouche delivered the following lecture, before an audience of approximately 200 faculty, students, and guests of Central Connecticut State University on the afternoon of May 4, 2009.

There would appear to be some squabble with the numbers in attendance at this lecture hall. Observers at the scene and observers of the youtube clip are claiming about 20 or 30 were in attendance. But never mind, it’s on the Internet, which means that it surely will now achieve a mass audience. Youtube commenters, have it:
laroucheyouth The Larouche videos are way under-viewed. What can we do to increase it? Put a link on your facebooks, myspaces, and wherever you chat online. People need to be educated on the current state of affairs in this world!

The focus is on our website. That is the mass education and organizing center.
jmar10420 Let the sheep hand out their green leaflets. When the bottom falls out, they’ll be flocked! Lyndon LaRouche is the truth!

Hey guys. Your cult sucks. Quit that cult and join another cult, please.
Should I link to the youtube video and help alleviate their problem somewhat? Nah. Unless I did, in which case no big deal.
Incidentally, this is being blamed for part of the small attendance:
Student demonstrators gathered outside of Davidson Hall Monday afternoon to protest political activist and philosopher Lyndon LaRouche.
Mostly members of the Youth for Socialist Action protestors were armed with comic book-style fliers depicting LaRouche as “a small-time Hitler”.
LaRouche spoke as part of the CCSU Middle East lecture series. This particular event, unlike the rest of the series, was funded personally by CCSU professor Norton Mezvinsky.
“I know some sharply negative attacks are being targeted at LaRouche here on campus,” Mezvinsky said. “The material being handed out is, at best, problematic factually, and some of it just downright false.”

I think I know what the flyers were — run into them when rumbling online, though quickly checking Chip Berlet’s website it doesn’t appear to be from that site. I question if that’s a particularly worthwhile battle to wage, on the YSA’s part, and if it is if that’s the best way to demonstrate — but that’s their business and they may do what they must.

Norton Mezvinsky — I’ll have to email him and ask him what he was thinking and whether he found this a satisfactory lecture furthering free inquiry (questions rather narrowly construed to those mattes). You can email him too!
…………………………………………

Final Goldman items:Good as far as it goes, here and here — just so long as they know the man is lying quite a bit.If you read more of this little satirical piece than I did, you’ll find him referenced for the sake of putting him in the Democratic Party.

And this guy observed the whole Michael Bloomberg drumbeating. Our old leader of the Larouche Cryonics Movement, Phil Ossifur, provides an inadequate response to his Omniscent Master.

Why do they go after Nancy Pelosi (second to last comment) when Charles Schumer makes a more obvious target, placed aside Soros? (But I should really stop and not be handing them any ideas here.)

I see a bit of a tiff with Dan Savage and Ta-Neisha Coates regarding handling the sexual orientation of Florida Governor and newly minted Senate candidate Charlie Crist — seen here posing with a football in his hand.

Actually I think his candidacy should be seen as a sign of pogress.  Charlie Crist is an openly closteted gay man, not afraid of hiding his closeted homosexuality, fully embracing it — denying that he’s gay with a wink and a nod.  The fact that the NRSC has fully endorsed an openly closeted gay man is a sign of how far they’ve come and are going in acceptance of the closeted gay lifestyle.  As well, the voters in Florida, who have him up 2 to 1 against the potential Democratic challenger with their full awareness of Crist’s closeted sexuality.  What’s more, the right flank that make up those Republican primary voting detractors, lining up behind Marco Rubio’s campaign and upset with the NRSC’s endorsement of Crist, are not making Charlie Crist’s openly closeted sexual preferences an issue, even though they know he is a closeted gay man — more concerned with Crist’s acceptance of the Obama backed Stimulus Package and some scattered social issues.  Also interesting to note the liberal blog dailykos’s egging on of Rubio’s campaign much interested in the issue.

The problem with Barack Obama’s jab at Michael Steele is the problem of taking jabs at self-parodies. The most recent Steele-ism, heard here:

This crazy nonsense, `empathetic.` I`ll give you empathy, empathize right on your behind. Craziness.

What do you do with this? Well, here’s Obama:

Michael Steele is in the House tonight. Or, as he would say: In the heezy. WASSUP?

Overall, I find Michael Steele just a little perplexing. Why is he doing this? When I first learned about a “Michael Steele”, he was running for the Senate in Maryland in 2006. The New York Times Magazine had a story during that summer which focused on him and his run as a key part of a Republican strategy in slicing the 90 percent black vote for Democrats, a component of Karl Rove’s “Permanent Republican Majority” — this at a time when Bush’s approval ratings amongst Blacks was down to a stunning 2 percent, in the wake of Katrina. But Steele expressed himself well, saying that he was weary of being a tokenistic candidate and only ran if he thought he could do so on his own merits, self-conciously “Republican who happens to be African American” as opposed to the black Republican.

A few months later, Republican fortunes were dipping badly, sliding into the abyss. Here, Steele sent out an anonymous message to the media saying that the “R for Republican next to his name was like a ’scarlet letter’”. It was a stunt of sorts, the anonymity cracked by anyone paying the remotest attention to these things — me, for instance. It was an attempt at putting up electoral distance from the failing party, and a level of awareness he has dropped in his tenure as RNC Chair.

Whatever the case, he wasn’t dropping out-dated hip-hop slang — which, current slang would sound out-dated from anyone over the age of, say, 25. Actually, he was ginning up stories malicious racial attacks on himself from black liberals. But that manufactured story at least can be explained in terms of politics. Michael Steele’s current contrivances is just sort of baffling — as though somebody in charge looked over at him, saw that he was black, saw that the young people were voting Democratic and believed they listened to a lot of hip hop, and provided Steele with specific instructions that his job was to tap into that hip hop demographic, without any clear designation of what that would even mean.