Another vaguely haunting sense of a quasi – permanent political party “majority” (Karl Rove’s thought in 2004), or “White House Lock” (as was suggested in 1991), or “Lost a whole generation” — another chance to rehash the demise of the Whig Party and apply it to one of America’s major political parties.

After the 1936 election, where Roosevelt won all the states save Maine and Vermont (“As Maine goes, so goes Vermont”, the Republican Party was left with a whopping 16  Senators and 88 members in the House.  And yet the party did not disappear.  It took them ten years to gain the strength necessary to recapture teh Congress, which was presumed to prefigure a capture of the White House for 1948.  But Truman out-hustled their traditional politician figure, so that four years later, the elephants in the same spot of certaintude – they didn’t take any chances, and went the Whig Party route in Presidential nominating in selecting a genial quasi-partisan Military General.  If all else fails, and the Republicans fall further out of favor, they can pull that trick in a few election cycles and have themselves someone in the White House.

Since 1864 — 1860 was a mess — the two parties have quadrenially presented their candidates for election, and have gone 1 – 2 thirty-six out of thirty-seven times.  (Technically, Lincoln in 1864 was the candidate for the “National Union Party”.)  That thirty-seventh instance, Roosevelt over Taft, presented an instance of a recent Republican President beating the current Republican President.  The period between 1860 and 1932 saw the Democratic Party only finagle two presidents for two terms each, meaning that party spent 72 long years in a decided minority position — frequently regionalized.  A look-see at the current Senate delegation per state probably would reveal something not too dissimilar, though with a mirror image, for how it would look after, say, the 1920 Republican Party landslide:

2 Democratic Senators:
Hawaii, Montana, Colorado, New Mexico, California, Illinois, West Virginia, Washington, Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, North Dakota, Connecticut, Wisconsin, New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Vermont, Michigan, Arkansas, Oregon, Rhode Island, Virginia, Minnesota
2 Republican Senators:  Tennessee, Wyoming, Utah, Kansas, Kentucky, Georgia, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Maine, Texas, Idaho, South Carolina, Arixona, Alabama
1 each:  Indiana, Alaska, North Carolina, Iowa, South Dakota, Louisiana, Missouri, Nebraska, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio

I do not know what it would take to unsettle the electoral stalemate of the last century and a half.  Both parties have, somehow or other, pulled themselves out of supposed “death spirals” spurred on by narrowing ideological marginalizings.  (How is not always a pretty picture.)  Someone recently had a front page daily kos diary post predicting that sometime in the near future, shorter than “sometime in your life-span” suggests, someone with something other than a “D” or an “R” after their name will become president.  This was based on the third-party atmospherics of the Tea-partiers and the historic background of 1992, when Ross Perot flickered in the polls to a lead at times.  But who exactly is supposed to be this figure that rides that wave of disgruntlement?

Jesse Ventura?

Rifling through Hoover’s papers, one sometimes has the strange feeling that the President looked upon the Depression as a public relations problem — that he believed the nightmare would go away if only the image of American business could be polished up and set in the right light.  Faith was an end in itself, “lack of business confidence” was a cardinal sin.  Hoover’s first reaction to the stump which followed the crash had been to treat it as a psychological phenomenom.  He himself had chosen the word “Depression” because it sounded less frightening than “panic” or “crisis”.  In December 1929 he declared that “conditions are fundamentally sound.”  Three months later he said the worst would be over in sixty days; at the end of May he predicted the economy would be back to normal in the autumn; in June the market broke sharply, yet he told a delegation which called to plead for a public works project “Gentlemen, you have come sixty days too late.  The Depression is over.”

Already his forecasts were being flung back at him by his critics, but in his December 2, 1930 message to Congress — a lame duck Republican Congress; the Democrats had just swept the off-year elections — he said that “the fundamental strength of the economy is unimpaired.”  At about the same time the International Apple Shippers Association, faced with a surplus of apples, decided to sell them on credit to jobless men for resale at a nickel each.  Overnight there were shivering apple sellers everywhere.  Asked about them, Hoover replied, “Many people have left their jobs for the more profitable one of selling apples.”  Reporters were caustic, and the President was stung.  By now he was beginning to show signs of the more ominous traits of embattled Presidents; as his secretary Thodore Joslin was to note in his memoirs, Hoover was beginning to regard some criticism “as unpatriotic.”  Nevertheless he persevered, pondering new ways of waging psychological warfare.  “What this country needs,” he told Chistopher Morley, “is a great poem.”  To Rudy Vallee he said in the spring of 1932, “If you can sing a song that would make people forget the Depression, I’ll give you a medal.”  Vallee didn’t get the medal.  Instead he sang [here].

[…] One source of embarassment to the Administration was the stretch of Pennsylvania Railroad track between Washington and New York.  It was lined with thousands of billboards.  Half were blank, which raised awkward questions in the minds of passengers until admirers of the President began renting them to spread the slogan “WASN’T THE DEPRESSION TERRIBLE?”  Agreeing that it had been, but that it was past, the International Association of Lions Clubs celebrated Business Confidence Week.

— William Manchester, Glory and the Dream Volume 1

This will be of interest to someone, I think.

Actually the minor purpose of this blog post has probably been served, and thus I’ll go ahead and delete it. The man’s in prison now — where he belongs — and beyond that —

I imagine it’s not worth speculating on this nut’s future.  And it’s hard to fathom the meaning of it.

Memo the the “web2.o” brainiacs tasked to “blog” for the latimes.  Don’t put up a “Call for your swine ful conspiracies” entry.  There’s only one of two ways the flow of the comments are going to go.

In this case, the second comment set the tone and debunking his claims, or rebunking his claims, dominated the forseeable commenting.  Witness:

I’m not giving credentials and I don’t have to. I’m not giving you any information that requires it. I think intuition would tell everyone that if someone claims silver is the cure-all (for pathogens) then we would’ve know for a long time, it would be FDA approved, and we would live in harmony with the microbes. And yeah, I suppose we could all be scientists over the internet, but you would certainly get laughed at by the scientific community if you actually thought that worked. Sorry man, but your cure-all claim was killed the second you said ‘all viruses and bacteria.’

Posted by: Beetle | April 28, 2009 at 08:40 PM

Not going to take Beetle seriously now.

Posted by: Revgen | April 29, 2009 at 11:51 AM

And

Guy just sees no reason to force you from your Collodial Silver.  The benefit in making himself known does not

Anyway… the question asked about here:

via the Rense link (god love Rense!) “Will it turn your skin blue?”  Here’s Montana Libertarian Party star Stan Jones.

What does this have to do with the Swine Flu, though?
Nevermind, this is the type of user feedback that is going to save the Newspaper as we move further and further into the Age of the Internet.

A silver lining for the Republicans in the Senate.  Apparently the seating arrangement has the desks with a 50 – 50 split, Republicans on one side and Democrats on the other.  So, Specter’s seat change is going to free up some space on the Republican side and jam the Democratic side some.  The Democrats don’t have any more elbow room to move around.  The Republicans now have more room per person, and won’t be bumping into each other as often.  Makes for more fragile relations on the Democratic side, I’m guessing, as zones of privacy are decreased.

If I were a Republican Senator, I’d be rooting for the Democrats to pick up a few more seats in the next election cycle, so that I can relax, and lean aside, dozing off during a boring Robert Byrd speech.

Two wikipedia articles I don’t think are quite fair, or proper.  The American Mercury and HL Mencken.  The date at which you can posit the American Mercury as firmly, and respectably “conservative” in terms of political character would have to date back into the 1930s, and there is no date at which it tripped over the deep end — into a sort of John Birch Society Cold War hysteria  with attendant conspiratorial traps  (example, from a 1956 issue:  “Discussion Groups:  A Leftist Trap” — Adult education programs, promoted by the UN and sponsored by tax-exempt foundations, are being used to further the Communist ends.”), and then even further into the heart of Willa Carto’s Liberty Lobby.  Perhaps you can stick a fork at it, as a matter of symbolism, when a young William Buckley bailed on the magazine and founded the National Review, the better to have a leading conservative magazine not featuring the articles of one G Lincoln Rockwell.  I have to wonder what this writer for the American Conservative magazine wants when re-capturing “the Old Right”, and citing an American Mercury article attacking the Nuremberg Trials, placed next to an uber-patriotic piece by Rockwell.  (Perhaps a few articles over to opposition in the creation of Israel?)

The section on the (elitist, curmudgeonly, invective-spewing contrarian) Mencken’s anti-semitism is an odd focus.  But it is, in exaggerating this trait, the basis for The final phase of the American Mercury’s tie to the legacy of Mencken’s founding — never mind the truth of the “POV” statement found here.

There is a long conspiratorial series by a Paul Stevens (I don’t expect anyone to know anything about him) in the American Mercury which grabs my attention, in pieces.  “Money Made Mysterious”.  It was written off the heels, and in the same vein, as an article for the July 1956 issue entitled “Bankers’ Blueprint for Ruin”, in part:

But the most spectacular instance of a nation which was prepared for Communism from within by disloyal businessmen and bankers was Tsarist Russia.  The story of the role of the European money powers and the business sharpers in the delivery of Russia to the Bolsheviks has never been adequately told.  It stands as a nightmarish example to the unwary.”
The softening up of Tsarist Russia was preceded by an underhanded struggle of Western European bankers to fasten their talons upon the Russian economy.  Whatever the faults of the Tsarist regime, it must be said to its credit that it firmly repulsed the Amsterdam — Frankfort — Paris — London — Vienna ring of international bankers and family dynasts.  It was the check which monarchist Russia administered to the Rothschilds and their yes-men which swung the whole camarilla, with its immediate control over Western European opinion, into open sympathy with the Russian revolutionaries.

Always with the Rothschilds.  The article goes on to lay out the International Bankers’ Conspiracy, and I don’t have the patience to craft a flow chart.

Paul Stevens had a “Money Made Mysterious” piece which was composed entirely of excerpts from speeches by “Jacob Thorkelson”.  The wikipedia article doesn’t do him justice, but I guess it would be up to researchers to flesh out this wiki stub.  Thorkelson was the Silver Shirter’s favorite Congressman.  Ironically and incidentally, he was replaced in office by Jeanette Rankin, the first woman in Congress when she was initially elected for a term in 1916 — elected out of office with her “no” vote to a declaration of War–, and in this second go around the only “no” vote for a declaration of War after Pearl Harbor… a more tolerable pacifist, I’d say, as opposed to the condensed Thorkelson speeches:

The Internationalist alone is responsible for the chaotic state in which we find the world, for wherever he is you will find dissension, hatreds, unemployment, poverty, and despair. […]
The Internationalist is, as I have already said, an insiduous destroyer, who, like a parasite which undermines the health of man, saps the vitality of nations in which he is allowed the freedom to operate.  He uses the public wealth to entrench himself at the expense of industrious and patriotic citizens.
[…]  The Internationalists, however, have finally come to the conclusion that they cannot create the world government except by destroying every sovereign government in the world, and it is with that purpose in mind that unseen forces are now at work in the United States to destroy our government.  In 1913, they were successful in destroying the Soverign government of the state when representation was abolished in the Senate of the United States.  They no doubt hope to destroy the sovereign government of the United States by suspension of the Congress, either by war or because of some critical upheaval.

Just to clarify Torkelson’s position about who is the “Internationalist”, As a point of consideration, a May 3, 1939 article in The New York Times, relating to the “Brown Scare” which wrapped itself into a “Red Scare” before the Dies Committee (House UnAmericans Activities Committee):
“Moseley Proposes Use of the Army to Drive Out Reds
Tells Dies Committee Menace Could Be Handled in Five Minutes from White House”

Major General George Von Horn Moseley, retired, spent five turbulent hours before the Dies Committee today, alternately insisting that a Jewish – led Communist revolution was about to overwhelm the country and protesting that he harbored no anti-Semitic prejudices.  With an oratorical flourish he asserted that “the Jew is an Internationalist first” and “a patriot at home second.”

The General’s entry into the Committee room was impressive.  He stepped through the door, with a military stride, acoompanied by a retinue of attorneys, augmented by one member of the House, Representative Thorkelson of Montana, whom the current issue of Liberation, organ of William Dudley Pelley’s Silver Shirts, calls a “new statesman reaching high above this miasma of skullduggery.”

And, for curiosity’s sake, a June 2 article “Moseley Depicts a World of Jewry“:

General Moseley, who apparently lives under constant dread of assassination, started to drink from a glass of water which had been put at his place, as is the custom, when he jokingly asked if the water was all right.  An aide, taking him seriously, whisked the water away and brought a fresh supply in a new paper cup from the cooler in the corner of the caucus room.

What’s my point?  On a more or less weekly basis I throw up what amounts to the debris left over on the web regarding Lyndon Larouche, and there’s enough fairly interesting material that I might have done so.  I could have done that, but I thought I’d step back and put something in context, mainly with regards to a comment from factnet that’s always bugged me:  a demand for King to quit lying and speak the truth that Larouche’s “anti-semitism” heralds from “[King’s] Leftwing Stalinist Obediance” and not this nazi-friendly “Fascism.”
Actually I’m also somewhat annoyed by cries that Larouche created some “unique” line of (nonetheless bad) thought here.  Yes and No, with a slant toward the “no”.

Say, isn’t the two week Uber-Fundraising about over?  How’s it working?  (Second box here would, I guess, suggest an answer.  See also final link where accolytes to noted late night radio talk show guest Ed Dames compete stubbornly with accolytes of Lyndon Larouche to argue that their guy was right regarding the Swine Flu Pandemic and its attendent destruction of humanity… is that fund-raisable?)