It’s always interesting to see how the parties position their fund raising pitches, tending toward an unrealistic Villiany.  Try this story for instance.

The Democratic Governors Association sent a fundraising e-mail to supporters Tuesday highlighting Minnesota, Alaska, Florida and Georgia as “top pickup prospects.”  […]

He also invoked DFLers’ biggest opponents — Rep. Michele Bachmann and former Sen. Norm Coleman — in his pitch.

“Bachmann, you may remember, called for an ‘armed and dangerous’ revolution against President Obama’s policies,” Glendening wrote. “And when Norm Coleman lost his 2008 Senate race, he wasted millions of dollars on legal maneuvers designed to keep Al Franken from being seated.

“Can you imagine what Bachmann or Coleman would do if they took control of Minnesota and its eight congressional districts?”

A bit hard to fathom.  I am willing to bet neither will be running for Governor, or if one or the other does (particularly Bachman — though Coleman would be exempt from my bet if he had lost the election a bit more cleanly), the Republican Party of Minnesota and nationally would be unofficially backing somebody else for nomination.  And that’s not just because of the sentiment expressed with:

Although the names of both Bachmann and Coleman have been bruited about as potential candidates, both have demurred about the possibility.

So why bring the dire warnings of a Bachman or Coleman Governorship into a fundraising pitch?  Was George W Bush pre-occupied?

Rush Limbaugh explained Mark Sanford’s affair as an opt out of the Obama’s Destuctive System of Governance.

Michael Savage furthered along to the grand Obama Political Destruction Conspiracy:  “We’re also going to talk about the hit job on Gov. Sanford. Yes he committed adultery by admission, but you have to ask yourself a few questions. How did his local paper get his private emails, number one? Number two, they say they have known about this since December, but they held off releasing this information until now. So you have to ask yourself, why did the press just now get around to exposing the scandal of Gov. Sanford?”

Of the two, I’m guessing there is more to the Savage conspiracy than the Limbaugh theory.  Consider the history, and consider this bit of hypothesis.

Obama’s political career began with a special election in the Illinois Senate which opened up when US Congressman Melvin Reynolds was indicted and runned out of office — as the Illinois State Seantor Alice Palmer jumped up to run for the Congressional seat.  Famously, after Palmer lost, and after she assembled the requisite number of petitions to get on the ballot, Obama aggressively challenged Palmer’s name of the ballot.
Melvin Reynolds was indicted for  sexual assault and criminal sexual abuse for engaging in a sexual relationship with a 16-year-old campaign volunteer.  Perhaps Obama noticed this opening of sex-related scandals, as his next career rise was certainly aided and abetted by sex scandals.

The early Democratic front runner for the US Senate seat in 2004 was Blair Hull.  Then… A month before the primary elections a news story broke regarding his divorce from his ex-wife. The controversy ended up destroying the Hull campaign.^  Hull tried to keep the divorce records sealed, but pressure from journalists and his opposing candidates forced him to release them.  And so Obama was nominated.
The Republican nominee was Jack Ryan.  Some of his divorce records had been opened up to the public; others not.  Then…

On June 22, 2004, after receiving the report from the court-appointed referee, the judge released the files that were deemed consistent with the interests of Ryan’s young child. In those files, Jeri Ryan alleged that Jack Ryan had taken her to sex clubs in several cities, intending for them to have sex in public. […]  Jim Oberweis, Ryan’s defeated GOP opponent, commented that “these are allegations made in a divorce hearing, and we all know people tend to say things that aren’t necessarily true in divorce proceedings when there is money involved and custody of children involved.

In short order, Ryan dropped out of the race.  Obama had no opponent on the ballot.  Then the Republicans selected Alan Keyes to fill the ballot, improving Obama’s electoral fortunes even more.

Obama gets elected president four years later.   Sure enough, within half a year, two of his possible opponents are destroyed by scandals involving extramarital affairs. One John Ensign starts to work on raising his profile, and as such gets touted as a Republican presidential possibility.  He ten has to admit to an extra-marital affair with a a female staff worker to avoid threats of blackmail.  One Mark Sanford emerges as a leading opponent of Obama in striking against his stimulus bill, and becomes a favorite of some conservatives for a presidential run.  But he disappears for five days and is caught in a web of lies involving hiking the Appalachia Trail, and thus is forced to confess to an extra-marital affair in Argentina.
Two down — ten more to go!

It might behoove me to mention that Obama won the Democratic nomination from something called “the Clinton Machine”, a towering contraption which had various  vulnerabilities to it that the media tended to gloss over in early explanations of Hillary Clinton’s “Inevitibility”.  The residuals of the Monica Lewinsky scandal were probably one permetation, though it’s hard to measure against the whole body of work.

I suppose, to connect the dots, to challenge Obama on his way to the Power is to expose your infedility skeletons in the closet.  The one man Obama could not vanquish was his Congressional opponent, Bobby Rush.  Maybe the media wasn’t on Obama’s take yet?  Or mabe Rush was good at hiding any extramarital affair from Obama’s Hunger-Lust hand?

For the life of me, I can’t tell from what perspective this is coming from.

But it does link the two current stories in the “Ron Paul Revolution” — the ACLU and “Campaign for Liberty” backed lawsuit against a TSA search of a cash-wielding Ron Paul supporter.

Go one further step to the rawstory link and you find this puzzling opening.

The American Civil Liberties Union may have just earned itself a few more Republican admirers.

That greatly disfigures Ron Paul’s relationship with the Republican Party, but so it shall be.

The other item of news.  Paul’s “Audit the Fed” has gotten its 218th (ergo majority in the house) sponsor.  This was pre-arranged, though for the life of me I don’t really understand the point of the symbolism.

I suppose there is some overlap in support.  Your alexjones and “from the wilderness“ type has settled on Kucinich as the Democrat to balance Ron Paul in exposing the Oligarchy, but that’s just because Cynthia McKinney is out of office.

Though it doesn’t take too much googling to find support for a Paul / Kucinich ticket and the inaccurate sentiment that they are the most ideologically compatible of a bunch.

Incidentally, not so fast on that bill.  The Senate has a way of reconfiguring things.

Third item of interest: dateline Connecticut:  Stuart Rothenberg is not impressed by Ron Paul accolyte candidate Peter Schiff.  But that’s not Peter Schiff’s point.  I guess.

Out of the Matt Taibbi – Goldman Sachs dust-up — a bit of it here,
he brings to the attention that Goldman Sachs is set to profit from the Cap and Trade bill.

Of course, Mr. Goldman Sachs would.  He’s very much plugged in to the trends, and can hedge his bets every which way in Congressional pieces of legislation.  So he’s moved forward based on that one, so intricately tied to the US Government that he is.

Not really a good argument either way regarding Cap and Trade, as against some Goldman Sachs bashing in — for instance — the Dennis Kucinich question at the time of the first bank bail-out “Is this the U.S. Congress or the Board of Directors at Goldman Sachs?”.

Actually, I am left wondering about the greasing of the wheels for support from Big Corn in advancing the great savior “Ethanol”, skewing and disfiguring the policy unnaturally.    I have read a small amount of literature decrying Ethanol, and a smaller amount defending it.  My guess is that this geo-politically convenient energe source had better match the defenders’, lest this make “Cap and Trade” ever more useless, and…

… Obama’s legacy turn out to be one of swatting flies.

Maybe it matters not so much.  It barely passed the House.  Anything is supposed to be apt to pass the House.  I have a difficult time seeing the headlines as “Legislative Victory”, seeing the future in the Senate.  Maybe a “Clean Coal” allowance can be greased through to keep Byrd on board.

I kind of don’t understand it.  It took 12 days, 12 entire days, for the Alex Jones website “prisonplanet.com” (I know I could probably try to check in with what I suppose to be the higher profile “infowars” site, but I will go one or the other route with this one) to explode with an overload of “Da Conspiracy De Iran”.

Sure, there was a sputtering up before then.  But it took until two days ago for it to overflow the page.  Today, the page is less dominated by Iran, but two days ago looked like all the hallmarks of a campaign.

It took that long to thread their nihilistic needle, of assembling all the random dots and drawing all the necessary contrived lines, in line with blaming the CIA?
What?  Was this an abundance of caution?  They really needed to check their sources, and double-check, and find collaborating information?

Checking in with my other source of largely conspiratorializing aggregating — “Information Clearing House”, I see a George Soros. 

Meanwhile, Jeff Rense links to this here with the phrase “CIA May Have Executed Neda (big Surprise.”)   It is a straight-forward acceptance of the Iranian government’s straight faced lie.   (As well, isn’t it nice to see Israel Shamir’s analysis posted here, striking that oh-so-finely tuned balance between a demonstration of a more open Iranian government and a Totalatarian Jack-bootery.  He’s a real Centrist Conciliator, that “Israel Shamir”.)

I am to believe that the Iranian protests are one giant CIA (or, you know, whatever) psy-ops project.  Every bit of it.  The election was fair and legitimate — and if they weren’t, it falls under the field of legitimate Iranian constitutional purview — and if not, don’t you realize there are children starving in Africa?
Now let’s examine the history of “False Flag Operations”.

Surely Jeanne Kirkpatrick’s “Blame America First Crowd” phrase is largely an overused invective, used mainly by people prone to an American Exceptionalist viewpoint “my country right or wrong”, “America is the greatest country ever in the world comma sniff and you had better share that sentiment hand shake”, downplaying any negative action the American government has played in the world, or ignoring the negative feeling that engendered to the nations treated as chess pieces during the Cold War with the Soviet Union.

Our conspiratoralizing nit-wits?   Forget “blowback theory” in placing some blame or causality past the Islamic Fundamentalist perpetrators of 9/11 and to American and Superpower actions of the past — the functional target of the phrase “blame america first” and how it is prone to misfire in its stand against governmental stove-piping,
Forget that too, because in their worldview there are no Islamic Fundamentalist terrorists.  But we can’t even quite call them the “Blame America First” crowd.  It’s the Oligarchy.  And there are no other independent actors.  They have framed their perceptions to a narrow vantage point, — a more feasible idea might be something on the order of an intersection of overlapping conspiracies — that might get them out of this box where they are parroting an Iranian police state’s propaganda for the death of the poster-rallying matyr Neda.  (Which they wouldn’t in a million years do for some of the gross improprieties of the American state.  Or Israel — see: Rachel Corrie).

The other word from the “right” in the history of our politics, from out of Leftist support and apologizing of the Soviet Union, was “useful idiots”.  But it’s hard to put a finger on how “useful” the fringe is in this regard.  They’ll need to crowd further into the “mainstream” frame before they can be rewarded with such a title.

But… why did it take so long?  Was there some sort of coordination necessary to maximize an effect?
…………………..

The brohauhau over Obama taking the Huffington Post query is wrong-headed.  Never mind the “Iranian” and “Internet source” angle of signals — she asked the most pertinent question: whatever the long term holds (and the overthrow of the Shah in 1979 occured over a year, with long subdued periods when the threat to the government seemed to have passed), Ahmadinejad behind Khamenei will be situated in power — and so the question:

“Under which conditions would you accept the election of Ahmadinejad, and if you do accept it without any significant changes in the conditions there, isn’t that a betrayal of the — of what the demonstrators there are working towards?”

I don’t know the answer to that questio.  And Obama dodged it, meaning … we will wait to see if the Obama Administration has an answer to that question.

Iran is going to fade from the public’s mindspace and American’s notorious short attention spans.  Meaning it will be up to you to take actively care, if you so feel inclined, in short order.

“Thicket of Lies Sank Adams Case”.  The Oregonian reports.  Either dishonestly or misleadingly.

Well, the primary lie comes out of Beau Breedlove’s credibility problem.  Adams’s lawyer grabbed him at the go and had him sign an affadivit declining any sexual conduct before the age of 18.  This conflcited with his later admission of the bathroom stall kiss.  And couple this with Breedlove’s perceived flakiness in his fifteen minutes of fame.

But that headline.  Surely the Oregonian has made up its mind on whence where Adams should go.  And they can turn over their editorial page to a nonstop drumbeat of “Oust Adams Now” and remain firmly in their right.  Meanwhile, the front page headline “Thicket of Lies Sank Adams Case” is as narrowly correct as the Kroeger case was narrowly legalistically founded.  Clearly the Oregonian would like an implied apostrophe — “A Thicket of Lies” having indeed sank “The Adams Case” as opposed to “Adams’s Case”* having been sank by “A Thicket of Lies”.

Back to Breedlove for a moment.  Regarding this sentence in the Willamette Week’s pull:
Beau Breedlove is a puzzle wrapped in an enigma.

Perhaps you can say that, but there’s nothing in the following to support such.  He’s cahsed in on his 15 minutes of fame for a small fortune, and has developed a passive / aggressive stance toward the media — the latter aided in part with being pitted with, for instance, the Oregonian text message taunt of — what was it?  “Forgot to mention that one, eh?”, when such and such a revelation was made.

Really, I get the feeling the reporters of various news outlets are so entrenched in this media bubble that they can’t quite get outside of it and recognize a more than one-dimensional interaction with them.
(Incidentally, The Oregonian back-tracked.)

————–
* My Junior Year High School English teacher “finalized” my understanding of the rules of apostrphes.  Though, if a superior demands no “s” to follow a name/word that ends with “s”, I’ll comply — ’tis the one lesson I picked up from my Sixth grader teacher.  Which brings me to some Style and Grammer news:  The British have dropped the ‘I Before E Except after C’ rule due to “Too Many Exceptions”.

To clarify my Sanford posting in the “Horse Race” post, when I saw the hoop-lah over Mark Sanford’s disappearance I knew what was happening was a lot of sharks circling around looking for a sex scandal.  I didn’t really believe the “Went hiking the Appalachia” story, but I didn’t disbelieve it either — I don’t know the fellow, and despite what people seem to think, a governor has a bigger field of privacy than a president!, nor was I particularly dismissive that an affair wasn’t the source of a cover-up, I just would much prefer to allow a politician, or whomever, to have the opportunity to jump away for a spell and hike the Appalachias, or whatever, without a presumption of something unsordid.

It’s a characteristic of the Internets that the reaction was to tap the “Hike Naked Weekend” and ponder that storyline.

When it turned out he dashed over to Argentina, I gathered that the sharks swimming around looking for dirt were about right, though it’s a curious affair.  So we have two Republican falls from grace within a week.  Two Republican Presidential Hopefuls?  Not particularly — Sanford would surely have run for office, as that sort of messanger candidate that doesn’t really accumulate a nomination, and Ensign’s Presidential Bubble was a nugget of a bored ever flowing chattering class apt to notice a politician ducking into Iowa.

But the bottom line is that I need to do a dusting off of this here.

I think I can safely pluck away the Kid — that was a case of kicking ’em while they were down, and Joe the Plummer is no longer a Republican.  But for the life of me I don’t know who to replace these three with.  I’ll get back to it, I guess.

We still have Nixon to kick around.

And he weighs in on Roe v Wade with…

“There are times when abortions are necessary — I know that. . . . Suppose you have a black and a white, or a rape.”

I will forego the current parlor game of interpreting whether Nixon was equating rape with inter-racial sex or fighting the plague of mixed race progeny – I guess we take this as Nixon’s beyond the grave commentary on the current president.  It’s enough to make one start to suspect that Nixon had a Dark Side to his personality.

Fun Nixon fact: in 1974, at the height of Nixon’s unpopularity and disgrace, a Democratic pollster working for the Democratic Congressional candidates found that, according to his poll, and contrary to the results of the 1972 Nixon landslide, George McGovern won the election.  Similar to how polls show Obama’s margin of victroy over McCain has increased since that election.