I never understood the point of the public campaign against Molly Kronberg.  Sure, the private and internal items made sense in that purely vindictive slashing evil fashion, but propelling these items into the public domain (even as nobody was really reading — this was at the time they were evidentally deliberating on which way to go with the new Obama Administration) produced such confused elements as Jerry Pyenson (sp?) posting a Kronberg – headline to a 9/11 Truth board.  I guess this particular “campaign” is best explained as simply stating that they’re a little bit unhinged and a lot paranoid.  Beyond that, it is best not to waste time making sense of the senseless — their internal frustrations spilled out externally.

Roughly concurrent to my posting after seeing the factnet posts, I see Kheris posted on it here (and at another blog), and Nicholas Benton “tweeted” it here.  Dennis King posted this a bit later, propels it to a modest audience, and the “Legal Times” (blog) posted it here.  And also we have this from the Loudon Times.  Note too the additional edit on the wikipedia entry for “Kenneth Kronberg“, unfortunately having to explain his sourceas if to appease your Leather Stocking (“The blog post contains material that has been disputed in earlier discussions here” — Heh!) and (it’s coming) zillion twelth iteration of “Herschel Krustofsky”.
While I’m browsing wikipedia for these things, I will note how problematic these items are for wikipedia’s viability, and leave it at that.  As is taking leatherstocking’s disingenuity about “larouche-planet” published documents seriously.

Last night, my radio left on at the end of the night as Mike Malloy (on KPOJ) finishes his show,.  Next show is one I never listen to — I don’t even know her name right off the bat (Looking it up, it’s Nicole Sandler.)  And at the top of her program she references some Hitler Obama Swastika waver encounter she had for a town hall meeting with Henry Waxman roughly concurrent with the Barney Frank — Rachel Brown meeting, and promotes for next hour’s interview with the author of a piece for “The Daily Beast”, Max Blumenthal who “Found out who is behind these Hitler Obama posters.  Lyndon Larouche … Lyndon Larouche??? He’s still alive?”

Ba da bing, ba da boom.  Or, to quote wonkette.com :”1988 Called, and they want their Larouchies back!”  Obviously the product of the same media black-out that has a confession every so often slip through, such as with the first sentence of this article.  (“Past the filter” indeed.)

Blumenthal says what we basically know and adds little to, for instance to quote myself:

“The question with the Larouche cult’s particular brand of demougery: what measurement can we use to suggest they’ve injected something into our discourse, and to what degree have they simply reflected some bad impulses?  It is, I think, mostly the latter but there are times when the former does impugn on us, and there are a few small times when there are not clear – cut answers.”

Noteworthy, public imagination has it as often as not that they lag.

Blumenthal clearly alluded to Jeremiah Duggan and/or Kenneth Kronberg, without reference to their name, though wisely did not head into an area that he did not have the facts at his disposal and was a tangeant from his broader political point.  “The cult is not terribly interesting”, except inasmuch as we get something like — to quote the cult:

“One senior political operative told EIR that the Republican Party, desperate to regroup after the electoral defeats of 2006 and 2008, picked up the LaRouche attacks on the Obama health-care swindle, studied the documentation, concluded that LaRouche was absolutely correct, and jumped on the bandwagon. By last week, according to the source, every faction within the GOP had picked up on the LaRouche message—to the point that a frantic Karl Rove jumped in, to warn Republicans that they were losing control over the issue to LaRouche.”

And Rush Limbaugh is doing nothing to refute such a proposition.  For instance a listener calls in to suggest the “Hitler” analogies are counter-productive and off base (gives the opposition amunition), and Limbaugh doubles down with the old suggestion that “I’m beginning to think you’re a Seminar Caller”, the term used when a deviating opinion or thought somehow manages to flow into the show.

The next paragraph in the cult’s item here, though, serves to demonstrate the folly of at least not carefully crafting your “partisan problem” with Larouche.

Furthermore, a wide range of Democratic Party-linked voices, from The Nation’s David Greider, to the New York Times’s Frank Rich, to cultural commentator Eli Siegel, to Arianna Huffington, have also joined the attack on President Obama, denouncing him for cutting a dirty backroom deal with “Big Pharma” and “Big Insurance,” and accusing him of being a corporativist—i.e., a fascist.

They think they’re propelling events, with you part of it no matter where you stand.  Hell, they even take credit for the juvenile Uranus pun.  The problem I have with Chip Berlet’s post here is that, whatever else you can say about Larouche and company in relation to the broader agitators (and I see that he subsequently wrote on the broader agitators and assorted demonstrators) — the Larouchies remain interlopers and framing any agitations into their own movements, and not part and parcel to the rest of it.  (Hm.:    Finding a large Lyndon LaRouche pamphlet in my parents’ house was somewhat disturbing. … Mental note: trash them as soon as I leaf through, after spotting on lying around after a “Deployment” happens, to avoid that problem.)

But the part of Blumenthal’s discussion that was most noteworthy for me, aligning to both what we know about Jeremiah Duggan and what is conjectured about his death, and aligning to Peter E. Tennenbaum (“Earnest One”)’s testimony on his experiences with the cult, was his description of a visit to a meeting of Larouche’s young recruits.  After watching them being told to “Give Up Their Dreams” and alerted to the grim task at hand in fighting the Oligarchical Forces, he challenged the speaker to quit “scaring and taking advantage of these young, vulnerable lives” and “quit twisting their minds”.  He then had to rush off, and run to his car to leave, and as he did so, the Larouchies surrounded his car in mob mentality fashion, and to make a break for it (and I suppose the Larouche org would twist these words to suit their purposes) he explained that he had to “practically run them over” in escaping the place.  If you can find the top of the second hour of this program anywhere, it is worth a listen.

(One last note: Yeah, but let’s get one thing straight: he is no Mihkail Gorbachev.)

John McCain, in what has become the ballsy move toward deigning a “bi-partisan” bill of 80 votes, notes that the “public option” may be a “big threat” to Private Insurers.  Which is or was the idea, wasn’t it?

Also, where’s the panel discussion with McCain, Kerry, Dole, and Dukakis?

The cynical promise of Obama’s Health Care policies, such as it is, was that “Big Pharma” might be bought off in order to reign in the power of the Insurers.  But that line is not holding.  We do know why.  It begins with Rahm Emanuel’s stated line that the “Only Non-negotiable is Success”, afraid to be holding a bad when a finality falls short.  It allows everyone to play both sides against the middle, and is a debate against Failure.

I do not quite understand why the process can’t dictate a 60 Democratic defeat of the filibuster to move on to whatever bill can garner 50 votes, except that the process has been built up to fail in such a manner.  After a porcess held up hostae to Max Baucus and Kent Conrad, who themselves have held it hostage to Chuck Grassley, they finally shout out a, “Ronciliation it is!”  Except for the wise words of a Joseh Lieberman, who wishes to pass the buck of the heart of any reform.  To a later time.  Sometime after the historically-to-be-expected party mid-term losses, I gather, which would not make anything easier?  Didn’t we try to get rid of that fellow?

There are serveral ways of looking at the much heralded Obama approval slide.  His “Liberal Slide” is more striking than his more than inevitable “Conservative  Slide” and “frustration from process” Independent Slide.  It is the fear of letting the Bad become the enemy of the Good, as opposed to Good become the Enemy of the Perfect.  But watch the other numbers.  Just when we thought the Republicans’ numbers couldn’t slide down any further, they have.  It is a bit of a game of “murder – suicide” they are playing, and an understandable game.  There is an underlying assumption that a presidential candidate can propel him (her?) self with the messaging of “Rising above it all”, timeless in the scheme of Bush’s “Changing the Tone in Washington” and the thing about Obama which lead many voters over to Clinton in the primary — and is tested round about here.  But as liable to happen here is that Obama will shore up his numbers, by extension his party’s, and that leaves the Republicans with the long-term electoral problem of being identified with yelling “Death Panels!”

The expected Democratic losses in 2010 — again, the times the party didn’t lose seats in a midterm through the past century are all rather anomolous (advice to Republicans: find a Senate candidate in Arkansas pronto!) — is minimized by some feasibly forward-moving health care bill passing and maximized by one not passing.  That’s sort of how these things work.

I was curious to see how one of the most conservative of Blue Dog Democrats, Walt Minnick of Idaho, making an appearance before “Tea Party Boise” would play.  A summary.:

There was lots of loud applause and some fairly lusty booing at some points, but whenever someone tried tried to speak out of turn (they drew random numbers, and only those people could come to the microphone and ask questions / make comments) the crowd shushed them quite effectively. (An example was when Walt was explaining how President Obama is President of the whole country, and someone yelled out “What about his birth certificate.”)

One “Birther”.

Lots of Tea Partiers had what I considered some radical ideas and some fuzzy thinking — one suggested that the whole concept of insurance was the cause of all the country’s ills, and that if there was no insurance people would be a lot more personally responsible. There was lots of cheering for the concept of putting people in jail who tried to use the emergency room and not pay, but they also complained about the high cost of incarcerating people and wanted frequent use of the death penalty. Combining the two, it seemed the only logical solution to their conundrum was to execute poor people who couldn’t afford to pay their hospital bills.

Of course.  What would Ayn Rand Do?

I was beginning to get disappointed that I wasn’t going to see any fireworks when the meeting ended, and then it happened — the “Truthers” (“Israel did it” sub-division) showed up.

A bit more:

Some audience comments drew applause, whistles of appreciation, and a few catcalls about Communism and socialized medicine.  Minnick received some boos for saying he supported the president, if not his health care plans.  Minnick said he saw the need for some private-sector reforms that would ensure everyone has coverage.

AND

In his opening remarks Walt emphasized how we must “pay for” any health care reform, drawing many approving hoots and much applause. Then he said, and this is a near quote: ” I’ve met with lots of groups, (and he named some clubs and political groups) and North End Democrats, and I think that group is more likely to produce a Fox News moment than this group.” Laughs and applause. Which kind of put me off, to be honest. […]

My favorite question was when the elderly “gentleman” complained that “this administration has too many czars and coming from Hungary he know about czars. After attending meeting felt as though I needed to get home quicky to shower. Don’t think that I have ever spent time in a room with people that were filled with so much hate and negative energy!

BUT BUT BUT … a Rebuttal to that:

On the issue of all the Obama Czars he said, there is no such position. The president can call his advisers any title he wants. (WHAT?? Wake up Walt all these Czars are going to make your job irrelevant if you don’t figure this out.)
This blogger than proceeds to refer to his blog in the third-person, and by initials, in calling him a one-termer due to his failure to impress him.

But, initial blog third person figure is right, and everbody knows it.  I do not know what a Walt Minnick gained from deliberating with Bill Sali’s electorate — it is possible that his half – conciliatory straddling, finding that “middle way” that puts him 40 percent into his political party, and that allowed him to defeat a Bill Sali.  He is that accidental congress-critter, much like Cao in Louisiana — in the Democrats’ whip game of “Catch and Release”, one of the last caught, and one of the first released.

Hm.

Well, they’ll need all the money from Canada they can get, I guess.
I await the mass deployments with the “Molly Kronberg with Hitler Mustache” iconography.
Lawsuit here.

It might be a good idea to start watching this spot  to see if new insults are hurled on one of the more bizarre stop-motion comments threads out there, and at this wikipedia editing page for the “Criminal Trials”.

Watching a mother lead two elementary school “Back to School” shoppers brought back a weird set of memories.  It was of my teacher — maybe first but certainly second and third grades —

Classroom full of lots of colorful and bright placards and posters all around the room, professional and not, lamenated cardboard of educational content through which students might possibly glean something through a sort of Osmosis —

A horrible memory from the start of fourth grade.  They were coming down at us from the ceiling!  Motivational messages — “If life gives you lemons, make lemonade!”, cut out in the shape of a lemon!  OH THE HUMANITY!

— Reset.

Amelia Bedelia always left me with a certain amount of disporportionate frustration and angst.  The story of Amelia Bedelia’s severals books was of a maid hired with s list of house-keeping instructions.  She would go through them — literally fulfilling idiomatic expressions, thus botching every one of her jobs.  She would then bake a lemon merangue pie.  The upper class New England gentry would then return home, be aghast at each of Amelia Bedelia’s botched jobs, fumigate in anger, prepare to give Ms. Bedelia what for, but then — have a mouthful of that lemon merangue pie, and suddenly all was forgiven and she’d be hired again, except next time with very carefully written instructions.

Ignorning a smidgeon of an inability to identify with the upper class New England gentry.  There was a further problem with my inability to understand why anyone desire lemon merangue pie.  But those were not terribly problematic.  What always put me on edge, whenever one of these two or three teachers read one of these books — compounded by that sort of feeling I garnered that the teacher thought this was somewhere near the pinacle of these stories and a personal favorite / classic — what always annoyed me was that on multiple occasions, spliced throughout the book, the literal interpretation that Amedlia Bedelia pursued was not at all literal.  For instance, she might have an instruction to “Draw the curtains”.  She would then draw ON the curtains.  This was not the same thing, and I knew it.  So, I sat in my seat, or in the “story – book corner” (legs crossed “Indian Style” — do they still use that term?) , not able to process why this error exists, and as whole not really having any outlet for my frustration.  Even if I somehow had that opportunity, I would not have had the necessary vocabulary to explain the books’ essential problem, and I knew that I’d get stuck in suggesting this problem to the teacher that she’d think I’m grappling with the simple “literary” / “idiom” matter, and not see the deeper problem with “false literary” / “literary”  “idiom”.

So, if nothing else the great lesson to be taken from my expreiences with Amelia Bedelia was to grin and bear it, as the teacher smuggly and self-satisfied read this supposedly brilliant piece.  It’s probably an important lesson, really.  There are a number of reactions to different stimuli through the years I hav ehad where I am left wondering one of two subtley different things: Am I the only one? or Is this common at all?  Or was it just little old neurotic me?

I think I am going to have to poke into the Amelia Bedelia books to see if my grade school problems were at all founded, or if maybe I wasn’t at that proper age to appreciate them.  (The primary audience for these books are an ‘elementary school teacher‘ type, the secondary audience the captive classroom who the teacher is trying to mold their minds away from, say, the morning’s GI Joe cartoon and whatever it is the girls watched.)

I am having a problem understanding the “news” Tom Ridge is “relvealing”.  It is forcing a quick file search through my brain.  Color coding in the terror alert system was politicized? You don’t say.

Didn’t he already say that?  Maybe it was some other Bush Administration official?  Or was it my awareness based on the simple matter of a very base level of observatory skill?  his doesn’t even rise to the level of “Confirmation of Suspicion” because I’ve thought my suspicion confirmed long time.

In other news, I felt an element of  “Oh, Go to Hell” with this. But I guess I can cheer up. The man’s no longer president.  Actually, most of his lasting damage happened in his first term anyways.

Your Dick Armey, representating Freedom Works — an organizer for those there Disrupting tactic protesters, has an interest in assigning all mentions of Obama = Hitler to the Larouche org.  Rush Limbaugh has an interest in telling a “Barney Frank Fag” joke, as well keeping his perogative in pronouncing Obama as Hitler.  I haven’t looked into Sean Hannity so don’t quote me on this, but he appears to be brushing the Larouchie into his band of merry agitators — Barney Frank stomped on her, dagnabit. (Live by the Sword, die the sword?)  Here we see Bill O’Reilly make an attempt to hedge his “Merry Band of Agitators” with a disclamer that the first person there was not real and instead a  “political activist“.  (Er.  Bill.  They’re all “political activists”, as much as you define that as a slur.  Actually the problem here is that his point could have and would have been served better by not mentioning her.  Later in the program O’Reilly chats with Dennis Miller, an interesting conversation I’ll post in the comments, and floats another item of dishonesty by calling the Larouchie a “plant”.)  But wait.  Hold on a Minute!

Every network and most cable stations played the confrontation between Rachel Brown and Barney Frank in their prime time programs, mostly featuring Buffoon Barney’s question about “what planet are you from?” as if it showed he was tough, standing up to the “crazies,” even though most left out Rachel’s LaRouche connection. Most revealing is that both Rush Limbaugh and Jon Stewart, both the right and the left, showed the video of the confrontation, made clear that this was LaRouche vs. Barney, and then suggested that the proper response to Barney would be to note that he was from Uranus – adding another of Lyn’s jokes to popular culture, along with the now famous moustache. It is unlikely that Barney will bring up other planets again.

I didn’t catch that oen with the Jon Stewart clip.  Maybe I’ll have to go back and watch it a third time.  He’s almost certainly told the Uranus joke in the past, oh so ironically juxtaposed next to something more high-minded, for instance.  (Post-script: He meant Stephen Colbert, probably.  Interestingly there, Stephen Colbert has used the visual “Hitler Mustache” image as a running joke.  Witness the “Hitler Mustache” on the old man here for another good visual gag.).  In the anals of the Larouche cult, Larouche is responsible for oh so many things.  SDI, for instance.  SDI and apparently the Uranus joke.  SDI, according to wikipedia (always right, except when it’s wrong, and as always watch this space)  was fathered by Daniel O. Graham, Peter L. Hagelstein, and others.  The Uranus joke I had always thought was authored by this kid I knew back in Kidnergarten — name of Alex.  Now I know better.  The LYM / LPAC film team should get right on that historical docu-drama.  Get me Robert Beltran for narration!

Anyway.  Rachel Brown.  Who’s she?  She is the young “volunteer” of the Larouche organization who Barney Frank shot down.  That is surely enought to catupult her to the top of the pecking order in terms of future Larouchie presidential contender, right?  Do you know who Lane Hudson is?  He is the man who shouted out a question about DADT and DOMA during a Bill Clinton speech a week ago.  Let’s compare blog results for these two names using blogpulse.  (Finally able to upload these things.)

Another way of working this might be to chart “Barney Frank”, “Larouche”, and “Rachel Brown”.

Hm.  “Rachel Brown” and “Larouche”.  Wow.  Who’s getting the fuzzy end of the lollypop here?  Of course, she may be better of off not identified.  Prsumably she’ll have to put this in her past post cult life, and as David P Goldman “Spengler” discovered recently, artful lying is in order — the more traces there are, the harder it is to minimize.

Mike Malloy (mentioned in my last post) brought up the Barney Frank questioning at the beginning of his radio show Wednesday night.  He did not mention Larouche, which was interesting because (as I posted) he relayed a scene with a deployment the night before.  He said (roughly) “When I see an expression like that, I know that one of two things is happening between her ears.  It has either been emptied, or it has been filled with snakes.”

The Larouche org will take the non – mentions as a sign of a media and Elite conspiracy, and play it up to their organization.  First sign of that was this taking on a stray Huffington Post mention arguing that the media was giving too much attention to “crazies”, that they shouldn’t be given any more attention than Larouche.  They may even be ready to slam a supposed victory at Conor Clarke with his admission that he has no interest in looking into this further.  (Amusingly enough, the Larouche organization rather clumsily slammed a puff piece he wrote for the New Republic — I read that to be somewhat in lieu of any reaction to a more substantial piece Avi Klein was working on for the Washington Monthly.  Not that I can criticize Clarke much for delving into an asterisk and footnote of American politics.)

Heh heh.  He said “Uranus”.  Heh heh.

This Washington Times “Blame Game” blurby thing?  I call Partisan Blinders.  In stylistic terms and in some modest amounts of substance (in as much as it is a variation of Franklin Roosevelt’s perhaps apocrapyl “You have to make me”), Bill Clinton came across well in that exchange, and in his defense of his policies.  His interjection, “You oughta go to one of those congressional health care meetings, you’d do really well there,” was a reasonable way to cool off the audience protest and move ahead with his agenda at hand (a speech), and I do not think gay-rights blogger Lane Hudson had anything to take personal offense.

Substance-wise, Bill Clinton came up short.  To believe his would be to dissolve from the record book his electioneering of garnering votes with his “Defense of Marriage” act, and even more to the point some rather toxic snubbing of homosexuals at the White House in the aftermath of the 1994 mid-term losses for his party, and since I’m having a problem finding it around the Internet in quick order — I’m forced to pass it away.

I suppose there’s a reason he was elected twice, which takes a healthy amount of cynicism.  Just don’t say he advanced the country on this social issue.

In the not too distant past, leading out of the debris of that moment when just under half of the Democrats in the House voted to authorize the war in Iraq and just over half of the Democrats in the Senate did as well, and coming in to the shift of an oppositional line from the Democratic Party, the easy calculation was made in order to demonstrate to the American public that they meant business and were not “soft” in the Military and Defense departments.  Afghanistan was and is smart; Iraq was and is dumb.

John Kerry stumbled around there, further expressing a proposed — dare I call it — “surge” of military personnel in Iraq.  Muttering rollsed in along the lines of “maybe he doesn’t believe it?”, though I luck-lusterly meted that out with “maybe it’s a better strategy”, albeit not one that aligned in with the anti-war platform most of his voters would support.

Interestingly enough, as support for the war in Iraq deteroiated through 2005 and 2006, a counter-veiling and quasi-counter-intuitive opinion emerged amongst a certain subset.  It made sense, even if it seemed based on such a bit too broad a framework of understandings — “a little bit of knowledge” being “more dangerous than none”.  Iraq will turn out fine enough — better than under Saddam; they have a well enough history of maybe authoratarian and undemocratic order, but order nonetheless — to pull together.  (And, oh yeah, caveat to keep some cred here: we’re building permanent bases.  ‘Tis a shame.)  But Afghanistan?  I don’t know about that one.  Not going as well as we are lead to believe.  And it’s the grave-yard of empires and all that.  The United States might be screwed with that one.

As it were, Obama campaigned promising winding down a war in Iraq, and ramp up a war in Afghanistan.  It is a plank that comes from out of the previous item of Democratic conventional wisdom.  It is worth mentioning, on the eve of their election, that the administration has professed an uncertainty over the metrix, a sure-fire direction to uncertainty of purpose.  Democracy, I guess, is being served:  James Carville had provided political advice for one of Karzai’s opponents.  Elections tomorrow!