Item the first:

All politicians need money for their campaigns. But a congressional candidate from Santa Fe is asking supporters to give his campaign something he says is far more valuable than cash: gold and silver.

Kokesh is a supporter of U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, who campaigned for president last year on a platform that included returning U.S. currency to the gold standard.

I’ve seen much the same story before.  I guess running for office to make a point — in this case the Glories of Precious metals — is an honorable use of the ballot access.

The thing about this race, when compared to the earlier Oregon race in 2006, is the rise of Ron Paul into the insertion of the story.  “Ron Paul supporter” becomes either a shorthand, or an explainer for a phenomenon of candidates in Republican primary.  Or else we could say that these candidacies have been taking place from time immemorial (or at least since around the heyday of the Birch Society), but are now being corralled into something else.

… which happened somewhere around the point of:
Item the Second.

Nope.  Nothing cultish about that.
And what in the world is this?

Meanwhile, interesting twists in the race of Rand Paul, enter Kentucky AND Item the Third.

“I was actually going to offer to pay for Rand’s registration myself today with a personal check if he would file what he really is – a Libertarian,” said Mike Bryant, a Paul protester.

Party hack.  It’s a primary — and I do believe a two way primary at that.  If you want the mainline Republican to go to the general against the Democrat instead of the “Libertarian trying to take over the Republican Party” — mobilize your Republican base to beat the Paul.

The idiocy of the definitions toward “Centrism”.

Moderates don’t tend to win presidential nominations — see Joe Lieberman or Rudy Giuliani — and, given that Bayh has been seriously considered as a running mateand then passed over twice in the past eight years, it’s hard to see the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee putting him on his or her shortlist.

We have been saved the Evan Bayh Presidency, which seems to be a good thing.  But… what the heck is this “moderates don’t tend to win presidential nominations” business?  Arguably John McCain once staked his reputation as something (medialy, at least).  Then we have George Herbert Walker Bush who won one in 1988, Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996, Jimmy Carter in 1976, Richard Nixon in 1960 and 1968, and…

Evan Bayh and Joseph Lieberman just kind of stink.
Then there’s the problem that “Centrism” has no meaning that I’ve been able to decipher.

In doing that round through of Larouche articles at wikipedia, I found that the org has been rather successfully shut out of their propaganda editing offensive ever since the brief flurry of an attempt post Krusty Banishment.  Assuming this call for a spell check cleaning isn’t part of the Sock Puppet tree, and an attempt to crack the editing privileges open — but I assume that’s just paranoid conjecture on my part.

But I came upon this line:  LaRouche has run for president on eight consecutive occasions, a record for any candidate, and has tied Harold Stassen’s record as a perennial candidate.
Is that right?  He ties with Harold Stassen?  Well then, considering Larouche’s strong aim for Immortality, there is only one thing that needs to be done.  The record is in his grasp.  Larouche NEEDS to run for President, just to blow Harold Stassen into the dust.  Come on, everybody in the Larouche organization.  That means you.  Yes, you, Harley Schlanger*, I’m pointing at YOU.  Lyndon Larouche NEEDS TO Be ON THE BALLOT in 2012.  You don’t want to be the equivalent of this year’s Indianapolis Colts team.  (And otherwise, you’re stuck with a vague rememberance of a Whale-related bumper sticker as a historical legacy.) HISTORY BECKONS!!
* Disclaimer:  Actually I’m pointing at nobody in particular.  That name just randomly came to me.  Disregard it.

Of course, maybe there is no urgency at all here, and Larouche can wait for 2040 to make the record breaking run.  This under the stewardship of the Cryogenic advances of Mister Phil Ossifur.  But at that point, I’d just go ahead and exhume Harold Stassen and commence the stalement.

In the meanwhile, as we await the HISTORIC presidential bid announcement, there are a few other perenial items.

HITLER!!!

“Because Harry Reid has now made himself a duplicate of Adolf Hitler, he’s responsible for every Jew who was killed by Hitler,” LaRouche said. “Harry Reid must take personal responsibility for every Jew killed by Hitler, by allowing this thing to go through. Every Jew who was killed by Hitler, Harry Reid is responsible for now! He must resign immediately in embarrassment, in abject apology to the American people for copying exactly the Hitler policy, which is so infamous. He has made a page for himself in infamy!

Wow.  That’s kicking it up a notch — one inch more explicit and ahistorical.   I guess they disagree with the statement that The Fuher has no place in the Health Care Furor.

And to go back to the whale postings:
sounds fishy to me. larouchies aren’t really known for their sense of humor.
That’s a… sense of humor, right?

As I recall, the original “Nuke the Whales” was from the old Bloom County comic strip. Might have been a parody of the LaRouche campaign.  I think it was expanded from there.

On to the other perennial.
Well, the process has gone on, since last August. It’s undergone various transformations. Now, we’re reaching the point that we’re headed toward a breakdown. There’s a breakdown crisis in process in Europe, there’s a breakdown crisis in the Americas, there’s a breakdown crisis inside the United States. We can not, at this point, assume, that unless we do what I will emphasize we must do, by the middle of January — no later — unless we do that, the United States will go down, and the world will go down, into a prolonged Dark Age. So people who have these ideas about step-by-step, the usual kinematic kind of thing, we’ll do this, and then we’ll do this, and then we’ll do this — no! You won’t do that.

NOT ANOTHER 14th Century Dark Ages!  We were only beginning to recover from the last Dark Age, which occured on October 12.  I don’t know how many more of these Dark Ages the World Economic Infrastructure can take.  These Dark Ages do appear to be shorter bursts than the one always being alluded to with these things — it is curious to note that i took the creative energy of the careers of the Great Renaissance figures to end the Dark Ages.  These Dark Ages apparently are so transitory and flimsy that they’re defeated by a random weekend afternoon cable tv showing of the TMNT movie.
Or a 1999 Jack Van Impe broadcast.  Nobody is all that original in forecasting disasters.

2007 flashback here with this.  And this bearded guy is entreated in 2009.  News is that that the call to “Repeal” the health care bill might be a Republican 2010 Congressional election rallying call — which I suppose might save the organization the headache of finding a new cause to glom onto.   (I’m not sure sliding the British into the coming 12/25 Truth Movement can be judged to get them very far — but I guess I’ll wait to see if Webster Tarpley jumps into that fray shortly.)  Otherwise, we’re stuck celebrating China’s new Train.

In concluding news, the whole “Laroche Industries” mistaken identity fiasco made a year-end best (or worst) list.

minus Garfield, William Henry Harrison, and the current occupant of the White House.

Tier 1 — The quote-in-quote “Greats”

1.  George Washington
2.  Thomas Jefferson
3.  John Quincy Adams
4.  Abraham Lincoln
5.  Chester Arthur
6.  Woodrow Wilson
7.  Franklin Roosevelt
8.  Harry Truman
9.  John Kennedy
10. Gerald Ford

Tier 2.  “Good”.

1.  James Monroe
2.  Andrew Jackson
3.  John Tyler
4.  James Polk
5.  Zachary Taylor
6.  Grover Cleveland
7.  Theodore Roosevelt
8.  William Howard Taft
9.  Dwight Eisenhower
10. Bill Clinton

Tier 3.  The “Middlers”

1.  John Adams
2.  James Madison
3.  Martin Van Buren
4.  Ulysses Grant
5.  William McKinley
6.  Warren Harding
7.  Herbert Hoover
8.  Lyndon Johnson
9.  Ronald Reagan
10. George Bush

Tier 4.  The Bad

1.  Millard Fillmore
2.  Franklin Pierce
3.  James Buchanan
4.  Andrew Johnson
5.  Rutherford Hayes
6.  Benjamin Harrison
7.  Calvin Coolidge
8.  Richard Nixon
9.  Jimmy Carter
10. George W Bush

Maybe you’ve seen this Urban Legend in your email box, carrot-packed and with a cc list heavy on right wing list serves.  Or maybe you saw it on a message board.  Oliver North lays out a scary super villian he encountered in his extra-constitutional globe trotting adventures.  An Incredulous Democratic Senator guffows.  And then North gives the name.  “Osamba Bin Laden”.

The first time I saw this was 2004, or maybe 2003.  John Kerry’s name was inserted into the narrative, as per the Presidential contest.  Last week I encountered it again, this time with the name “Al Gore”.  Arguably Kerry at least was on the right Investigative Committee, and for the life of me I can’t countenance why we settled back to Gore  (I suppose it might’ve been a reversion to 2002, Gore still probing a presidential run, and a means to suggest “We got the Right President in!”).  The thing is a dud, comforting the biases of a slice of the electorate who man the keyboards against incoming Democratic Administrations.

The propagators of that urban legend probably are hanging onto the “We did it” proclamation of “al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula” — not to be confused with the other al Qaeda franchises such as al Qaeda in Iraq, and the famous al Qaeda in Walla Walla.  The keyboard warriors have rededicated their mission in the wake of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s failed airplane attack.  I don’t quite know what to make of them — are we supposed to find out what country he comes from, and then bomb Yemen back to the Stone Age?  At any rate, the attack was foiled by the second to last line of defense.  The final line of defense would be the possibility that the chemical reactions concocted would have been a dud — a pointer that everything in the plans has to work to get this to succeed.  But we don’t really want to get that far in the problem.  This next last line of defense is somewhat better, and while still we don’t want to get this far in the screening process — it is here that Janet Napolitano horribly tripped up, there is something there to point to the folly the Islamic Terrorists face.  The success of 9/11 is no longer operable — the plane is not going to be hi-jacked ever again, that tactical plan has been spent away.  So a terrorist receds to the next line of attack — which has for them the unfortunate side effect of being likely snuffed out by half-way observant by standers due to the conspicuous nature of how the plan is implemented.  Understand, the mode of operation for the terrorist right now has them pulling stuff out of their anus and out of their shoes — this cannot help but lead to suspicious behavior, and in this case the by-stander quickly assimilated the oddity of aguy behind a blanket with smoke starting to roil out.

The Richard Jewell or Whatshisname Beemer in us has less personal danger and a larger vantage point to save the day.  I suppose we could name the new guy — but it seems he wants a pay in advance for his story, so he’ll just have to go unmentioned as I have no interest in paying him.

Meanwhile, 25 people were killed by a suicide bomber in Pakistan.  Obama made sure to mention throw in a rhetorical supprot for the Iranian protesters in his big speech (and I think he made sure to sidle past the Bush golfing gaffe).  All showing that, you know, the physical geographic spot of America remains on the periphery of the Islamists’ War.

Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues

In 2004, the magazine for the John Birch Society, The New American, published a review for the Michael Moore movie Fahrenheit 911.  It was positive, thumbs up.  It is interesting to note that the New American is indexed into google news (and not to be confused with a newspaper of the same name that publishes for recent immigrants — which seems an altogether different readership than the Birchers.)

The next time the Birchers pierced their way into enough public consciousness for me to notice, The Nation was pegging them as a source for the “Nafta Superhighway” structure — a highway being built that would take things from Mexico into Canada without stopping in the USA.  “NO!” yelled some usual suspects — by which I mean Alex Jones and the entire state of Oklahoma.

In the 2008 election, a photograph surfaced of Wasilla council woman Sarah Palin sitting at her desk, with a John Birch Society pamphlet.  It is interesting to note that various bloggers and news sources were tied up all over themselves picking the source of this publication, when really a simple call and check over to the John Birch Society would have solved the question of what she had on her desk.  Whatever the Birchers are, you’re not going to be catching cooties from them. All the stranger, as the Society had their heart in Ron Paul — who when asked brushed it off with roughly my “cooties” comment.

I don’t know what it means that CPAC is being sponsored by the John Birch Society.  I gather most people dropped the group from their conciousness round about when Barry Goldwater was being urged to disassociate them from them, before proudly standing foresquare behind Extremism.

But hey.  We were all a bit nuts back then, contemplating some matters.  Time change.