The Harry Reid Campaign stuck up an anti-Sharron Angle campaign, which was basically just a replication of the Campaign website that Sharron Angle took down upon her nomination.  Sharron Angle then sent a cease and desist order claiming copyright ownership.

If you were Sharron Angle…

She does have a point, or sorts, with this one.

The Angle campaign also claimed that by leaving fill-in boxes for e-mail addresses intact, the Reid campaign was in a position to gain contact information of Angle’s supporters who were deceived into thinking this was actually her site. Angle spokesman Jerry Stacy said in a press release: “Make no mistake, the Reid campaign was forced to take this site down because they were breaking several laws and trying to deceive the voters.”

Which is why the Harry Reid campaign removed them when they took the website down before putting the website back up.  We’ll see where Sharron Angle goes from there, I suppose.

tap tap tap…

I have a theory about running for political office.  A candidate should go about laying out his own scandal:  something relatively serious but not too much so in his or her background, sprung at the opportune time, which will be rolled over and beaten to death and lead to something of “Scandal Fatigue”, rebound against his or her opponent — even if it gives the candidate a sheen of a “Used Car Sales person”.  It might work with Sharron Angle — dribble out one view or other, and let any new view be an “Old News” as you continue pointing out that Harry Reid is a transactional politician manning the machinery.

(shrug.)

In case you’re curious, here’s the changes that were made with the Siena poll between 2002 and 2010.

Abraham Lincoln.  Was #3.  Now is #2.
Theodore Roosevelt.  Was #2.  Now is #3.
Woodrow Wilson.  Was #6.  Now is #8.
Harry Truman.  Was #7.  Now is #9.
James Monroe.  Was #8.  Now is #7.
James Madison.  Was #9.  Now is #6.
James Polk.  Was #11.  Now is #12.
John Adams.  Was #12.  Now is #17.
Andrew Jackson.  Was #13.  Now is #14.
John Kennedy.  Was #14.  Now is #11.

It is here that we have a new divider.  Barack Obama has been inserted to the list at #15.  Does hit belong there?  To hell if I know.  I do enjoy the carping from Reagan fans that they’ve barely seen him ever on any of these lists crack the top 10.

Lyndon Johnson keeps his same assessment, at #15 in 2002, at #16 in 2010.  And so…

Ronald Regan goes from #16 to #18.
John Quincy Adams goes from #17 to #19.
Bill Clinton jumps from #18 to #13.
William McKinley falls from #19 down to #21.
Grover Cleveland jumps from #20 by remaining at #20.
William Howard Taft falls from #21 down to #24.
George Herbert Walker Bush rises from #22 by remaining at #22.

And George W Bush?  Falls from #23 (when, I suppose, he was thought of as another Bush, and in the shadow of a 9/11 Glow) down to #39.

This throws the poll into another great rippling.

Martin Van Buren rises from #24 to #23.
Jimmy Carter falls from #25 to #32 — the second greatest noticable drop.
Richard Nixon falls from #26 to #30 — notable as well.
Rutherford Hayes falls from #27 to #31, as though his fate is to entwined with Nixon’s.
Gerald Ford rises in esteem by hanging steady at #28.  Something has changed to pull him ahead of Nixon.
Calvin Coolidge rises in esteem by hanging steady at #29.
Chester Arthur jumps to Carter’s old spot (or, I guess Martin Van Buren if we subtract Obama) , going up from #30 to #25.
Herbert Hoover falls from #31 down to #36.  It is not hard to figure out why.
Benajamin Harrison falls from #32 to #34.
James Garfield jumps from #33 to #27 — another ripple here — why his rise in esteem, I haven’t got a clue.
Zachary Taylor goes from #34 to #33.
Ullyseus Grant goes from #35 to #26 — another one of those great ripples, and it’s been a long march upward for him.
William Henry Harrison goes from #36 to #35.
John Tyler remains at #37 — again, that counts as a jump forward.
As with Millard Fillmore at #38.
And the bottom four remain the same, joined in the bottom five by you know you.

What does it mean that Lincoln has usurped Teddy Roosevelt for the number two spot?  A bit of “Team of Rivals” haliography.  Similarly, John Adams’s fall comes as David McCollough’s book fades away from its 2001 publication.  What’s up with James Madison rising?  Probably the same with Kennedy.

The strange jumble in the third quarter of this list is curious, and I suppose I should just suspect a game of horse-shoes.

… (lifted from an entry at dailykos).

Benjamin Franklin then proceeds to, um… take away Kool Aid Man’s vital fluids, like the Vampire he is — but that’s probably a pretty standard stand up comedy routine by now.

Remember: we’re citizens.  Not subjects.

No, I do not believe that the magazine “Inspire” is real.  How can it be?  Nobody puts out an article entitled “How to Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom” — do they?  Then again, there might be cultural differences I don’t understand regarding the pscyhotic.

The magazine itself has a hefty feature well, reports The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder, consistent with what any ambitious editor would want to see in a roll-out issue.  Osama bin Laden himself offers his thoughts on “How to Save the World”: Blow stuff up when people disagree with you about what’s Islamic! His deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, shares his insights on what’s going down in Yemen.

But the anchor is a message from Anwar al-Awlaki, the New Mexico-born preacher who’s become al-Qaida’s biggest draw as an online propagandist. So much so that the Obama administration reserves unto itself the right to kill Awlaki, a U.S. citizen, without due process of law.

And then there are some promising front-of-the-book experiments. “What to Expect in Jihad” is self-explanatory. “The AQ Chef” gives you a step-by-step on how to “Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom.” And that threads the needle for the apparent purpose of launching Inspire: getting frustrated Muslim youth to buy into al-Qaida’s holistic conspiracy theory that the crises of the modern era are attributable to a nefarious American-Jewish alliance against True Islam, and then giving them the tools to murder people.

 

The twist is to get Muslims living in America and other Western countries to subscribe — Najibullah Zazi, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (educated in Britain), Faisal Shahzad, Major Nidal Malik Hasan — in order to send the message that nowhere is safe for the Americans. That’s a huge, preoccupying concern for John Brennan and the rest of the Obama counterterrorism team. […]

Which makes Inspire look anomalous. It’s not, apparently, online yet. Ambinder reports that a virus corrupted an attempted upload on extremist websites on Wednesday. And it’s not apparently an as-Sahab product: It bears a banner of al-Malahem Media, the publishing arm of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, a franchise of al-Qaida that trained Abdulmutallab on putting bombs in his underwear. And that’s even more fishy: Al-Jazeera’s Gregg Carlstrom tweets that it’s not al-Malahem’s typical logo.

“It is difficult at this point to confirm its authenticity,” says Marc Lynch, a George Washington University political science professor who specializes in Arabic-language media.

It’s a Print Magazine that is going to be distributed in the United States — how?  Subscription service is pretty easily:  Heavily vetted in a plain brown paper bag and a generic company name, like pornographic and sex toy companies? deal with their mailings.  I imagine any subscribers would be hauled off to Gitmo in, like, 5 minutes upon delivery.

In other words, don’t cancel your subscription to Technical Mujahid just yet. That magazine, at least, is not afraid to be service-y.

I imagine this is true:
the Internet Haganah reasonably points out that owning a copy of it might get you in trouble in some countries, so don’t.

I have pondered this idea of a voter’s guide for these United States.  It is a bit depressing, but Rand Paul puts its usefulness in stark relief — and he is not the first politician I’ve seen have trouble with this issue.
I’m gonna pass on the age of the earth. I think I’m just gonna have to pass on that one.

My voters’ guide idea starts with the base-line question “How old is the Earth?”  The candidate who answers 4 and a half billion years, and I am not a stickler for exactitude, will get the endorsement over the candidate who answers 6,000 years.  If they both answer 6,000 years, nobody gets the endorsement.  If they both answer 4 billion years, we go on to the next answer with a smidgeon of satisfaction.

I am not sure what the next question would be.  Maybe I’ll ask to guage a level of outrage at efforts to remove “under God” from the Constitution, but that feels like a bit too much like a trick question.  I do think I need a bridge question of some sort to get to my next Voter’s Guide item: a rapid fire succession of queries about whether various scenarios fall under “God’s Will“, an idea prompted by Sharron Angle and her exchange?  The endorsement goes to the person who answers “yes” the fewest number of times.

Then again, for overall Party Choice to fill out the ballot beyond the reach of politicians I can’t finangle to answer this voter’s guide questioneer, I can go to the Chair Person of the Party and see how he (she, theoretically) defines the Afghanistan mission.

But the thing about Michael Steele —

I remember seeing this tv show, a cheap Summer temporary replacement deal, with the premise of having two contestants given a retail job, the goal of which was to get fired as close to the end of the workday as possible.  It’s a premise that sets up some interesting dynamics — you can’t get fired too early, but have to start collecting negative chits toward the direction of being fired, against co-workers and management who are prone to be patient for a launch.  I think Michael Steele just may be on a show like that one.

A couple of notes of refernece from the Washington Post article of 2004, in contemplating the curious circumstance of a random blog comment (linked from the last message in this blog category) referencing my brother in insult — message: we know your brother’s name, a post which was followed by a member of the org alluding to said insult, which was then followed by him having to point directly to it to make sure that I saw the comment.  The insult was, I suppose, something on the order of my reference to “circle jerk” — two people are licking a hated politician’s nuts.  I suppose we can consider it a new high-point in the “Rachel Brown for Congress” campaign?

Anyway, Michael Winstead explains some cult dynamics, and Erica Duggan explains her feelings of paranoia in looking into her son’s death.

Eventually, he became accustomed to the humiliating insults and tirades. “They call it making somebody a self-conscious organizer,” he says. “It is about getting somebody to break down and cry, just to have an emotional collapse. Once you do that, then people are malleable.” […]  

According to Winstead, attacking someone for having “mother issues,” being homosexual or sexually perverse seemed to be a common strategy for controlling members in the office where he worked. Leaders directed the group to gang up on colleagues for minor infractions, a phenomenon Winstead calls “wolf-packing.” It was effective, he says.

Once he witnessed organizers surround and berate a woman, he says. The sobbing woman tried to leave, but one organizer wrestled her back into a chair, Winstead says. She didn’t resist again, he says.

Another time, Winstead says, a member having second thoughts about the group asked him for a ride to the bus station so he could visit relatives. Winstead obliged, infuriating movement leaders. “That whole week I just got pounded [by] everyone in the organization. It was comments like . . . ‘Mike, you’ve been driving people away from this movement! You are an agent, aren’t you?’ “

And Erica Duggan:

It is an irony not lost on Erica that LaRouche, veteran weaver of conspiracy theories involving the British and Zionists, is being pursued by a Jewish mother from Britain. She has become an accidental but determined traveler in his realm of plots and apocalyptic fantasies. She even wonders if LaRouche partisans are tracking her movements, hacking into her e-mail.

I high-light that phrase because it appears the Larouche org meant to implant that sense of paranoia in me this week.  I do not want to overstate a statement of empathy (empathy as in “full knowledge of what another has gone through”):  I am not a victim of the cult, and am removed from the insanity of the cult by quite a good distance.  Erica Duggan, on the other hand, one day never heard of Larouche, then met their existence under the absolute worst circumstances imaginable.  And the one thing I can say with certainty about Jeremiah Duggan is that had he not met up with the Schiller Institute and gone to that conference in Wiesbedon, he would be alive today.

I am not altogether sure that this makes sense — that the Larouche organization is still somewhere hawking their 1986 AIDS patients quarantine message, as focused in on the California Ballot Initiative “PANIC” — and these guys seem to love giving their names double meanings to explicate the horrendous nature of their goals, don’t they?

But it comes together in the person of “Heavy Metal Suicide”, who was seen on factnet defending the measure — years later.  And the name of this person appears to derive from comments I made here to the suppositions of one “European”:

I at least have some reference points for where one can conjecture “suicidal”.  For “Suicide Pact”, I really have not the foggiest reference point — outside of, perhaps, the hysterical 1980s anti-Heavy Metal campaigns aped in the Larouche org by Don Phau (for appeals to Christian Conservatives, I suppose?) and currently all the rage in the Islamic World.  This is a bizarre conjecture, made stranger by his denial.

I believe it is from this came the nom de plome of a commenter from the Larouche organization picks up the name “Heavy Metal Suicide”.  See how sick they are?

I’ve long had the basic concept that the Larouche organization has been peddling two tracks with Jeremiah Duggan.  One is something we see with the circumstances of Matthew Shepard — a gay man who was beaten and murdered.  Given that it’s entirely beside the point and doesn’t matter one iota in the case, it does feel scurrilous to suggest that Matthew Shepard was not an angel, or was troubled in some standard ways of humanity.  On that track of suggesting that Mrs. Duggan is not facing up to her son’s supposed pre-death state of mind, we saw European.  and the German Authorities who largely took down the notes from the Larouche organization.  But the fatal flaw in terms of keeping this story straight, as we saw with the recent “round-table” discussion, and why they can’t leave that alone, and have to leave exaggerated suggestions from picking apart the fragmentary bits of information on what happened at that conference that day– and lead to this:

It’s obvious this guy was a suicide, it’s obvious that his mother knew he was a suicide, because he told us that, he told us he had to take drugs to avoid suicide. He told us.

They have no ability to cling to the at least tenuable public relations-acceptable “mother can’t get over it” line, because it would deny the role of the “World Historic Mission” and the forces pitted up against the cult leader.  It leads to their two-track contradiction “stance” on Erica Duggan — is she being “used” for political purposes, or is she someone who (sickly) “knew” this would happen?

Now what happened? I attacked the, well, — Tony Blair on BBC on two occasions. I was joined,–is or that not or but–not directly, but indirectly, by the followup , by a chief high-ranking intelligence official of the British services

And so it continues on to today, because of the strength of the org as shown with the candidacy of Kesha Rogers.

I got attacked at the TDP convention!! Just got accosted by LaRouchies outside the convention center. I told them NO and no, again, when they tried to give me some Kesha propaganda. Once inside – and by inside, I mean inside the bat cave (press room) – all I can hear is the LaRouche choir, singing something that sounds very hymn-y. My friends said they had “Obama is a Nazi” sign. I wouldn’t know. I turned my back to them and hurt their feelings. They are out in the hall.

The hymn selection so far:

As We Gather By the Center
We’re Marching to Britain, Beautiful, Beautiful Britain!
All Hail the Power of Kesha’s Name
Come Ye Crazy People Come
We’ve Got the Whole Extraterrestial World in Our Hands
LaRouche, LaRouche, We Adore Thee

and. . . Standing in the Need of Prayer. Which they do need . . . a prayer and divine intervention for Kesha to have chance.

— was nominated thusly:
Roger and her band of sign carrying loons took to the street in a simplified form of campaigning know as “standing in a busy intersection waving a sign with Roger’s face on it.”. It was the cheapest form of campaigning in the history of campaigning and it obviously worked.

Will fare better than Summer Shields for obvious reasons.  Though, as “Ace” put it:
If Shields had won 100% of the vote you’d be whining it was fraud or that his name was first on the ballot.
‘ Can’t argure with that.  As it were, he won zero percent because he was not even on the ballot.

They have talks with Putin, you know?

I could not believe that this LaRouche follower actually was honest enough to admit that Putin is working with LaRouche right to my face. When did this happen? At Pastor Manning’s Columbia trial, back in May in NYC.

And the name of the game.

When you were 10 years old, did you ever grab a pen and sit down with the daily newspaper, methodically drawing mustaches on all the photos of politicians, movie stars and ordinary people who happened to make the news that day?

It was a fun, juvenile thing to do — embellishing people’s faces with creepy pencil-thin mustaches, curlicued handlebars and droopy Fu Manchus.

But adding facial hair to photographs is one of those things most people seem to outgrow, once they turn into adults.

… I hold some pessimissim, but hope I’m wrong, about the outcome of the Inquest in Britain.  We go back to techniques such as — note well.  We’ll see.