Looks like Michael Savage has written his first novel.  See if you can guess who his protaganist is based on.

Jack Hatfield is a hardened former war correspondent who rose to national prominence for his insightful, provocative commentary. But after being smeared as a bigot and extremist by a radical leftist media-watchdog group, he ultimately loses his job and finds himself working in obscurity as a freelance news producer in San Francisco.
One afternoon Hatfield is on a ride-along with the SFPD bomb squad when a seemingly routine carjacking turns deadly, after police find several pounds of military-grade explosives in the jacked car. And when the FBI urges Hatfield to stay out of it, he knows he’s onto something big.

Jack Hatfield is a radio host out of San Francisco who is smeared by a left wing media watchdog group.

Then he gets to play Terrorist Hunter.  Against a corrupt Intelligence Community.

I want to know what the smear that the Left Wing Media Watchdog tore down Jack Hatfield with.  In the meantime, well… let’s see what Media Matters for America is saying.

In place of these pretenders, Savage suggested his own list of classics: Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer… and his own recently-released debut novel, Abuse of Power.

Savage explained that Abuse of Power is a “Great American Novel” because it “is about the saga of a single man fictionialized, and it tells the story of what’s going on in the world today — what happens when a man stands up and speaks the truth. He gets crushed by the power.”

Hm.

In a February radio segment, Savage explained that his book would “surpass” Kerouac’s On the Road and beat “Dharma Bums in its depiction of San Francisco and the bay. Only Jack London will be left standing for me to top, and that’ll occur in the next incarnation of the next novel.” During that segment, Savage said that the book is “loosely based upon my being banned in Britain.”

Indeed, Savage includes plenty of hints that protagonist “Jack Hatfield” is a fictionalized version of himself:
Savage, who has spent years railing against Media Matters, describes Jack as a character who lost his television show due to a “smear campaign” that was “carefully orchestrated by a radical watchdog group called Media Wire.” (Hatfield loses his distinguished weekly talk show in the book due to comments he made about Muslims that were taken “out of context” by Media Wire. In real life, Savage lost his MSNBC show after making anti-gay slurs on the air.)
One of the main villains on Savage’s real life radio show is George Soros. In the book, an “eighty-one-year-old” billionaire who “made his fortune by betting against national currencies” is the man who orchestrated the campaign to destroy Jack’s career.
In the book, Jack — like Savage in real life — is banned from traveling to the United Kingdom.
In real life, Savage has a beloved poodle named Teddy. In the book, Jack has a beloved poodle named Eddie.

Darned.  I was hoping he’d base it on how “I hope you get AIDs and die” was taken out of context.  It is interesting that he changed his poodle’s name to Eddie, though.  Dropped the “T”.

Howard Scott and the Technocracy, Inc group he founded is getting whalloped in the news media right now.

A fully fledged Technocratic movement flourished in America in the inter-war period: it believed in an economy based on measuring energy inputs rather than prices, and in what would now be called crowd-sourced solutions to political problems. This paper first used “technocracy” in March 1933, when a book reviewer bemoaned the “lurid prominence” of the term. He derided its proponents as “half-scientist…half-charlatan”, decried their “indefensible” conceptual basis, and ascribed their popularity to “extraordinary” American credulity. Howard Segal, an historian at the University of Maine, says the movement imploded when its leading light, Howard Scott, was unmasked as a failed wax salesman, not the great engineer he claimed to be.

Okay.  Fine.  It’s just this Economist mention and this Slate article.

Inspired in part by the ideas of economist Thorstein Veblen, the movement was led by engineer Howard Scott, who proposed radical utopian ideas and solutions to the economic disaster in scientific language. His movement, founded in 1932, drew national interest—the New York Times was the first major news organization to report the phenomenon, and Liberty Digest declared, “Technocracy is all the rage. All over the country it is being talked about, explained, wondered at, praised, damned. It is found about as easy to explain … as the Einstein theory of relativity.” A year later, it had mostly flamed out. No popular Technocratic party exists in the United States today, but Scott’s organization, called Technocracy Incorporated, persists in drastically reduced form.

But it gives the “Technocracy Technical Alliance” something to dump a load of their counter-veiling propaganda in the comments section and herald the greatness of Howard Scott… who’s not seen with Albert Einstein.

He gets a better write-up from the Guardian.

Yes, there’s no harm in saying it: technocracy once used to be a big idea for the international left. In 1930s America, for instance, it wasn’t a term of abuse but the programme for a new social utopia. In the middle of the Great Depression, an emergent technocratic movement led by engineers and dissident economists such as Thorstein Veblen and Howard Scott proposed that populist politicians simply weren’t capable to fix the system: “The maladministration and chaos imposed upon the industrial mechanism by arbitrary rule of extraneous interest has reached such a point that many technicians feel the urgent need of confederating their forces in a program of industrial co-ordination based, not on belief, but exact knowledge,” thundered a pamphlet by the Technical Alliance.
The American technocratic movement was short-lived, not least because the flaws in its thinking were so apparent: their belief that anyone could ever be completely apolitical in their decision-making now strikes us as naive. No one remembers the technocrats’ “Plan of Plenty”, and everybody remembers Roosevelt’s New Deal.

I don’t see any comments from the Institute off this article.  I do see “Hyper Zeitgeist”, oddly enough.

And that probably ends the current moment in the sun for the organization.

It came to pass just as South Park predicted.  As the Occupy Encampment moved to its final mark of the radicals bruising for a showdown with the Riot Gear Cops, I saw a lone figure sit at a nearby vacant lot — a tent, a sign that said “Independent” over “Occupy Artists’ Refugee” and holding up three cardboard signs.  “I Protest Theft”, “I Protest Addiction”, “I Protest Sexual Assault”.  You won’t find many dissenters for that, I suppose.

And I saw a group of a dozen cyclists go by.  Shouting “We Bike for Social Justice”.  ‘Cause we need some material for the next season of IFC’s Portlandia series.

And I watched the End of the Occupation Encampment, with a horde of other people.  It was that protest for protests’ sake — defiance for the sake of defiance.  It is here that the protests kind of grow met, post-modern, referential — They forge against the death of this protest.

Reportedly earlier in the day, 6 hours after the Eviction time, at 6 am, the Camp shouted about Victory.  Why, I have no clear idea.  No, it seems a strikingly careful and just police response, careful and plodding and patient in their aim.  The necessity of the media is to grab the most photogenically stereotypical figures doing stuff, and I guess we have that.  And we have the winner of the “Last Person at Occupy” derby before being removed from the park.  Good for her.  A bit of a booby prize, I think.

And now we see the floating debris of the future of Occupy.  A banner stating an intention to “Occupy” whatever bank, a march to “Shut Down” wherever whenever.  It strikes me that the Occupiers might have proven themselves useful as a counter-force to this promotional effort from a credit card company handing out a device that makes it easier to swipe your credit card at any time.  This is Ad Busters material, right?  If it can get nimble enough to march at these when they pop up, that’d make it a useful force.  Instead we just have a smashed bank window.

And now we get the individual splinters, focal point in a general direction of liberal – left – radical.  It is the current mode of Political protest and dissension, I guess.

I hope those Ron Paul folks are happy.  They have hit media pay-dirt.  The image that the media is printing and the video the media is using for Presidential Candidate Rick Perry at his moment of Campaign Horror — it includes Ron Paul, standing at the podium just next to him!

I do largely sympathize with Rick Perry after his Dunce Brain Freeze “oops” moment.  I suppose one could say that this complements his problem — knows what of national workings? — but on its own it’s just one of those things I’ve gone on record as stating voters need to slip aside.  The one problem may be that in his fund-raising pitch off of the “oops moment” — listing presidential “oops” moments such as Ford and the Soviet Domination issue, he slides in “Obama is still looking for all 57 states”.  This is an admission that can not stand, something on the order of Romney with health care.

The bigger problem with Perry is not his “oops” moment, but something we see in his recovery efforts.  Something like this pops up in the news articles about it:
“This ain’t a day for quitting nothing,” he declared.

Perry had sent out a trial report balloon about ceasing these debatings, and I guess we now have a fuller scope on just why.

And the Republican field has been thrown for a loop now.  Kind of.  Don’t believe it — this is still a charade — we’re just sitting around waiting for the Mitt Romney nomination.  And here’s his current selling point, by the way:

“He won’t embarrass you,” Rep Jason Chaffetz, a Romney supporter, tells Republican lawmakers still on the fence.

It’s a variation of that old Kerry — Dean dynamic, as the final push went “Dated Dean.  Married Kerry.”  And Romney looks to fall under the long line of Party “UGH” nominations, which stretches back at least to Thomas Dewey.  [Note that Obama is said to be studying in some detail that Bush victory over Kerry.]

Michele Bachmann, of all people, is getting in on this premise.
“We can’t have any surpris4es with our candidate” Representative Michele Bachmann says in a web ad.  As she speaks, an image of Cain is shattered.
Yes, you definitely know what you are getting with Michele Bachmann.  Is that supposed to be a good thing.

So, here’s we stand with this Big Charade:
The CBS News poll, conducted Novemeber 6-10 during the span of both crises, suggests a 3-way tie for the nomination among Cain, Romney, and a resurgent Newt Gingrich among GOP primary voters.

No.  Seriously.  Gingrich is back in play.  It’s just like prophesied in his classic Press Release.  THERE STANDS GINGRICH!

………

It’s interesting to compare the profiles of Gary Johnson and Jon Huntsman for some “men’s magazine”.  GQ, Esquire, one or both.  From a distance and a glance, they both seem to frame the two the exact same way — the “Reasonable” candidates, who don’t have a damned chance with this GOP electorate — never mind one’s that “moderate Conservative” at least temperamentally, and the other is libertarian.  And then we are flashed the same rough-hewn image: we have this image of a flabby and shirtless Gary Johnson on a motorcycle before New Mexico desert and mountains.  Not to be confused with the similar components in the Jon Huntsman photograph against Utah desert and mountains.

The other candidates:  Buddy Roemer is reaching out to “Occupy” in framing a possible third party bid.  Probably not the final Anarchist Occupiers in Portland.  I suppose Fred Karger is reaching somebody by appearing on Alan Colmes.  Rick Santorum is hugging Iowa.    And this should be the end of his Presidential bid if Roy Moore is going to bid for his Alabama Supreme Court job — I mean, you can’t be both US President and Alabama State Supreme Court Justice at the same time, can you?

From the Oregonian on the coming eviction of “Occupy”:

Police officer West Halfrich watched the City Hall assembly and was philosophical about what’s to come.
“Everyone knows it has to end,” Helfrich said.  “Some people are going to make our jobs easy, and some will make it hard.”
“We’re not leaving!” a passing protester yelled at Helfrich and a fellow officer.
“That pretty much sums it up,” Helfrich said.  “You can’t reason with people who are illogical, whether they’re drunk or high or whatever.”
…………………………………………………….

I’ve been on record here as stating that the encampments of Occupy have gone past their dates of purpose and should figure out the next stage of their movement, and am not really siding with those “Occupiers” preparing to man the barricades.  But I stop at this part of this story.  I am not at the scene of this moment in the interview, and do not know the state of this guy yelling at Police Officer West Halfrich.  Was he drunk, high, or “whatever”?  These are three very different categories.  And how does one define logical and illogical?

A headline in the day’s paper.
“Transcripts Reveal a Raw, Bitter Nixon”.
I swear I’ve seen this headline before.  Or was that headline “Tapes Reveal a Raw, Bitter Nixon”.  Whatever.  We still have Nixon to kick around some.

Herman Cain … Hulk… Bob Dole.

I chose to address these accusations directly, rather than try to do it through a series of continuous statements or spokespeople because that’s the person Herman Cainis, is to take my message directly to the people.”

“Well, a businessman by the name of Herman Cain stepped forward. Here I am. But I know from the American people that I have talked with and I have spoken with over the past several months, we are not going to allow Washington or politics to deny me the opportunity to represent this great nation.”

“But you see, that’s one thing about Herman Cain that I think that a lot of the American people know, and that is, just because it’s tough, there’s no reason for me not to do what I feel like I have to do. And because of what the American people have said to me during these turbulent times, we will get through this. We will get through this.”

“Well, I happen to think where it’s coming from is that some people don’t want to see Herman Cain get the Republican nomination, and some people don’t want Herman Cain to become president of the United States of America.”

And the word for the day is illeism.

Herman Cain goes Hulk on us!  Herman Cain Smash the Democrat Machine!

The political figure made famous for third person usage, Bob Dole — thank you Norm MacDonald for being the bright spot during a dark period in Saturday Night Live history — in reality, it shouldn’t bear one way or the other on the presidential selecting for Bob Dole — maybe there is something on the matter of it reflecting upon a person under fire and pressure, but the 1996 contest ame down to this classic George Carlin line:

“I think people show their ignorance when they say they want politicians to be honest. If honesty were suddenly introduced into politics, this country would fall apart. And, I think people know that deep down. They like their bull shit out front where they can get a good strong whiff of it! That’s probably why they picked Bill Clinton over Bob Dole. Clinton was honest about his bullshit. He was up front. He came right out with it. Dole tried to hide it. ‘I’m an honest man’.” –
George Carlin

I would think there would be a website made up entirely of Bob Dole third person usage, but I can’t quite find one.  That may be something from Web 1.0, where we are currently at Web 3.0.  (This blog being a remnant from Web 2.0).  What I’m left with is this classic quote:

“If something happened along the route and you had to leave your children with Bob Dole or Bill Clinton, I think you would probably leave them with Bob Dole.”

And this Los Angeles Times editorial from the time.  I think Bob Dole has catapulted ahead of Bo Jackson in terms of pop cultural references on this matter.

SMASH!

And regarding that particular Bob Dole quotation — some things never change.  Here’s a blogad I just ran across:

Sometimes I just don’t understand the assortment of ads on a blog.  Here’s the collection on a right wing conservative Republic blog, not an upper tier thing, I am looking at right now.

The Herman Cain Coalition.
Fund Raising Pitch, attempting to amass $999000 from the Internet donations.
Citizens 4 Cain.  There’s two Cain blog-ads here.

This is kind of curious, in that I have seen a movement of this blog-splotch move from Sarah Palin and her tease of non-campaign — donate to SarahPac, everyone — on over to Michele Bachmann and now we’re spotted at Herman Cain.

Two ads for Amazon.com.  Fair enough.  Everyone reads.  Have you seen the latest from Michael Savage?  It’s a doozy!

BetOnIraq dot com.  The New Iraqi Dinar has been steadily increasing for the past few years.  Yet it is still unbelievably affordable. The same amount that was once  equal to over $82,000 can now be purchased for around $50. But, what happens as the dollar crumbles and the oil really starts flowing?  All right.  This is the target market for such a thing.  It would be more amusing if this were stretched next to a goldbug ad.

An Am radio station.  I won’t look up to see if this has been checked in to my local market.

And…

Mutually Beneficial Arrangements.
Which shows an image looking down a young woman’s blouse.

Wait.  What?