Things to ponder.

But Hastings, who announced recently that he won’t seek re-election after 10 terms, leaves a much more polarized Congress than he entered.

That’s, um, with the “Republican Revolution” of 1994.  Which was all cream puffs, if I recall right.

He was rated the House’s 72nd most conservative member by the National Journal in 2009, just before the tea party wave election of 2010. By 2013, he was ranked 175th most conservative.

Hey.  Let’s compare the political climate of the House for other retiring Representatives… John Dingell, who… has been there for… a while.

I see a couple of, I would guess, tourists stop and take a picture of the Portland Mounted Patrol.

They are the problem.  They are the reason we can’t get rid of this stupid unit.

Giving this for it’s money worth… in an argument about a Republican primary in Illinois being “most surreal ever”
No primary can get more surreal than the one where two LaRouchie’s won the Dem primary and the Dems had to form a new party.

Skip over to Texas 2014, and … I wouldn’t be surprised.  So it is campaign battle-lines once more, the “Stop Kesha Rogers” joint is re-established, and we get… something better from the “Lyndon Johnson Democrat” crack from the Harris Party leader in 2010… we get this.

It’s rare that the leader of a political party would wave arms in the air and send out a mass email saying don’t vote for someone on the ballot.
But that’s what Democratic Party chairman Gilberto Hinojosa is doing.
“Do not vote for Kesha Rogers,” Hinojosa stated.
She’s raised only $26,000 for her Senate campaign, according to the latest Federal Election Commission, but her challengers are not exactly household names yet either.

And here they are…

David Alameel
Maxey Scherr
Harry Kim
Michael Fjetland.

Explaining the current state of the Texas Democratic Primary Race.

Apt description:
the follower of Lyndon LaRouche – the by-now grand old man of conspiracy-minded, so-far-left-he’s-right, or so-far-right-he’s-left American politics […] who makes Steve Stockman look mealy-mouthed in her foursquare support for impeaching the president.

And so…  “I have a track record and my track record is that I have been working with Mr. LaRouche, who has never been wrong on his economic forecasting, for over ten years.”
I thought he was supposed to be right since, like, 1958 or something.
In the LaRouchian worldview, Great Britain is the seat of evil, and the British killed Kennedy and executed the cover-up that followed.
Also the Larouchies hated Kennedy until 1983, when they started liked Roosevelt and eventually Kennedy.

The “Tea Party at Perrysburg” chimes in favorably.  Just to piss on the inevitable “not tea party” commenters.  See too… I thought it strange a so-called Democrat would choose to address, ahem, the NE Tarrant County Tea Party.  But I suppose this is where one goes to up the money total of…

Her coffers are almost empty, with barely $2,500 on hand and less than $27,000 in total donations.

Interesting question.  Do they think they’re voting for Ke$ha?

Freddoso  on his Conservative Intelligence Briefing blog.

Regarding the Mary Poppins cover tune, he insisted he was ‘not making this up.’

Things to know:
Actually, Texas has closed primaries, which means you can only vote for the candidates of one particular party. You are open to pick whichever ballot you want, though.
This is sometimes referred to as “semi-open,” but in “closed” primaries you can only vote for the party you’re registered with.

Herein lies the one main route to victory for Kesha Rogers in a Senate run-off.  This cross-over Republican voters, playing your “Operation Chaos” to muck up Wendy Davis and the Democrats.  Or, even a minor number of actual “Hey!  They’re for Impeachment!” voters out of Tea Party land.  (Or, the cutsey ironic voter:
While we think impeachment is a horrible waste of time, money, energy, and political capital, we are 100% behind Kesha’s effort to impeach. Heck, if we lived in Texas we’d probably vote for her.)

(Although it is important to note that the majority of surveying for this poll took place before the best-financed candidate, David Alameel, began running ads and sending mailers.)

Debate time…
Point:  “…she favors expanding manned space explorations and colonizing Mars to prevent ‘mass extinction of the human species.’ ”
Really? That’s an “in addition”…what, exactly, does this have to do with her being an unsuitable Democratic candidate or being nuts?
Counterpoint:  The issue isn’t so much that she supports space exploration, which is a reasonable position by itself. The issue is that like many followers of LaRouche she believes that colonizing Mars soon is essential to our survival as a species.

Lyndon LaRouche is still kicking? I remember when he was passing out fliers saying that the queen of England controlled the money supply of the US. I see the idiocy has continued

This is the final straw. If true, there is no doubt that the entire state of Texas is populated with lunatics. I’m a Democrat, and frankly I’m embarrassed by what I’ve read in this article if true. Perhaps there’s something in the water…….. In fact I’m not sure this isn’t a copy/pasted Onion satire article.

In the March primary, voting for any Democrat besides Kesha Rogers works against her getting 50 percent and at least forces a runoff between the top two candidates. If it becomes a runoff between Rogers and any other candidate, it is essential that Democrats get behind whoever that candidate is.

Even if it’s the “contributed to a bunch of Republicans in the past and lacking any real Democratic or Progressive / Liberal values” guy?  The answer to that question would be … yep.

And so, come March 4, the Texas Democrats may find themselves spending money to stop an “impeach Obama and travel to Mars” candidate to prevent her from sharing a ballot with Wendy Davis. A bigger irritation than any unflattering magazine cover.

I don’t think a run-off is as much a disaster as everyone thinks it is (again… nobody’s out complaining about the 2012 run-off candidate), but we’ll see.

LaRouche publishes insanely long essays almost weekly sometimes in excess of 15,000 words and holds 3 weekly web shows. On Monday they have “the policy Committee” of which Rogers is a part, these are the candidates. On Wednesday they have “the weekly report” where they discuss weird pseudo science. On Friday the 91 year old LaRouche does a webcast where he basically stands at a podium answering questions, except he never answers the question and goes on long rants about the British and throws in racist jokes. The process repeats weekly, we are always one minute to doom and only LaRouche has the answer that can save us. So if you plan on voting for Kesha I would go look long and hard at the organization behind here.

And here I’d thought only Larouchies, some posters at laconics, and some posters at factnet watch those things.  Because… here’s what you’re getting:

 We have started to do a lot of work on this issue that Mr. LaRouche has been raising on the fight between Prometheus and Zeus, and I think this will be some really useful and interesting work to actually put out …

WHY IS KESHA ROGERS NOT PUTTING THE FIGHT BETWEEN PROMETHEUS AND ZEUS OUT DEAD CENTER IN THE CAMPAIGN?  ARE THEY HIDING THEIR RECORD???

Hm.

But the Democrats’ attempt to build a “dream team” ticket to regain control of, or at least get a foothold in, Texas politics are running into two familiar stumbling blocks. The tendency of Texas primary voters to make really bizarre, uninformed decisions at the ballot box. And the enduring political machinations of megalomaniac conspiracy theorist, Lyndon LaRouche. […]
That’s probably not the kind of rhetoric Texas Democrats want to see coming from the space on the ticket just below the electoral headliner of their ‘Battleground Texas” campaign, but unless they figure something out in a hurry, it’s probably going to be.

Point Counterpoint.  Hitler : Directly responsible for the deaths of over 14 million, imprisoned various minorities in concentration camps, planned for mass extermination of the Jewish race, and was a facist.
Obama: Has pretty sh*tty ideas on health care.
Kesha Rogers, Obama is no Hitler.

“No one is going to trust you guys, because you are sacrificial leaders and they’re sacrificing the population,” Rogers yelled. “What they’re doing right now, this policy was tried at Nuremberg.”

Thank you, Kesha Rogers, for firing another torpedo into the Democratic Party. Obviously a DINO, her and the obscene LaRouchers are nothing more than the wackjob cousins the Tea Party RINO’s try to keep hidden. Imagine, if the Tea Partiers are already so far to the right they’d fall off the edge if they breathed too heavily, how much further off the whole political landscape are the LaRouchers?

This is the stuff that comedies are made of. Can’t wait until they portray her on Saturday Night Live.
Hm.  SNL didn’t run with anything in 1986 after Illinois.

In other news…

The point man for Eurasian and Ukrainian policy in the Kremlin is Sergei Glazyev, an economist who like Dugin tends to combine radical nationalism with nostalgia for Bolshevism. He was a member of the Communist Party and a Communist deputy in the Russian parliament before cofounding a far-right party called Rodina, or Motherland. In 2005 some of its deputies signed a petition to the Russian prosecutor general asking that all Jewish organizations be banned from Russia.

Later that year Motherland was banned from taking part in further elections after complaints that its advertisements incited racial hatred. The most notorious showed dark-skinned people eating watermelon and throwing the rinds to the ground, then called for Russians to clean up their cities. Glazyev’s book Genocide: Russia and the New World Order claims that the sinister forces of the “new world order” conspired against Russia in the 1990s to bring about economic policies that amounted to “genocide.” This book was published in English by Lyndon LaRouche’s magazine Executive Intelligence Review with a preface by LaRouche. Today Executive Intelligence Review echoes Kremlin propaganda, spreading the word in English that Ukrainian protesters have carried out a Nazi coup and started a civil war.
And…  we’re on the verge of Armageddon once again.  Or is that just the Texas Democratic Party?  (“One time Presidential candidate”???)

Paul Craig Roberts?

Kesha Rogers, who advocates the president’s impeachment, is not a serious Democratic candidate.
That’s what they said about Mike Gravel, and look at where he is now.

She lost by a landslide in the 22nd Congressional District in both 2010 and 2012. LaRouche moles can sometimes win low-turnout primaries, but they are soundly rejected in general elections. Kesha Rogers is not a serious candidate now, nor was she the previous times she lost.

Are the Larouchies still around? Peter Bowen used to hang in front of the Wrigley Building with a sandwich board raving about Queen Elizabeth and Henry Kissinger. Haven’t seen those cats for a while.

In other candidates, not worth worrying about… they have a candidate against Nancy Pelosi… who made his first impression with factnet watchers here:

07-31-2012

Also notable is the fresh face! Matthew Ogden is off for some reason (which may explain the site blackout yesterday) and we have a new moderator. At least, I haven’t seen him before.  Michael Steger is the young man’s name, and I feel confidant saying he is the handsome, chiseled specimen that LPAC has needed for YEARS. Why is Matt Ogden’s dumb mug doping at me year after year and they’ve been holding onto this mountain of a hottie?

We’ll see how many single points Michael Steger gets.  It’ll be better than Shields, though he at least got a semi-endorsement from… Michael Savage.

Get out the Vote, Texas Democrats:
Because I can guarantee there are Teapublican activists and pranksters who will cross over to vote in the Democratic Party primary just to make sure this nightmare scenario does occur.
I would love to see an African-American woman run for and one day become the first African-American US Senator from my home state.
Kesha Rogers ain’t the person I want to see making that history, much less making history by getting the Democratic nomination for that US Senate seat.

Interesting to see this “disavowal” from Camp Rogers in campaigning:

Two campaign representatives for U.S. Senate hopeful Kesha Rogers stood behind a picture of President Barack Obama, defaced with a mustache to look like Adolf Hitler at the corner of 5th and Bagby Streets, today.
“We don’t want to impeach Obama for those mainstream racial bull—- reasons,” Rey Padron, a Rogers campaign representative, said. “He’s in the way of us rebuilding the country.”

Lest she lose some of the black vote.

And so it goes.

Daily Kos chimes in:  Fortunately, no one really cared about a hopelessly red House seat, so Rogers has mostly existed as a curiosity to election geeks (and German fangirls). But if she wins a Senate primary, that’ll attract national headlines—and very embarrassing attention for Texas Democrats. Fortunately, Dems will have another chance to stop Rogers in the runoff, but Alameel isn’t exactly a vibrant candidate, though at least he’s running ads, however cheesy. (Alameel spent a small fortune to take just 11 percent in the TX-33 primary last cycle.) Still, this is a nightmare no one wants, except for Lyndon LaRouche.

Will this issue come into play?  The “ sodium pentothol” issue.

The one thing I can say about Colorado Governor Hickenlooper on Marijuana Legalization…

Since Colorado began recreational marijuana sales on Jan. 1, dispensaries have generated soaring amounts of revenue for the state. In the first week alone, Colorado pot shops took in more than $5 million in sales, with approximately $1.2 million of that going to state coffers.

As a result, Hickenlooper announced last week that the state’s total pot sales for the next fiscal year are now expected to reach about $610 million — that’s up more than $200 million from the cannabis industry’s earlier projections of approximately $400 million for the year.

But the governor said that the appeal of added tax revenue “is absolutely the wrong reason [for other states] to even think about legalizing recreational marijuana.”

Is … he’s basically right.  I say this as a proponent of marijuana legalization (or decriminalization) who’s slightly annoyed by the “creation of carefully state controlled or even state-ran markets” strategy at work with the current wave of state legislation.  This is not a “panacrea”, and the revenue “boost” argument (oftentimes the driving argument that Marijuana Legalization Advocates make).  As annoying as the insistent qualifications of “I personally don’t use the drug” or the stumbling into stoner- based humor (“Think of how it’ll boost the Snack Food Industry!”)… on a different level with my vague opposition to state run gambling — which is used as panacreas for state budgets… there’s enough of a social cost to make the argument annoying.

I see a blog post at Reason magazine asking the pertinent question of whether the Media is ignoring or down-playing the crackdown of opposition in Venezuela.  I see this on the backdrop of seeing multiple above the fold newspaper headlines about opposition crackdowns in Venezuela.

The answer for the Reason blog post thus becomes… “If you think this is the most important news story out there”.  And it’s a product of ideology and political posturing.  I presume, for instance, if the USA were actually on a warpath against Venezuela, Reason’s blogger would find media coverage (if it were wall to wall) as part of the government’s war propaganda.  But here the need is more to compare a sort of Hugo Chavezian Socialism with the Obamaist Socialist, and so the question ends up more along the lines of… ACA and “IRS Scandal”.

If we judge by page views and how it reverberates around the Internet… I suppose we’re in age of User Decisions on news priorities.  After the various wacky news items get the most page views, the news item of opposition crackdowns in Venezuela gets commented on by the “Right” and the Left focuses on, say, the Gay Crackdowns in Africa.

Personally, I think the Media is  not focusing in enough on the  political crisis in Turkey, which features things not seen in the American political scene since the 1850s.  A bloody nose!  But then… what’s the political implications domestically?

Rush Holt is retiring.  He is noted for having beaten a computer on Jeopardy.

There is no interesting piece of trivia for retiring Congress critter Doc Hastings.  Unless being played by a black man, accidentally, on Saturday Night Live counts?

I am curious on this sort of automatic comment.

Kind of interesting observation at the end of this article on … the “Jon Stewart”, or whatever, edging of political humor for a Thailand political humor show.

“Shallow News in Depth”.

Irony is in plentiful supply in Thailand today: A billionaire tycoon is praised as the champion of the poor. A scandal-tainted politician leads a mass movement against corruption. Protesters declare that they need to block elections to save democracy.

The show has drawn inevitable comparisons to “The Daily Show,” the satirical American news show anchored by Jon Stewart.

“Shallow News in Depth” follows a similar format of celebrity interviews, commentary on news and humorous dispatches by reporters on the streets of Bangkok.

But with its ultrafast, chaotic pacing and its silly antics, “Shallow News in Depth” is “Jon Stewart on crack,” in the words of The Bangkok Post, an English-language newspaper.

And you get the message from there.

In terms of the Jon Stewart comparison… where some of the humor is just sighing…

“There’s a conflict of interest? No way!” Mr. Winyu said, with mock horror and disbelief.

And the inevitable…

The political crisis has been comedic gold, she says, but some Thais are so weary of the crisis that they are eager to disengage from politics altogether.

“How many times can you feature people saying these ridiculous things?” she said.

“Nobody is shocked anymore.”

Irony fatigue.  The problem with shows like Jon Stewart… watch tonight’s episode, watch a new episode in a few months, and wonder if you haven’t already seen it.

Such is a universal problem for these types of programs, in any nation on Earth.

Meantime in Russia… interesting “inspiration” for a tv station that we’d in the “West” be inclined to sympathize with as it battles it out with Putin and the government…

Mr. Vinokurov, 43 and dressed in a button-down shirt, jeans and thick-rimmed glasses, looks like the audience he targets — young, successful, upwardly-mobile Russians, many of whom poured onto the streets of Moscow in 2011 to urge Mr. Putin to exit politics. He modeled the channel, which began broadcasting in 2010, on Fox News, a strategy that he says usually elicits gasps from Western interviewers, who do not realize that he means the Fox News business model of politically charged news, and not the station’s politics.

Fox News’ theatrics are as much the problem as the politics, but… I guess we have to take it from a different perspective of context.  As opposed to the great “Russia TV” which broadcasts… um… Legoobama.

But they all reject that the reason was a poll on a Sunday evening talk show late last month that asked whether the former Soviet leaders should have surrendered Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, to the Nazis “in order to save hundreds of thousands of lives” from a crippling, 900-day siege during World War II.

Some interpreted the survey as an attempt to question the country’s immense sacrifice during the war, a conflict that killed an estimated 27 million citizens of the Soviet Union and touched almost every family in this country, including Mr. Putin’s.

I don’t know what to make of that question.  Is this suggesting this idea would be Military Strategy, or Appeasement?  But, sometimes in the states we get pissed over narrow questions which seem to suggest something not great about “American Greatness”.  Pretexts are pretexts are pretexts.

“I want to know, dad.  About President Ford.  Tell me about President Ford.”

This is an odd conversation.  I’m not listening intently, and the dad is quiet enough that whatever response he’s giving his teen daughter… I just don’t know.

“Was he a Democrat or a Republican?”

All that matters in the world of politics…

“I guess when you’re in that era, from Truman to Nixon… Carter.  Was Carter after Ford.  Wait.  Technically, I guess.  Yes…”

“We have a chapter on each of the 20th Century Presidents”… I’m guessing this in their high school history books, maybe?

I suppose the “fell down a lot” riff could be tossed out for color, if a bit of a Ford partisan this could be pointed out that this was exaggerated by Chevy Chase on Saturday Night Live off of a mere incident, and Ford was just about the only athlete of the 20th Century Presidents (if back in the day).

One of the more fascinating things about President Ford was there were two assassination attempts on him within a very short time-table, one by Charlie Manson acolytes.  This wasn’t brought up.

Good to see a teenager interested in American history, even if …

Odd addition to the “Complete Get a Life DVD” set in extra features…

special commentary with psychologist Dr. Wendy Walsh analyzing Chris Peterson’s mental issues

Do they do that on the Mr. Bean dvd?