Senator Lawrence Sherman, Illinois, 1919

“… a coterie of politicians gilded and plated by a group of theorizing, intolerant intellectuals as wildly impractical as ever beat high heaven with their phrase – making jargon. . . . They appeal to the iconoclast, the freak, the degenerate . . . essayists of incalculable horsepower who have essayed everything under the sun. . . . Psychologists with X-ray vision drop different colored handkerchiefs on a table, spill a half pint of navy beans, ask you in a sepulchral tone what disease Walter Raleigh died of, and demand the number of legumes without counting.  Your memory, perceptive faculties, concentration, and other mental giblets are tagged and you are pigeonholed for future reference.  I have seen those psychologists in my time and have dealt with them.  If they were put out in a forest or in a potato patch, they have not sense enough to kill a rabbit or dig a potato to save themselves from the pangs of starvation.  This is a government by professors and intellectuals.  I repeat, intellectuals are good enough in their places, but a country run by professors is ultimately destined to Bolshevism and explosion.”

George Dondero, Congressman of Michigan, holding strong against expressionism, surrealism, dadaism, futurism… 1946, repeated in 1952

The art of the isms, the weapon of the Russian Revolution, is the art which has been transplanted to America, and today, having infiltrated and saturated many of our art centers, threatens to overawe and overpower the fine art of our tradidion and inheritance.  So called modern or contemporary art in our own beloved country contains all the isms of depravity, decadence, and destruction. . . .
All these isms are of foreign origins, and truly should have no place in American art. . . All are instruments and weapons of destruction.

How nice.

Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Mr. Gingrich declared that “Barack Obama is no Ronald Reagan.” But he offered a pointed suggestion to the audience: invite President Obama to give the keynote speech at the conference next year.

But only, he said, if Mr. Obama follows through on suggestions that he is moving toward the center.

Has Obama, or any of his first level of surrogates, expressly said — in these terms, mind you — “I am moving toward the center”.  I hope not.  Even if that’s their road-map moving forward, and their mental trajectory of the “playing field” you don’t describe policies in those terms — make of the speech before the Chamber of Commerce what you may.   Apparently what Gingrich means here:

Among the things Mr. Gingrich said Mr. Obama should do is sign a bill repealing his health care plan, sign tort reform for doctors, repeal the estate tax, sign a conservative budget and act to “decisively control the border now.”

If Mr. Obama does those things, Mr. Gingrich said, he deserves to be invited next year. (Though he added that he was not counting on it.)

Rhetorically praise Clinton, then jump to the hoops and claim Obama is Carter.

Instead, Gingrich ripped Obama’s national security record, specifically in the Middle East. “The Obama administration is wrong on terrorism, wrong on Iran, wrong on Hezbollah, wrong on the Muslim Brotherhood,” he said.

Two words on the threat of Socialism, ring up Donald Trump:

Real estate mogul Donald Trump told the crowd gathered at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C., Thursday that Republican Rep. Ron Paul “cannot get elected. Sorry.” Trump toyed with the crowd and hinted at a White House run in 2012. In his CPAC conference speech, Trump said, “I have a reputation for telling it like it is… and I may be willing to put that to work.” Of the 2012 presidential contenders, Trump was booed by the crowd after he said, “I wish there was a candidate that I saw that would be fantastic because I love what I’m doing. I have a great club that’s 15 minutes away.” Trump followed by saying Ron Paul won’t be able to win.

Presidential candidates Ron Paul, Donald Trump, and Newt Gingrich.  Too bad Cheney seems to be demurring, or we’d have a real contest on our hands.

If you’re a crazy preacher wanting to hide Alaska is the place for you. They probably noticed him because he’s not from Texas. Also, he wasn’t driving a giant diesel pickup truck.

One, two, three…

He is from Texas. Here is a story of how he got his preaching ideas during the breakup of a small church in Leander, Texas where he is from. He stood out because he was standing outside in freezing weather demanding tithes. http://www.struat.com/justin/leander.html

I don’t forsee a part two or three.

The guy’s crazy enough that I bet Trinity Broadcasting Network has offered him a gig.

One, two, three…

He actually bragged that he was contacted by the 700 club people and had a radio show pending, but along with much of what he posted I think it was all delusion. Maybe he sent them an email and got a form email back and took it waaaay too seriously.

That sounds about right.  His prediction for the new year was that he would get his kids back, and he would have a national radio program.

What annoys me is that no matter the circumstances of a case and situation, in an era where people lead forms of public lives online (and Lee has been wanting to be a Celebrity of sorts anyways) – we’re an era where one is told and supposed to cultivate an online image for the benefit of future employers, a matter with a lot of discomfiting repercussions —

You’re always going to have your Defenders.  This guy, commenting in the Oregonian, is a piece of work himself —

From what I read on this, he said “God was going to punish those who harmed him” and this was taken as a threat by him, so does this mean all preachers will go to jail now when they state this ?
Does it mean when people read the parts where is says God is going to punish sinners that it will be taken as a threat too and put in jail and having to post gobs of money for bail ?
Does it mean that if Judges and law official say they are going to punish you that it can be taken as a threat now too because they directly threaten people every day. The guy lost his family and no one is helping him with his loss WTH ? If he is in fact mentally ill then someone needs to sue the courts for not taking this into consideration as it is blatant discrimination to the mentally ill by everyone involved. So far I think this case is bogus and should serve as a warning to things you post online for everyone can be bent to serve the law anyway they see fit. But if he violated a restraining order not to post info, then it’s sad that he could not contain himself in expressing through words only on a message board of which what once considered a place of free speech. Watch out what you say any where including text messages, because it can and will be used against you in a court of law.

What is up with “Supporting Guy”?  I guess he’s worried about a slippery slope such that “HOW I WOULD REJOICE TO SEE YOU WRITHE AND BLEED AND YOUR SKIN TO BE BROKEN AND YOUR BONES CRUSHED. HOW I WOULD ENJOY TO WASH MY FEET IN YOUR F…ING HISPANIC BLOOD!!!! OH, HOW I WOULD REJOICE!” will slide over to anything he might have to say to people.  I imagine there’s an element of how people become defensive with these things.

The commenting exchange went nowhere.  Post the inflamatory quote, or ones like that.  He reposts the “Just quoting the bible” screed.  Like the end of the youtube clip, where Preacher Prophet  argues that the Mechanic has called him a False Apostle because of publishing a head covering article, as though that’s the one thing anyone cares about.

For the record, he once gave me a repobation percentage of, like, It was something like 98.7864 percent — I don’t remember and the only really interesting thing about the figure was the existence of four or five numerals after the decimal point.

But to review, the launch of this chapter in the life of Preacher Prophet Man is available at youtube: 

Daniel:  Well, Exodus 20 says that my wife and children are my property. It says do not covet your neighbors donkey his house his…your…his neighbors wife, they are a form of property.  Now,granted my wife and children are my most valuable property. I would never sell them. But they  are my property, according to Torah.   And,yes I realize that techically, in Oregon Law yes, I’m kidnapping my children, okay…fine. But Torah supercedes Oregon Law! So, that’s why I’m kidnapping my children!
James:Dude! And you’re gonna go to jail.
Daniel: No, I’m not. They…They’re never gonna find me in Government Camp. Trust me, it’s very rual. It’s up in the mountains of Oregon.They’re never gonna find me! They’re never gonna find me.

Take bets in Vegas on when DJL will be arrested.  The most amusing thing to see is that over the past few days, the comment has been posted on any website (news or blog) concerning this story — “He’s in Haines, Alaska”  — which, I guess sort of sums up his insane naivette of escaping into the mountains — really rural places — where they can never find him.

I suppose I can now look away, and look back to see where things are five years from now.

A comment from the Preacher:

You never got rid of me, you fucking fool.
In fact the web traffic on my website has SKYROCKETED.
Yah rebuke you, you fucking filthy hypocrite!

Followed neatly by, two messages later:

LOL, I guess this was a last gasp. He may have even been typing this as the authorities were knocking at his door. It turns out DJL was arrested aproximately 2 hours after posting this.

And:

I was hoping you had heard….G-d is not mocked, sooner or later He was going to shut this fool up.
Let’s pray he stays locked up a long time.

So it goes.  And goes.  And goes.

There’s a type of television program that achieves high levels of fandom that I don’t have any interest in watching, but I want to know about anyway – as a cultural study to understand its appeal to its audience and what makes it a cultural touchstone.  I have come to see any number of clips from the show “Glee”, heard some fans talk about it, read various articles about it, and I have come to a conclusion.

The Superbowl promotions demonstrate that the show has “Jumped the Shark” in a rather classic motif of the phrase.  At some point, the show found its “Bad Guy” — an annoying character of cartoonish supervillian motives the viewer is meant to love to hate, someone whose values are the opposite of all the Glee fan holds dear.  What the Superbowl promos show is that she has become the show, and with it the dynamic of the show, Glee, narrows considerably.  Which is a little odd to suggest, as the show itself has always been broad with little room for subtleties.  But if we understand a basic dimension of the show has the heroes of the misfits in the Glee Club pitted in ways overly familiar with the “in” crowd of jocks and cheerleaders, marking the bad guy as the coach of the cheer squad motivated to undermine the Glee Club at every turn just — just ’cause — brings the show to eat at itself.  There are any number of ways the show can promote itself on this broad audience — it has become a vehicle that has pushed a lot of itune purchases, and has its well orchestrated routines of popular music classics to lean on — but she was omnipresent.

Take this clip, which travelled well on the Internet when aired, a rather blunt as a boulder item of preachy moralizing with its obvious appeal — but, organic to the show.  Compare it to this explanation for the post-Superbowl time slot plot line:

HOW DO YOU get many tens of millions of football fans to watch a show about a high school show choir?
If you’re Fox’s “Glee,” you kick off your post-Super Bowl episode this Sunday with a Katy Perry dance number involving acrobatics, pyrotechnics and – wait for it – scantily clad cheerleaders.

A defining notion in “Jump the Shark” dom, tricks for ratings grabs, somewhere outside the nature of organic production.  Also a sign of things: self-directed dialouge ala “I’m bored.”

But I don’t know.  The person who suggested she watches less than she did because of the centralizing of the “bad guy” may be out of step with the audience writ large.  Also, the show did wind its way to the Thriller production, after all.  I can think of three other shows where a character took over and became its face, and two of them probably really didn’t have any identify before that happened.  (Without any regard to taste, levels of deriviativeness to the program, and etc: Family Matters and Melrose Place).  The third is where Glee seems to fit into place, and its the origin of the “Jump the Shark” phrase in the first place.

For the life of me, I don’t know if my position as basically un-concerned outsider, non-viewer, makes me less qualified in making these observations — I’m largely relaying something someone else has expressed with a glean off of how annoying her presence in the Superbowl ads were — or if not really watching it but having a passing interest in the nature of these things makes me apt to see the forest from the trees.

Did Elmo overtake Sesame Street?

Hm.  The man was visibly angry and said that the Internet is not a good place for people to exchange ideas and conversations.  Maybe?

This comment leads itself to an open-ended discussion and dialouge, no?

Back to the youtube comments in Russia Today:  LaRouche is a living legend. He would make an outstanding leader. He’s the type of guy the world needs.

Therein lies a dilemma in meeting the Thousand Year Challenge.  The Larouche ideology is that HE IS a “Leader”, right there in the fight.  It’s just that nobody knows it because he is the square root of two.   (What?  You want me to find the exact quote from the old Twentieth Century Science and Technology?)  So goes the contradiction.  The only salvo for the members might be the GLORY that comes with being on the ground floor, before the UPSURGE of Mass Genius Adulation — which will come as the British Empire is at last slained, and with it the pesky Second Law of Thermodymics.  The problem, one I am not sure the org has thought through when formulating its Thousand Year Challenge, is that once this happens the Laws of Calculus will be destroyed as well.

Unfortunately they don’t any of them have a campaign website up yet.  Well, it’s early in the process.  Early in the 2012 candidacy, and early in teh 2020 presidential candidacy.

Bottom line:
Just like I have seen the Larouchies here (at the health care public meeting, with a big photo of Hitler!) and in other cities. They are not prohibited, but again, that’s not part of the real political landscape, it’s just background.
Sort of unnoticable unless I make a point to look.  But they sell anytime a Catholic bishop warns about slipping into Eugenics as a sign for themselves.

An Interview with Aljosa Durnik!!!   No, really.  ALJOSA DURNIK!  Who can resist?

Okay.  Wikipedia Update!  I did not get the new HK “experiment” quite right.  Angel’s Flight is flying in to make the references to the various supposed Validators amongst old Soviet functionaries and Italian parlimentarians.  Fun stuff.   Meantime, unidentified commenters are levelling taunts at Will Beback to “ban everyone”.   That’s the experiment.

And meanwhile, at the Administrator’s Board… Everyone knows where this is going… and it’ll repeat itself with .:

FWIW, user:Angel’s flight has also been involved in Lyndon LaRouche-related articles, in a manner consistent with past sock puppets of a banned user. See WP:LTA/HK. So-called “Death panels” and “Obamacare” are key issues for the LaRouche movement, which has become known for its posters of Barack Obama with a Hitler mustache (because they believe the plan is similar to, and inspired by, Hitler’s T4 euthanasia program). I have not gathered specific evidence on Angel’s flight, and am not explicitly accusing that user of being a sock puppet. While we should make a practice of assuming good faith, there are times when it is not warranted.   Will Beback  talk  22:55, 5 February 2011 (UTC)

FWIW, every time an editor on the LaRouche talk page disagrees with Will, Will insinuates that the editor is a sock. It seems to be SOP. Angel’s flight (talk) 16:36, 7 February 2011 (UTC)

If your suspicion is right, it would make sense of my concern, as the POV I see being advocated from Angel’s flight is definitely LaRouchian. Hauskalainen has his own POV pushing problems,[12][13][14] IMO. At worst, he seems to know “the truth” about things and can’t control his urge to opine in article space or remove things he doesn’t like with dubious edit summaries. He also can assume bad faith easily.[15][16] He can be a productive editor at other times. Jesanj (talk) 02:29, 6 February 2011 (UTC)

I’ve also been concerned that Angel’s flight is a sockpuppet of a banned LaRouche editor who edits from the Los Angeles area. Angel’s flight arrived recently at Talk:Lyndon LaRouche to support reverting to parts of an old version favoured by the LaRouche account(s). I don’t know anything about the healthcare edits he has been making, but if they’re consistent with LaRouche’s “Obama is Hitler” position, that would increase the concern. SlimVirgin 16:46, 7 February 2011 (UTC)

Actually, the funnier laugh-line lies here:
But I also see a long-standing problem of article ownership. I posted a request at the incident noticeboard but it drew little notice. Is there no other avenue to request some intervention from the management of Wikipedia?
I saw the notice it received.  It received the notice due to it.

We passed a couple of milestones in American Presidential Memorials.  The 50th Anniversary of John F Kennedy’s inaugural and the 100th Anniversary of Ronald W Reagaon’s birth.  Two men who are revered beyond the point they deserve, and two models for our polar partisan shaped Cult of the Presidency.

A question was asked by a political magazine blog at the time of Kennedy’s milestone — I think it was the American Prospect — Why is it someone whose presidency was so thin in accomplishments gets so haloed?  The answer lies in part with his marketing.  Consider, for instance, that one of the attributes the public always gae him in polls was that of “Good Family Man” — which may or may not be the case, but I’m guessing had there been less television coverage of his endless touch football games and more for his endless philandering, the public’s attitude would have shifted somewhat.  Then again, perhaps some hintings of the latter did him some good — the better to focus on his “Vigor”.

His Inaugural Address was delivered on a frigid cold day.  His predecessor was all bundled up, sensibly you can say, with long overcoats.  Kennedy welcomed a contrast by wearing just his suit and jacket.  He got away with it where William Henry Harrison didn’t — partially because he really was young and vigorous and partially because his speech was shorter and more succint — oriented as it is to the key soundbytes about “Torch” passed to “born in this century” and all that.

Kennedy also preceded before the Great Unravelling, before suspicion of the government exploded and was shown to be justified.  He never had to face the music, as did Johnson and Nixon, and so the cynical state machinery was not yet laid bare.  Thus, Johnson’s accomplishments can be conveniently shoved in to the public mind as Kennedy’s — because Kennedy is not holding the baggage that Johnson had to hold.

The answer to the question of Reagan, as I have suggested a time or two here, lies in answering “Who else have you got?”  Every generation of partisan has the need to revamp their reverred president — the Democrats managed to sneak away from the Jackson — Wilson axis and get to the Roosevelt — Kennedy axis.  Carter got the problem of the Republicans correct in his nomination acceptance speech — to paraphrase, Reagan is quoting a bunch of Democratic Presidents, because otherwise he’s left quoting Nixon and Hoover. 

I do slide a bit with the conspiracy theory / Left axis who charge that, for instance, the Tri-Lateral Commission was set up to curb the booming Democracy that was coming out of the 1960s protests and floodlights on State Secrecy.  Under this strageum, of course, one of America’s Greatest of Presidents was… Gerald Ford.  For no other reason than he was under a tight perimeter against public opinion forged against public distaste of the Pentagon Papers and Watergate.  It was also here that America hit its largest vault of permissive attitudes in “lifestyles”, and if this tended toward a sleazy construct like the suburban key-swapping party, at least it’s better than the government being mobilized in a Virtue Campaign.  Reagan came in to restore State Perogatives in matters of State Secrecy (nobody since Kennedy could quite get away with) and Virtue Policing, and the Republicans revere him for it.

I am fascinated by the manner in which opinion splits regarding Egypt, not least of which it becomes highly politicized in the nation.  Really, the only people who I peg as reasonably consistent are that type of neo-isolationist / dreary realist axis which is the order de jour at the “American Conservative”. 

The criticism of Mike Huckabee being the voice in defense of Mubarak need only turn to Dick Cheney.  Which is interesting, because I can’t quite tell if Cheney (not a neo-con, mind you) undercuts my thought that the charges from the various Fox News corner of the political discourse, and on to your John Boltons and Sarah Palins (groan… no, I don’t quite know what she wants Obama to do — Speak out for Democracy but question the protesters?  I guess we are onto something of honest policy disputes even if it’s in this narrow sphere of questions — if President Bush were doing what Palin is requesting, I’d object), that if Bush were the president right now, they would have no problem thumping everything going on in Egypt as part of the Big rush of Arab Democracy launched off of the missiles blown over in Iraq.

Which some are doing.  If they can just corner off Obama out of the picture.  Obama, you remember, who delivered this speech — which I remember with Jon Stewart mocking Republican criticism with a rendition of his words delivered out of his mouth in the way they would like it delivered — as bomb blasts.  I recall too some liberal criticism — the center of the Islamic world is shading off toward Africa, and he should have delivered the speech there.

Meantime, the Conspiracy corners are both predictable and a bit chaotic.  On one hand, they need to stand with the Egyptian protesters and can’t side toward Murbarak.  So we can trumpet this up — clandestine American involvement in Egyptian pro-democracy groups.  (Of course, wikileaks is mutli-sided — pick and choose when it’s good and when it’s part of the vast Gate-Keeping unit.)

The obvious and easy place for Liberals to go is to point to the various authoratarians the US supports.  Policy repercussions are always tricky — and we’re round the corner of the contradictions for what you do with policies.

More practical interests lie about here… the “lifestyles” section of International Politics.