Dennis King, in his postings on the developments in the inquest into Jeremiah Duggan’s death, criticizes the nature of google’s news aggregator, largely spelled out here, but also at the top of his update page is this.

Jan. 29: A LaRouche press release now ranks on Google News as the number one news source re the U.K. Attorney General’s Duggan inquest decision. The AG’s “fiat” for a new inquest is an important news story being covered by numerous newspapers and other media outlets in Britain. Responsible newspapers with substantial circulations. But what comes first on Google News as of 10:30 PM, Jan. 28–if you type in “Jeremiah Duggan”–is a scurrilous rant signed by LaRouche.

Other news sources aggregated by google…
The John Birch Society.  As well their magazine “New American”.
I’m a bit hazy on some of the other “news” sources of similar questionable repute that google aggregates. 
Then there are any number of opinionated bloggers, and I would say any number of them don’t really fit the category “news”.  (For instance, to his credit the dailykos blogger asked for his site’s removal.)  I could go either way with most of them, they may be worth a read for different perspectives on this or that news topic, but surely they can be aggregated by something else.

I guess if EIR had the blessing of Morton Downey, Jr in the 1980s, it gets to be thrown into google news.  As for the piece on Duggan, I could swear I’ve read that LPAC / EIR piece on the Jeremiah Duggan case several times before.  It’s all a head scratcher.
Is not my appearance twice on the BBC broadcasts in the matter of Prime Minister Tony Blair’s lying pretext for launching war against Iraq, as this fact of the matter was emphasized by Dr. Kelly, the primary area of fact bearing on Erica Duggan’s launching what has been a largely fraudulent campaign against me, launched by important associates of Blair in the setting of the death of Dr. Kelly, of the highest relevance in the behavior of certain British circles in the strange role of Erica Duggan?
I can answer that for you.  No.
But at least the Herschel Krustofsky branch of sock puppets have been kept at bay at wikipedia.

As for actual news items, Dennis King seems to have pulled the bulk of the UK’s offerings.  The BBC.  United Kingdom Press Agency.  Their attorneys at Leigh Day.

Ask the deployed members at card table shrines on about Duggan, and they’ll respond round about like this.  Meanwhile, the EIR item will shortly be dumped onto that weird sort of weblog — this sort, for perhaps further commenting by Howie G.

Things I’ve been wondering about Howie G.  About a third of the posts at his sites are paid sponsor posts.  Buy this.  Curiously enough, this doesn’t have the “Visit Sponsors’ Site” button, but it’s evidentally a paid message, as per the disclosure:
The compensation received may influence the advertising content, topics or posts made in this blog. That content, advertising space or post may not always be identified as paid or sponsored content.
Well, I’m sure Howie G is raking in big bucks with this.  But maybe there just are no better ways of making of a living — tough economy and all that — this way is falling a bit a way.

I remember giving two Larouche people $10 at a Chicago airport for some subscription, I never got a thing, lol, this is my way of getting back at the Larouche crowd, by posting this tidbit here.
investur – January 25th, 2010 at 6:51 pm
I agree, when I had asked a Larouche youtuber he gave me his Hawaii phone number and said he’d only communicate that way, no emails, no text messages online–so I dumped him.
splintercell99 – January 25th, 2010 at 9:49 pm
yeah those guys mean well, but they wont tolerate people not following their ideas all the way down the line. If you dont agree with them you are automatically against freedom/life/ etc

But we just need enough to get by to the end here.

LaRouche continued: “You have got to understand emotionally, as well as intellectually acknowledging things, that you are talking about the extinction of civilization as we have known it. And this is coming up now.” […]

Hold on!  Now I see why google news aggregates this.

A silly thing about keeping up reguarly on a blog is that I find myself with this mental list of names and a curious question of “How will I tackle a blog post at their death?”  It’s a weird distortion of thinking about this hobby.
Howard Zinn was on that list.  He is that guy — that caricature everyone’s talking about when they refer to the left wing academic activist “Blame America First” figure.  And somebody has to be.
Zinn, by the nature of his fame, lends himself pecularly to a wading of blog posts in a blog aggregator and by and large by-passing the obituaries in major news sources, because  he is a man who registers for basically political activists on the left or right, and not in a vast mainstream center.  The most interesting thing is to read the caveats toward some otherwise complimentary items from detractors — “Sure, he’s a pinko Marxist Revolutionary… BUT –“.  It is by way of acknowledging that outside the current wash of his death, the only times they’d be referencing Zinn is a sort of pejorative short-hand of marginilia, hyphenated with “Chomsky”*.

Or perhaps…
Although one suspects that within another generation or two he’ll be as curious and obscure a figure as Lyndon LaRouche or Pat Buchanan: once interesting to a few, but utterly irrelevant to the future.

I reference Howard Zinn here by way of bringing myslelf back to Lyndon Larouche.  When he dies, and one looks into blog aggregators, there won’t be any relatively positive pieces from anyone who’s referenced him as a pejorative slight, caveats or otherwise.   The small number that there will be will read like this.  Or maybe this.
I see little reason not to get this out of the way, and post my quick salvo upon Lyndon Larouche’s death.
He accomplished astouding feats, in the same way a man who dediccated his life to the creation of elaborate and intricate castle sculptures out of his own feces might.  I stand at the sighting of these sculptures, a foot or two steps back to avoid the worst of the pugnant ordor, and while I admit to gaping a bit in wonder, mostly I am just scratching my head and asking “What the Hell was the point of that?”

One last note, this is worth a look — this collection of essays on hnn’s website.

Michael Ledeen Responds to Liberal Fascism Michael Ledeen

Matthew Feldman and Chip Berlet reference the Larouchies’ current campaign, sticking Hitler mustaches on politicians’ faces.  Feldman includes that image.  I note that the other image used in this set of articles is that in the Roger Griffen piece with of the tween (they’re teenagers now, right?) neo-nazi pop sensation Prussian Blue.  There’s… something there.

Question.  What does this comment even mean?

Describing Howard Zinn as “a man of the left” hardly begins to do it justice. He was a dedicated Marxist revolutionary who would have been quite happy to see our constitution overthrown.

“Dedicated Marxist Revolutionary”.

I should not say too much about the man.  Do a little web surfing and see what you find, beyond the major obituaries where you’ll learn the old chestnuts that he was friends with Ben Affleck.  So, I guess Schlesinger was more or less right when calling Zinn “not a historian, but a polemicist.”    But punt past that, and go to the ordinary people — or, I guess, his audience comprised of a good deal of Grad Student radicals.  This is good, for instance.  As is this.   To get off that stereotype, maybe.  Furthering along.

A week or so ago, I saw that a poster at the “Daily Paul” (as in Ron) post a recommendation for Zinn on American foreign policy.  A curious item, but here he is eulogized in the same way at the lewrockwell blog with the caveat…  (ahem) While he was a bit of a pinko on labor issues.
It is a world where in mainline media discourse “left” is defined by the doings of the Democratic Party and “right” is defined by the doings of the Republican Party, so this is what we get.  But I guess things could get worse there.

One thing.  I’ve always seen these reports that Zinn’s famous polemic “A People’s History”, is used as an alternative textbook in “many high schools”.  I’d be uncomfortable with anything other than used as a supplementary item to draw upon.  But just for laughs, I suggest one of the members float the text before the Texas textbook adoption committee.  Just for the laughs the reaction from the right-wingers on the panel.

See today’s Oregonian?  There’s a strange item of vitrol in the letters column.  It has my head spinning, and is worth a whirl.  It is Mark Kraschel, who a quick google search shows is not new to tossing acid about.  It appears he hates it here and hates the people who populate the city.  Go figure.

The letter.  And some footnoted thoughts from me.

Your article on Obama’s first year shows there will always be a lunatic fringe that thinks with their heart and not their head. [“Oba-Meh,” WW, Jan. 20, 2010].(1)

Even though he is now more unpopular than Richard Nixon in his first year (2), I have no doubt that there will always be a teeny bopperlike group that carries a crush for Obama. Let’s face it, liberals are too emotionally immature to lead, and electing Obama proves it.

You had a chance to elect the first woman president, and getting eight more years of Clinton—a proven brand(3) and something conservatives could have stomached. (4)But the misogynists(5) in the party squashed that idea at the convention(6), instead going for a Harvard-tongued(7) Soros-backed(8) neophyte in a misguided quest to turn America into France(9).  […]

………………………………

(1)  If I recall right, there was one respondent who was up on Obama, one was down, and the others were apprehensively in the middle somewhere.  But, you know, anything more than complete and utter rejection to the point of making “Obama Opposer” a part of your identity is worshipping the quicksand he walks on.

(2) Wow.  Really?  More unpopular than Nixon in his first year?  Honestly, I would not be able to come up with a more meaningless political marker if I tried.  In other news, Zogby polls show that Obama has a lower approval rating at this point in his presidency than anyone since Eisenhower.  Think about that one for a second.

(3) It may be that the reaction to the recent Supreme Court ruling on Campaign Finance is overblown, and that the corporates have already basically won control of everything in politics.  See the ease with which people discuss candidates as “brands”.  In the old days, detractors blasted the John Kennedy campaign as a lot of style over substance.  Joe McGinnis wrote a book called The Selling of the President charging that Nixon was being sold like soap.  Today we don’t even think twice about it, and speak to each other in corporate marketing terms, and accept it as what we want.

(4)  See the logjam of now remaindered Clinton books put out by Regancy and other publishers between 2004 and 2008.   For instance.  OR.  They only then shifted to a boatload of Obama books.  For instance.  Today’s favorable opinions of Hillary Clinton come from not having any real political stake in her fortunes.

(5) Crack the nut of the racism versus misogyny race.

(6) Or, you know, the primary campaign.  Hell, even in PUMA world, the decision was made before the onvention.

(7) Yes We Can!

(8)  According to David Horowitz, Soros had dibs on Hillary.  But maybe he’s turning to Larouche for the lowdown on the inter-party battle on where the Soros takeover of the Democratic Party is happening.  In the real world, he ended up giving donations to both candidates (“Retire Hillary’s debt!”).

(9) Oui nous pouvons !

(10) Honestly, I got bored and will let the rest fall into the ether.
Oh.  Okay.  I’ve come back to it for the final paragraph.

Cap-and-trade was a swing and a miss (11), socialist health care was strike two (12), Obama is not going to hit the home run you hoped for(13), and the best you can hope for is a walk, resembling something pathetic like a reenactment of the Carter years(14).

Cue Obama comment.

“I’d rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president,” President Barack Obama told ABC News’ Diane Sawyer during an interview that the network is airing in pieces on World News and Good Morning America.

I just kind of have to hate the query that prompted this answer.  This is the only politick answer Obama could provide; to say otherwise would be to suggest you’re a political creature.  It is rote, but he stayed on the script that he has to stay on with that one — and you know, no need for the self-parody that came with the Teleprompter set in that sixth grade classroom, for this is a more general self-parody of generic presidential answers.

He is a president, you have to understand, who only now and only this week has lost me to an extent.  I say that with the suggestion that he only marginally “had me” to begin with — and a comment that I always hold to this sneaking suspicion that in the end, an administration’s influence on one’s life lies merely at the margins.  I expect better than this last week or two, a sour note has chimed in to what’s otherwise been a tolerable decent imperfect middling good mixture.  He appears to guilty of responding too much to his own press, and by that I mean Andrew Sullivan.  Well, it’s a long term or two; I guess I expect troughs and periods where things just kind of go off course.

But, to Obama, on his one term comment, I’d have to say: — hokay, Wise Guy.  I recently compiled this Rating of the Presidents.  It corrals the disparate contradictory and competing impulses, and through the four categories warrants asterisks aplenty of acknowledgements of what’s wrong with this picture, and which would only serve to muddle.  It is also — how do I say — idosyncratic.  BUT… Mr. “I’ll take a Good One Term over a mediocre two termer”… who do you want to follow in the footsteps of and how do you intend on following his footsteps?

 John Quincy Adams.  Yes, I admit, this is a lifetime achievement slot.  Remove his stellar post presidential congressional career needling the Slave Power, remove his pre-presidential “Monroe Doctrine”, and he’d fall to — probably the next category.  How can Obama be a one termer of the stature of John Quincy Adams?  I suppose he can return to the Senate, and put up a legacy there.  Also, Adams made a decent contribution to American Arts and Letters, and so flag the “Dreams of My Father” book good and well.

Chester Arthur.  Okay, this one appears to be a joke.  No, no I’m quite serious.  Chester Arthur matched up against unusual circumstances.  Garfield was killed by a man wanting to thwart reform to the civil service spoils system — that cancer on our political system that was making our election system a joke.  Arthur, chastined by the situation, and also aware that he would be dead in a few years, instituted the necessary reforms.  And he went after the corruption of his former backers.  History then very quickly forgot he existed.  Lesson for Obama?  I don’t know.  Give us a good, concrete result that makes the democratic process a lot cleaner.

Gerald Ford.  Actually, he’s Chester Arthur’s doppelganger — fell into office through a sideways means.  In his case, he was forced to a level of few real ambitions for the presidency.  But he provides one particular area for Obama, somewhere in the vision of the Vietnam War:  let some disasterous policies of previous administrations expire.

John F Kennedy.  Probably better to leave him out of this.  But, if I must suggest to Obama something out of Kennedy: even if you fail to advance in the legislative buzzsaws, leave behind the rhetorical framework with which your successors can work to leave a lasting legacy.

In the next round of ten, things get a bit odder.  I stuck up the name John Tyler — who could easily be slotted in the bottom ten, and generally is in the Historians’ listings.  I’m a little mischievous here, but you have to understand the circumstances of what Tyler dealt with, and the one historical legacy he absolutely had to leave behind — he was President, with all the responsibilities and privileges that position holds — and nothing less than that, even as your Henry Clays in the Senate wanted to take that away from him.  If you can impart a lesson for Obama from such a thing as what John Tyler endured, it is the mere act of survival and keeping your head about you, fighting against fierce partisan headwinds.

James K Polk is the usual suspect the Historians’ lists stick up there as “Top One Termer”.  You can leave them to explain him — round up a small list of things you wish to do, and then doggedly get them done.  There’s a bit more, having to do with the virtues of knowing future political careers reside outside the ebb and flow of this presidential administration — the virtues of a prolonged Lame Duckdom — but I suspect that such a thing has passed away and can’t really work in this day and age.

It’s probably not worth going down any further.  We have in this second category that mostly just didn’t disgrace themselves — Zachary Taylor offers a Kennedy-lite problem in that you can imagine he might have played the future a bit better, so with Taylor he might have amoelirated Slavery and had a firmer path toward its destruction inherent in the Compromises to come — smothering rabid pro-slavery Southern sentiment by mere fact of being himself a Southerner (positioned as moderate).  But he offers nothing besides that one.  Carter offers a clear suggestion of things not to do — don’t make a speech outlining the problems the nation faces with an offering of a plan to combat the problem, and then in rather incoherently fire your entire cabinet.   

You also don’t want to be Harding and have your Interior Department sell off public lands, or Coolidge and swerve the nation into illusionary economic bubbles… but that last disaster (and he was the truest disaster of the three twenties presidents) served a good five years — so I guess he counts as a two termer.

Actually, I want to break up Hayes and Harrison, but I don’t know who in the third category to slide down and which one of these two most warrants a slide up.  A lesson from the Gilded Age one term presidents: keep your presidential preogatives.  He might have screwed the pooch on that one already by not keeping a firmer guiding on Health Care.

Now to the mediocre two termers…

I’m SHOCKED!  SHOCKED!  SHOCKED!!!

For the better part of six decades, Paul Harvey spun tales on the radio in his staccato baritone, entertaining up to 24 million listeners a day with folksy vignettes ending in unexpected twists.

Previously confidential files show that Harvey, who died last February at 90, enjoyed a 20-year friendship with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, often submitting advance copies of his radio script for comment and approval. Harvey wrote Hoover and his deputies regularly. Hoover, in turn, helped Harvey with research, suggested changes in scripts and showered the broadcaster with effusive praise.

Okay, I’m not that shocked.

And then Joe Stephens describes the “Meet Cute” moment of the Romantic Comedy that is the story of Paul Harvey and his toolship as Bureau propagandizer, skiddadling past what you have to call an act of Journalistic Dishonesty on Paul Harvey’s part.  Moving right along.  Or, if you want to go to the hack newswriter cutesy quip being used for this story, now page 2.  (I myself already blew that line by not starting this blog post with something like “And now the rest of the story.”)

In 1956, Harvey sent tips about “known Reds” at a Texas Air Force base to McCarthy and his witch hunters, whose paranoiac anti-communist crusade destroyed the careers of federal bureaucrats, Hollywood intelligentsia and others before McCarthy’s demagoguery was challenged and exposed by pioneering CBS News correspondent Edward R. Murrow.  (In charater, naturally, and actually nothing particularly outlandish.)

In 1959, Harvey and the FBI colluded to go after author, psychiatrist, and educator Bruno Bettelheim after he had been critical of Hoover as well as U.S. law enforcement’s handling of juvenile delinquents.

“Meat to the bones”, we say.

Insert Bose Radio commercial.

“I think your words portray us very well but, as you requested, my staff has added a little ‘meat to the bones,’ ” Baker wrote. The resulting commentary, also distributed as Harvey’s syndicated newspaper column, included the FBI’s suggestions word for word.

Truth be told, this is all ancient history.  His most recent career is marked less by any odd government collusion, and more of the reading of carrot encrusted right wing forwarded email, in the evolution of the Urban Legend he sort of served as a conduit for for oh so many years.

It was on, I think both, the goofy libertarian Mises Rand freak website of lewrockwell.com and the blog for Reason, though a quick search only shows up the lewrockwell item, that I saw this oh so provocative question “Was Einstein a Libertarian?”

At least he admits the ridiculousness of affixing Einstein into a predisposed idea.  But to review, so much as his politics can be looked at.

He tended to dodge from totalitarian or bureacratic governments en route for Scientific Inquiry.  He hated War, and was signatory to what was an aborted petition stating the fervent desire that once hostilities around WWI ended (whatever the hell this fight was about), everyone across nations would b e able to commence forward in the great inquirous quests of Humanity.  He was horrified by the specter of Hitler, and to that end let Roosevelt in on the power of the Atom lest the Allies lose an Atomic Race to the Axis Powers.  And he warned that targetting a civilian city for destruction would indeed constitute a War Crime.  After the war ended, he was terrified by the prospects of the Cold War in this New Nuclear Age, and hitched his name to the presidential bid of One Worlder and Soviet Accomodationist Henry Wallace.

Oh, and also he made a snide comment about the incomprehensibility of the Income Tax.

A bit stuck at the spectre of the Henry Wallace Libertarians, I can’t quite figure out what the point of this “Einstein was a Libertarian Exercise” was.  Does this illuminate anything at all?

Watching the basic thrust of the Health Care debating, and the rather easy manner some things get politicized in the most weirdly warped manner, within a legislative process laid bare to a root of fragility…

the focus of the why bother here gets lost.  Here’s an example of perhaps not the most hard scrabbled case, but mundanely relatable nonetheless.

My son was dropped from our family’s employer-sponsored health insurance shortly after graduating from college in May. While filling out the application for a new policy, he asked me how to answer a question about his marijuana use in the past year. I said, “Honestly.” He checked a box indicating he smoked very occasionally and was denied coverage. Now he is uninsured while countless pot-smoking liars have coverage. My husband thinks I gave our son foolish advice. Do you agree? — M.H., Montclair, N.J.

Randy Cohen gives the answer, with one dangling sentence lying about.

And so, were I filling out that form, I’d lie without remorse. (All right, with some remorse. Accompanied by resentment. I blame my upbringing. And my inept, albeit imaginary, therapist.) But I could not advise my child to lie — even an older child, even to an insurance company. I would feel a parental duty to teach integrity and encourage civic engagement. So I would urge him to supply an honest answer on that form and write an urgent letter to his elected representatives, particularly those working on health care reform. The real solution here is to guarantee access to medical care to all people, not just those pot-smoking liars.

What?  Are you nuts?  The elected officials are really going to introduce recreational drug politics into a debate already blasted apart at the seams by auxiliary and tangental policies of — Joseph Wilson’s “You Lie!’ regarding goddamned immigration policy, and Stupak entering the fray against Abortion.

Event Television for a slice of a certain age group, it would seem.

Not only would that be by far the biggest rating in that age group for any kind of show at any time Friday night (if it holds up as a national rating and it will probably decrease only slightly), it is also a better number than almost every prime-time show that has appeared on NBC this television season.

In the current television week, only three entertainment shows on television — “American Idol” on Fox and CBS’s two Monday comedies, “Two and a Half Men” and “The Big Bang Theory” — have exceeded a 4.8 rating in that younger adult group.

Or maybe not.  It’s not like “Two and A Half Men” is “Event Television”. 

Nonetheless, this ratings item is strking.  And it is probably something that makes no sense to, say, my parent’s generation.  Just as it makes no sense that Jay Leno might have been this fresh personality back in 1990.  Some things  need a bit of sense in context to explain.  Sample Conan back in 1993 and 1994, and the impression is probably not all that great.  Your twenty-something demographic came to it as it developed, out of sight a tad.

To be fair, Jay Leno’s Tonight Show beat Conan in even this demographic.  Until these last couple of weeks.  To be further fair, everyone’s ratings were sliding — including The Tongiht Show with Jay Leno.

The word being floated about with Conan’s “Goodbye” speech is “classy”.  I myself had thought he would thank Jay Leno, but then again the classy thing to do there would be to leave that name out and avoid the ensuring chorus of boos.  I don’t quite understand it.  The entire gist of the last two weeks’ of programming was a comedicly exaggerated classlessness.  They insult the venetration of the “Venerable Institution” of “The Tonight Show” by putting on the “Masturbating Bear” — smuggled from what he had thought was retired at the end of his Late Night Run, and that is the joke.  (Not quite on this wikipedia list, though.)  I gather everyone is on the joke here except Leno, see Letterman’s surge of Leno and NBC jokes.  But here, Conan has an advantage: his “burning down the house” has a natural time limit of his final prgoram — Letterman just has to fade away his current running gag eventually.

Watching the montage sequence — to Cheap Trick’s “Surrender” — heavy on what was arguably the most memorable skit of his short run of his program, the very first one — and the search for visual humor.  An odd mark of Letterman’s old show sits there — that “Human Bowling Alley” has a strange similarity to, say, Letterman’s “Human Sponge”.  The Monster Truck destroying a Giant Pumpkin is oddly similar to Letterman throwing Watermelon out the window.  Odd, given they’re too very different personalities.  (But then again, these things were Stolen from Steve Allen, as he says.)
Visual gags.  But  nary a Pimpbot in there.

I have a tough time imagining Jay Leno piecing together a montage of visual humor and cues of similar kinesis.  Then again, the same might be true of Letterman CBS.  With Jay, it’s a distorted face to a “Brain” character, a distorted face to a “Jock” character, and a continuous loop of him asking Hugh Grant “What the Hell Were You thinking?”

Which is fine.  These shows are, at the end, merely entertainment promotional vehicles.  Leno will return to The Tonight Show, ratings leader.  Here I’ll toss in one irresponsible suggestion  The NBC brass will promote it with something that has eerie echos of the “Great Silent Majority” behind the beleagured Leno, similar to his “America is Standing Up for Jay” ad campaign.  So, if you want to continue in the great George Wallace — Richard Nixon — Jay Leno tradition, Go for it — who am I to stand in your way?

If a tree fell in the forest and nobody was around to hear it, did it make a sound?

The answer is “yes”, and with that I breeze right past an old chestnut of a Zen riddle.

The analogious question concerns the news that broke yesterday.  Air America Radio is now dead.  So it is every conservative talk radio host will get in one last dig, and other than that nobody noticed.  The quote-in-quote “Progressive” talk radio format, such as that is, long moved past “Air America”.  The most viable hosts on that channel long moved past Air America.  Al Franken is in the Senate, Rachel Maddcow is on the television, Thom Hartman has a different syndicate, Randi Rhodes is with Clear Channel, and Mike Malloy self-syndicates.  Today’s KPOJ programmer faces the daunting task of replacing programming for the hours of 6-8 pm and 11 pm -3 am.  I imagine the 6 to 8 slot will be filled in with something temporarily, in the expectation that Ron Reagan will be picked up by someone shortly — similar to what they did with Randi Rhodes.

As for 11 pm to 3 am… whatever moves the meter.  Hey!  They have Alan Colmes!

The weekend schedule is where they face a task… and you know, for what that’s worth.  Its broadcast of “Air America” programming seem as much a dumping ground as anything else. I imagine that they’ll slot in Stephanie Miller broadcasts for Sunday, as they currently do on Saturday.  Er… Alan Colmes on Saturday, as they currently do on Sunday.  After that, I have no idea.  They have to find something to replace Lionel.  Lionel, I never understood.  He was with WOR and syndicated from there, then he made this weird career move and signed with Air America.  That career move never made much sense to me, and maybe it doesn’t any more for him either.

Maybe they can put on a new local show with host Heidi Tauber.

Good lard, the Democratic Party sucks.  They lose a Senate seat, and decide to pack it in.  If the feelings we have surrounding this party is apt, I suggest they put it to a vote right now on who should organize the Senate Caucus, and hand title of “Majority Leader” over to Mitch McConnell — holder of now 41 seat, 42 if you toss in Lieberman for making his usual coy comments.

The Democratic Party Reaction is, if asked, I am liable to identify myself as a member in good standing of the Whig Party.  The Whig Party has a few things going for it.   Henry Clay had a decent and workable vision for uniting the nation — “The American System”.   The party ditched the idea of bothering with platforms, and just ran beloved Generals.  We had William Henry Harrison.  Zachoray Taylor did not disgrace himself in his 14 months of office.  At the mid-point of the twentieth century, the nation decided to give the Whig Party another whirl, and elected Dwight D Eisenhower — who gave us the Federal Highway System.  Harrison, Taylor, Eisenhower.

There is a strange quality to the current deliberations.  Politically it’s probably best for the Democratic House to pass the Senate bill, as much of a Rube Goldberg Device as it is (and it is a Rube Goldberg Device because it’s a contraptiond designed for 60 goddamned votes), and sell it as that flawed foundation we’ll get back to in the years ahead.  This has the advantage of being less noisy in the process, and it’s the noisiness of the proecess that’s killing everyone.  Policy-wise, I long desired that that thing is too far gone that the pared down items to be gotten through Reconciliation and 50 goddamned votes — your Medicare Buy-in down a decade and a few Insurance Reforms — probably makes for better actual policy.  Modest in some ways, more radical (I hate that word when describing these reforms) in other ways.

Unfortunately, watching the party I will go ahead and change registration to “Whig”.

For a time, I’ve had this generalized theory of how a throughline of a more or less  successful Obama Presidency, of two terms, would look — success being I can look back at it and think more highly of it than Clinton.  And the throughline throws as a given substantial losses in 2010.  It’s generically that pattern that holds for previous presidents — I see someone has unearthed what should be more widely understood about Ronald Reagan‘s presidency.  Actually, Reagan held three periods of popularity — coinciding with the 84 and 88 elections that they may, and a lot of area of unpopularity.  Likewise, Gallup lets us in that Obama has a lower approval rating at this stage in his presidency than anyone since Eisnenhower.  No, seriously.  A Political Life is not something for the squemish.  But the throughline gives us, though, the requirement of a Big Ticket Item in the first two years.  The Democrats seem bizarrely giddy to blow it.

… And, you know, not that I am a Democrat.  I am a member of the Whig Party.