Several years ago, I found the title of the perfect book to take to court when trying to avoid Jury Duty:  Our Enemies In Blue.  Pick up a copy, put it on your book-shelf, and eagerly pull it out when summoned with the notification — as an experiment.

The great footnote in the history of the Obama Administration passed everyone, received its fifteen minutes of hub, beer choices dissected, sociography studied — can’t just be Obama, the cop, and the professor — got to balance the racial scales with Biden.  Media descended, stood at long range with cameras — all quite ridiculous, really.

Nothing much comes out of this.  We have two new celebrities.  Officer Crowley, the man who abused his power, and Professor Gates, the man who was guilty of the great crime of “Contempt of Cop”.  Crowley apparently finding the loophole for arrest by getting the man outside the house, thus making “disorderly conduct” feasible — if you’re in the mind to see it as such.  The police report already disposed as fictitious in that the only part verifiable, the 911 call, was ficitious.  As examples of a wanton police state go, this is actually negligible enough — worse than that is this or this.  (Or, this.)

After the hub-bub of the “Beer Summit”, I’ll not so much put aside the racial component as get back to it from a separate angle.  I am well aware of the small “c” conservative and understandable deference to police that  holds much public opinion behind Officer Crowley.  It is a tough job, somebody’s got to do it, and a “baddie” can jump right out at any time.  It is from this starting point of “on guard” that we arrive at the anonymous LAPD officer writing for the National Review these well travelled fascistic comments in opposition to private property rights.  And it is there that we also get Rudy Giuliani’s lessons from his Mafia Father — minute in — to not question the cop.

NRA politics tends to go on about how the government is coming to take away your guns, and that will happen “FROM MY COLD, DEAD HANDS!”  I suppose the part where this Vinn Diagram between the “deference to the police” and “Proud ‘Gun Nut'” meets hasn’t worked out the contradiction — when that fateful day comes for the government gun confiscation, it would be a police agency.  Either that, or it may be that a fear of the gun confiscation is an example of  “White Male Privilege”.

There is this interesting polling metric Rasmussen threw out, the graph to which Republicans have glommed onto.  It isolates the “Strongly Approve” and “Strongly Disapprove” and arrives at a number with the difference.  Thus, with Obama’s approval rating even now and even still above 50, the strong disapproval outweighs the strong disapproval by a decent margin and something is to be made of the “fervor” of disapproval outweighing the “fervor” of approval against the backdrop of a vast middling.

Whatever else I ca say about the President, he has a relatively long field vision range that enures himself from such transitory noise.  A significant factoid from the Obama — Clinton primary fight:  the Clinton staff was always on top of the latest Drudge missives, the Obama staff was not.  That explains a good deal of how Obama could claim his running of a campaign demonstrated his presidential abilities — notwithstanding the problematic nature of Obama’s candidacy.  (He — um — was a US Senator on the National stage for all of a year before staking his claim at the presidency, and a good part of his campaign was the equivalence of projecting a giant image of himself out there for a cult-like ambience to his supporters.  What?  Did I say that?)

I am temperamentally unable to “strongly approve” of anyone.  There is the flimsiness to these polls, and particularly this one.  I suspect a portion of Obama’s “Left flank” support has hedged over from “strongly support” to “middling support”.  A larger portion of the “Strongly Disapprove” is more solidly in place than the other categories on this continuum — the very real advantage of opposition — the supporters can make value judgements on the act of governance.  The nature of our two-party system discourages any movement from “Left flankers” beyond the middling support range.  Take that “Problematic nature of Obama’s entire campaign” comment I threw out there.  There is this right-wing video offered up, outraged by the very presence of Obama and considering his very presidency illegitimate by tact of being oh so unqualified and sudden and as a by product of a of media conspiracy.  It is a more partisn tinged version of the Alex Jones conspiracy joint “As the Mask Slips” — its commentary experts that assortment of talk radio persoanlities and newsmax and world net daily types.  Who makes an appearance on this film?  Sarah Palin.  See how the public is hemmed in in these assessments?

As an example of that:  Joseph Biden recently made a rather crude analysis which undermined Ameican “soft power” relating to US — Russia relations.  It causes a bit of a row in the Russian media, and some consternation on the part of Vladamir Putin.  Notable about the gaffe, thought, is it was simply an explication of what Biden was saying by implication in his recent foreign tour.  And if you assembled an assortment of the foreign policy team for the past four Presidential Administrations, the consensus opinion would align behind Biden’s “Russia fade” comments.  Such is the nature of human relations and diplomacy that such statements can really only be passed behind coded messages to be divined.

Back to Biden’s counterpart in the 2008 campaign:  Palin.  She can, I hear, see Russia from her house, and would have our nation on guard for when Putin rears her head over the Alaskan horizon.  Which is to say, at least Biden’s gaffe made sense.  I’m tempted to suggest Biden should have that talk show and not Palin — Biden’s love of his own voice would provide the gist for the mill for everyone; Palin would best be advised to play up oppositional phone calls to buttress her and her supporter’s “aggrieved” complex.

I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with Sarah Palin right about now.  Is she a major force in American politics, or a sideshow freak?  The problem is I know and you know that she is never going to be nominated to a presidential run, even if she might think she’s pulling the route of Nixon post 1962 pre-1968.  But she has a following in this American Republic, and someone somewhere out there looks at that image of her signing a baby and does not cringe.  (From :53 to, oh, 1:52 of youtube: Noted Poet Laureate Sarah Palin.)

It is the audience that believes The Media is up to wantonly slander Old Glory (youtube 3:25 to 4:32… fascinating at 5:25 where the CNN news ticker alerts the “Developing Story”).:

Democracy depends on you, and that is why — that’s why our troops are willing to die for you. So how about, in honor of the American soldier, you quit making things up?”

And everybody else.:

We are facing tough challenges in America, with some seeming to just be hell-bent maybe on tearing down our nation, perpetuating some pessimism, and suggesting American apologetics, suggesting perhaps that our best days were yesterdays.

Suggesting “American Apologetics”?  (I think this is a Dictionary Moment.) 

July 4th, or probably more like the 3rd, one of those “lists” was thrown out at me — “Most Patriotic Songs“.  The wasn’t the list and has an aspect of “Counter-Programming” to it — as against the list I saw which stuck that quaint old country diddy “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue”, but this song includes the song I want to mention.  Johnny Cash’s “Ragged Old Flag”.  I tis an item of smaltz, and hearing this narrative I am left with this basic problem:
All very well and good, but I think your little town would be better off if you, you know, repaired the flag and put up a fresh coat of paint on your old courthouse (renovate or upgrade to a more modern one?) as opposed to throwing out Patriotic Bromides.

So.  Sarah Palin.  Do with her what you must, I suppose.  Good luck to Alaska’s new governor.

As you know if you’ve been following these things, this crew have gotten their “Inner Ross Perot” on and given us a “This is what Health Care Reform looks like” (as opposed to their bubble-plague graphs which have been ripe for mockery):

Health Care Reform looks roughly like this, they say:

It is a design that obfuscates more than it illuminates, an attempt at the 1994 graph used by Bob Dole to show a bunch of bureacracies getting in between you and your doctor.  I recall Conan O’brien having Bob Dole on his program, and having a gag with him where he questioned the honesty of the graph by “zooming in” to one of the boxes to show one of the new bureacracies as “The National Basketball Association”.

Or… I have engaged in some form of “Create instructions for simple task”s exercise on more than one occasion.  “Make a Peanut and Belly Jelly Sandwich”, for instance.  Or better still for my illustration:  “Here’s a fairly simple design of boxes and circles.  Write up instructions on how to draw them.”  When given this type of exercise, my inclination is to create a precisely correct, but purposefully difficult to comprehend unless the listener is paying close attention, instructions.  It’s a project where I’d want it to end up where the person following the instructions will screw up, but I will be certain that it would be his/her fault. 

The New Republic rebuts this chart, in part with a chart of our current system.:

The graph is, I would say, a lot more honest — illuminates more than it obfuscates.  In the end, a lot of the arguments against is striking me as arguing that we’re just replacing one box with another — sympathetic supposition, I suppose, particularly as Congress and the Obama Administration are hammering out what amounts to the compromise of a compromise of a compromise of a compromise.

A clearer cut chart can be drawn for this piece of legislation.  Something to the effect of a Vinn Diagram — Humans on one side, Animals on the other, with a giant “NO!!!” in the point where the two circles meet.

Last time I pushed through this arena of a joke — the joke comes from the fact that the election is 3.5 years away – it was June 23rd.  Well, I suppose I can throw this up again.

#1:  Mitt Romney.  From out of nowhere, a poll shows a neck and neck race with Obama.  Though, of course, the question is operable:  This has to be the silliest poll ever. Obama has been in office less than six months. The elections are over 3.5 years away. What exactly does one expect to learn from a poll now?  Romney’s rolling into Nebraska (as we all know, the Nebraska Primary is HUGE) , he’s getting an exciting painting of himself unveiled, he’s trying to stop Health Care and is trying to wriggle out of his state’s Health Care for his base, which under the right circumstances would be a good thing.

#2:  Mike Huckabee.  Some AP analysis:  Mike Huckabee is turning into a front-runner for his party’s 2012 presidential nomination almost by default.  (You know… the election is 3.5 years away?)  Well, in the run up for such a thing, Huck Pac is restructuring. 

#3:  Sarah Palin.  Had I posted this a few weeks’ back, I would have had her as #2.  Not that I’m thinking too hard about this matter.  (Did I mention the election is 3.5 years away?)  She now leaves her seat as governorship of Alaska to tour America, quitting one thing to do another thing altogether.  Sarah Pac is apparently doing swimmingly in donations garnered.  Rush loves her and has taken up her cause.  She used official government office for personal purpose, but who hasn’t done that?  Also, she has found th perfect tool to rebut these problems: Twitter!

Also she keeps popping up on ad-buys on my computer screen.  It’s rather bizarre.  I don’t quite understand it.  Am I to donate to Sarah-Pac from various websites that do not much like her?  It’s that type of Maverickyness — that she feels bold enough to insert ads at poe-news, that keeps her up to #3.

#4.  Condoleezza Rice.  What — was that too random for you?  A throw-back to the old Dick Morris charade of a book?  Well, check this out!  Actually, this begs the question… who the heck is Gary Johnson?

#5:  Gary Johnson.  Like his haircut.  That’s enough to throw him up the list.  Has a facebook page pushing his presidency.  Remind me to look up Rice to see if she has a facebook page.  I bet she does.

#6:  Bobby Jindal.  Back in the game, back in the swing of things.  Writing op-eds.  That’s how you stay in the game.  He’s also waving giant sized novelty checks — part of the “have it both ways” nature of opposing and supporting Federal Stimulus.

#7:  Dan Quayle.  I take the opportunity to point out that someone sought out his opinion on things.  And he provided a headline grabbing soundbyte.  This doesn’t really portend a presidential run, but in case you haven’t figured it out, I’m not really taking this list seriously.

#8  Mike Pence.  He’s in Iowa.  That does portend a presidential run.  Kind of.  He urges a return to the values of Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich.  Anyway, they’re getting used to him in Iowa — trying to get a good idea of what he looks like. 
Meanwhile, Pence is throwing himself in with what they all are involved in these days — slowing down Health Care, grinding it to a hault.

#9:  Ron Paul.  Because they asked for his inclusion in these things.  But I think Gary Johnson might be his new “more mainstream” stand in, now that Mark Sanford has been sliced away.

Well, in a month I’ll come back and see how things have rejumbled themselves.  Who knows?  Maybe Tim Pawlenty will re-emerge back onto the list somewhere.  That would be quite a comeback.

“The paranoid spokeman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms — he traffics in the birth and deaths of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human value.”  — Richard Hofstadter.

“I go further than you do, for I question whether the Dark Ages in Western Europe from the fifth to thirteenth centuries were really as dark as the usual historian paints them.  It might be worthwhile to compare not paintings and arhitecture or literature of the Europe of the seventh century with the Europe of the eleventh century but to compare rather the state of civilization of the mass of the inhabitants of these far seperated ages.  […]  Another thought for you — the only “civilizations” which have really ended have been isolated islands like Yucatan and the Incas.  They, I fear perished without transmitting much of their gain to any other part of the world.” — Franklin D Roosevelt, letter to Theodore Dreiser, 10-5-39
…………………………………..

“Internal document usually means something which Chip Berlet or Dennis King claim that they have obtained through clandestine means and which cannot be verified.” — Leatherstocking, on this wikipedia page.

Leatherstocking knows better than that, of course.  After all, “Revenire” stated so naw justin, i don’t mind if you read/scan LPAC/”the” briefing/etc… you’re a nice enough person and just doing your thing so keep at it. (2/25/09)
Then there’s:
As far as I’m concerned, “conflict of elites” and “psychosexual political organizing” are esoterica and won’t be missed. The “economics” section is different;
Har de freaking har.
Really, I think this wikipedia entry should be shortened to the two sentence “Larouche views himself as a world historical person, and has proceeded on the basis of ensuring that someone somewhere believe it along with him.  He has a long line of opposition to this claim, mostly expressed with the question “Who?”.”  (An observation made right here   If I must, the wikipedia article may be expanded beyond that — but the central problem is always, as expressed by these conflicting Will Beback statements:

“Confidence in the dialog”? How do you expect me to have any confidence in the dialog when at least 15 sock puppet accounts of a single user have made 432 edits to this talk page? After that much deception it’s hard to have confidence in a dialog. This page is a monument to mendacity.  AND:
“in the interest of compromise“.

Which ensures that the larouche pages are the poster children for the limitations of wikipedia, as voiced recently by a “Cas70″ with:
I’ve always told my students not to trust everything they read on Wikipedia, and it seems I’ll have a cautionary tale from this experience to reinforce that warning. […]   To call LaRouche an econimist would be tantamount to calling a little child playing with a stethoscope a doctor just because he imagines he is one.

Though how can he describe this all as “Jabble-Wockey” when confronted with this opinion:
I was just totally mesmerized by it. I had never met anyone who spoke so eloquently as Mr. LaRouche.
……………………………….

The big question for Ryan James here:

Now usually any citation of Mr. LaRouche instantly puts me off the subject matter, as I am sure it does with you, for the reason that Mr. LaRouche and his followers have a worldview that tends to go down well with a certain amount of Kool-Aid. However, I bring this information to light so that readers can decide for themselves.

So why bother?   The given answer to that question  is:

While the report does not name any sources, other than party officials, it would still be in the interest of Gov. Beebe and Sen. Lincoln to disavow this report and deny that the White House is pressuring the Governor’s Office to “crackdown” on Mrs. Lincoln, even in the face of the White House and Democratic National Committee’s decision to run television advertisements against the senator in order to pressure her to vote for Obamacare.

There’s, I suppose, a formula being worked here for LPAC.  Obama is engaging in nothing more than standard politicking –truth be told, nowhere near as strong-arming as your Lyndon Johnson engaged in — if he weren’t putting pressure on Senator Lincoln, he’d be guilty of a sort of Political Malpractice.  That is about the sum total of the “nugget of truth” in this article — perverted beyond reasonable recognition by the Cult.  So from this we jump to:

But LaRouche, a student of both history and psychology, understood that someone suffering from an acute Narcissistic Disorder, has to be confronted—repeatedly, and with ever-growing candor—if he is to ever break free of the syndrome and return to the world of reality.
The man knows from Narcissstic Disorders, don’t he?

Slightly more than 100 days have passed, since LaRouche delivered his clinical diagnosis, that President Barack Obama suffers from acute malignant self-love. In the intervening period, the evidence of the President’s disorder has become so transparent that one prominent Washington, D.C. Democrat confided that the joke circulating around Capitol Hill and at Democratic National Committee headquarters is: President Obama awoke one morning, looked in the mirror and saw that his nose was bleeding. Furious at what he saw, he ordered aides to immediately bring him a new mirror!

Attention LYM members and assorted Baby Boomers: Who and where are these people that reach back to this reference to illuminate, casually at that, contemporary events?

Senior Democrats, speaking on condition of anonymity, have told EIR that they are astounded at the behavior of the President and his Oval Office aides. “They see the world as a zero-sum game,” one official commented.
Again. It is highly unlikely that anyone speaks in that particular idiom on capital hill.  Try again next time.  Or don’t — it serves its internal purpose, as well its middling external “now, Larouche is a nut, but –” purpose.  The other game is the defense of Ethics-challenged House members. (Conyers is a new figure to pop into such a list, but googling “Conyers” and “ethics”, I see a conservative group has filed a complaint.  Hm.  To be an elected official is to have that done.)

Some of the people on Emanuel’s Congressional hit list, among them Representatives with the greatest seniority, and the strongest “FDR Democrat” credentials, have surfaced as recent targets of relentless FBI investigation and a barrage of media leaks. Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), Chairman of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee; Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY), Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, perhaps the most powerful body in the House, responsible for all tax legislation; and Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, who has championed a single-payer universal health insurance plan, that was instantly deep-sixed by the President […].

Well, here Larouche fineses his way to a “left-plank” position*.  The standard liberal position being “Single payer is preferable, but at the very least a public option,” and the former is cut off the table from the outset due to the power of the Insurance industry.  The Larouche position apparently is, as suggested here (but probably if spelled out elsewhere not so much), “Single Payer, yes, and Obama’s public option is the Nazi program of genocide.”  The double-speak is that Larouche is dropping health insurance for his organization.

This morning Morrison & Foerster, a California law firm whose employees contributed heavily to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, is seeking to stop organizers associated with LaRouche Political Action Committee from campaigning against the President’s health care policy at Los Angeles area shopping centers. In legal papers filed in the Superior Court in Los Angeles, the firm specifically complains about posters and literature that document that Obama’s health care policies are identical to those personally adopted by Adoph Hitler in 1939.
A spokesman for LaRouche PAC stated. “This is exactly the way the Nazi’s behaved against those who resisted Hitler’s policy of eliminating lives deemed ‘not worthy to be lived. ‘ This is the United States of America 2009, not Nazi Germany 1939. Obama’s loyalists won’t stop LaRouche from exposing their Hitler-like plans.”

Exactly like the Nazis, this… this… attempt to stop the org from setting up card tables in front of various businesses.

I await to see how this q and a session is written up in LPAC, to see the fun-house mirrors in action:
Then we got another question from the LaRouche crew, tying the Holocaust to with government-run health care. The panelists were abruptly dismissive of the question, and good for them. (The weird thing, is the LaRouche person felt like she was helping them – like they were all on the same side.)

Well, I suppose this is a more mainstream cause than the continued grasps at the 9/11 Truth movement.  The comments suggest some general problematics:

Again, a Mossad backed mis-information campaign to move the attention away from the Israel-Mossad-9/11 link. Half-truths implicating the wrong people to steer the general public away from the real perpetrators. 
AND
I could only view two of the YouTube links before I got bored.
These people are seemingly more interested in How Larouche Got It Right than in formulating any coherent approach to the subject matter.  […]
The whole thing (or the two links that I saw before giving up) was pretty weird, and oddly amateurish. Mind you, who listens to Larouche folks anyway? …………………………………..
Howie G confuses me while stepping into the old “Fema camps” junkyard, and then returning to — I guess this?
Howie G:  Is this a typo:  that went on after the election of Jimmy Carter, in the December 1975 time period — or is the phrase “time period” supposed to be a weasel word?  (Suggested to a group tending to be hung up over a misplaced “Tri-lateral Commission“.)
………………………….

Mesmerizing power of Jeffrey Steinberg!!!
(Now, it’s true that from the libertarian perspective, Obama is fairly similar to Bush. It’s likewise true that, from the perspective of a die-hard Lyndon LaRouche supporter, Obama and Bush are also peas-in-a-pod, both ignoring LaRouche’s prophecies about the gold standard and the British monarchy and the like.) Jonathan Chait

Ah… but Obama can be fixed.  If he just realizes his Narcisstic Problem.  And then realizes the inherent “Institution of the Presidency”.  Which means following the road of the FDR — Clinton — Larouche Democrats!
That out is laid at the end of that “Narcisstic article”.  Clever game, they continue playing.

Okay. 
It’s been a while since I’ve heard anything about Lyndon LaRouche. Maybe since the eighties? I’m not sure.
If I remember correctly he’s a darling of the lunatic right-wing fringe. I’m dying to hear more about the “Anglo-Dutch financial oligarchy.” I wonder if it’s anything like the International Jewish Conspiracy to take over the world.
Oh, not particularly the “darling” of anyone  — “right – wing fringe” or otherwise.  I think this sort of popular-conception is where some former members get annoyed by the “experts”.
Michael R. Zaeske has been active in the LaRouche movement for the past 13 years. He and his wife live in Oshtemo Township with their three dogs.
I’m tempted to post a rather mean-spirited allustion to cult policy, but I can let it go.  Cryptically, I’ll just say that I trust they’ve walked their dogs today.

Hillary Clinton:  What we’ve seen is this constant demand for attention, and maybe it’s the mother in me or the experience that I’ve had with small children and unruly teenagers and people who are demanding attention. Don’t give it to them. They don’t deserve it. 

Kim Jong Il, or rather North Korea’s foreign minister (and somehow I don’t feel guilty about personalizing a dictatorial government like that), from right here:  We cannot but regard Mrs. Clinton as a funny lady as she likes to utter such rhetoric, unaware of the elementary etiquette in the international community. Sometimes she looks like a primary schoolgirl and sometimes a pensioner going shopping.

This exchange is probably about as insignificant in the grand course of things as the recent Ron Paul — Sarah Palin flap.  Not only that, but it appears that the comedic gist of it is more or less over — at least on Hillary Clinton’s end.  Which may mean, depending on how you grade these things, that Kim Jong Il “won”.  After all:

All the people can perform astonishing miracles and feats when they wage a high-pitched drive, fully determined to demonstrate once again the spirit of heroic Korea before the enemies by bringing about a great surge on all fronts of socialist construction.
Rodong Sinmun Thursday observes this in a signed article.

How can we ever hope to compete with that?

What is behind the Birther Movement?

Racism.  Mixed with Nativism.  Two different impulses, though perhaps the difference between the definition of the two words is a distinction without a difference.  But Barack Obama is Black., and comes from off the mainland.  And his father is from Kenya, and he extolls those roots.

A few days back, I heard a caller to a conservative talk radio show — the same sort of woman as the “I Want My country Back” lady who made famous a town-hall meeting with Mike Castle — made this concrete.  The radio show was, um, the Sunday morning I should have the radio on to NPR and “This American Life” but for some reason have it on here instead  Kramer and Abrams — which actually is, to be fair, a conservative and a quasi-liberal show with a a conservative listener and caller base…

The woman went off on Sonia Sotomayer, and demanded to know why they were not covering the fact that Sotomayor was an illegal immigrant who didn’t really have a Harvard Law Degree.  And then she asked why they weren’t covering Obama’s Birth Certificate controversy.  The two items go hand in hand, and are the product of the same premise, inextricably linked.

The best lines of comparison for the Democratic side on this fringe into mainstream movement are the “Stolen Elections”, (in particular 2004 and Ohio; I say that by way of lending my own credence to Florida and 2000), and the 9/11 Truth Movement — which is to say, Democrats and Liberals holding town-hall meetings uncomfortably squirm with audiences peppering them on questions over those matters.   Ohio 2004 can be explained by Florida 2000, directly.  9/11 Truth is a tad more complicated, but it comes in part from the manner people concoct fanciful conspiracies due to the fanciful conspiracies that actually exist, the less than stellar motives of people and institutions in power, and their not wholly democratic nature.

My point is “9/11 Truth” is a marginally more sympathetic cause than the “Birther’s”, because their underlying assumptions have more grains of truth than the “Birthers”.  The Birthers come from a simple distruct of black (and, as that radio talk show caller showed, brown) people.

To what degree does the Republican Party have a “Birther” Problem?  They have more of one than they might be willing to admit.  We have seen a rise in legitimizers of this “movement”.  There is, by dent of a large number of co-sponsors to a presidents must show birth certificate bill, a Birther Caucus in the House of Representatives — I suppose every constituency needs to be fed.  Rush Limbaugh has poked one step beyond his previous joke (which I defended on this blog) to a statement.  (And why not?  He cites World Net Daily with all seriousness, which is a source that is right there in “Birther Land”).  The “Fox Nation” website, a strange blunter version of Fox News, has a forum for discussion of Obama’s birth certificate.  And there are several conservative radio hosts, if you flick your am dial back and forth, who discuss this seriously.
As well Lou Dobbs.

The opinion journals should take the matter head on.  As a means of comparison, Eric Alterman for the Nation wrote an item a few years ago where he addressed the groups of 9/11 Truthers who always poked that question in his book and speaking tours.  This inevitably makes him a “Gate-keeper” for the conspiratorialists, and that is the point.   (As well Markos Moulitsas who banned that thing from his blog).  National Review gives us this, from David Horowitz (after some mild “raising of the issue” from Jim Geraghty).  I think we can say that “Birth Certificate Madness” is more extricably tied with the Republicans than 9/11 Truth is for the Democrats — so I suppose a brusk and regular mocking in the bullet-points section of those magazines might serve them well.

It is worth noting the blow to the “Military Industrial Congressional Complex”, as evinced in the vote to scrap the F-22 bomber.  And it’s worth noting the vote break down.

58 yes.  40 nays.  And voting nay — ie: for Defense Contractors:

The floor leaders of the faction in favor of more F-22s were Sens. Saxby Chambliss, a Republican from Georgia, where the F-22 is assembled, and Chris Dodd, a Democrat from Connecticut, where parts of the plane are built. Joining this strange couple were such erstwhile doves as Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein of California, which also hosts several F-22 contractors.

And returning to service, rushing off his hospital bed, a man who really, really, really likes Pork:

Senator Robert C. Byrd returned to Capitol Hill after a two-month absence to vote against stripping financing for the F-22 from the defense spending bill. […]
The senator said in a statement that it was “wonderful to be back in the august body where I have served for more than 50 years, and to see all my colleagues who have been so supportive of me during my recent hospitalization.”
The West Virginia Senator, 91, was hospitalized May 15 with an infection and developed a staph infection in the hospital. He was released six weeks later. Mr. Byrd last voted on May 13.
After the vote, the senator was wheeled away and helped into a mini-van. His office said he is expected to “ease back into” his role as senator, and plans to ensure he is well for votes on the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor, health care legislation, and climate change legislation.

Good to see the old man’s got his priorities right.

The voting map I want to see relates to the standard Military Contractor tactic:

The Air Force shrewdly spread the plane’s contracts to firms in 46 states, thus giving a solid majority of senators—and a lot of House members, too—a financial (and, therefore, electoral) stake in the program’s survival.

With that, it’s pretty much a given that the two Oregon Senators voted “yea”, and the two Washington Senators voted “nay”.  Oregon lags at the end, 50th, of this “Military Industrial Complex” scheme– hence, Wayne Morse of the two votes against the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, and Mark Hatfield — and probably one of the four states that had nothing whatsoever to do with the production of this “weapons system“.   The state of Washington is the province of Boeing, and the spirt of Harry “Scoop” Jackson.

The question comes with how strongly each state was tied to the contracts.  Is this a case where Connectict and Georgia in particular were strapped to this project, along with California and (I’d guess) Washington, and the other 42 states’ ties to the vote drift down a tad?