A though comes to me regarding the Obamas’ new Puppy.  He is, in the hauntings of the media attention regarding the puppy and in the White House life with the family in tow, “Kennedy-esque.”  The Puppy in Camelot.  Camelot is the Puppy.

During the course of the presidential campaign, Barack Obama was compared to seemingly every single presidential candiate past and present.  He was the reincanation of Abraham Lincoln William Jennings Bryan Franklin Roosevelt Dwight Eisenhower Adlai Stevenson John Kennedy George McGovern Jimmy Carter Ronald Reagan George Bush.  And probably a few others — facing the same sort of backlash that the first seriously considered Catholic candidate in Alfred Smith was facing, for instance.  Now that he is in office, I suppose we can drop the losers out of the mix, and boldy proclaim him the new Abraham Lincoln Franklin Roosevelt Dwight Eisenhower John Kennedy Jimmy Carter Ronald Reagan George Bush. 

But he is not a pure amalgration of these figures.  He is one at a time.  He avoided a Carter-esque moment in getting the hostages out of the Pirate Ship — or perhaps he was the fulfillment of Carter-esque in that one?  Well, never mind: right now the public is gawking at a goddamned dog for the kids.

Interesting to note one Bill O’Reilly chiming in on the stalled placement of one Al Franken into the Senate.  First off, reading his assortment of letters — he apparently wowed his fans by socking it to David Letteron on Letterman’s show.

Andy Jacobs, Clearwater, Florida: “Bill, you were calm and collected in a hostile environment. Your superb handling of Letterman may have changed a few minds out in Never-Never land.” Vincent Tordarello, New York City: “Bill, you rocked on Letterman. It was refreshing to see his propaganda smacked down.” Alan Skorski, West Hempstead, New York: “Hey, Bill, anyone who cozies up to Al Franken the way Letterman does, has no right to discuss truth telling.” Gerald Christensen, Huson, Montana: “Kudos to you, Bill, for holding your own with Letterman. Some of us out here wish he would pack up his house and take Tom Brokaw with him.” Mr. Letterman and Mr. Brokaw have homes in Montana.

I don’t quite know how someone can insert Al Franken’s name into this, and despite the Leno / Letterman difference in comfort level for political guests I don’t quite see how this can be positied as some sort of one-on-one “Crossfire” “Hardball” match-up.  But that’s the way O’Reilly rolls.

On a later program, we find him discussing the election, and from the transcript.:

O‘ REILLY: Thirty-eight, 28 or whatever.

This?

I assume that with the “THIS” he’s waving clips of, say, Franken in a diaper on a SNL sketch or Franken on SNL doing the Keith Richards impression.  The answer is a, “Yep.  That.”  The reason– Al Franken’s qualifications for the US Senate?  He won an election.  He could be spouting off everything that Michelle Bachman has been saying, or he could be Montana’s Finest, Bob Kelleher, and his entry into the Senate Chambers would be just as necessitated.

But, in the interest of stalling this seating, we have the viscarel argument of “THIS?”, which has a seductive quality, I suppose.

He seems to be aging in Metric Time right now.

The nation has just re-elected him to office, as prescribed by the Constitutional Process:

Mr. Kim’s appearance at the Supreme People’s Assembly, where he received a standing ovation and was unanimously reelected to his country’s most powerful position, was his first in public since he reportedly suffered a stroke in August. It was seen as a climactic moment of triumph after a week dominated by news of North Korea’s successful launch Sunday of a long-range missile.

Although North Korean state media have shown Kim on a record 44 visits in recent months to military and industrial sites, he was not shown in motion on video until two days ago – and then only briefly before broadcasts of a missile launch last Sunday.

Throughout the week, North Korean broadcasts have repeatedly claimed that the launch successfully put a satellite in orbit. The United States North American Aerospace Defense Command has said the missile’s payload fell into the Pacific Ocean along with the second stage of the rocket.

Kim’s appearance came a day after thousands of North Koreans rallied in the heart of the capital, shouting slogans of praise for his “glorious accomplishments” in launching the missile and the satellite.

The session of the Supreme People’s Assembly had the aura of elaborate ritual. After unanimously rubber-stamping his reelection as chairman of the National Defense Commission, the center of power, the members unanimously adopted a revision of the country’s Constitution. It’s not clear what changes were made.

In this photo made off APTN footage, North Koreans attend a mass rally at Kim Il Sung Square in Pyongyang, North Korea, Friday, April 10, 2009 to celebrate the re-election of Kim Jong Il as chairman of the powerful National Defence Commission. The banner reads ‘Hurrah for great leader Kim Jong Il’s revolutionary idea ! ‘(AP Photo/APTN)

Hu has offered a hearty congratulations.  Who?  Hu!

Chinese President Hu Jintao conveyed a congratulatory message to North Korea’s strongman Kim Jong-il as the latter was reelected head of the National Defense Commission by its rubber-stamp parliament Thursday, Pyongyang’s official sate media said Saturday.

“The reelection (of Kim Jong-il) as the chairman of the National Defense Commission shows the North Korean people’s sincere support and high confidence (in him),” Hu said in the message, Yonhap Saturday quoted the Korea Central News Agency as saying.

Always love the re-elections held in a dictatorship.  They do tend to be quite festive.

With a Hostage Crisis, and a vaguely Carter-ish feeling regarding the economy and the Democrat in the White House making repeated “Keep your chin up, folks” remarks…

… shouldn’t Nightline return to its roots and proclaim “America Under Siege”?

Or are we to turn the clock back to the last American — Pirate stand-off, back to the Jefferson Administration?  What two or three word phrase was the news media using back then…

… not the mention the venom from the Federalist Bloggers, putting today’s Republican blogging watches of “First International Crisis for Obama!  Can He Show Force?” to shame.

… In related news.

15 seconds of Sean Hannity is enough to tell me where the Republican National Party is and what line it is pushing.  So with that, and with a dot and dash on the Internet, I know what you probably know too — Barack Obama is, as the polls show, the most partisanally polarizing president EVER.  It is the affect of pushing such a RADICAL agenda with NO INPUT from the Republicans — evidenced by the lack of votes the Republicans provide for his agenda.

Well, the reason the poll shows a wider discreprency between Republicans and Democrats on Obama than, say, Bush is pretty darned obvious.  Take it away, Chuck Todd.:

And then the other thing that Republicans ought to be aware of when they’re making these charges, is that the pool of Republicans has gotten smaller, and so sure, the most conservative part of the party is still identifying themselves as Republicans, and absolutely, three out of four disapprove of the President’s job. But there are a lot of former Republicans sitting in that independent category now, Nora, and a majority of independents do approve of the President’s job. So it is a, it’s one of these things that Republicans ought to be careful about how they’re writing it because it’s not, it’s not the best news. It’s a smaller group of Republicans that are identifying themselves that way and when you’re getting shellacked in the middle like that, it doesn’t matter what the ends look like. The middle is what decides these elections and right now we’re seeing the President, he had big numbers with the middle during the election and he still has big numbers with them now.

The Republicans might also want to avoid tagging Obama as “Socialist”, though in that regard our “Republican Crazy Uncle of the Week” has skipped past Obama to some of his fellow congress critters.:

But he said he is worried that he is being steered too far by the Congress: “Some of the men and women I work with in Congress are socialists.”

Asked to clarify his comments after the breakfast speech at the Trussville Civic Center, Bachus said 17 members of the U.S. House are socialists.

Seventeen is an awfully specific number.  But the problem here — and while you can’t refer to anything much that’s going on as Socialism, is that as this label is being bandied about, its corrosive effect is falling apart.  Take Obama’s strongest approval-getter, the under-30 set, for instance:

Adults under 30 are essentially evenly divided: 37% prefer capitalism, 33% socialism, and 30% are undecided. Thirty-somethings are a bit more supportive of the free-enterprise approach with 49% for capitalism and 26% for socialism. Adults over 40 strongly favor capitalism, and just 13% of those older Americans believe socialism is better.

It’s a pretty lame Proleteriat Uprising, all things considered, but then again it’s a pretty lame “Depression”, all things considered.

The effect of the Republican Rumpus at the moment can be seen in a false equivalency — say, from a transcript of an MSNBC program where the liberal side argues that the rhetoric of a Glen Beck helped affect that recent shooting, and the “Second Amendment Foundation” spokesman argured thusly:

GOTTLIEB: Well, let`s put it this way. It pales in significance compared to the vitriol aimed at President Bush by Obama and his supporters. […]

If you look at the recent Pew research poll put out on polarization, Barack Obama is the most polarizing president that we have had for four decades.

And on Beck’s Nazi imagery.:
GOTTLIEB: I agree it minimizes it. It`s just like Barack Obama supporters minimized a lot of things by claiming we`re becoming a police state under George Bush, the same rhetoric they used, the same kind of imagery they used. The bottom line is this doesn`t help at all. But when it comes right out of the White House, with programs, policies, economic things that scare the hell out of the American people — you know, in politics, every reaction has an opposite and equal reaction. You are seeing the reaction to what the Obama administration is doing.

I can find you the “Bush is Nazi” stuff, and I can also point to any number of clamorings from the Sean Hannitys of fairly innocuous rhetoric that were claimed as beyond the pale.  (And I can point to a “Sarah Palin CUN# shirt.)  In the regard of Obama’s rhetoric — I don’t know which election campaign he just watched:  this was all a lot of happy gibberish, and promising of ponies, and floating of Hope — wasn’t it?

So, as the March of Socialism continues, and even as Democrats cannibalize themselves a tad,  here’s what the Republicans have going for them.  An astro-turf crusade of “Tea-bagging.”    Good luck with that one.  AND… they also have a full fronted you-tube attempt, where Republican Congress-critters are to heckle (in otherwise bug) the most vulnerable and targetted Democratic Congress-critters when they deliver their CSPAN speeches, and another forced attempt by the Republican followers on Democratic campaigns of asserting themselves to force perhaps a “George Allen Macaca Moment.”  Well, it’s a strategy, I’ll give them that.

Spencer Bachus

April 10, 2009 (LPAC)–U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder began a series of personnel moves yesterday in sensitive areas of the Justice Department, in order to restore confidence in the Justice Department in the wake of the prosecutorial misconduct shown in the prosecution of former U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) and other political figures.
The Justice Department, is facing “fresh calls to reopen the cases of other prominent political figures” since Holder ordered in the wake of all charges withdrawn against Sen. Stevens.
The most outrageous case of prosecutorial misconduct, according to former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, is the case of American Statesman Chuck Norris.
Words fail me.  But next line:

Eric Holder’s tough and non-Mollycoddling approach to prosecutorial misconduct is encouraging, and should be extended to the Norris case.

The prosecutional excesses in the Ted Stevens case is “Mollycoddling”.  Who the hell do the folks in the Boiler Room in Leesburg think is reading and paying attention to these things, and is this something of an admission of sorts that it’s just about nobody but “larouche watchers” (of one stripe or other)?

Damned it, I broke protocol.  I meant to type “Chuck Norris Watchers”.
……………………………………

If you have a Bloomberg fascist government in the United States and a Lisbon dictatorship in Europe, I have the distinct fear that we are on a road to World War III. — Hegla Zepp.

What is a Bloomberg fascist government, and how does the Mayor of New York hold such a diabolical reign?  Also, wasn’t the Bloomberg fascist government supposed to be marked by the imminent Bloomberg fascist presidency?
…………

The ‘Citizens Electoral Council’ is the most demented group to make it onto the ballot in Australia. LaRouche and the dimwitted retards that sing in his dicky choirs and spout his half baked ideological bullshit. He claims Bertrand Russell is one of the most evil people ever to have lived. Bertrand Russell was one of the most amazing minds of the twentieth century. Larouche is one of the most amazingly ed minds of any century.
……………………………………………

And that’s when my interlocutor lost the argument I didn’t know I was having. In a classic case of Godwin’s law, he called me a Nazi, thus, according to one popular formulation of the law, forfeiting any claim to a reasonable position by virtue of rhetorical name-calling. And all because I disagreed with his, and Lyndon LaRouche’s, ardent demand for a new New Deal, which apparently anyone who’s not a Nazi knows is exactly what our country needs right now. Had he accused me of KKK membership, I would have been no less astounded.
I trust Jim knows that the two were talking past each other.  He can feel the satisfaction in having called you a Nazi, you can feel the satisfaction in knowing his irrelevance, and plot to write this experience up on your blog.
Perhaps he was just a coherent lunatic whom I made the mistake of listening to. Or perhaps there is a running tide of political polarization sweeping this country, one that teaches people to reflexively hate any opponent without regard for rational thought, and this was merely the first wave lapping at my feet.
The possibility of the latter, though I don’t think this signifies that — this seems to go beyond any political trend — does not negate the possibility of the former.
……………………………..

From wikipedia.
I placed the tag because of the comments in the previous section by an IP identifying itself as Paul Krassner. However, whatever edits he made may not be enough to justify the tag. There has been a pattern of Yippie activists editing Wikipedia for the purposes of self-promotion. —Leatherstocking (talk) 16:56, 9 February 2009 (UTC)

By this he means Dennis King.  He put up a COI tag on Paul Krassner’s wikipedia page to assert the COI tag on Laroache related pages.  Coincidentally enough, this came at about the time I posted a link to The Realist archives on my sidebar.

I did not realize until just now that the name Leatherstocking is a reference to James Fenimore Cooper’s work, a writer with few sympathizers in academia, but who Larouche has sidled into having up held us against the Dark Ages.  This tends to undermine his claim here, not that his claim needs more undermining.  More on how the great James Fenimore Cooper in the org here.  And Mark Twain’s essay is available here.

Mark Twain, of course, is a perpetuator of Dark Ages and Confederate America and all that.  Or something.  As seen from the real world, those distinctions come across like so:

In the decades following the American Revolution and the adoption of the Constitution, the quality of mind and intellect, which allowed for those events to succeed, was gradually undermined. Whereas Cooper took up his pen to save the republic that his father’s generation had created by waging war on stupidity, ignorance, treachery, and cowardice. He did so, not only with his pen, but also as one of the key leaders of the American secret intelligence service during the second quarter of the 19th Century. As a result, Cooper, like Larouche, was seen by the enemies of the United States as a clear danger to their plans to destroy our republic.

Hm.  For a more sane celebration of the works of James Fenimore Cooper, go find this Weekly Standard article.  Or you can just go ahead and read through what Norton’s excerpted, which I gather is used widely by English Professors to have a point of reference to the Twain essay.
………………………………

Howie G has posted a few more crude sexual references to European’s blog.  It is his thing, I guess.
…………………

The existence of this posting, the highlight in terms of games of connecto of which is this,:

My belief is that [Milton] Cooper was murdered by the Illuminati because of his work to expose the Beast to the public. This series of talks on B’nai Brith and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) was part of his work to enlighten the public on who’s who behind the veil. Right at the beginning of this series he makes a comment about just such a scenario arising for many who did what he did. God willing he’ll be the last one to die for such efforts. Bless his soul.

gives me a good reason to post to my posting of the first article here.

Tomorrow, a Webcast will be viewed by… um… nobody, roughly.  It will feature supposed questions from supposed Important People — anonymously, I guess scribbled out by folks in the Boiler Room in Leesburg or something?  It will be available in and near trash-can in various major cities and colleges in a couple weeks, at the end 3-day Deployments behind card-tables stacked high with the past handful of “webcast transcript” dominated packages.

The April 11 webcast comes at the two year anniversary of Kenneth Kronberg’s suicide.  Keeping in mind the scheduling antics for the leaf-let job Newton residents in 1993, and considering the focus of the org as it rolls into this “Historonic Webcast” settles into making a reference to “Molly-coddling” relating to attaching a supposed exoneration of his crimes with the Prosecutorial Misconduct in the Ted Stevens case…

Will he use the word “Molly-coddler”?

3 early 20-somethings discuss history, and… actually 2 do, with the other not making any sound — but that’s fine.

“This shirt, says ‘Department of Homeland Security, has these Indians holding guns and says something like — ‘Protecting the Homeland Since — something like 1600-something or thereabouts.”

You’ve probably seen this shirt.  It’s pretty clever.

And its date is “1492” — a date that makes sense from that wry perspective — I don’t know which Indian Removal or war would count for the lad’s “1600-something”, but 1492 comes before that year.

Next came a conversation where one of them was just reading and learning something about the Japanese Internment during World War 2.  (Odd because my last post concerned it.)  Apparently for the first time.  And here, I thought the Educational Establishment focused on these sins mercilessly to incubate a sense of Guilt — so they say.

Open the Weekly Standard’s April 6th edition, on stands now — one week back in the harper on the website — and on the inside cover you will see that Fox News has an advertisement.  It is a dandy of an advertisement, and needs to be seen.

Waves of red, white, and blue — thin stripes and starts — emit from a central map of the US — and I haven’t a clue why some of the shapes are cleared and others put in white… it looks like it would be a presidential electoral college configuration, but it resembles no election year I’ve ever seen or can comprehend happening in the foreseeable future.  Another image of the US map overlays this background map of the nation — actually this one resembles an Air America logo — with the bold words “The FOX NATION” atop it.

At the top of the ad, it reads:

IT’S TIME TO SAY NO
TO BIASED MEDIA
(underline)
AND SAY YES
TO FAIR PLAY AND FREE SPEECH

On bottom, it reads

Be a part of the REAL NEWS of America and join
the online community that believes in the right to
express your views, your values, your voice.

And then, the web address and

SEE THAT YOU ARE NOT ALONE.

It’s all very schizophrenic messaging, isn’t it?

The issue itself features the usual article declaring Obama’s Presidency a failure, and another usual article which suggests the 2010 race in Connecticut as being the start of the Republican Comeback.  To be fair, I don’t really have any item of sarcasm to throw at the rest of the issue, which is decent enough political criticism, but I must point to the concluding paragraph of Matthew Continetti’s “A Big, Fat Failure” (I think it’s the weekly standard’s weekly standard article) and mock it by pointing to the manner this thing has been mocked:

Americans of all political stripes, as well as the non-Americans who hold U.S. bonds, are voicing concern. May-be that will be enough to make Obama change course. If not, conservatives have a real opportunity to introduce a truly responsible vision of a welfare state that maximizes efficiency and growth. The budget outline that House Republicans released last week is a start, but it sure could use some work. And if the president persists in giving America a big and slothful government rather than a limited and energetic one, then it will be incumbent on Republicans and sensible Democrats in Congress to stop him.

Yelp.

Worth noting — Senate votes affecting the state of the “Estate Tax”  (or, as Grover Norquist has us saying, the “Death Tax”) –are seen at this and this  spot.  

“To create a deficit-neutral reserve fund for estate tax relief.”, hence passed 51 to 48, with the Republicans plus these Democratic Senators.

Baucus (D-MT)
Bayh (D-IN)
Cantwell (D-WA)
Landrieu (D-LA)
Lincoln (D-AR)
Murray (D-WA)
Nelson (D-FL)
Nelson (D-NE)
Pryor (D-AR)
Tester (D-MT)

Doubly so, to narrow down the “Blue Dog” types even more:   “To provide that no additional estate tax relief beyone that which is already assumed in this resolution, which protects over 99.7 percent of estates from the estate tax, shall be allowed under any deficit-neutral reserve fund unless an equal amount of aggregate tax relief is also provided to Americans earning less than $100,000 per year.” — passed 56 to 43, with the Democrats minus these Senators.

Landrieu (D-LA)
Nelson (D-FL)

Okay?

Enough shifts have taken place in the perpetually shifting line-up — largely out of their control — that it is worthwhile for me to take stock of the state of KPOJ 610 — “Portland’s Progressive Talk”.  We are awasy from their original incarnation five years ago — a bastion of rank radio amateurs, British voice-overs, and advertisements hawking bad commercial projects, and a certain flavor of over-done insurgent rebellion that didn’t quite match.  Notable today is that KPOJ didn’t float that commerical campaign regarding their anniversary — “They said we wouldn’t make it, etc., but we’re still here” — but perhaps that’s just because KPOJ’s hired voice talent recently passed away.  (Note, for instance, that their new 3 pm program is introduced with a generic introduction that does not mention the name Nancy Skinard.)  Also apparently gone is the most recent incarnation where they seemed to stuff every syndicated liberal programming out there somewhere in the line-up — notably Stephanie Miller is now back on 970 AM weekdays 6 am to 9 am, her Saturday slot here replaced by 3 hours of Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC rejiggled to radio program — a good freeing for both of them, I suggest.

So, to blast through this.  Bill Press is on at 3 am to 6 am.  Like him?  Not particularly, but it’s 3 in the goddamned morning.  6 am to 9 am: Carl Wolfson.  I do not like the woman who replaced Heidi Tauber — annoying yes – cheerlead “yay”s that to hear makes one cringe.  Other than that, decent bastion for a variety of media editors and politicans — hence, worth flicking past, turning on and off, changing the station around, and etc. 

Thom Hartmann…  Ed Schultz is still on 12 pm to 3 pm… the last man standing from the original line-up.  As terrible as ever, I presume.  Does this guy blow or what.  Well, anyway, he’s got himself an MSNBC program — the cable network’s Fox News counter-program prime-time line-up of Keither Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, and I guess Chris Matthews counts if you must.

Nancy Skinner replaces Randi Rhodes, and — OHMYGOSH — Randi Rhodes has been blotted away and thrown off like a bad fungi infection!  Though, I guess, that’s a bad thing… she was a stablizer here, for all my negatives opinions of her.  Nancy Skinner, I have no strong opinion toward.  Competent enough, and preferrable to 6 pm to 8 pm’s Ron Reagan — and I gather you get slotted to the front of the line if you’re the sone of the former president and want a talk show gig.  I find him only slightly tedious.

Mike Malloy remains a god-send… 8 pm to 11 pm.  Air America kicked him off, Nova M busted apart, something replaced Nova M for roughly 15 minutes and then fell apart too.  Mike Malloy is the personality that would bravely self-distribute where your Randi Rhodes wouldn’t.  Actually, Malloy veers toward a bizarro- Glen Beck, but I guess that’s a necessary antidote.

There’s some guy named Jon Elliot who sort of tells the story: this is all beginning to be trangely indistinguishable.

Peter B Collins used to be on weekends at 4 pm , but has disappeared — I assume his show no longer exists because I doubt re-runs of Ron Reagan count for much.  But anything you can get from Peter B Collins you can get from a few websites, so I don’t suppose I’m missing much from him.  Lionel followed at 7 pm and remains, and he’s either great or horrible depending on the moment.  I think they were trying to farm him out to other radio stations, unsuccessfully.  They’ve slotted a Ron Kuby on Sunday mornings at 10 AM, and he is pretty horrible.

How much of it can be placed on the background?  Much of it.  How much of it is worth tuning in on?  A lot less than much of it.  How much should be shunned at all costs?  Not too much of it.  What I want to know is:  Who should be the next voice-over, and how uncomfortable a transition would that re-imaging have to be?  (The voice-over was there for 2 formats ago, for Pete’s sake.)  The general manager is shifting through the tapes now, I guess.