I seriously don’t want to make this a habit, but I simply have to return to the comics page to make a quick comment on the flaws of this Luann strip storyline.

The problematic line is:  “One of those decoy stand-in guys”?

I know that was de riguour in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, but is that a standard procedure in the United States, to have a bunch of Presidential look-alikes who might fool a would be assassin, an extra layer of protection for the president — maybe it was issued for the extra problems that meet a President Obama?

While I’m looking at the world of comic strips, I point to yesterday’s Zits as a weird item of social commentary, and I’ll link it to the “Josh Reads” site:

Huh.  Not good, not bad, just kind of interesting that this strip would wander into the arena of “Abstinence Pledges”.  There is no follow-through — today (Saturday, least read days for newspapers, and where cartoonists of comic strips traditionally dump their worst gags) we have the Pierce character making an innocuous funny — we will never know whether the cartoonist behind “Zits” has a positive or negative opinion, thankfully sparing us all from a bout of “Relevancy” by way of political and sociological commentary.

At this point I see the perils of commenting on modern comic strips, and will pledge to cease to do so.  But the Luann strip had a strangely political bent which needed to be unplugged a bit.

Yesterday, reading the Comics page in the newspaper, I had a queasy feeling with the “Luann” strip.

The story in sum, an incomprehensible and implausible story.  Um.  So, they got the idea to have the class visit Washington DC for Obama’s Inauguration, a prospect that excited in particular Luann’s black friend, Delta.  (Character name I had to get from the “Josh Reads” website comments here, and if you want the entirely predictable and rather dumb spoiler to be exposed, don’t go that link.)  They raised money, but as so happens, ended up short of just enough money that one student in the class would not be able to go.  Now, frankly in the real world a school class would not let this happen, but if it were to happen I believe they would find an academic reason (ie: the student flunking out is not going) or behavioral (the student caught sniffing glue in the boys’ room is not going) to disqualify a student.  But in the Luann-world, the teachers had the class draw straws.  The black student drew the short straw.

The story wound its way to even more ridiculous premises when Luann and her friend (the frizzy haired girl, I don’t know her name) came up with the perfect fund-raising tool to get that extra bit of money so Delta could go.  See, the idea they hatched, which was accepted by the higher ups of this high school (how, I do not know) was getting the class bimbo (again, I’d have to look up her name, but that’s basically her role in the strip) to agree to be dunked into a tank for a buck (or five, I don’t recall) a ticket.  This lead to the strip presented here, and I see that her name is Tiffany.  From that strip, she was forced to put on a t-shirt, tied in a knot, and there were a few strips of a gaggle of guys waiting to dunk her, drooling over her.  She quit, and — ha ha! — Luann filled in, and the lines dissipated.

This part of the story actually reminds me a bit of a part from this episode of “This American Life”, where the writer of “My Possee Don’t Do Homework”, the book the movie “Dangerous Minds” and the tv show that followed were based on, commented on the continued Hollywood debasement from book to movie and movie to tv show, commenting on an episode where her class had a fund-raiser at a strip joint with “I would not have approved of that.”

Anyway, they somehow or other get the funds.  I think Tiffany ended up not going, maybe?  And they go to Washington, and it leads to this strip…

To which I knew that my worst fears of where this rambling and disjointed story is leading were about to be confirmed.  Though, my thought was “I hope that she’s about to have her long time dream of meeting Senator Patrick Leahy affirmed.”

It’s all a little bit nauseating, isn’t it?

Although the creation of a “Car Czar” to oversee the bailout was originally proposed, President Obama is now reportedly dropping that plan, and devoting his administration’s top economic minds to the problem.

There will be no Car Czar.  ‘Tis a shame.

But maybe Obama can retap Bush’s planned mission to Mars and at least salvage a “Mars Czar” out of this wreckage.

This is about Liberals in general, you must be sick in the head, hate America is your motto, Socialism is your ideology, then you have Barak Obama the usurper in office, thats right, he’s not even a natural born citizen and you people are to stupid to realize what you have done to the country. Is your new salute, Seig Heil.

Posted by: A Patriot from Kansaas | February 14, 2009 12:09 PM

Posted here.  There isn’t too much to say about it, and it’s not really indicative of too much — surely I can dredge up something similarly uninsightful from the liberal/progressive sphere.  I think the “Conservapedia” post on the “Republican Party” is due for the “birth certificate” edit into this line:

In terms of winning presidential elections, the Republican Party has been the most successful political party in U.S. history. Since the American Civil War, Grover Cleveland is the only non-incumbent Democrat who has won the office of President of the United States under “ordinary” circumstances (meaning no third party, no Great Depression, no disputed count in Illinois, no assassination of the previous president, no Watergate).

It would fit right in there, right?  “No foreign birth”, such as that is.

I may also report here that I think the Conservative Pundit talk-radio type guy to watch for for in this Obama Era is Glen Beck.  Surely he was popping up here and there during the Bush Administration, saying such and such a silly thing, but since being consigned to the “Loyal Opposition”, he’s emerged as someone who’s words and antics stick out just a little bit bolder than his compatriots.  Between focusing viewer attention on his eyes and analyzing events in terms of finding the “Archduke Ferdinad Moment”, he appears to be the one to watch.

So Michael Phelps apologized to China, which I suppose will go a long way to repairing our frayed relations with China, repairing our special co-dependent relation with China.  China, you understand, was absolutely Apopletic over Michael Phelps’s Bong Use.

These are tense times to be sure.  We have yet to receive word on whether China will accept Michael Phelps’s apology.  If they don’t — well, you thought our Credit Crunch was bad now, just wait to see China when they feel that they’ve been pushed too far.  Pray, pray, pray that China forgives Michael Phelps, for all our sakes.

What, you thought I had some more  elaborate system than that?  But methinks that the Larouche Organization has the phrase “New Dark Ages” keyed in a google search.  Someone at the AP, please post up something write the phrase “Dark Ages” so I can test my theory.

So the debate continues.  This man argues that  the field of Larouchian Economics is best  relegated to sidewalk ranting, said off-handedly as a means for a partisan attack.  This man believes that Larouche is “Possibly One of the best minds in economics today“, I believe relegated by the first man (and about everyone else) to the sidewalk, seeing as Larouche has never worked in the field of Economics Ever, or perhaps not to the sidewalk as to the comments sections of various paranoia-stokers.  Well – he is such a Thorn to the Powers that Be — after all monitored by the government of Sweden and all that.  I have to say, it’s unfair to lump the anti-Fluoridites into the picture, since Fluoridating the Water is indeed a Government Plot to anesticize the public into acceptance of the New World Order whilst Whitening its teeth.

I found a copy of the latest, unless they’ve been so good as to print up a new one, LPAC pamphlet.  The previous possessor of this item — I think it’s called “Doom, Fear, Fear, Doom” — showed the proper respect and correct level of reverence by scribbling a goofy beard and moustache on Lyndon’s face. 

Remind me to go through this pamphlet and comb through the dialouge, and report out the many unnamed luminaries who are said to be asking Lyndon questions.  It’s a silly exercise to be sure, and one that falls on the “Evergreen Pile”.  But, if memory serves, I can report that a functionary of the Confederated Tribes of the Europa section of Alpha Centura asked Larouche what the shape of the table for the proposed meeting between India, China, the US, and Russia was.  And Emperor Xenu asked what the best color to decorate the head of this table might be, where Larouche will sit and dictate Economic instructions for India, the US, Russia, and China to follow.  But these questions pale in importance next to a Phillipine LYM leader’s question on the importance of the Artist in the new Epoch and Renaissance, the answer being that they will furnish the world with the lavish portraits of Lyndon on every Meglev Train and Waterworks Projects.

Since, well, Superbowl Sunday and when last I checked in on this blog, Factnet has exploded in its productivity.  Sort through the last bunch of pages at your leisure.  There is a certain aminus toward Dennis King because of the fundamental difference of opinion that while King believes Larouche has hewed closer to the Adolf Hitler , its argured that this is completely wrong and, indeed, Larouche borrowed more thoroughly from Joseph Stalin.  The problem with the suggestion with Hitler, and reason for discontent, is that it was never a part of anyone in the org’s experience… well, except maybe for things like:

I stood in the elevator as Steinberg told the Jews in a Volkswagen “joke” and didn’t say anything. I knew it was a test. And to be honest I did not know at the time of the extent of my own family’s losses in German gas chambers.

Hm.  If it helps, Larouche’s real life exempliers of good governance, Saddam Hussein for instance, tend to be self-modelled after Stalin and not Hitler.  But really, after a while I begin to suspect a replay of the German — Soviet Pact was in play circa 1973 or thereabouts.

Other than that, I’ll simply link to this here and this here.  I know I posted Part One when “Earnest One”, son of a Luminary in the field of Mathematics, posted it (that would be “New Revelations of Terror Part One”, I assume).  In embryonic form the story was posted once upon a time to this blog, and while I did locate it, I’ll go ahead and pass on linking to it.  The story unspools from there, from about here.  To quote from here, “We now hold the gravest reservations about both the methods and motivation of this group.”

A bit surprisingly, someone emailed me responding to my posting from a 1968 book surveying the American Political Fringe.  “Larouche in it?”  No.  You’d have to wait a few years for him to pop through, and wait still a few more years for him to become the very dictionary definition and thus warranting a large part of a chapter.  Tim Wohlsforth is mentioned as “perhaps the most tedious” of Trotskyite leaders.  The names of various Free School class offerings are listed for minor comedic effect.  If you want to spot Larouche further than that, various ideological underpinninigs surface both right and left — what, him being a composite of a Hitlerite and a Stalinist, or perhaps to fit the “Contrarian” thesis, the ultimate Contrarian of a pro-Stalin Trotskyite.

Back in, well, two weeks probably?  Really, the weekly schedule is becoming bothersome because the googling is drying up.

The same conservapedia “In the News” sidebar that lombasted Bruce Springsteen as an overweight has-been lapping up Liberal dogma at the Superbowl also editorialized that Judd Gregg was pulling a Judas, a Benedict Arnold, a Quisling.  I can only assume that the articles on these men all ascribed them as big fat Liberals.

I can’t say that Judd Gregg’s decision to join the Obama administration didn’t make sense to me.  I assumed Gregg reached the decision that he was ready to pack up his partisan career and not run for another term (the first in a while that he would have had to sweat to keep the seat), and thought that a stint in the Obama Administration was a good use of his belief in “Public Service.”  It wasn’t to be — I assumed he also figured that Obama was somehow the right man at the right time and Gregg would be ready to bend his Republican politics.  Apparently not.  Gregg learned that he was a Republican and Obama was a Democrat, the differences were present, and thus he’s back to the Senate.

There is something in this article worth considering as we move forward.  I could immediately spot the reasons for strengthened partisan ties for the Democrats compared to the start of the Clinton Administration.  Clinton came into office winning with a smaller percentage of the vote than Dukakis received, as I see Dukakis point out whenever he is interviewed.  And the slow glacial Southern realignment that moved the South from having a bunch of conservative Democrats dangling away from the National Democratic Party to being the stronghold of the Republicans was not yet complete — the greatest break would come in 1994.  But beyond that, the most troubling part for Obama and his group of Democrats comes in the comparison to Clinton who passed his Economic Bill with… a Senate tie broken by Al Gore.  As opposed to Obama who needs to get to 60 votes.  The Filibuster has been strengthened as a tool of Minority Restruction under the arms of Mitch McConnell.  Really, someone needs to write a primer on the expanded role of the Filibuster as a matter of course — during the Democrats’ years in exile, it was used essentially to keep judges from being appointed, though even that was smashed at the behest of the handful of, um, “Conservative Democrats”.

I suspect Norm Coleman is tying Al Franken down in court as much to keep the Senate in behest of the Specter — Maine Senators Cabal, a team-up of 3 which serve just as well for this Stimulus Bill — actually this one probably is best served with some compromise — as impossible as that is with a Republican Party that apparently has a core 38 Senators not in on any a’dealing, but in the future the Democrats are going to have to actually force a Filibuster.

by Louis Adamic, October 1930, American Mercury

“The idea caught on right away.  Everybody thought it was a great stunt.  It spread around in no time and all the wobblies in Seattle got excited about it, and they also heard about in in Tacoma, Spokane, Centralia, Walla Walla and as far down as Portland and Eureka.  They even heard about in the woods hundreds of miles inland.

“We only had about a week to organize the stunt, and it had to be done more or less in secret so that it would hit them as a surprise.  You see, we still weren’t thinking of playing a trick on Wilson, but merely of getting with Ole Hanson and his bunch.

“Days passed.  Monday or Tuesday somebody else, I don’t know who, improved on my idea by suggesting that we pring thousands of hatbands inscribed ‘Release Political Prisoners!’, which we did.  We would thus present our petition to Wilson anyhow; he could read it while he drove past us.

“Thursday and Friday nights we held special meetings all over town to instruct the wobbly mob where to assemble and how to act when Wilson came by.

“On those two nights I couldn’t sleep a wink.  As I have said, it was my idea.  I was as excited as hell about it.  I began to see now that this wouldn’t be merely getting even with Ole, but that we were pulling a stunt on the President of the United States.  I knew how susceptible Wilson was to public response.  How would our lack of response affect him?  And would it work?  You can imagine how a thing like this can flop at the last minute.  Would the public interfere when they saw us assemble?

“But it looked great.  All day Friday and on Saturday in the afternoon wobblies poured into Seattle from Tacoma, Spokane, Centralia and elsewhere, including the lumber camps in the woods — hundreds of them, from everywhere.

“Then Saturday afternoon came.  Wilson was in town.  He had been cheered in Tacoma; in fact, he had been cheered, more or less, wherever he had stopped and given the people a chance to see him.

“In Seattle everything was closed and tens of thousands turned out to see him and hail him.  The streets he was to pass along were jammed.

“The reception was scheduled for two o’clock, but we had our mob out long before one.  We occupied five long blocks near the end of the route, on both sides of the street.  There must have been five thousands of us; some say ten thousand, but that’s exaggerated; and we packed the sidewalks from the walls of the buildings to the curb.  The great unwashed; all of us wearing grimy working clothes, blue-denim over-alls and blue working shirts with sleeves rolled — outcasts, the scum — some of them six feet and a half, great big fellows, Bohunks and squareheads, with powerful arms and necks, chests like barrels.

“We had the five blocks that we had packed out all to ourselves.  The respectable mob naturally steered clear of us.  We were pariahs, the ugly big boil that Dr. Ole Hanson was trying to cut open and cure.

“At first the cops were sort of excited as we began to mass together, but they didn’t know what to do about it.  There were too many of us, and more were coming.  Thousands of us.  And some of the lumberjacks and dockwallopers looked as if they could eat five cops apiece for breakfast.  Beside, how would it look if they tried to chase off the streets when, so far as they knew at the moment, all we wanted was to see the President?

“The chief of police was all flustered.  He rode by us in his machine several times with a worried face, but finally — perhaps after a consultation with Ole — it was decided to let us alone.  I guess they figured it was for the best.  They didn’t want to have a riot in the city while the President was there.  Also, by being all together we would not contaminate the good people of the town further up the street.

“Most of us wore the hatbands: ‘Release Political Prisoners!’  We had many ex-soldiers in the movement; they wore their overseas caps and we put them out in front so that Wilson could see them.

Obama has selected a new “Drug Czar”, a place in the government which is a little problematic, though it’s being pointed out by pointer-outters of these things that the new “Drug Czar” has some liberalizing tendencies toward low level drugs and holistic views in prevention, etc.

But really, he’s a disappointment as a pick.  I was hoping Obama would tap Cheech Marin as Drug Czar.  I think he’d be a real Change Agent.