Four Western oil companies are in the final stages of negotiations this month on contracts that will return them to Iraq, 36 years after losing their oil concession to nationalization as Saddam Hussein rose to power.

Homecoming Reunion.  Welcome Back Class of ’72!!!

Other than those phrases, I have nothing snarky enough for commentary on this bit of news.  It is off by one, though, as one Petroleum company not involved in the Old Order is invited to the party.

In considering the Bush / Cheney Era, and trying to assemble what it has been all about, it occurs to me that it is best to consider it as one giant Perpetual Plunder, wherein one small cloitere runs from one plunder and when that jig is up runs to the next one.  The $4 going on $5 gas Speculation Boom is at the end of the line, I suppose.  We’ll just have to see how the Obama Administration and the collection of Weasles of the Democratic Party congress duct tape some things up.

Those who believe that Steny Hoyer “caved” to the Bush Administration are mistaken.  He “caved” to the Telecom Firm interests, and “caving” may not really be the operable term.  Really, I’ve known this coming as for the past few months, even after the House scuttled this, Hoyer had been making noises insisting that a “sensible compromise” was, indeed, “possible”.  Hoyer being the Democratic Majority Leader, that means it is his priority (if not anyone else’s down the chain of the Democrats) and it will a’happen. 

The implications: If the president asks you to do something illegal and you do it, you will get immunization.  My head hurts.

The ironic thing is here is that we would be better off with a Republican Congress — the Democratic minority had scuttled this issue better than the Democratic majority — and the implications of that thought are pretty depressing.

I have had a particular matter in my back pocket, waiting to bring this up.  Those three special elections everyone has been celebrating, the three special elections which have had the Republican Party quaking in their boots.  I have been waiting for one of these set-up votes to see where these Democrats stand.   It’s a 2 to 1 split for the Immunity Bill.  The man from Illinois was against.  The other two?  You know the story.

Police say a truck driver involved in an accident that left two men dead in Calhoun County may face charges. Two men from Chicago, 48-year old John Morris and 66-year old Gary Genazzio reportedly ran out of gas on I-94 west of Albion late Monday night. Police say the two were hit by a passing dump truck as they were putting gas in their tank on the shoulder of the road. Both were pronounced dead at the scene. Charges are pending against the dump truck driver, a 57-year old Jackson man. His name was not released.

A couple of Larouchie “causes” come to mind.  One was directed to a vaccine shortage which happened at the end of October of 2004 and was a political issue that the John Kerry campaign was trying to use against the Bush Administration.  Larouche, having appended himself to the cause of electing John Kerry president under his alternate fiction of sitting alongside James Carville as a force within the Democratic Party, upped the ante further and further into simple demagoguery. So I saw (as well multiple people across the country on election day eve), Larouchies with signs alerting us to “Cheney Killing Your Grandma”, attached to conspiracy theories regarding the decimition of your grandma.

The other came with the Minnesota Bridge Collapse. I remember thinking “Why have I not seen the Larouchites run through this issue?”, into their attachment on the issue of decaying infrastructure.   Sometime within a week, they did prime that pump, and the larouchepub mill threw out swill from that direction.

Consider the political point of view being proferred by Larouche Inc:  Spend-thrift measures cause death, Governments (down to us in the public) put aside the bother to spend the money to take care of some basic infrastructure.  The next matter, if you peel away and look past the “British” and Zionist source of all evil, is one of Graft and Government Corruption, which I mention here purely to parallel with the case of the accident at hand.

It seems the case that Morris and Genazzio lost their lives, running out of gas, and running out of gas because the inverted Financial Pyramid that is the Lyndon Larouche Organization did not grant them enough to cover the expenses of the bill for rising gas prices, and this was basically to fully finance the trip to Italy for Lyndon and Hegla Zepp to continue their odd little duality of quote-in-quote “World Historic Figure”/ Insigificant Lurcher into the Comfortable Shadows of Obscurity, which produced this.

Surprisingly, The Progressive Magazine had a feature on current Republican Senate candidate Bob Kelleher in June 2002, sometime before the Daily Show “Shirley” feature. It is in a story of the attempts to carve out the Green Party of Montana, and Kelleher’s uncomfortable relationship with those plans. The one thing I can say is that the Progressive article has a lot more sympathetic airing from the Green Party members than the derisive note struck by the Green Party head on the Daily Show feature, and I guess it was a 50 -50 choice which would have had him standing behind him.

At times like this I wish I could cut my nose off, but not to spite my face.  It is the case that my nose is a bright red and my face is more or less a palish white freckled self.  The same principle at use in putting a clay sculpture in a furnace and having its attachment fall off, except my nose remains… if I am not careful, and sometimes I am not, sunburned to a crisp.

I mention this because of a toddler encounter I had.  My relation to all pre-speaking humans is basically one of an exchange of funny faces while they are being courted about by their mom or dad, generally but not always without the mom or dad paying attention — and then briskly turning my attention away whether or not the child follows suit.  In this case the toddler looked at me, pointed to his nose, and made a wide smile of derisiveness.  He found my bright red nose funny.

Tomorrow I think I will walk around with my nose completely succumbed in a giant wad of sun screen.  My nose will be white, the white will drip off for the hour uncomfortably but ah well.

I’m doing a search for Michael Reagan’s recent comments about sticking dynamite up one year olds in Palestine, when I trip over, from a (um) paleo-conservative opinion webpage, something entirely different.  Michael Reagan’s recent comments about wanting to murder some 9/11 conspiracy theorist just… because.

Now I have two items to juggle.  I don’t quite know how to dissect the second one, but regarding the “Put grenades up their butt.  Bye bye Baby, Goodbye”, found here, I will point out a particular recognizable strain here.  His battle cry is to turn the caller’s comment around with something more outrageous, and to smirk at his outrageousness.  So it is: Step 1: make outrageous comment, “Grenade up their butts” when the baby turns one.  Step 2: Caller references mother.  Step 3: “So we kill the mother and the babies.”  The step 3 is crucial here, and so important he wants to make sure the caller heard it so that he can be taken aback from it.  This is why Reagan repeats it three times, as if to ask “Get it?  We’re on two different worlds here!”

Such is the dark corridors of talk radio.  I did a once over of the am radio dial today, and heard a non-descript radio bot on the fifth rate right wing talk station chime in about the Liberal Bias of the LA Times, which if you notice ran a photograph of an attactive female couple for the Gay Marriage coverage, and they made sure to run with Lesbians because, you know how men are.  Which was a blip of mutterings which told me more about no-name bot than anything else…

I guess look forward to learning (second or third hand) who Ronald Reagan’s adopted son (is there any other reason he has a show?) wants to kill tomorrow (is that tendency the other  reason he has a show?).

Bob Kelleher, the surprise winner of the Montana Republican primary campaign for the Senate, says this of his conversion from the realm of perpetual candidacy in the Green and Democratic Party to his current alignment as perpetual candidate (and victor amongst) of the Republican Party:

Kelleher said he split from the Democrats and the Green Party because Republicans share his ideas of being pro-life and wanting unity of powers in the government.

Previously he stated, fairly accurately seeing as he runs on every which political party, that party affiliation does not matter because nobody is bound by Party Platforms, so this sort of seems to be a weasley in explaining his Republican Party affiliation.  But it is an interesting reason in one respect.  Kelleher advocates changing our system of government to a Parliamentary system which would effectively put one Party or the other in charge as a bloc as oppsosed to endless compromises made within a party and across party in our legislative body and compromised with the powers of the executive bod.  Here we see him placing his advocacy of a Parliamentary System in line and places it in line behind the “Unitary Executive” of expansive powers vested into the Executive Body and particularly his liberal use of Signing Statements.  This seems arcane to posit as a political party’s ideology and something to campaign on — partly an advocacy of the dismissal of Congressional Perogatives I’d suppose — but I guess it is what Bob Kelleher has to work with, and as this is George W Bush’s legacy, I guess you have to suggest it is fairly accurate.

I should be more bemused than I am that John McCain evoked the name “William Jennings Bryan”.  I suggest that it is odd enough that cannot possibly be politically calculated for electoral effect, such that his more recent reference to Jimmy Carter is — and is instead a sincere show of contempt toward Obama as a man who can electrify a crowed with speeches and is a movement unto himself.  Bryan, I’ve tended to think, missed the boat in his embrace of Bimetallism and would have done better for true Populist credentials to preach the cause of the Zinc Standard.  Some will suggest that Obama has embraced the “Oxygen Standard” — putting a premium on the worth of Hot Air.

Aside from losing three presidential elections — something Barack Obama simply is not going to be allowed to do– there are worse figures to be compared to than Bryan.  I have to feel sorry for whoever lost out to Bryan in the 1908 bid, shouting in their hotel room “AGAIN???”

Judging by his speaking performances, most notably the one done before Clinton’s non-concession speech and Obama’s “This is the moment we healed the Earth” speech, John McCain might be better served doing what William McKinley in 1896 did to battle Bryan’s Presidential campaign speaking tour.  McKinley did that whole “Front Porch” campaign, a lost campaign tactic last employed I believe by Calvin Coolidge.  Here, McKinley simply planted himself on his Front Porch in Ohio, and did not budge.  He issued telegraphs, and brought in delegations of voters to stage conversations on the days’ issues.  It was asymetrical campaigning that avoided direct competition with his opponent’s strength.  Of course, there was also the matter that McKinley outspent Bryan by a rather astronomical amount, as Big Industry filled the Republican Party coffers up something fierce.  Not quite anything McCain has going for him — K Street largely opts to back the one they think is going to win the thing.

McCain should just sit there in Arizona, perhaps plop out a keyboard and fix his lack of computer knowledge and start a blog.  He can explicate his “Carter’s Second Term” comment.  I would be curious to see if he can post something about any other politicians that Obama reminds him of, or maybe a tv character he remembers from a 1950s sitcom?

Getting back to Paul Krugman’s foray into baby-boomer psychodrama:

If Barack Obama was not appreciate of the back-drift of 1960s culture war, he is getting a crash course on it right about now.  I can’t say how his dismissiveness of The Weatherman issue plays out with “Okie from Muskogee”, but it probably plays well with everyone who themselves are dismissive.  If you don’t think that weird Weatherman item is reverberating around some corner of this political sphere, understand that “Hannity’s America” weekend program of silliness is working that angle, as the word “Radical” keeps being used to suggest a radicalism beyond anything we’ve ever seen or heard.  (Though, that seems to have a weird racial component to it.)  There’s a standard form to these, and to the extent that Obama’s “post partisan” (witness the absurdity of “This is the moment we begin to heal the Earth.”) campaign is subtextually about dismissing “Baby boomer psycho-drama”, that puts him in a better position than John Kerry having to handle without fighting such a thing the residuals of Vietnam War battles occasioned by the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth”.

I occasionally exchange emails with someone, I’ll identify as from a  marginal Southern Swing State, who said this:

Obama would never have a better time to run (or any Democrat for that matter) but I just have to hope he can be a uniter in spite of his low preparation for office. I don’t have anything against him and see some plusses (to shut up Europeans about how the US is “so prejudiced” when they won’t confront their own version) but what was wrong with Bush more than anything was his being out beyond his depth and so I also partly dread the experience of some kind of repeat. Hopefully whether he or McCain wins, neither will not make the country even more polarized than it is.

I don’t really have an answer to this, largely because I don’t see this country as terribly divided.  But I’ve seen here and there a fretful columnist pierce over this nation and say something along the lines of “Has this nation ever been so divided?”  An ahistorical reference that ignores such periods in our nation’s history as … THE CIVIL WAR.

But this emailer, it occurs to me, is geographically planted in a place where that civil war played out, as well as much of the civil rights fight, and as such largely symbolic local political fights continue from the debris left over from there.  And then there’s the fire coming out of the Bible Belt which is a lot closer than I am witness to.

I take a sigh of relief that I was not the only one to do a double-take of sorts when reading Paul Krugman make this comment:

By the way, it was during the heyday of the baby boom generation that crude racism became unacceptable. Mr. Obama, who has been dismissive of the boomers’ “psychodrama,” might want to give the generation that brought about this change, fought for civil rights and protested the Vietnam War a bit more credit.

(A search for “Krugman” “baby boomer” and “psychodrama” will get you most prominently wonkette.)

Where does this come from?  Barack Obama surely hasn’t been raising the issue of “Baby Boomer Psychodrama” at every speech he’s been giving, and while I suppose you can read that into his message, I’d have to dismiss that as an example of baby boomer psycho-drama.

Nay.  Apparently Obama wrote it into his second book — The Audacity of Hope, the more politically posturing and therefor inferior to his first book Dreams of My Father.  Krugman’s thoughts are more annoying as, even though he went off an aside of calling Obama a Cult Leader, I’ve generally thought Krugman was better than most columnist at explaining policy differences in why his preferred Clinton candidate was preferable to him than Obama.  I’ve generally thought these slight differences didn’t matter much, and my ponderances with Obama have had more to do with whether his rhetorical stances has any room for a basic partisan fight… which, actually does in a way go back to Krugman’s concerns about not owning up to the Culture Wars.

As for “Baby-boomer psycho-drama”, the author of Nixon-land in an interview with Reason magazine gives us this:

…………………………………..

reason: The last line in the book is, “How did Nixonland end? It has not ended yet.” It says something about the book that this felt really compelling as I read it.

Perlstein: (Laughs.)

reason: But then I thought, hold on. Do we live in Nixonland today? The intensity of the violence and paranoia that you describe actually feels pretty alien. Now the hard-core Red Team and Blue Team partisans have to work themselves up artificially into the sort of frenzies that came naturally to people in the ’60s.

Perlstein: It’s a fair criticism. When I say Nixonland is with us still, that could literally mean that things are just as ideologically intense as they were from 1965 to 1972. Or it could be that things were so ideologically intense from 1965 to 1972 that we’re still kind of trailing off the exhaust fumes.

I think the latter is true. There’s a lot of surplus rage from the ’60s that was never really worked through publicly. I think a lot of that rage still exists, and I think you see that when John McCain runs a commercial that beats up on Hillary Clinton’s earmark for a Woodstock museum. I have a friend whose people live in Sulphur, Louisiana, and they still talk about Woodstock as basically a visitation from hell.
………….

Anyway…