From Studs Terkel’s 2007 Touch And Go: A Memoir pages 147 – 149:

The occasional FBI visits to my house were not always pleasant.  With a sense of some shame, I say this.  My wife, usually the most gracious of hostesses, was for some reason, inhospitable.  There were at least two occasions I recall whem she peremptorily showed them to the door.  She always let in small boys who sold magazine subscriptions for the benefit of the nation’s halt, lame, and blind; as well as to make points that would enable them to attend Harvard.  But to the FBI, she manifested — how can I say it — contempt.  I was, of course, terribly embarrassed.

I myself was hospitable at all times.  I seated them.  I offered them choices of Scotch or Bourbon.  I had triple shots in mind.  Invariably, they refused.  Once, I suggested vodka, making it quite clear it was domestic.  I thought I was quite amusing.  At no time did our visitors laugh.  Nor did my wife.  I felt bad.  I did so want to make them feel at home.  I never succeeded.

They had questions in mind.  They frequently consulted small notebooks.  They hardly had the chance to ask any of their questions.  I wasn’t that I was rude.  On the contrary; I simply felt what I had to tell them was far more interesting than what they had to ask them.

I read Thoreau to them; his sermon on John Brown.  Passages out of Walden.  Paine.  I told them these are times that try men’s souls.  And so on.  We hold these truths, I even tried on them.  Nothing doing.  Their attention wandered.  They were like small restless boys in the classroom, wiggling in their seats.  At times, I showed them where the bathroom was and asked if they wanted any reading material.  No, they didn’t.  I have done some of my most exploratory reading there, I told them.  No response.

After several such visits, with a notable lack of response on their part, my patience, I must admit did wear thin.  On one occasion, a visitor took out his notebook and studied it.  Our son, five years old at the time, peered over his shoulder.  The guest abruptly shut the book.  The boy was startled.

“Why did you do that?” I asked.

“He was peaking in my book.”

“He’s five year old.”

“This is government information.”

“Is it pornographic?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Isn’t it fit for a child to see?”

“This is serious.”

“Does it have dirty words or dirty pictures?”

“What??”

“Does it?  Come on, be a sport, let me see.  I won’t show it to the kid.”

With the determined step of an FBI man, he stalked toward the door.  He had trouble with the lock.  I opened it.  “One for the road?”  I was determinedly hospitable.  He walked out without so much as a thank you.  His colleague followed suit, step by step.

I shall now take a gander at the senate race in Louisiana, seeing as it is very likely the Republicans’ only pick up opporunity.

Mary Landrieu is one of the more conservative Democrats in the Senate, and part of a prominent political family in the sstate.  She has been elected twice by very narrow margins, her 2002 election notable as it was due to a last minute December run-off assistance by Bill Clinton phone-banking to get the black vote out.  Her vulnerability increased as Harricane Katrina dispersed the Democratic base of New Orleans, and in particular poor black residents.  Her campaign is largely focusing on the issues of her procuring Hurricane assistance and rebuilding funds, which does her the service of side-stepping national party issues in a state that was trending Republican even before the disaster.

Running against Landrieu is a former Democrat who was personally persuaded by Karl Rove to switch parties and run for the seat.  The candidate running against Landrieu is none other than John Kennedy.  This is a very fascinating turn of events, considering that John Kennedy is something of a legend and an icon amongst Democrats nation-wide, and seeing as he was rabidly opposed by the National Review for botching the Bay of Pigs, sliding forward with civil rights, and for the belief that he stole the election from Richard Nixon.  Over the years, some conservatives have warmed up to him, believing that he was “strong on Communism” and praising him for lowering the top marginal tax rate from a really high level to a merely high level.  Another interesting about John Kennedy’s candidacy which I wonder how it would play out is the controversy which surrounds his assassination, an event that swarms with many speculative theories involving any number of powerful forces.

I think it will be difficult to defeat John Kennedy, and I wonder if a whisper campaign could be employed regarding the newly discovered Marilyn Monroe sex tape — the man being obscured but Jay Edgar Hoover wished to pin down on Kennedy.  However, this is Louisiana, and you have to consider that David Vitter’s poll numbers increased after being exposed to have had sex with a rather anonymous prostitute, and Marilyn Monroe is a popular culture icon.

A certain tone deafness has emerged with Barack Obama.

We have long since established this narrative of the “Prince” versus, I don’t know what the other archtype is named so I’ll call it the “Brawler”.  The candidate skewing toward the upper class and collegiately educated who sounds the notes of change and reform versus the candidate of the lower classes and lesser educated socio-economically not much able to afford that luxury of dreaming of reformation and willing to have someone wade through the muck and slime to get it done.  The quintessential example was Eugene McCarthy and Hubert Humphrey, but Gary Hart and Walter Mondale work just as well.  Things get slightly murky after that, but Howard Dean treaded to the former demographic, and after Gephardt fell Kerry had to schlep to the status of the latter.

Barack Obama versus Hillary Clinton.  But this is largely a matter of personality and rhetoric, policy differences relatively microscopic, as is the level of feigning toward what amounts to pandering regarding trade agreements — the main crux for the economically stranded making up the politically dismobiled at the heart of Obama’s controversy.

Just as Barack Obama was closing the gap in the machine-oriented blue collar rust belt laden Pennsylvania primary race, he managed to throw himself a grenade in speaking before a crowd at a fund raiser in, of all places, San Francisco.  Throwing out that “What’s the Matter with Kansas” hypothesis on rural Pennsylvanian voters, “cling”ing to cultural values by way of “guns, god” (and the third ‘g’ is “gays”, but that half falls into the “god” category and only half drops simply into maintenance of cultural mores), with economic deprivation extending through Republican and Democratic administrations, and so we came that fatal word: “bitter”.

With that, forward momentum in the polls stopped, Bill Clinton’s bizarre backing over to Hillary Clinton’s phantom sniper controversy was replaced in that 24-hour news cycle, and with that my own desire — along with that of Senator Bob Casey, Jr’s, to get Obama’s inevitable nomination over and done with before June eroded.  Would it have been better if Obama had somehow included the adverb “justifiably” before the word “bitter” to suggest a fighting spirit and desire to work on behalf of their betterment, or is that parsing not going to happen due to its still being an elitist looking down on those Guns and that particular God?

Barack Obama’s response shows he knows this is a trifling annoyance, and shows the stubborness in knowing that it is hard to dignify this controversy with a response.  As he must, he spots it as a “slip of the tongue”.  Those three words are becoming a bad habit, following as it does the more meaningless controversy over the five word phrase “just a typical white person”.  This is theater review, only tangeantly connected to the matter of what a Barack Obama administration might bring, but it is what it is, and should we wake up in November to see that John McCain has been elected president, this is the personality trait which will be at the root of Obama’s failure.

From “Papering Over the Problem:  Killing the Dollar to Save Bear Stearns”, from “The Cunning Realist”‘s Wilson Burman, in “The American Conservative”.  Leaving aside some issues here and there and the Reagan love, a couple of key thoughts echo those I have had, ie; wait a decade and we’ll be blaming that president for problems time-bombed from this president.

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Anyone who works long enough on Wall Street knows, at least sub-conciously, that this is the way things work: if the going gets tough, a small coterie of unelected and mostly unaccountable officials in Washington will probably decide that your employer is too important to fail. […]

Inflation’s defining characteristic is expediency.  It obviates sacrafice and postpones pain.  That makes it a natural compliment to many political ventures, particularly unpopular wars.  As early as 1965, Lyndon Johnson’s economic advisers worried about rising inflationary pressures.  As Johnson resisted calls for new taxes, the deficit for fiscal year 1967 came in at $9.8 billion.  By the time Congress and the White House finally agreed on a tax increase, in 1968, after years of escalation in Vietnam, the deficit was $25.2 billion and inflation was rampant.

Of course it got far worse over the next decade.  Even as the seeds of inflation planted in the mid-1960s grew, Richard Nixon put pressure on Fed Chairman Arthur Burns to goose the economy for the 1972 election.  That dynamic continued and worsened during the 1970s.  By the early 1980s, Ronald Reagan was dealing with the consequences of decisions made by Johnson and Nixon over a decade earlier.  Part of Reagan’s legacy was the latitude he gave Paul Volcker, as risky and painful as that was, to deal with these problems.  Unless one believes that the next president will want to take the hit for Bush’s decision, or that soneone with Reagan’s mandate and courage is about to appear, whoever is in the White House a decade from now will probably confront the economic fallout from current policies.  But by that time will anyone remember how it started?  How many cursed LBJ or Nixon in 1979?  The White House not only knows the answer, it’s counting on the nation’s forgetfulness.

“I eat this blog for breakfast.” 

The problem with a comment like that one is that devoid of context, you would be hard pressed to know whether it is an insult or a compliment.  Figuring that other statements by “revenire” read like crypto- but not quite death threats (re: Or better yet, call the cops.  […]  Go ahead, jump… because you’re a nothing and the rest of your soap opera characters are empty husks… dead souls.) — because I am the Cuban Frogmen of the 21st Century – I know it’s supposed to be insulting, though I can’t say precisely how.  It does come across as flattery, though, worth sticking on my sidebar.

I do not believe this blog offers enough fiber to be the best nutritional punch, but it almost certainly is better than a couple of doughnuts and a Jolt Cola.  My imagination struggles to conjure up the visuals for “eating this blog” — I have a vague image of a cartoon panel I think I might have seen, I think from Shannon Wheeler, with an oversized mouth awkwardly wrapped around a computer — but it’s vague enough that I would not know where to look and do not know precisely what I am looking for in order to post it.

revenire would also like everyone to know that he defecates this blog out as his 11 am constitutional, and that it makes for intriguing bowel movements.

… Why does anybody need to hear from Chelsea Clinton?

(To be fair to Chelsea, I always thought that her campaign trip to Hawaii was a stroke of genuis.  What was to be gained from delegate-thin and Obama is a native son Hawaii?  Well, it’s… Hawaii.)

In case you missed this item as it whizzed past us, and you have to suspect it is going nowhere and serves to prick up his book moreso than anything else, a book which contemplates some sort of wacky “Pro-Wrestling Ticket” stampeding into the White House.  (The recent glory days of professional wrestling popularity subsided in — I don’t know — 2002 or thereabouts.  It was an interval of time which included the year 1998, which helped serve his lark of a campaign into the governor’s chair against two political hacks.  The book’s spot in a national cultural zietgist is probably about two election cycles too late.)

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BLITZER:  Let’s talk about Minnesota, your home state. You were the governor of Minnesota.  There’s a very important Senate contest that’s going to happen this year, Al Franken, the comedian, now a serious Democratic politician, vs. the incumbent, Norm Coleman. Who do you support?

VENTURA: Well, neither. You have got Norm Coleman, who is a chicken hawk. He wouldn’t serve in Vietnam. He protested against it.  Now he’s rubber-stamped George Bush every vote he wanted for the war in Iraq.

Then you have got Al Franken, a carpetbagger. He hasn’t lived in Minnesota for 30 years. I would be surprised if he even had a Minnesota driver’s license. And, if he does, he just recently got it.

Well, Wolf, look at it this way. What would happen to this race if I jumped in?

BLITZER: Well…

VENTURA: Because, you know — you know, I have until July to file, don’t I?

BLITZER: What are you going to do?

VENTURA: Oh, I don’t know yet. I have got until July to decide.

BLITZER: You want to be a United States senator?

VENTURA: I don’t know. I might look into it a little bit. I would sure cause a lot of hate and discontent in Washington if they sent me there.

[…]  BLITZER: It’s interesting you say all this, because you came almost out of nowhere and got elected in a three-man race for — for governor of Minnesota.  So, what you’re hinting at right now, you’re thinking about doing the same thing in the Senate contest?

VENTURA: I don’t know. I’m — I’m thinking about it. I don’t know how serious yet. But, let’s remember, I already beat Norm Coleman once.

BLITZER: When he was running for governor, and you beat him.

VENTURA: That’s right.

……………….

I was listening to Marc Maron guest hosting for Mike Malloy having a call in from Randi Rhodes.  This was a little bizarre, because what this represented was three refugees from Air America to NovaM.  (Least so Maron, who has no radio program.)  Marc Maron’s “Morning Sedition” was canned with one of any number of new managements came in with the seeming idea of ridding the network of anything interesting or novel.  Mike Malloy was canned sort of officially unofficially due to his interview of one Webster Tarpley, of 9/11 Truth fame and formerly of the LaDouche cult, but if that was really the reason the new management was going to get rid of him and his conspiracy-friendly act sooner or later anyways.  Ringing as similarly false was the reason behind the controversy that canned Randi Rhodes.

Understand, I think rather poorly of Randi Rhodes and her talk radio show.  To the extent that I hear her it is in small snippets while roaming around the am dial during the dearth-programming hours that her slot represents on the AM dial — which, realistically, is enough to know what she is saying a time or two over, repetitive she be.  That aside, I recognize her as being, from a business stand-point, one of the few real assets the struggling Air America network actually has, and I recognize her so-called “stand up act” (and the bar for the definition of “stand-up act” apparently has rolled rather low) as being a contrived controversy.  Simply put, nobody would have noticed had the network drawn attention to it by putting her off the air for these last two weeks.  The controvery’s contrivancy is such that it lends credibility to Rhodes’s self-serving explanation of a contractual power-play at work.

The up-shot is a sort of worst of both worlds.  620 KPOJ, and any radio station that has been airing her, will pick her back up shortly and hardly miss a beat, so nobody is spared her disappearance.  “Air America”‘s tortured history continues, as it devolves into the syndicate it would probably always eventually have to become — and one with an uncomfortably bland-ish line-up choice.  I suppose Air America leaves the legacy where something called a “Progressive Talk” format can exist, to the extent that that it does, but at this point someone programming such a thing just as well may select programming out of the Jones Radio Network and “Nova M” (pull Sam Sedar in and they can become the network of displaced Air America hosts) as from the perpetually bankrupting fiscally insolvent Air America network…

… which, I hasten to say, does carry Rachel Maddow, so you can give them that.

The formation of the LYM in 1999 was meant as Larouche’s survivng legacy in his quest for “Immortality”, at the expense of the baby boomers who made up his organization. For this purpose, a purge would have to be implemented sooner or later, moving his chess pieces around. Through the previous decade at least, the published propaganda rattled on — with increaing vehemence — about the problems and failures of the Baby-boomers, and hatred of the baby-boomers was to be the focal point of the ideology implanted on thenew LYM cadre of recruits.  The published hatred of the baby-boomers was a manifestation of much the same meant internally by the organization to its adherents, and specifically related to certain individuals.

Namely Kenneth Kronberg, who ran the printing operation and was loyal to a fault to Lyndon Larouche.  Getting rid of Kronberg would be to successfully dump onto his lap all financial debts incurred with PMR’s function as Larouche’s printing press — if at first at cost of operation than later at PMR’s expense, Kronberg becoming the useful scape-goat for the death of the organization’s ability to disseminate his propaganda through the printed page.  So on that fateful morning of April 11, 2007, the Daily Briefing ran off the problems of the “Baby Boomers” who if not ready to join the “real world”, should consider “virtual suiccide”, before singling out the Printing Press as the source of the organization’s troubles.  Seeing no escape, Ken Kronberg jumped off an overpass.

In the parlance of Larouchian terminology, “the real world” means working with full fervor for Larouche’s causes in conjunction with “Immortality” (his), and “virtual suicide” is the supposed worth of your life outside the organization, the promise from the man in charge that you will suffer a nervous breakdown outside his curiously crafted sense of a “comfort zone”.

Purges have happened before, and are necessary as a means of control and means of reinvention for an organization such as Larouche’s.  In a sense, the lifeblood of this type of organization is the management of the internal crises in purporting the crises outside the world.  But this was going to linger and deepen.  I cannot say how I would imagine Larouche could pull off his feat in moving his “Youth Movement” in taking over the organization from thebaby boomers, but I find it difficult to see him picturing this purge as happening in the manner it did.

The Memorial Service for Ken Kronberg proved to be a meeting ground where former and current members renewed connections.  Bridges were built, mainly bridges which could allow some members to walk out of the organization.  Over the next year, the specter of “outside projects” for a staff at the National Level not fully committed to Larouche’s project of (self) Immortality would loom and haunt the organization and his most loyal of loyalists.  Just as important, bridges of information were built that would allow the dissemination of what can be called “The Secrets of the Elites”.

In previous years, the necessary revision of history and tightening of conduits of information could be more successfully completed.  The problem for Larouche came in the form of the Internet, and a loose network of observers with varying levels of awareness of what is going on (IE: This blog and I are quite clearly trailing on that list — I not being a former or current member or long time researcher and professional expert on this topic), but at any rate apt to disseminate the contortions and non sequiturs Larouche’s organization was set to go through in their attempt to weasle around the issues.

When Lyndon Larouche’s organization finally came around to acknowledging the problems attendent with Ken Kronberg’s suicide, two things immediately floated in the air.  First, the urging of continuing the struggle for “Immortality” as Kronberg’s supposed dying legacy.  Second, Kronberg’s suicide was stated as his biggest mistake — in the ideology of the organization’s thought process means as much as anything else, that Kronberg’s suicide was Larouche’s biggest mistake — and biggest source of consternation.

Larouche was confronted with a twin set of problems, the problems specific to the two parts of his organization with the Baby Boomers and the Youth Movement. For the Baby Boomers, particularly in the National org in Leesburg, he had to simply move the baby boomers past Kronberg.  For the Youth, he had to simply innoculate them from the controversy completely, and to the extent that he needed to address it, tell a side of the story that would effectively leave it in the laps of the Baby Boomers and the Kronbergs.

To that latter end, the organization directly addressed the issue of various websites’ focus on Larouche, the “AFA funded” FACTNet board, “John Train’s salon” in Dennis King, and a “new blog by(a) Star Trek groupie and Robert Beltran stalker”. Recharged in earnest was a a full frontal assault on computer related culture — in the form of video games and myspace — as well as a demonization of the Internet tools of wikipedia and google (which had long been bugaloboos for the Larouche organization).  In the end, the measures culminated in the edict that banished the Larouche Youth Movement from visiting the Internet — and while I cannot say I  really know what the terms of this edict are, which in addition to dropping 80 daily hits from Nick Benton’s myspace site (and for all I know, this blog) served to isolate them from the fallout from the national organization, and anything not given to them by the organization.

The problem with the National org, meanwhile, was that it was full of individuals with a clear memory and level of affection toward the recently departed Kronberg.  Necessarily, the berating Ken Kronberg took prior to his suicide would have to be pushed aside.  The best Larouche could push for with Ken Kronberg — while maintained a failure to his cause, at least a loyal foot-soldier in the cause of (his) Immortality, and in that week delayed “open letter” to the widow Molly Kronberg, he threw in a clause meant to put her on warning.  Molly Kronberg was set to be, internally speaking at least, Enemy #1.  The coup de grace came when Larouche issued his “Final Word” on the subject by pointing to her couple of hundreds of dollars in donation to presidential campaign of George W Bush.  In an act of conscience which showed Larouche the uncomfortable level of dissension within the ranks, this factoid would be left off of its designated memo, forcing Larouche to issue the notice again.  The parallel tact was another act of revisionist history: change the subject completely.  So it was that the cause of the consternation and rambling within the organization was newly minted as the history – changing webcast where Larouche exposed the BAE Scandals, the historical mission and issue that the organization was now supposed to throw itself into for the Greater Good.  Anyone overly burdened and by the schism of this history changing event was instructed to a friendly chat with the resident house psychiatrist, Gerry Healy. (sic?)

Intruding into the attempt to completely change the subject was the hovering presence of Avi Klein, doing research for a piece for the liberal political magazine The Washington Monthly.  The Larouche organization did its customary act of shutting down any line of communication from them to him, and worked their way to the proper response.  Here they went to the go-to-line, which is to suggest that Avi Klein was a Mossad Agent.  After that, it was a task of placing the article into the larger context: this was a hit job for the “Vast Right Wing Conspiracy” to bring down the candidacy of Hillary Clinton, the “Vast Right Wing Conspiracy” having been a continuation of the “Get Larouche Task Force” of the 1980s that brought Larouche, and various associates, to prison.  It was a convoluted act of rationalization which could only be believable by delievers in Larouche, and increasingly not even to them.  One line did show the mindset of the organization in assessing what they needed to protect most of all.  Jeff Steinberg wrote that what these forces fear most of all was the implication of a growing Larouche Youth Movement that would survive and thrives past Lyndon Larouche’s demise.  Their focus was in incubating the LYM.  As an aside, the word “demise” seems a bit of a Freudian slip, Steinberg seems to be thought of as more or less planning a think tank to survive the death of Larouche, one that has no room for Lyndon Larouche.

Whatever else one can say about the proported “Vast Right Wing Conspiracy” outgrowth from the 1980s plot to bring down Larouche theory, it did dove-tail back to the emerging line against Molly Kronberg.  To get to that point, you had to leave aside that the Washington Monthly’s spot on the political map is roughly that of a sort of “Clintonistas in Exile”, and put aside that Kronberg was next seen lending an interview with Chip Berlet, who wrote some articles for High Times Magazine, a fact the Larouche Organization used in fund-raising from largely conservative Republicans in the 1980s.  Larouche unveiled his next line of attack against Molly Kronberg by revising the history of the court trials and the prison sentence of the 1980s.  Whereas the old storyline focused on the role of George Herbert Walker Bush, President of the United States and former CIA Head, in supposed railroading the crew of political prisoners, the new focus of “newly revealed information” swirled around Molly Kronberg’s acts of criminality and back-stabbing (one large part coming with Molly Kronberg’s attempt to keep Larouche from testifying in her trial).

At this point, Larouche and company were well aware of the shake-out in the org and the hollowing out at the national org, and so ran ahead of the matter as much as they could by issuing internal memos warning the faithful of the back-stabbing enemies in their midst.  This shake-out would reach a crescendo in March, when Larouche let out a bellow against the “stupid manpower shortage” he was seeing amongst his leadership, and the proliferation of “Outside Projects”.  He rolled back into his long standing attack on the baby-boomers, and in a published release on his website explain “one of the things I hate about my associates”.  Reportedly, and I have no way of confirming or denying such a statement, the NEC is now comprised of six people.  Lyndon Larouche has gotten his purge, whatever good that does him.   The prime directive of the NEC at this point has to be to direct and manage the Larouche Youth Movement, getting back to the task of making them feel as though they are World Historic Figures under Larouche’s own belief that hs is the World Historic Figure, in part by creating a sense amongst the “Youth” of feeling superior to an the generation that joined in the late 1960s and early 1970s.  The fight for Larouche’s immortality is one of stringing them along in training them that Conflict is more powerful than Love.

I see the scope and nature of the coverage of General Paetreus’s visit to Capitol Hill exemplified on the cover of USA Today.

A photo of, in order: Paetreus.  McCain.  Clinton.  Obama.  Or, some order with these four figures.

And so it is status quo with a slice of electoral political theater, ultimately pointless.  Good job, whatever it is that is sourcing this job.