The thing about Mukasey is I knew he would be approved by the Democratic Senate, and passed through by the Democratic leadership — in this case meaning Charles Schumer and Dianne Feinstein.  The hope that sprung eternal when he provided uncomfortably vague answers about water-boarding was ill-advised, and I never thought worth wandering in and typing some words about.

Just admit it:  you do not belong to the same political party as they do.  Even if you voted for them.  Even if it is advisable that you vote for them, something you must weigh every two years.

In the midst of this whole series of events, George W Bush felt inclined to provide his schtik.  Something about Democrats bowing to the wishes of moveon.org bloggers and Code Pink ladies and if they don’t approve Mukasey, we won’t be giving them anybody new.  I don’t know the structure of moveon.org, so I can’t comment on its blogging functionalities, but my best guess is he’s off a bit there.  The bet of passing on Mukasey and ending up with nobody is worth taking.  But there is an odd functionality with this:

I think we can consider the functions of Code Pink a little beyond the Democratic/Republican party dichtomy, for good and bad, but moveon.org is a functionable Democratic fund-raising site, for good and bad.  Through this sort of McCarthy-esque smear, it is being poisioned in terms of functionality in acceptable political discourse.  This is not a good thing for the Democratic Party, but I think it is what Chuck Schumer and Dianne Feinstein would like.

Anyway, we are likely veering back to the great Democratic stand on the S-CHIPP program, watering down the benefits to get to the filibuster proof margin, which I heard the great Democratic honchos announce “… And then the President will be irrelevant to this debate.”  Don’t make me laugh, Democratic Party honchos.

There is an election coming up on Tuesday, with various local issues tossed in your face that you have to deal with wherever you are.  I do not know if you can aggregate anything into national significance — the best we can think is to witness the elections in Virginia to see if it can gallop a bit further into the “blue” column, and I guess the Kentucky governor’s race flushes out who might be taking on Mitch McConnell in the next Senate election campaign.  So, beyond my station here in Portland, Oregon — and aside from that curious race in Northern New Jersey I can’t say I know what is worth observing.  I’m sure something will pop up when the elections all flush out.

Anyways…

I happened upon this list somehow or other.   The Republican honchos at Human Events compile their list of the “10” most vulnerable Republican Senate seats for 2008.  Which I would think is a relatively easy task — Virginia, New Hampshire, Colorado, New Mexico, Minnesota, Oregon, surely.  Alaska.  Maine… a bit skeptically, but we’re working to ten here.

Kentucky is an interesting one, and in horse race terms, which is what all the bloggers seem to like to observe, the Republican Leader’s numbers have fallen below that magical 50 mark.  The Republican Party is sort of self-destructing there beneath McConnell, as the Weekly Standard noted recently — and as the Nation noted recently from a different direction.  Hence, it becomes that “hmmmm…”

Number 10, I don’t know.  Nebraska?  Sure, why not?  Still.  Even though dearest Bob Kerrey, thank god, walked away from the challenge.  Do I think the Democrat has much of a chance?  No.  But we are talking ten seats here, and it’s a juggling act between this and all the others.  If you want to dash Maine out of the equation — the Democrats hope it is the image of Rhode Island who offed the popular Chafee for a Democrat, but the problem comes in the urgency isn’t there with a sure Democratic Senate (as opposed to possible if you off the Senator) and a likely Democratic president — you’d have to fish one out of North Carolina or the “netroots” dream of Texas or…

Which brings me to the basic problem with this Human Events list.

Idaho?  The Democratic candidate is pretty well set — Larry LaRocco who received 39.36 percent of the vote in a statewide race for Lieutenant Governor in 2006.   There’s a strong chance the Republican candidate will be Jim Risch — who received 58.29% in that exact same contest.  And at any rate, it’s not going to be Senator Bathroom Stall, who — I will give you this — would surely lose the race to LaRocco.  They saw the Senator Bathroom Stall, they didn’t quite notice that he would sooner or later disappear, leaving a state that is Idaho with a voting pattern that is Idaho.

Wyoming?  Now this one is just lazy.  Really?  A quick google search shows me that the man who nearly won the at large House seat was recruited for this Senate seat, and has wisely decided to try again for that House seat.  The wiseacres at Human Events split the difference, saw this as a quasi-open seat — Barrasso having been appointed — and decided that makes it competitive.  I don’t think there’s anything special about Barrasso, which makes him, but — Wyoming?

That list thus becomes stupid.

I think we can acknowledge something here and now.  Spokane, Washington has a thriving closeted gay community.  (So much so a La Center man will traffic over there.)

(As though torn from today’s headlines, this headline, from 2005.)

And Larry Craig has certainly crossed the Idaho border before… or is that activity confined to Minneapolis bathroom stalls?

Not to go all “Brokeback Mountain” on you, but maybe all munipicipalities have “thriving gay communities” — it just so happens that only a handful of zip-codes might elect one to a political position, hence… a thriving closeted gay community.

Rolling around the am dial Friday evening, I found myself at the local conservative talk show host Victoria Taft. She brought on the Presumptive Next Mayor of Portland — Sam Adams. I refer to him as “Presumptive Next Mayor”, particularly as the man who would have been his fiercest competition crashed and burned in trying to spread rumors that he had sexual relations with under-aged staff — and I am obliged to mention that the last “Presumptive Next Mayor” did not make the transition to “Mayor” — instead ending up “Election Loser”.

Apparently there is this big bugaloboo in Conservative Portland circles about a “Fetish ball”, and apparently at a Human Rights Oregon function, celebrating a civil partnership bill’s passage, cards were handed out by the organizers of the Fetish Ball as invitations? Apparently. I will have to take her word for it. Anyway, the interview began with the question “Were you invited to the ‘Fetish Ball’?”, with Sam Adams’s response: “Huh?” Once the premise was explained, all the Democrats had invitations to the Fetish Ball, Adams wandered over to a tongue-in-cheek comment that Taft is the most attractive talk show host he knows (I will note for the record that Sam Adams is gay) , somewhere approaching how I would have answered but not quite, which is:

Are you… jealous… that you didn’t get an invitation? Disappointed that you don’t get to go?

And from there it wanders into the arena of Tom Potter’s bail-out in the middle of the street renaming flap (replete with the line that pretty well sums up his position right now), the bike controversy, and I don’t know… I turned it off because I half wanted to know where the Fetish Ball talk was supposed to end up.

The problem with having this sort of P-list blog and having it parked on a cult with a long track-record of exploiting any economic insecurity within the nation, is that that tempers my expression of fairly dire economic troubles.  That we are not swerving toward economic Apocalypse does not mean we a few Shoes are about to drop which the body politic is going to have to rumble through.

The American people seem to know the score.  At a recent Republican presidential debate, the question came up on why  polls show Americans hold a negative view on the immediate economic future.  The phrase that came up with the Republicans defending Bush-o-nomics was that we have “The Greatest Story Never Told” regarding economic good times.  This has the flip side problem of Dick Gephardt’s 2004 comparisons between Bush and the rumored “Double Dip Recession” and Hoover and the Great Depression.  For the rich white guy who said that, the signs are pointing us toward a different direction.

I have noticed an advertisement has disappared from the backs of the alternative weeklies.  It had a 20-something year old woman in a Superman t-shirt saying “I Didn’t Know I Could Buy A Home”.  This ad was a lie.  There is a fine line between home ownership and debt culture membership, and I don’t quite know where it is — but the person this ad was attracting fell into the latter category.  It had been clear to me that a
dash of short-term thinking, perhaps even some ensnaring charltain work, was gripping this sector of the economy, which would catch up sooner or later.

Indicative of some things, even if I know that this too will pass, and the latest issue of The American Conservative offers up this dark visage:

Young Adults accustomed to thrilling paydays will instead have to memorize dozens of excruciating formulas for different sorts of beverages more or less based on coffee.

A quick note here: a recent David Brooks editorial riffed off the seeming emergence of a state between “Adolescence” and “Adult”, understandably a little anxiety-inducing to cultural bemoaners.  I had always assumed that this was a product of the triumph of Consumer Culture, but with this line — which was prominently pull-quoted in the magazine — does have an economic thread going: Where are those jobs, and what happens in that state?

The meta-cycle of suburban development, including “housing” and all its accessories in roads and chain stores, is hitting the wall of peak oil.  The suburban build-up is over.  This will come as an agonizing surprise to many.  The failure to make infinite suburbanization the permanent basis for an economy will rock our society for years to come.  Hundreds of thousands of unemployed men with pick-up trucks and panoplies of power tools will feel horribly cheated.  I hope they don’t start an extremist political party when the repo men come to take their trucks away.

Provided is this remedy:

Reality commands that we prepare to rebuild our small towns and small cities and downsize our gigantic metroplexes.  Reality commands that we get serious about local food production and local economies.  Reality commands that we rebuild the kind of public transit that people will be grateful to travel on.  Reality commands that we prepare to restore our habor facilities for a revival of maritime trade, using ships and boats that do not necessarily run on oil.  Reality commands that we put an end to legalized gambling in order for the public to re-learn one of the primary rules of adult life:  that we should not expect to get something for nothing.

The lottery was always an avoidance technique for politicians to keep away from proposing new taxes and fees, complete with some socioeconomic troubles.  I scratch my head and figure that the “revival of maritime trade” insistence is archaic in terms of what is important.  The urging toward smaller communities, in addition to fulfilling the paleo-conservatives’ nostalgic romantic sense, has a grasp toward what eats up resources — how much hydro-electric power out of the Colorado River does it cost to prop up Phoenix?  And then there’s the big problem with converting us to a different energy source — against the power of the entrenched Oil Interests (and, for that matter, the entrenched Corn Interests who profer our less than desirable alternative).

None of this strikes me as dire, and we will likely trip into some of our fixes, off of the fringes of Industry and Government flickering the innovations from the sidelines into thefore-ground.  Supposing for a second, though, that in the meantime the economy falters into a somewhat reasonable guess, say — the depths of late 1970s Stagflation — well, we passed through that before, did we not?
………………………………………………………………
Also in this magazine, this warning shot, and you should know what to do with it.  Maybe.  From “War Whisperers”

The continued deference to former administration officials extends to the very lifeblood of the city right now — the presidential election, where neoconservative war boosters will enjoy A-list invites, give and get tons of money, and have the ear of top-tier GOP candidates.  Meanwhile, old and new Democratic hawks have largely pushed anti-war liberals to the margins of the establishment, creating think tanks with muscular names and erudite journals to catapult their colleagues into top-level jobs in a new Democratic administration.
[…]

No less than eight names associated with the Clinton and Obama campaigns– including Indyk, Steinberg, and O’Hanlon — have turned up, in some cases multiple times, on statements and letters authored by the Project for the New American Century.

This connection is admittedly one that recognizes how punk rock has
 transmitted at least some of its artifacts into mainstream culture in
 general. However, this is also an example of how certain aspects of
 baseball, at least what is considered the authentic or "pure" nature of
 baseball, can be captured, or recreated, if recognized. Just as queer theory
 sometimes devotes its time to finding elements of queerness in cultural
 artifacts, so too do punk fans attempt to find punk rock in culture.
 This is nothing new, but the connection between punk rock and sports
 zines is not simply one of spotting the punk in baseball. Although
 certainly there are elements of this. ChinMusic also had an article and
 interview that dealt with the case of Jim Walender of the Detroit Tigers. In
 an article from Issue #2 of ChinMusic titled "How publicly admitting
 you like the Dead Milkmen can destroy your professional baseball career!
 An Interview With Ex-Detroit Tigers infielder Jim Walewander by Jeff
 Fox" Fox noted that:

In 1987, he was brought up from the Mud Hens to play in the majors for
 the Detroit TIgers. Oddly, soon after his arrival in Detroit,
 Walewander became infamous for (of all things) being a Dead Milkmen fan. This
 fact is even noted on his major league rookie card, which reads,
 "[Walewander] became an instant legend in Detroit for his devotion to an
 obscure punk-rock band called The Dead Milkmen." On the Detroit stop of the
 Milkmen's tour that year, Jim came out to see their show in Detroit and
 then invited the band to Tiger stadium for an early game the next day
 against the Angels. Walewander's unlikely association with the Milkmen
 became cemented when he hit his first major league homer against the
 Angels that day, fueling speculation that it may have been the Milkmen's
 presence at the park that had inspired him to hit the two-run, upper
 deck blast.

According to Fox, Walewander was somewhat embarrassed by the attention
 paid to him as a punk rock fan, even his baseball card mentioned his
 love of the Dead Milkmen, but most baseball players come from small rural
 communities and few are veterans of the punk rock community. There are
 notable exceptions. Both the Chanel article in Ztsk and an interview
 in ChinMusic dealt with St. Louis Cardinals' reliever Scott Radinsky,
 who first played in seminal punk band Scared Straight and later formed
 the successful Epitaph band Pulley. This does not imply a direct
 connection between punk rock and baseball, only a desire on the part of the
 producers of the sports zines to try and connect their mutual loves of
 punk rock and baseball as a coherent whole.

-- From "Was He Safe or Was He Out?": Sports Zines and Questions of Authenticity
Cogan, BrianJournal of Popular Culture

....................................

I would be remiss if I did not point to and make a snide comment at the staged FEMA press conference. (Here.) Which comes off the heels of the typical White House editing of a beauractratic report on Global Warming. Off the heels of … oh,picking something at rando, creatively defining torture so that what the US does is defacto not torture.

The thing is I don’t know what snide comment I can make with these bits of political stage-craft. I suppose I could compare these acts of governing to utterly controlled governments, but after that I’ve got nothing.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t care enough about the comic strip Adams’ Apple to carry on a grudge-match with the artist or the strip, unlike, apparently, Nathan Sheets. (Mistyped “pondering” in the final sentence, btw.) It is a mediocre comic strip admist a sea of mediocre comic strips — which I end up reading occasionally because sometimes, when I have the comic strip page open, it takes more effort not to read a comic-strip than it does to read one.

The situation of the paricular strip I mentioned in September of 2006 was both a special case and not a special case. Understand that episode as being about the teacher’s discomfort with having to deal with the possibility of one student’s differing religious creed, and his relief when it turned out that “Whew! For a moment I thought he was one of THOSE kids raised by THAT TYPE of parent”. (Regretfully I can’t run it to “in THOSE neighborhoods.”) It is the strip that jarred me the most, but the cartoonist regularly ends up drawing up these weirdly revealing strips, ones that lead me to think “Um… That’s a YOU problem.”

The problem is I do not care enough to document the atrocities, or keep a mental rolodex. I remember that one strip, and the others that fall into that category and give me similar pause elude me due to apathy. Further, I fear that discussing the matter would get back to the cartoonist and give him some gratification of earning a weird sort of chit, anecdotal evidence that he must be doing something right — why, I can spark controversy! So I’m just left with one slightly obnoxious teacher drawing out his occasionally obnoxious thoughts in a slightly-tedious but mostly innocuous and bland comic strip, and perhaps occasionally reminding me why it’s a good thing I’m long gone from the years of K-12.

Okay. Got that? Good.

AND… To begin again…

— GIVE THE AMERICAN CITIZENRY BACK ITS SOUL! –

Lyn held a several hour discussion with the NC/NEC on Saturday afternoon, in which he kicked off a process of discussion for improving the functioning of the organization, which cannot be
adequately summarized here. Here are a few of the highlights of the areas discussed:

* THE CURRENT STRATEGIC SITUATION:

We are on the edge of something worse than fascism taking over the United States–the edge of the doom of civilization itself. If these Greenie idiots, typified by Gore, do what they plan, the world’s population could go from 6.5 billion, to less than 1 b illion people. We are already in a {breakdown} crisis, and if we don’t get the United States to make a change in direction {right now}, we will have no chance to survive. That’s the test of responsibility today.
………………………………………….

I was sort of making half-hearted and botched attempts at a response to the final comments of the long-time Larouche cult member who just wrote — what? 100 comments? — on this blog over a weeks’ span. One question lingering in my mind is where do I take this crock?

The line of questioning were stupdifying, but instructive in the way that the leaps that arrive at the questions show the beach-heads that allow someone to believe in the conspiracy of… um… Al Gore, I suppose a puppet of the synarchy of Felix Rhoyatin or the British Empire, and their environmentalist ploy of mass genocide to eliminate the Earth’s population from its current 6 billion to 1 billion — masked in a Global Warming Crusade. After a bit of thought it also occurs to me how this allows a person to see the scribblings of a wayward blogger (um… me) or the publisher of a national publication (go back to the L-PAC “Vast Right Wing Conspiracy” shot at the upcoming Washington Monthly article) as motivated to attack Larouche because of a desire to STOP LAROUCHE from exposing the great Global Warming Fraud.

Really.

I think I have more or less cracked the strategum of concerns over the vacuuousness of popular culture, and how that can ensnare a few wayward youth (and onto a lineage of history). But I have never gotten around to a certain battle over neo-Mathusianism — as enabling with a straight face, what’s that line? Some combination of the terms “Technological” “Humanism” and “Positivism”. (Maybe I’ll insert it here later.) There is something here.

“Let me guess: there are too many human beings and not enough resources?” “Okay, who should die and who should live? Who will decide how many children I can have?

Surely you jest. But Larouche has provided me with the absurd basis wherein I have a short-cut in unscrambling this: Population 6.5 billion down to Population 1.billion. I don’t need to say another word. You start with some plausible-sounding enough that might catch someone (Hey! China has a “One Child Policy”!) and, as if to make sure it stops short of accidentally latching a mass movement — you go to 1 billion. (Enough wiggle room between the two lines to lead somebody along, enough wiggle room to garner some fund-raising ala “environmentalist wackos”.)

Okay. It does not take a Great Greenie to summise societies must make adaptations here and there regarding issues of population and resources and how they affect day to day life– and if forced to I’ll go into some very practical matters drawn into any Environmental Impact Statement. But Larouche believes in a sort of “Unlimited”, unencumbered by the laws of entropy or environmental impact. Or, you know, moon bases will be hegemonic for humanity and solve whatever minor problems there might come from rapid development. And fusion, which I’d summise is a solution to some matters, but has proven to be a case of “Waiting for Godot” — put it in the hands of people seriously working on it and ignore a cult and maybe somebody is progressing on the matter.

But you go from that breach — the line about everybody believing that “Earth has too many people” — to the assumption that what they are attempting to thin the Earth’s population, which allows for the manichean view that Al Gore (or whomever… Um… Jarred Diamond) and wouldn’t you know it? They are the pessimists predicting the Apocalypse SOONER THAN NOW, not us — who are, you know?…

… all with a straight face. The Dollar equals Zero right now, after all, and have entered a dark age similar to the second interval of the years… etc. etc.

I gather that one keeps the 1 billion plot hidden in seeking funds from some less-than-Larouche-nutty-Conservative arenas (as the same with less-than-Larouche-nutty-antiwar arenas in the “Children of Satan” area), but I’ve never been entirely able to figure out how those things fully work.

…………………..

http://www.floridatoday.com/blogs/brevardwatchlist/2007/10/larouch-is-back-crying-british-are.html

……………….

Somewhat puzzling moment in a Larouche “Historic Internet Broadcast” q and a session. A weird discordant note — as posted at factnet…:

[Flintstone] I’ll ask you them, one at a time….

The first one is: “Mr. LaRouche, if you stop all foreclosures, how would you prevent some people from simply ceasing to pay their monthly mortgages? Or even just cutting back some months if their money is tight? If banks can’t foreclose, how does one force people to continue to pay their home mortgages at all? The entire population could just skate home-free on their payments.”

LaRouche: What a swindle! What a phony question!

Look: The provision is—as I made very clear, and even an idiot in the Congress can understand it—the way you do it is, once a property is in a state of threatened foreclosure, you come into negotiation, and it’s a negotiation conducted under law. What’s the law? I specified it very clearly. Didn’t the idiot listen to what I said? He wants to criticize what I say, before the idiot knows what he’s talking about?

I said, we will, instead of paying the scheduled mortgage as scheduled, there will be an agreement, an arrangement, under which the person who is the occupant of the property, will pay something per month, in the form, as if of rent; until such time as a resolution of the debt can be made. The object is to keep the people in their houses. And if you take them out of their houses, and if you take the extent of the evictions which are about to occur if this does not happen, you’re going to have the United States going into a sinkhole of Congress!

Anybody who opposes this, should be considered as tantamount to a criminal mind.

Freeman: I figured that was a good warmup.

Hm. Tightly controlled as those things seem to be… who asked that one, anyways? Designed to make an example, I … guess.

Just so you know, a certain synergy exists with “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week”.  David Horowitz and Rick Santorum head groups of individuals wandering onto college campuses to raise awareness of a non-existent ideological construct*.  And as they do so, any other nutjob is more open to participate and add to the discussion:

This coming week will host “Islamo-Facist” week at a number of colleges across the Country. The intent of this event is to reveal Islam in all its faux glory and deception by a litany of conservative commentators.

Since there will undoubtedly be a big outcry from Mohammed’s followers, this will be a great opportunity to counter their supposed “influence”. The colleges represented can be accessed from the following link…

So, um, everyone can find, um, Jesus now.

No word on how Fred Phelps might be able to get a word in edge-wise with the Great Debate and Challenge to Academic Orthodoxy.

*Really?  Islamo-Fascism?   Have they ever heard of of “Radical Islamic Fundamentalism”?