The upper half of the front page of the Oregonian on Monday– or at least the front page of the attention grabber – tends toward the sensational or lowest common denominator to grab attention and suck up a couple of quarters “Street edition” in those boxes — blared out some NFL sports scores: “GOOD NEWS” and “BAD NEWS”.  The good news was the Seattle Seahawks won; the bad news was the Atlanta Falcons lost.

Seattle not being in Oregon; Atlanta being even further from Oregon.  But the market for Portland, Oregon and the state in general has decreed the Seahawks and the Falcons as the team that we are following.  For Seattle, I suspect that the lines of demarcation for what the networks play have expanded and contracted, moving from side to side, over the years depending on the relative strength of the Seahawks and the northern California teams of the 49ers and Raiders.  For Atlanta, we seem to be forced to swallow whatever team former University of Oregon quarterback stand-out Joey Harrington is on — which, because Harrington has had a bad NFL career, means that Oregonians get to follow a bad football team.  (Harrington has had a sort of fools’ luck in ending up as starting quarterback.  He was signed to the Falcons as a backup to dog-killer Michael Vick, who is now either in prison or shortly will be in prison.)

Is this coverage going to continue until Joey Harrington is drummed out of the league, or will there be a final cut-off point where Harrington’s plight is finally cut — maybe when he ends up the third choice on a team?  All I have to go on for comparison is Jon Kitna (a more successful NFL quarterback, for whatever that is worth) of Central Washington University, and I don’t think the Ellensburg transmitter cuts out from the Yakima affiliate to show the team he leads, not since he was with the Seahawks, at any rate.

………………………………..

Random quote from an article on Appalachian State:

“I want to play against real teams,” Connor Vaughan, 19, a freshman from Atlanta, said before the game.

With quotes like that, it becomes deeply satisfying if a lesser team in its division does to Appalachian State what Appalachian State did to Michigan.  (Which, in the end, does not appear to be a massive upset, Michigan being… a bad team and all.)

An interesting measure of the zietgist and how much mental brain-span is devoted to thinking about 9/11 today comes with a scan of the comics page in the newspaper.  The comic strips, at this moment in their devolution, tend toward being postage stamp sized greeting cards, and tend to have a hard time resisting the urge toward a bit of sentimentality.  Any previous year, it was likely loaded with cartoonists doing 9/11 commemerations.   Today, the number of comics strips in the Oregonian involving 9/11 was One.  And that was  a local strip.

Other convincing nods to 9/11 — sidewalk chalked with “9/11 Truth Means No Wars!  [blahdeblah.blogspot.blahdebla]

So Usama Bin Laden’s tape, timed for 9/11… And General Petraeus’s testimony (the troops are coming home!  Or… you know… a slice of the surge.  The rest we’ll be debating for the 2012 presidential election. ), timed for the same reason. The flap the Republicans in Congress have carried forth with the condemnation of the moveon.org ad shows me a mentality that has it that, nobody can speak any evil of Petraeus.  He has been knighted by the elite opinion-marblers — in similar ways as McCain or Colin Powell at one time — or Bush in the immediate after-math of his bullhorn speech in 9/11.  Or, at the very least, they are trying to hammer that into existence — and to a degree, have.

………………………………..

I tend to view Chuck Hagel’s retirement as something of a bad thing.  It is not so much his departure — with him liable to show up in some foreign policy think tank or as a token Republican in a Democratic administration — before winding up to cashing in as a lobbyist in that permanent government slot.  Despite some rhetorical flourishes at Bush’s policy in Iraq and various facets of the “Imperial Presidency”, he maintains a solid voting record with the Bush Administration, up to and including those arenas he criticizes Bush for — it is the “well, with great reluctance” trap of the “Centrist”/”Moderate”/”Mr. Serious”.

He is a maverick to the name of maverick.   He would be infuriating as a Democrat — he would be Joseph Biden.  His greatest asset is that he annoys Republican partisans.
I suppose one cannot underestimate that part of the Senator’s power — the Sunday morning blathering fest, which is why Lieberman is more aggrivating than a number of other Senators.  The word on the street is that the Democrats are going to siphon us with Bob Kerrey, automatic front-runner for the Senate seat against anybody the Republicans might put up there.  I think I know the Democratic Party well enough to know roughly what they will be doing with Bob Kerrey — somewhere within the Good Ol’ Boys’ Network, his stature will be inflated and grown — Nebraska’s Senate race will be  a Top Priority, and probably THE TOP PRIORITY in terms of the down-the-ticket ballot.  All those liberal blogs (and moveon.org) — the “netroots” — as the election proceeds, will be tapped to donate to Bob Kerrey.

Bob Kerrey, ironically probably as a whole to the left of Nebraska’s current Democratic Senator (The most conservative Democrat in the Senate), but where Ben Nelson tends toward his issues of what Nebraska needs and doesn’t make have a huge public profile, Bob Kerrey will.  And on that issue of “War and Peace”.  An interesting little dilution.  The drive to something of a 60-seat filibuster-proof majority is mooted.

Identical voting record tendency on that area of concern, rhetorically worlds apart, probably the same effect within their parties — though the Democrats can’t quite absorb it as well the Republicans — unless it were a matter of the Democrats maintaining a majority over a minority — which even a tepid party and tepid agenda is an improvement for the short-term, no matter the corrosive forces within the party.  (Ie: Barbara Boxer heading the committee covering global warming versus Jame Inhoffe.)   It isn’t though.   So, Nebraskans, vote for the Republican.

The mill for the conspiracy theorists, and the conspiracy theorists in all of us, are currently being plowed by the Usama Bin Laden tape, and the political message and entreaty for us, the servants of the Great Satan.  It is second nature.  (He has a black beard, I see and hear.)

Remember when Henry Kissinger, goddamned Henry Freaking Kissinger, was tapped to lead the investigation into 9/11?  Or the rules that Bush set for his testimony, sit with Big Dick Cheney — nothing in the record?  Those were the moments of pause, when I myself felt obliged to fall into that particular abyss.  Or at least let the conspiracy theorists go wild without any objection.

Beyond the taunting of simply attempting to thrust his presence into our mindspace, I can never make heads or tails of Usama’s purpose in saying what he says.  Either he is moving straight ahead with what he considers well-heeled arguments or he is trying to affect a certain political response in our corner of the world.   Richard Clarke claims that agents in the CIA watched the eve-of-the-2004 election taped greeting and greeted it with the analysis of “He wants Bush to win.”  Indeed, Bin Laden probably shoved Bush into his margin of victory, with a message that was red meat for right-wing Republicans… “Why he sounds just like Michael Moore!”

I cannot offer up that analysis for that tape, and the right-wing intelligensia and pseudo-intelligentsia cannot offer up that familiar refrain for the latest.  If they want to glom onto the Noam Chomsky reference and the calls to enact Kyoto, I can only glide onto the trumpeting of “Islamofascism”‘s low tax rate and good moral groundings.  The tactical idea of acting as a parody of some left-wing figure falls to shreds.  He seems to be covering his bases, from his fuzzy perspective of how American (and onto “The West”) political discourse moves.

So, in the next tape, I want Bin Laden to make a direct plea to the 9/11 Conspiracy Theorists.  The ones who believe Bin Laden is an apparation, a US government creation.  Then we can really get post-modern on our asses!

Do [you] want the truth to it all from someone on the inside? Nothing. It does nothing and is nothing. A complete waste of money.

That always struck me as one of the more random comments this blog, regarding the doings of the Department of Homeland Security.  Random in its claim of “inside” information, without any particular reason to either believe or not believe that.

Just days before the sixth anniversary of September 11, congressional auditors are giving mixed grades to the Department of Homeland Security on its efforts to unify 22 agencies into one department and other goals.

The 320-page report from the Government Accountability Office, which will be presented to Congress on Thursday, finds that the DHS has made progress in many areas, but has failed at major management functions.

The DHS was created in 2003 by the Bush administration following the 9/11 attacks “to provide the unifying core for the vast national network of organizations and institutions involved in efforts to secure our nation.”

The report compiles other studies by GAO, the non-partisan research arm of Congress, and contains detailed analysis of the DHS’s progress in meeting 171 performance goals.

Although DHS has been developing programs in its mission areas, such as protecting the U.S. border, it has had trouble putting them into action, the accountability office report says.

I think I regarded The Department of Homeland Security as a lot of box moving, which may or may not be good or bad — but wasn’t an elixir.  Watching dispatches from “Homeland Security”, all I can really figure is that as a government agency, it’s been treatable as any government agency — an opportunity for pork for Congressional election and coffer purposes; an agency for the Executive Branch to utilize for political ends.

Here is a breakdown of the report card:

Substantial progress

On the other hand, they are right on new Bin Laden tapes.  His beard is black.

With the new school year dawning, the sight of a group of elementary school children lined up and being marched somewhere or other, all holding onto a rope, has become returned.  I do not remember hanging onto rope, but I do remember, and I do know, that elementary school is all about lining up, getting into a line, taking an inordinate amount of time to up yourselves collectively into a line — head anywhere, you need to be corralled into a line.  What took the place of the rope, which — I suppose — has no purpose of existing unless you are marching into the busy downtown of a city, so I’m freed of that contraption — for at least one grade and one teacher was the phrase “Zip your lips while you’re on a trip”, which — in addition to a quick flurry of exaggerated zipping noises seems to lead to a single minded focus, one foot in front of the other — to the lunch counter or music room or recess or wherever.

Toward the other end of the K through 12 spectrum, I have to admit to not really understanding these kids’ fashions.   Why are they not wearing something different from what was worn by us a decade ago?  I believe we have had twenty years where, to one degree or other, baggy pants — low-slung and everything — have been spot-able in some corners of groupings of teenagers.   I pick the “twenty years”, massaged a bit — (to tell the truth, 20 years back brings us to the age of — what? Acid Wash?) — for the point of asking:  At some point, don’t the kids move onto something different just for the sake of rebelling against what their parents wore as teenagers?  (Interesting to note the renewed interest of various blue-hairs in policing such fashion, which may be exhaustion at the tedium as anything else.)

Self-described pedophile Jack McClellan, who fled Washington and California amid public outrage over his habit of photographing young girls, said Wednesday that he has moved to Portland and plans to stay.

The 45-year-old McClellan has drawn national attention in recent months from media and concerned parents over a now-defunct Web site that featured photos he took of young girls in public places.

McClellan admits he is sexually attracted to young girls, though he said Wednesday he has not and will not do anything illegal. He said he won’t take pictures of children anymore because he now “sees it from the parents’ side.”

McClellan publicly announced his move to Portland via a Web site and in multiple media interviews. He said he wants to pre-emptively blunt efforts to “out” him by those who track his movements, adding that he feels media attention will help protect him from vigilantes and police harassment. He chose Portland for its “reputation as a Northwest haven for offbeat people.”

Really?  “Portland has a reputation as a haven for offbeat people”?
Also, what clued him in that parents might be see it as they do?
In other news of Internet usage…

Multnomah County sheriff’s office investigators are scrutinizing a corrections officer at the downtown jail for Internet postings made from his work computer in which he gloats about how fun it is to Taser people and brags about having crushed one inmate’s eye socket.

David B. Thompson, 30, recently wrote on an Internet message board that one of the more pleasurable parts of his job is when he gets to use his Taser, thus exposing people to the agonizing sensation of 50,000 volts of electricity pulsing through their bodies.

“Seeing someone get TASER’d is second only to being the guy pulling the trigger,” Thompson wrote on an Internet message board Aug. 25. “That is money. Puts a smile on your face.”

Asked by the Portland Tribune to review the posts and comment, Sheriff Bernie Giusto launched an internal investigation of Thompson that will examine, among other things, whether he lied while accusing an inmate of assaulting him as a way to justify having injured the inmate.

Well, Portland has a reputation for offbeat people, I hear say.

I am, of course, number one million to point us to this, but at times it just seems worthwhile to note these moments for a sort of record for poserity, the downfall moment a candidate, and where Bill Richardson lost me. 

Democratic presidential hopeful Bill Richardson said Tuesday that his comment about it being God’s will that Iowa votes first was off-the-cuff as he defended the state’s primacy in the nomination process.

Campaigning in south-central Iowa, the New Mexico governor faced questions about his comment Monday in which he suggested that there was a more serious reason for Iowa to lead the nomination process with caucuses.

“Iowa, for good reason, for constitutional reasons, for reasons related to the Lord, should be the first caucus and primary,” he said Monday. “And I want you to know who was the first candidate to sign a pledge not to campaign anywhere if they got ahead of Iowa. It was Bill Richardson.”

The Des Moines Register reported on Richardson’s comments to the Northwest Iowa Labor Council Picnic in Sioux City.

Asked about it Tuesday, Richardson said: “Look, that was an off-the-cuff comment where I said Iowa and New Hampshire should be first.”

When pressed further, he said Iowa should launch the primary calendar because “it’s a tradition in American politics that has worked.”

“Iowa scrutinizes candidates through a grass-roots state. They are very good at winnowing down candidates,” he said. “They don’t listen to national polls. Iowa voters are very independent and issue-oriented.”

I cannot quite figure out which part of the story is worst: the first part — God loves Iowa just as he (she? it?) loves every single sports team on the planet.  (Though its spot on the presidential election calendar is roughly as much a curse as anything else.  Yes.  I want to bump my elbow against John Cox the next time I eat breakfast at a diner.)  Or his later implications, which… well… serves as an attack at the other 49 states as much as it does a service to the greatness of Iowa…

Arbitariness in the now insane presidential process notwithstanding … I hear Iowa is a hole anyways.  And I say that because I want to burn any and all possible bridges to an American Presidency.  Maybe I should also solicit sex in the men’s room?

Earlier this year, I ran into someone from that era at the National Press Club in Washington, a reporter for a major network radio station, who quipped affectionately that in the 1980s I’d been the first person to introduce the press corps to the word, “Krasnoyarsk” (a city in the Soviet Union where work on missile defense was being done).

I had one of my worst bowel movements in Krasnoyarsk. Or, actually, just outside the city proper — Stolby, which — in order to conceptualize based on my experiences, I describe as the forestry of the Cascade Mountains leading to the rock formations of Southwest America. But that’s okay, Nick Benton probably was not referring to Krasnoyarsk anyway, as the closed area Krasnoyarsk-26, now the Uranium powered furnace for Siberia — which is secretive, so secretive that my brother can run off with a few photographs from his stint of teaching English.

As for my shaky bowels — and the horrors of that one outhouse, I am thinking it was probably some raw fish products. One probably should not obligingly eat anything their host shoves in front of them. Stick to crackers and jam with the tea, I suppose.

OKAY! Backward from there…

Moving to Washington D.C. in mid-1985 (to the present), I maintained my nominal affiliation with LaRouche’s so-called “National Committee” (NC) during that period primarily, and ironically, to keep his organization at bay with regard to me, personally, and my new wife. The affiliation provided me with just enough authority to tell LaRouche’s aggressive lieutenants to fuck off and leave us alone. This was particularly important in the case of my wife, who was debilitated by chronic fatigue syndrome, who I fiercly protected from intense pressures to fundraise out of the organization’s new national center in Leesburg. She was, as a result, spared from implication in the shady fundraising practices that eventually sent a lot of LaRouche associates to jail. While my wife and I are now divorced, she remains my closest companion to this day, now going on two decades after our disassociation from LaRouche. Also, once in Washington, I used my NC authority to mitigate severe cases of abuse against “rank and file” LaRouche associates, including one who’d come from Montreal where he’d been allocated $5 a day, along with everyone else in that LaRouche “local,” and I discovered was gluing in his dentures everyday with rubber cement. I saw to it that his dental needs were comprehensively met. Another case involved an associate suffering severe fatigue from what turned out to be acute food allergies, but only after I insisted he be let free from organizing obligations (you know, the usual 16 hours a day at an intersection, etc.) and that he receive comprehensive medical care.

In 1985, I began attending White House daily press briefings despite my refusal to use that opportunity as a platform for so-called “interventions” on behalf of LaRouche, as pro-LaRouche predecessors had done. Instead, I became respected by my colleagues in the mainstream press for my acumen and willingness to ask questions on subjects many of them were not privy to that I had gleaned through paying attention to intertnational press outlets, and so forth.[…]

All of the relevant events cited here from 1984 on are backed up by documents and other hard evidence, including eyewitness accounts from a practicing attorney, that would stand up in any court of law were issues of lies and/or defamation of my character to arise.

Sure, disassociated from Larouche. While with EIR, not the lackey of Larouche. Documented from 1984 onward. respected by the peers probably for anything that is not this, AP 1986:…

In Washington, Nicholas Benton, an aide to LaRouche, attributed the victories to “unprecedented disgust with leaders of both major parties” and “the new mood of the American people and their support for the kinds of remedies offered by Mr. LaRouche.”
Reading these posts and that odd matter has bugged me a tad, and really for no reason whatsoever — none of my g-danged business, even as I “study weird exotic growths of fungi” — but I think I will that it is something best left to acknowledge and resolve it as minor compromises one makes in everyday life, not the least when still somewhat connected with a cult.