The State of the Union, or more properly the Body Politic, is fretted with a sort of lethargacy — we, as a nation, in terms of our government, are waiting for a situation to change itself to something that can be productive, and have resigned ourselves to the fact that nothing is going to be done until 2008. In terms of presidential and Congressional esteem, I compare the situation to the Congressional and Presidential period of 1931 – 1933, the last two years of Hoover’s Administration, with a bare Democratic majority that wasn’t aligned to anything as of the moment — Congress’s approval ratings were lower than Hoover’s.

George W Bush is one point off from Nixon’s low point, and has sustained the depths of presidential approval for a longer time than Truman. And we’ve gone through this sustained bottom-dropping for an awful long time. I remember the moment when it seemed to occur, when I looked up and saw that he was stalled right down into the 30s, and not about to move out of it. I started coming up with ways the nation should be restarted — an “Under 40” rule whereby a president who cannot come to that mark in his second term and through a decent stretch of time should be automatically replaced. Through all this time, any number of pundits have come out and proclaimed that Bush is experiencing, or will shortly experience, a bounce in public esteem — sometimes meted out as Bush rose from 30 percent approval to 33 percent approval, sometimes just simply meaningless. All we can do is watch in bemusement.
“It’s astonishing,” said Pat Caddell, who was President Jimmy Carter’s pollster. “It’s hard to look at the situation today and say the country is absolutely 15 miles down in the hole. The economy’s not that bad — for some people it is, but not overall. Iraq is terribly handled, but it’s not Vietnam; we’re not losing 250 people a week. . . . We don’t have that immediate crisis, yet the anxiety about the future is palpable. And the feeling about him is he’s irrelevant to that. I think they’ve basically given up on him.”

I think there is a feeling that the other shoe is about to drop somehow.
In the meantime, The Weekly Standard published a cover-item on the man less popular than Bush — Dick Cheney. The Weekly Standard being the outlet that would favor such a man. A book has been published. One that posits him as non-hugging, but gives him a… human side. And to that, the Murdoch – owned and rather silly New York Sun gives us this suggestion.

My own guess — okay, hope — is that Mr. Cheney has taken a look at the Republican presidential field and sees an opening.

Sure. I’ve always wanted to see a 50-state electoral landslide. Just imagine the day after Election Day, the headline: OBAMA PULLS 50-STATE VICTORY! Mercy, mercy me.

I mean, even a hypothetical Bush third term attempt, in a hypothetically different Constitution, stalled in the 20s in approval, would bring in Wyoming and Idaho.

……………..

Incidentally, I know “lethargacy” is not a word, but a google search shows that I am number one with that word, so I will use it with a sense of impunity.

Arlen Specter, who looks a tad older than I last remember, has been getting all of the press regarding the Alberto Gonzales hearings. It follows into line of the beloved “Even members of his own party” storyline — so much so that Fox News did their usual thing of “accidentally” identifying him as a Democrat. And because this line drips with nervous dread.

Specter: Do you think constitutional government in the United States can survive if the president has the unilateral authority to reject congressional inquiries?
Gonzalez: I’m not going to answer this question.

But Sheldon Whitehouse, a Freshman Senator you probably don’t know — someone I checked off last midterm election as “R to D” and didn’t think much beyond that, to me served as sort of the mean average response. Go to the split screen of Whitehouse and Gonzales, and the contempt manifests on his face, as he looks incredulously onto Gonzales.

Gonzales arrived at a novel line about the infamous meeting to Ashcroft’s infimary bedside — the attempted circumvension of acting Attorney General Comey not signing off on extending the wire-tapping program — which, for everything else in what due to the nature of politics can be obfuscated into complexities into “a tempest in a teapot” and drubbed into the donkey versus elephant narrative– is therefor the most straight-forward Dramatic and bold part of the story. Gonzales says that Congress did it. The closed bi-partisan group of 8, and by that he pretty much would emphasize the Democrats. The meeting with the infirmed Ashcroft was no big deal — Comey’s testimony notwithstanding — and he just wanted to tell Ashcroft the urgency of what was needed.

But nobody believes him, and those that say they believe him are lying to either us or themselves.

On a purely political front in terms of the Donkey – Elephant War — fully apart from the meaning of actual governance and pretending as though scandal were just part of the sport which the two sides bob and weave with, there seems to be a certain malaise in the body politic — a fatigue. I don’t think it is possible for Congress to have a high approval rating in an environment like this one — Congress’s and the President’s approval ratings tend to be tied to one another because the government is seen either moving forward or not moving forward — since the Presidency is all powerful, the Democratic Congress’s ratings don’t much mattter. If the Democrats wonder why they can’t get any real traction in the American public’s psyche about, quote-in-quote “Attorney Gate”, it may just be because the jig is up, and they’ve already registered their displeasure to Mr. 26%, and fully understand what he is all about, at least in broad terms — drumming up specifics ends up being an act of redundancy and a few too many extra thoughts.

(on public trasnsportation)

“… friends with benefits, you know.  Won’t handle anything more right now.”
“Tough life with mistakes made during my 36 years.  But I kicked my habit.  The Penitentary helped with that.”
“Laying low.  My job opportunities are improving slightly.”
“Oh man.  I’ve been seeing my 16 year old a bit lately.  He’s been making some of the same mistakes I had.  It just doesn’t make sense.”
“I’m going to have to get a Paternity Test for that one.  He sure looks like me, but I need to make sure, y’know?”
“Yeah.  I’ll go see her.  I’ll call back later tonight for a Booty Call.  Got that?”

And then he got off the Max.

Russ Feingold has come out for “Censoring” the President. This is a relatively interesting slap on the wrist, and I note it as a sort of fatigue of what it is that entails the implausible task of Impeachment — and the sobriety that such a thing ideally entails, but still itemizes it for the record. (Which, in the end, is all Impeachment really does — short of the next step of the “guilty” verdict in the Senate, that which did not hit Clinton. Hey! We have that itemized notation for Clinton. What the itemization was, history will just have to scratch its head and decide for itself.)

Cindy Sheehan is going to run her sort of stunt campaign for Nancy Pelosi’s seat because she will not pursue Impeachment of the President. We have come aways on that front from the days when it was bounded and hawked as a petition from “As far out of the political mainstream as you can get without being imprisoned” Ramsey Clarke, but seem unlikely to go any further. I remember what a novelty it was when a national polling company first touched on the issue of impeachment, and remember thinking “DUH!” when polls showed more support for such an idea than at any time during the Clinton administration. Today you can shift around and find a poll that shows the number up to a somewhat staggering 46 percent, though I do not quite know how the question was worded.
As it is, I am not entirely sure Feingold captured the right items for his “Censure” motion. The list? For overstating the case that Saddam Hussein had WMDs, particularly nuclear weapons, and falsely implying a relationship with al Qaeda and links to 9/11; for failing to plan for the civil conflict and humanitarian problems that the intelligence community predicted; for over-stretching the Army, Marine Corps and Guard with prolonged deployments and for justifying U.S. military involvement in Iraq by repeatedly distorting the situation on the ground there. A second resolution would censure the administration for approving the illegal NSA warrantless wiretapping program, for promoting extreme policies on torture, the Geneva Conventions, and detainees at Guantanamo; and for refusing to recognize legitimate congressional oversight into the improper firings of U.S. Attorneys. A few things on the list may as well be brought back retroactively to past presidents. But there are things out there that we can not play the “BUT CLINTON” game with — and I note the recent Jonah Goldberg editorial which attempted, badly, to do the “Pox on Both their houses. Heh heh.” appeal — the conservative commentator’s last refuge surveying the landscape, going for some higher broad historical sweeping ground of shifting political positions right as the Bush – Cheney administration just made one sweeping executive privilege claim, folding in the Justice Department. Oh, Janet Reno, where are you now — right when we need you the most?
I have to tap the shoulders on Bob Barr to get a somewhat more grounded anti-Clinton appeal — insofar as Barr recognizes Bush as worst in these arenas as Clinton and does with that what he must — something Goldberg’s appeal is incapable of.  The thing is that Impeachment and Censure are not measures designed for the current president, but for subsequent presidents.  It is a tough road — I fear the Giuliani President for the reasons that the latest words on Giuliani from sources like Harpers magazine are floating at us.
So “Censure” is as off the table as “Impeachment”, somehow conflated as having the same starkness of partisan fury. Maybe that is just as well, “Censure” being this weird measure that does have the effect of a no-confidence vote toward the president, and as Nixon said in his farewell address, he will resign because he no longer has a sufficient base within the Congress with which to work with. (Bush will always have 40, with a handful more feigning against him but seeming to slide right in for him.) It does strike me as that weird pooh-poohing of the “Censible*” that always seems to crush anything of any sanity.

* misspelling on purpose — combine “centrist” with “sensible”.

I have a much simpler, more straightforward explanation for why LL et al., substitutes the fake spelling “Jeremy” for “Jeremiah”:
The search string, “Jeremy Duggan” yields very little in Google (for example), whereas “Jeremiah Duggan” produces a vast amount of extremely damaging information.
People who are unfamiliar with the tragedy (Yutes, new recruits, etc) might perform a search and, seeing little, might not delve further.

Well Golly gee. Things that I must do: go through every reference I have made to Jeremiah Duggan, stick the misname right after the name, and link Jeremy Duggan to JusticeforJeremiah. Like so. Jeremy Duggan. His actual name was Jeremiah. So don’t call him Jeremy Duggan.
……………………………………………….

So I leafed through the final 13 issues of “21st Century Science and Technology”. And one thing hit me like an anvil.

I assume they are the final 13 issues, or final 13 printed issues — the printing choice of Larouche Inc having been bankrupted through lack of payment, of course, the company PMR — headed by the baby-boomer aged Ken Kronberg, who was, in case you missed the news, suicided. Maybe the magazine continues in some vague form online.

There was a shift of focus. A rather quick and sudden shift of editorial direction. One issue — the Winter 2002/03 issue, there was no mention of the Larouch Youth Movement — just a pack of articles whose chief editorial direction seemed to be to incoporate the name “Larouche” every fourth paragraph somehow. The next issue, there the Larouche Youth Movement were. And the issue after that, the LYM were the whole show — indeed, taking over articles completely unrelated the Larouche Youth Movement — as seemingly every technological and scientific advance in human history were the product of a Youth Movement, usually with an elder Guru — for example: Benjamin Franklin’s Youth Movement. The image of which bearing striking relation to this omnipresent image of Larouche sitting in conversation with a bunch of Larouche Youth. Or how about that one famous image of those very jovial nuclear scientists en route to creating the Atomic Bomb — (“how a youth movement in science in 1945 fought the Establishment to win civilian control of nuclear power”. How very convenient.) which bears a striking resemblance to the photographs that this newest direction of 21st Century Science and Technology has with all those photographs of those jovial LYMers. The propaganda is laid rather thickly.

So we begin. “We present this piece as a contribution to the pedegogical effort of the Larouche Youth Movement, which is presently struggling to master the paradox of the Pythagorean Comma. Their crucial, related purpose is to attempt to revive the aging intellects of the Baby Boomer generation, who have denied these youth a future by their immoral abandonment of the principle of truth.”
And then the next issue. The cover is The Larouche Youth Movement. And the focus deepens. “You won’t read about it in Science or Nature, but the big news in Science today is the growth of a youth movement, commited to the principle of discovering the truth. […] We have now around us, in a social-political and intellectual process that has chosen to call itself the Larouche Youth Movement [So… um… What were the runner-ups in that naming contest?] , a core grouping of several hundreds of very serious young people in the 18 to 26 age bracket. Around this rapidly expanding core is a very much larger circle of university – age youth [That be you, Mr. and Ms. University Student], debating the ideas which are being forcibly presented to them by the dedicated cadre of thinkers.

The “Burn the Textbooks” article is now sort of legendary — because of that other youth movement that burned textbooks it can’t help but evoke, and because the author of the piece was a recruiter for Jeremiah Duggan — aka (falsely) Jeremy Duggan. And then we get to the “guest editorial from a LYMer. Tell me that this doesn’t represent a disturbing attitude toward the generation of this young chap’s parents. And… other things. Aren’t you tired of wanting to die? Wallowing, wasting away here on Earth, until you run out of breath? That’s how Baby Boomers now live. And we, the youth generation today, will we imitate our bored, shrivelling parents, following in their stinky, pleasure – fouled path? Awake! Pleasure can be entertaining, momentarily, but look around. A muscle bound monkey-man, speaking English in the style of a professional wrestler, directed by a stable of financier criminals, threatens to become Governor of California. The President can’t read, and his minister of Vice Dick Cheney wants to murder human beings with nuclear weapons. There is no economy. There are no jobs. Rave dances and pot parties spatter the social environment. People don’t read. There’s no technological progress, no discovery, no culture. Is this the result of the ‘I’m so free because I do whatever I want’ Baby Boomer counter-culture?
Why don’t we stop lying to ourselves and admit, this culture stinks. We need a Renaissance, a rebirth of creative discovery in the social process, which makes us human, — not animals, but human beings, much superior to any beast on the planet.

Oh, mercy me. The eternal hook, tried on me right here on this stupid blog. I imagine them all shouting in unison: “ARE WE NOT MEN????” (Before getting around to discussing plans for a sort of “Master Race” of sorts?) Meanwhile, through 40 years of drubbing into his followers about the death of Scientific and Technological Development, scientists are advancing science and technology, and here I am on a keyboard — at a personal computer which is far behind the latest consumer products — with a network that had been set up methodically — and I note for the record that I can look up where the scientists — not quite a part of a Human Renaisance but we can still all be productive in something less than utopian (after all, we have Bush / Cheney in the White House and Schwarzenegger in the Governor’s Mansion, but I guess we’ll just have to push on through that, won’t we?) — at this moment in mapping the human genome. But that’s just for example.
Now let us Double the Square! We appear to have found something that lies beyond the infinite: all those fractions (an infinite number of them) and none of them makes the magnitude we are looking for? This so-called “squre root of 2” appears a “hole” in our number line, a discontinuity in what we before thought to be completely continuous. Now you know what the synarchists are confronted with in Larouche!

Incidentally, try this photo montage: Bertrund Russel 91872 – 1970), Norbert Wiener (1874 – 1964), John Von Neumann (1903 – 1957), Issac Newton (1642 – 1727), Johanes Kepler (1571 – 1630), Nicholas of Cusa (1401 – 1464), Gottfried Leibniz (1646 – 1716), and Lyndon Lar… Too bad those other individuals have passed on. I guess they’re stuck with that last one in their intellectual tradition, right?

Which brings us, conceptually, to the LYM – penned essay (the LYM have taken over the magazine from the baby-boomers) “From Lincoln to Larouche’s Land Bridge”.

And The stupidest science experiment ever. Two LYMers make orange juice out of an orange — one uses a juicer device; the other is stuck using his bare hands. The jucicer makes the orange juice in a much more efficient and quicker manner than the bare hands — which is the “ape-like rival” of the juicer-user. The lesson, in case you need clarification: Scientists who espouse the theory of Global Warming are luddites.

It is enlightening non-reading, and one can pin-point the precise moment that the cult was handed over in spirit to the “Youth”, because somehow they have a lot to teach the baby-boomers in the org, and deserve to be cut right in line before them. Oh well. Cults are a pursuit best fit for the young, it would seem. Full of energy to be drained out of them.
I suppose this is all old news by now. But it dove-tails as part of the backstory for the death of Ken Kronberg.

Sometimes I see a news magazine cover and feel stupider for seeing it.

I have noted in the past the design trick that Time Magazine has developed — Time Magazine has discovered it could stand out on the newstand by having a stark image against a white backdrop.

The blurb promises a story, a story which I am fairly confident could have been used for the past decades — but our politics has this weird way of running around in circles.  “They ignored the faithful for decades. Now Clinton, Obama, and Edwards want to level the playing field.”

Counting decades, I will go back three decades.   That is Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. Jimmy Carter.  Enough said.  Actually Carter almost represents the reversal of this circle we have been running in.  Bill Clinton.  Any number of incarnations of Bill Clinton focused in and refocused in on “faith”.  And how did he phrase his big apology?  “I have sinned.”

Reading the article, the problem comes in from one of these “religious advisors”, as well as Hillary Clinton herownself, that the “Faith needs to sound sincere.”  I note for the record that Howard Dean never much mentioned his faith until the drumbeat from some source on high, seeming to thunder down from the Drudge Report, forced him to sort of awkwardly wander into Jimmy Carter’s congregation, and toss out a few insincere-sounding words on that nebulous topic.  I note too the cunundrum that John Kerry was thrown in — the Catholic Church hiearchy seemed to have it in for him, and I encountered one rather jarring secularist (“Hardcore Agnostic” he called himself — an oxymoron, but never mind) base part of his anti-Kerry bias on the fact that he was a Catholic — at odds with his religion’s bosses.  (I fixed his wagon on that stupid point by pointing out this historical irony in relation to what Alfred Smith and John Kennedy went through.)  I also saw that Hunter Thompson clone from Rolling Stone magazine throw the couple of sentences on faith out of a wry article that posited his acceptance speech as “BS”, because Kerry isn’t religious — unlike Bush.  Maybe; maybe not.  But the former regularly attended church and the latter doesn’t.

Beyond that, there is some excuriacting for not buying into “Faith Based Initiatives”.  And thus is borne a new bill of goods for a new Bi-Partisan Consensus.

I will now scour the nation for a good atheist to elect as president.  Can we do so?  If not, can we also maybe elect a firmly implanted northerner, with a jab from a Southern state or two?  (Wait.  The Republicans have us snooked on that one.  Giuliani.  Romney.  It figures.)

I think this here is a conversation everybody takes a part of at some point in their life.

“I like the image of Jesus.  Really comfortable clothing.  Good Sandals.  Leads to wisdom.”

“Yeah, Jesus is cool.  Good miracles.  Loaves into bread, and etc.  There is part of the message I don’t like.  The meek shall inherit the Earth?  Haven’t seen that happen.”

“Maybe the meek inherited the Earth, but the Strong just took it back from them.”

“I think the meek inherited the Earth, than simply became the enemy they once despised.  Also, Moses… He parted the Red Sea.”

“Yeah, but that’s not that impressive.  The more impressive part is parting it back up right when the Pharoa’s army crosses.”

“I saw a movie once.  It looked pretty good.  But I think Moses ended up becoming this cranky gun nut.”
……………………………………….

A game to play might be to figure out which lines from that were mine.  Another game is to sort through your mind and recall the discussion you participated in which most closely matches that batch of talk, or to see if you end up in the exact same lines.  I note that the observation from sandals, slightly tweaked, was posited from Cliff Clavin on Cheers.  Human interaction is an interesting thing (I say as though I am a Robotic Mass puzzled over such a concept), in that you are compelled to say something, and thus you do.

Although that conversation is probably in some ways as ubiquitious, in the correct scheme of things, somewhere in the next 60 years I am likely to find myself dissecting it with a group in people in that matter.

Last night the U.S. Senate erased a page of history, literally.

The body agreed to permanently remove from the constitutionally mandated Congressional Record a vote taken earlier in the evening on a measure that said the president should not pardon I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff.

The Senate vote failed 47-49, but any reference to the vote itself was expunged as though it never happened.

After apparently getting annoyed, Democrats countered with the Libby amendment. “If you are going to shoot this way, we have to shoot that way,” said Sen. Ken Salazar, D-Colo., on the floor.

Republicans were beside themselves. “Until this last amendment, I haven’t seen politically inspired amendments before this body,” Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., said in opposition. There was so much audible grumbling from senators in reaction — and disbelief — that Kyl had to pause for it to subside.

After the Libby vote failed, Republicans struck back hard, offering an amendment condemning about a dozen previous pardons by former President Bill Clinton. As one GOP aide put it, “We brought our gun to the knife fight.”

Clinton was criticized after issuing more than 140 acts of executive clemency in his last few days in office.

But cooler heads prevailed when both party leaders decided not to have the Clinton vote, and Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada simply asked that the Libby vote “be vitiated and stricken from the record.”

And with those words, it never happened — except on C-SPAN tapes.

………………………

This is one of those things that doesn’t really make any sense to me.  A couple years back, some words by a Congress-critter of heated rhetoric saying that everyone in her southern Florida believes that Bush came in through a coup was angrily strickened from the Record, Tom DeLay wanting such blasphemy to not be reported for the historical record.  I scratched my head then as I do so now.  They can do that?  Why?  In terms of historical political theater, it doesn’t measure up to physical fights that have occured on the Floor over statements about Slavery.  But something about decorum demands that these things, if they happen, can be erased — like so many Chinese historical records of 1989 — the newest generation of Chinese youth have never heard of anything happening in Tiananmen Square because it does not exist in Chinese documents — or like so many Russian images of non-persons erased from photographs.

It is the sense of the Senate that Libby ought not be pardoned.  I think if the Senate is going to expunge that vote from the record, they may as well expunge more worthy items from the record.  The Bankruptcy Reform Bill.  The Iraq War Resolution.  The vote to confirm the last two Supreme Court justices.  The vote to authorize Bush’s electors.  They never happened.  Did they?