I’ve been wondering if I should delete from the subscription bar at my bloglines page the feed for the lewrockwellblogs, nothing wrong with the tedium from its anarcho-libertarian bent — even if I don’t think I’ve pulled anything from it in quite a while, its incessant fandom of Ron Paul has been irking me as a tedium overdone.

Maybe I will, but first I am sidelined by a phrase that one of those people used:

Antiwar Conservative Democrat (and former Republican) Sen. Jim Webb.

The story regards the big hoo-de-hah between Jim Webb and Lindsey Graham over Iraq which has received much attention.  Lindsey Graham should, by all rights, be one of those 40-60 percentilers that makes the difference between a filibusting Republican Party and some measure or other on Iraq (however pathetically weak a resolution it is that brings us to 60) — in the distant recesses of my mind, I remember the Washington Monthly magazine calling him the swing voter of that last Republican Congress — a conservative who bridged some moderate Democratic support.  Never mind all that, he appears to have entrenched himself on this particular issue — and now falls safely on the other side of that 40 percent line — the solid block of Republicans who can be trusted to line up behind Mr. 30 percent approval rating “William Kristol says that History will Vindicate Him” President Bush.
Jim Webb, meanwhile, has as interesting a pedigree as any Senator, and I noted that a pair of commenters from the Reason Magazine and American Conservative magazine high-fived each other at his election victory for holding up a “Libertarian” – “Paleo-Conservative” alliance.  But tricky beast, that Jim Webb.  He is, rhetorically, to my left on economic issues — and I say that noting that he compared our current economic disparity either unfavorably with or a little too one dimensionally with The Gilded Age of the end of the nineteenth century.  The rhetoric makes me question his continued allegiance to Ronald Reagan — used prominently in his Senate election bid, but I suppose I will just have to roll with it — and say that I imagine sometime in the future, the political crosswinds will shift, alliances will change, and he will be “on the other side” again.

It is the Kurt Vonnegut quotation again: “Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.”

But for the moment he isn’t “on the other side”.   At the moment, he is one of the most dynamic of Democratic Senators, and by all rights the point person for the party on Iraq and National Security.  I have not gotten a chance to watch the brohauhau with Lindsey Graham — full of tight-lipped references to their “friendship” and brittle and nasty references to each other’s current state of mind.

Political theater, much needed to keep as aware that the body politic isn’t stifled in the quest to appease the 40-60 percentiles of the Senate.

… yes, but Ron Paul won’t really have arrived until the sort of soft-core porn* web-video maverns who keep releasing those music videos of hot chicks slinging double entendres regarding the presidential candidates (And, yes, I just watched the new “Giuliani Girls versus Obama Girls” one, so I am no better than anyone else)…

… release one with some barely clad busty lady prances about for Ron Paul.

I think I see better how this “Chattering Class Consensus” on which candidate is legitimate and which is not works.

Interestingly enough, the Hillary one appears to be unaffiliated, which is strange because it is professional and with the same techniques and cues as the Obama video it was responding to.

I swear, these things make me want to go read somebody’s legalese-worded Health Care proposal. And it makes me appreciate Mike Gravel’s tossing of rocks into rivers.

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* In this case, a very broad definition that includes these cutesy, but titillating, things where the comment wowoweewa! this song was actually kinda catchy. and yes, i did masturbate to this video… eleventeen times! is not out of place, and probably — for that poster– true.

A quick check of ebay and I encounter a signed photograph of Mike Gravel, circa 1971.

I wonder if this is a situation where the seller has been sitting on this for years, and it just dawned on him that he can now cash in on “Gravel Mania”.  I note that the description fails to mention his current presidential bid, focusing instead solely on the Pentagon Papers.

It should come with a free rock, to tie the historical threads together.  I’m just saying.

I travel widely and it seems the opinion of the Australians and Europeans is that the United States cannot finish a military action. Our military is obviously the strongest in world but the policymakers do not have the stamina to finish the job. I’ve heard it said that we should have given the rebuilding job to the British on the grounds that they stuck in and fought to a workable solution during the Malay conflict. American history since World War II has confirmed the fact that in order to defeat the U.S. military all one has to do is hang on and continue to fight, because America will run from a protracted conflict. I suggest that this history is a threat to our national security as sure as Aldrich Ames.

I believe that the Iraq War was ill-advised and poorly executed, but I doubt that the difficulties of regime creation could have possibly been foreseen. I, like most Americans, would like to roll back the clock and do many things differently.

I think we all need to consider the fact that abandoning the situation now is to abandon all those who have fallen, American and Iraqi, et al, and condemn them to having died in vain. President Bush has lost the respect of the world; I hope our policymakers don’t let it be so with the rest of us. I would suggest a public relations campaign to win the hearts and minds back for this difficult task and let Gen. Petraeus do the job.

As the Seabee slogan says,”The difficult we do immediately, the impossible takes a little longer.” This should also be the slogan for our policymakers. The “Greatest Generation” did it in World War II. Are we incapable? JOHN WEBB Canby

I stopped reading at “but I doubt that the difficulties of regime creation could have possibly been foreseen.”  I took a deep breath, mumbled under my breath “Sure.  Pixie Dust for ‘Regime Creation'”, then flipped a coin as to whether to continue reading.

Slog through the argument about “not letting them die in vain”, which is not an argument because it doesn’t ask whether those dying to not let those die in vain are dying in vain or not.  I find myself to a simple question.

Why must it be that we must believe that America is capable of anything and everything?  That just seems implausible for me to believe — the strongest man on Earth being told to — finish the metaphor for me by naming a very heavy thing that he might not be able to pick up.  More pointedly, if it is capable of anything and everything, why is the road to accomplishing that assured as whatever course has been defined and being followed?  The strongest man on Earth being told to use his brute strength to thread a needle.
Does that make sense?

“Giving the rebuilding job to the British” may be precipitated less by our “inability to finish the job” than how we go about the job in the first place — which is a load of private contractor bonanzas, and not any real consideration of:

From “Instructions for American Servicemen in Iraq During World War II,” a pocket guide published in 1943 by the United States Army:

That tall man in the flowing robe you are going to see soon, with the whiskers and the long hair, is a first-class fighting man, highly skilled in guerrilla warfare. Few fighters in any country, in fact, excel him in that kind of situation. If he is your friend, he can be a staunch and valuable ally. If he should happen to be your enemy — look out! Remember Lawrence of Arabia? Well, it was with men like these that he wrote history in the First World War. Yet you will also find out quickly that the Iraqi is one of the most cheerful and friendly people in the world. If you are willing to go just a little out of your way to understand him, everything will be okay.

— Harper’s magazine

Funny, it appeared in the Oregonian a week prior to this letter — in that somewhat obscure corner of the “Living” section, the “wacky” Edge column.  And it’s probably more insightful than whatever David Broder column is appearing in the Opinion page this morning.

Actually, this is one of the better letters to the Oregonian, based on the fact that it doesn’t appear to come straight from a form letter.

Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) today released a list of the most egregious pork barrel projects spilling over in the Fiscal 2008 House Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies (THUD) Act. One section of the bill alone – – Economic Development Initiative (EDI) grants — has $78.2 million in pork spread throughout 480 projects. The purported purpose of EDI is to increase economic development and revitalization, but it is too often used as a pork depository.

Pork is one of those things that is a little hard to dissect.  Any number of congress critters rail against it, and then slice up all they can for their districts — thus having it both ways.  The pork meisters, in the Senate, are Alaska Senator Ted Stevens and West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd — who have wisely staked out their Seniority chairmanships to best enable them to take their jabs at the Federal Budget.  But there is a situation that arises where one dismisses Stevens’s infamous “Bridge to Nowhere” as a farce, and then thinks for Stevens’s somewhat non-descript highway appropriations that it is difficult to see how West Virginia couldn’t use those highways.

CAGW could use a better acronym.  How do you pronounce “cagw” — specifically the dangling ‘w’ at the end?

— $250,000 for construction of the Walter Clore Wine and Culinary Cente in Prosser, WA, in the district of Rep. Doc Hastings (R-Wash.);

— $200,000 for sidewalks, street furniture and facade improvements in Tamuning, Guam, in the district of Del. Madeleine Bordallo (D-Guam)

Maybe the Walter Clore Wine and Culinary Cente will bring in industry and tourism beyond its quarter of a million fund — and usually when I think of any Congress critter and the federal funds he brings in, I stall at the amount that Hanford requires.  But it is maybe a little startling to see that the Representative of Guam — who doesn’t have a vote — is in on the action.  One doesn’t think much of the power that Guam’s representative delegate brings to the picture.  A fifth of a million dollars for sidewalks, street furniture, and facade improvements?  What the heck is street furniture, and how much of the $200,000 is going toward it?
And could Doc Hastings get some funds for rodent removal — Prosser, of course, having had that nationally noted Humongous Marmot problem a year or two ago?

Last week’s article and blog entry from Scott McLemee (which I passed right on over over here) had me taking another gander at the strange review from Bronfenbrenner — which (shrug) I can send off to anyone who asks, in pdf form — as well that book Dialectical Economics. Bronfenbrenner wrote the only review of a Lyndon Larouche book to appear in an academic journal. The story behind this happenstance appears to have been given in one of the comments at McLemee’s blog:

Bronfenbrenner’s essay is, quite simply, a joke from beginning to end. The Journal of Political Economy does not often publish long review essays even about books its editors would consider important, but it often does (or at any rate did then) publish something funny or of quaint historical interest – usually much shorter than this one – as an end-piece. The JPE is, in addition to being one of the leading economics journals in the world, the house organ of the Chicago school of economics. In the early 1970s, Marxian economics was taken seriously by small but significant minorities in many leading American economics departments – but not, ever, in the Economics Department at the University of Chicago. Bronfenbrenner notes LaRouche’s dismissal of several leading contemporary Marxian economists, but it is not such serious contenders Bronfenbrenner has come to discuss: it is LaRouche, a clown, for the entertainment of the Chicago faithful. The nature of his audience is clear when Bronfenbrenner finds that he must drop his light tone to do serious business in one footnote, because LaRouche has actually landed a blow on hometown favorite Milton Friedman’s simplistic view of deregulated markets; the professor parries with Friedman and Schwartz’s rather more sophisticated Monetary History of the United States – a cheap move, for reasons that Paul Krugman spelled out well in his obituary of Friedman in the New York Review.

One footnote, however, does not a review make. That may leave the number of serious independent assessments of LaRouche’s theories at exactly zero, which would be evidence either of a previously unfathomed lower bound for standards in the diverse community of academic editors and referees (barring that one mercifully unnamed commissioning editor from DC Heath), or a supremely powerful conspiracy, I’m not sure which.

Just as well, it still stands there, confoundedly, for people like me and Scott McLemee, and probably Avi Klein and Dennis King, to pull up when engaging in relatively rudimentary research. A paragraph from that piece:
Marcus has apparently had the advantage of more private-business experience than the great majority of academic economists. One can guess that, blackballed by his radicalism from academia and civil service, he has turned to business in something like like desperation — and been rather good at it. Certainly the range of his experience, as reported here, is broader than the ordinary economist’s — including specifically mine. It is accordingly interesting to notice triple interactions between Marcus’ business experience, his philosophical background, and his policy conflusions.

I now accept this paragraph as dripping in sarcasm, a reading that suddenly allows it to make sense. But then comes this, and I am startled that I did not recognize the implications of what this is telling me.

Much of Marcus’s business experience, as he reports it, has been at the exploitative frontier of “white collar crime,” bordering on fraud both in the inducement and in the factum — a circumstance that I should imagine pushes one to one or the other end of the ideological spectrum.

Any other self-described Marxist and I could pass this off easily as someone regarding all of Capitalism as defacto exploitative “white collar crime”. Indeed I did when I read this. But Larouche is no ordinary Marxist, so now I’m stuck at a subject I once professed to be through with (and to a large extent am) — the life and times of Lyndon Larouche. His biography gets a little hazy up to 1967 or thereabouts, and I had assumed everything was on the up and up, Larouche was an erstwhile Marxist as he pursued business opportunities in a couple of fields, and then sometime just shortly before 1967 developed a more active interest in his politics and started haranging the Trotskyite bulletin boards with his loud, angry polemics. I note for the record that The Nation published a letter from a Lyndon Larouche in 1959, or thereabouts. Out of left field, there is this. I am weary of because I am infringing copyrights left and right by popping up. But one may do with that whatever one may.

Marcus’s experience extends to the speculative overcapitalization of capital values, creating “fictitious capitals” which cannot later justify themselves by earning capacity in the normal course of events. Observation of the overcapitalization process confirms Marcus in an overcapitalization theory of depression of the sort associated in America with [blah blah blah] Marcus has also been involved with inudustrial engineering and management science, including “rule-of-thumb” decision rules which appear to have soured him against bourgiois economics generally and reinforced his methodological biases. On the technical side again, Marcus claims to argue from the inside as well as the outside that the “US economy, viewed with some knowledge of the ABCs of technology, is one horrendous mess of waste, redundancy, obsolescense, and managerial incopetence.” Likewise, he believes the living standard of the representative fully employed US worker has fallen since the end of World War II.

At this point, we pause and reflect on every meaning of “Fictitious Capital” that one possibly could conjure, up to and including that which leads to a Felony Prison Sentence. Simply put, in other hands I would consider it a fair enough interpretation of economics. But, here, after scrambling in vein to find relevant material from his 500 page book on what he had to say about his past on the edge of “white collar crime”, we come to a question posed briefly on the FACTNet board: SO JUST WHAT WAS LYNDON LAROUCHE UP TO IN THE SHOE INDUSTRY?

As for the idea of being “inside” and “outside” of the US economy, flipping through Dialectical Economics, and right at the beginning, right there in 1974, he claims something he still claims today:

In fact, to a considerable extent, it is the exceptional efficiency of this dialectical mode that has enabled the author to become, alternatively, influential or bitterly vilified among most leading governmental and labor circles in North America and Europe today.

The component memes of his cult have always been in place. Back to the review, and one can check off just about everything.:

Marcus recaptures neither the confidence of the Communist Manifesto in a socialist future the day after tomorrow nor the confidence of the pre-1914 Social Democrat that socialism in itself would be a step forward whenever and wherever it came. His vision of the immediate future in America is of fascism not significantly more appetizing than the Nazi variety. His vision of socialism however, includes along with social ownership of the means of production a regime where most […] He appears to be what my late Wisconsin colleague Selig Perlman called an “efficiency intellectual.” That is to say, Marcus believes all rational men of goodwill accept his own technocratic design for the planned economy with minimal need for repression. All this is relatively standard, and Marcus also accepts a standard radical view that freedom today (in economic matters) is less than we believe it is because we have been narcotized by advertising, by salesmanship, and by the planned unavailabliity of goods we really want at prices we really can afford. In addition, like any other dialectic philosophers, Marcus sets off freedom against necessity in a fashion well adapted to rationalize almost any measure of dictatorship. Admitting that freedom requires the recognition of necessity, who is to draw the institutional frontier between the two domains? Judging perhaps unfairly from controversial manner, Marcus impresses at least one reader as a Me-for-Dictator type to whom it would be dangerous to entrust the task of drawing any boundary between the domain of freedom and that of necessity of order.

The criticism of consumer culture as giving one a false free will has struck me as a particularly powerful force in the realm of why a few hundred youths have joined up with LYM. I do not see the sense of rambling through the 500 page Dialectical Economics book (the body is 400 pages, but the footnotes and glossary are clearly just as self-important), densely written and with pseudo-knowledge that does not enlighten human thought in any way. One can leaf through it easily, and pick out items — the pooh-poohing of Adolf Hitler’s “peculiar psychology” as to why he set up those “work camps” (and what, pray tell, is this “peculiar psychology”, and what, pray tell, are these “work camps”?). Otherwise, I discussed matters on the book here and here.
Bronfenbrenner has a short wikipedia entry of some note, but I notice a new Larouche-feed entry includes the phrase: the notoriously unreliable, LaRouche-hating Wikipedia. ‘Tis a closed circuit, a cult.

Stumbling through the comments:

His Executive Intelligence Review developed a fixation on my dad at one point, thus resulting in the headline – ‘Martin Palmer: High Priest of Evil.’ (My dad was Prince Philip’s religious adviser at the time.) Such paragraphs as –
One of the more revealing expressions of the oligarchical strategy is the unwholesome symbiosis between Britain’s Prince Philip (Duke of Edinburgh) and his satanic religious adviser, Martin Palmer. Out of his oligarch’s pure hatred of Christianity and the modern nation-state, Prince Philip has resurrected the ancient satanic cult of Gaea, and has proposed to eradicate Christianity by means of superseding it with a mish-mash “world religion,” the latter incorporating all those degraded features of sundry religions which are consistent with Olympian hostility to science and do not promote the dignity of the individual person as “made in the image of God.”

used to give my family great amusement,

Actually I just find hilarious the sentence “His Executive Intelligence Review developed a fixation on my dad at one point”, which probably any number of people can claim.
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moderate update: Stupdified am I: Leftists describe the factional sectarian conflicts Larouche traveled through the 1960s. What amuses me most is that Larouche still today finds the 1957-1958 Recession a watershed moment in American economic history, that it has all been downhill since then — and one can pull this out of his literature still today, in the year 2007.
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Another update: Phil Ossifur sez: This is unbelievable idiocy. It’s why the good aspects of Bucky Fuller and Lyndon Larouche are not being employed to turn the world around. It’s unbelievable idiocy. Sheer idiocy. Idiotic idiocy.  UM.  Urm.  Huh.  Bucky Fuller and Lyndon Larouche are not particularly compatible in any measure.  Start with what one does with the environment and go on from there.

STOP THE PRESSES!  Jim Gilmore is OUT of the horse race!
Now we just wait for John Cox to give up the ghost, and we can finally get this thing narrowed down to the real contenders…

… you know… so we can all decide between Duncan Hunter and Tom Tancredo…

The Administration, he said, would not allow him to speak or issue reports about stem cells; emergency contraception; sex education; or prison, mental and global health issues. Top officials delayed for years and tried to water down a landmark report on second-hand smoke, he said.[…]

“Anything that doesn’t fit into the political appointees’ ideological, theological or political agenda is ignored, marginalized or simply buried,” Dr. Richard H. Carmona said Tuesday in testimony before a House committee. During his 2002 to 2006 stint as surgeon general, Carmona said he was also ordered to mention Bush at least three times on every page of his speeches.

There are news stories that just sort of fly by, so saturated are we in news that some relatively stark items just sort of fly by.  The basic problem with a frequently updated blog is that its dual duty as a report of important or quasi-important events and a ledger of commentary clash: Here is an important item that I have no particular comment to make which everyone else has.  Unless I happen to stumble onto some other piece out of the zeitgeist where the whole of the two pieces are greater than the sum of the parts.
A group of Christian protesters tried to shout down a Hindu clergyman who was invited to give the opening prayer during yesterday’s session of the Senate. Capitol Police say they arrested three people after they stood up and started yelling “this is an abomination” when guest chaplain Rajan Zed invited the Senate to join him in prayer.

The protesters’ concerns, according to the website of a Mississippi group that was trying to mobilize opposition to Zed’s appearance, were based on the fact that Hindus worship multiple Gods.

“It was a shocking event for all of us Christians,” the Rev. Flip Benham, head of Dallas-based Operation Rescue/Operation Save America, tells The Hill. “For all of these years we have honored the God of our Founding Fathers. It wasn’t a group of Hindus, Buddhists or Muslims that came here. It was Christians.”

The protesters, two men and a woman, face misdemeanor charges of disrupting Congress, according to the Associated Press. “We are Christians and patriots,” one of the men told a reporter before he was dragged out of the Senate gallery.

Benham issued a press release that criticizes Congress for allowing a Hindu chaplain to join them in prayer. “Not one Senator had the backbone to stand as our Founding Fathers stood. They stood on the Gospel of Jesus Christ!” he says.

I do not exactly know what to do with those protesters, but after a quick spell I realize that these two stories are indeed related.  Start with the political current that results in the demands for a Surgeon General to abandon stem cell research or sex eduation — and as the case is with the Surgeon General appointee under the microscope right now — that the Gay is an abomination — and then move to the more stirring similarity of their immediate demand.  Bush had that surgeon general mention Bush at least three times a page, the Invocation of Bush’s name was that important to float into the ether and enforce the word of George W Bush.  For the “Christian” “Patriots”, the invocation of Jesus’s name was of utmost importance, the reason they needed to attempt some feeble groundswell of opposition to the Hindu ecumenical prayer (of which nobody much anywhere could give a rat’s butt) to enforce the word of Jesus Christ.

Now I better understand Bush’s evangelical appeal.