This is fairly shallow, and people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, but Gregg Shumacher is pretty creepy looking.

The concluding chapters of the Schumacher Furrier story are now being written, reporting into the Oregonian and any other local news outlet that is interested.  Gregg Schumacher is not coming off too well.

Gregg Schumacher is a Drama Queen whose persecution complex is building him a small world of delusion and martydom.

It’s not that the protesters haven’t been hounding him, and clearly and quite verifiably on any number of occasions they’ve crossed over the line in doing so.  But his belief of a coordinated an particularly strong campaign of intimidation directed at the two malls that might have him are startling not believable.

#1, From the Protesters, agenda – driven though they may be — though they’re not too shy in sharing credit for the closure of the thing, so it’s hard to double-loop their agenda back to this place: Rossell denied that the group mounted an organized campaign to stop Schumacher from moving into a mall. “If there was a campaign, I would have certainly known about it.”

#2, the mall owners: Dye confirmed that mall managers met with Schumacher, but says there was nothing close to an agreement. The handful of e-mails were mostly polite — ranging from “educational” to rhetorical to support for Schumacher — but didn’t come into play. “We decided that at this point and time that it was not a good fit,” he said.

Running counter with Schumacher: McWilliams says Schumacher has documents proving mall managers received threatening e-mails and phone calls from “people who clearly support the protesters.” McWilliams said he didn’t have copies of the documents.

The credibility of whom is hurt with, and on a jury I would slide my “preponderance of the evidence against” due to:  Monday afternoon, Schumacher, who has announced his intent to sue the city, referred phone calls to McWilliams & Co., a Portland public relations firm. But his announcement, titled “Furrier Forced Out of Business By Violent Eco-Terrorist Protests,” showed that he wasn’t surrendering gently.

Which is his vision of the hordes, who can easily be transferable to a meager pile of comments inflated to apocalyptic scenarios.

Sometimes the duty of a blogger is to very self-conciously add to an echo-chamber.  Hence… the dualing quotations of Republican Representative Sam Johnson.  Followed by some commentary on what stuns me about these quotations.

December 1995, regarding Clinton and Bosnia:

I wholeheartedly support withholding funds… Although it is a drastic step and ties the President’s hands, I do not feel like we have any other choice. The President has tied our hands, gone against the wishes of the American people, and this is the last best way I know how to show my respect for our American servicemen and women. They are helpless, following orders.
…
Thirty years ago when I was sent to Vietnam in a similar situation, Vietnam started out as a peace type mission, no defined goal, no exit strategy, no idea whose side we were on, and a created incident to gain support of the Congress. A peacekeeping mission? Come on. Does this not sound just like a carbon copy? I think it is.

AND, thank you this guy for the February 16, 2007 address:

We POWs were still in Vietnam when Washington cut the funding for Vietnam. I know what it does to morale and mission success. Words can not fully describe the horrendous damage of the anti-American efforts against the war back home to the guys on the ground.

We must not cut funding for our troops. We must stick by them. We must support them all the way…To our troops we must remain…always faithful.

I can shrug off politicians’ tendency to say two separate things at politically different moments.   In fact, to oppose or support the mission in Bosnia is not a contradiction with supporting or opposing the mission in Iraq, even as one may end up saying things that seemingly contradict.

But this one is a doozy.  This is, quite simply, the most amazing flip flop I have seen.  Sam Johnson is flip-flopping on the very meaning of the Vietnam War, and is taking opposing sides in a crucial crux of the Culture Wars that emenate from the 1960s.  I don’t know of any parallels here.

Contemplating KPOJ’s line-up, which is a horrible schedule.  It is a mish-mash on-the-fly re-working from previous scheduling, and simply needs to be chunked.

2-3: Mike Riley 
3-6: The Young Turks
6-9: Thom Hartmann, local
9-12: Sam Seder, 3 hours delayed
12-3: Ed Schultz, 3 hours delayed
3-6: Randi Rhodes, 3 hours delayed
6-9: Sam Seder, rebroadcast
9-12: Thom Hartmann, national, 12 hours delayed
12-2: Rachel Maddow, several hours post.

So it is, a full 12 hours — half a day — of 2 hosts, one of which is simply a show repeated, and a mere seven hours of live programming.

Explaining the contours of this schedule and its reason for being: Ed Schultz is now tape-delayed because he just changed his show up 3 hours to be available to replace Al Franken.  I don’t much like Schultz, but I congratulate him on his savvy business sense.  KPOJ has not followed suit, and has replaced Franken with Sam Seder, which has been airing at roughly the slot of his old show at 6 pm.  Perhaps this is due to them rescheduling before Schultz made his move?  Thom Hartmann’s national show was Air America’s replacement for Franken — and you cannot abide by six straight hours of Thom Hartmann, which KPOJ appears to have quickly fixed by tossing Seder into the slot.  (Hartmann’s national program came on KPOJ roughly replacing Mike Malloy when Air America canned him.)

Randi Rhodes has been tape-delayed from the start to situate her into the drive-time slot the Eastern Standard time has her properly programmed into.  Rachel Maddow has been an after-thought, tossed in at midnight, running straight into Air America’s morning programming up to Thom Hartmann.

Playing the part of ametuer program director and jiggling the jigsaw pieces together, I have three basic premises and one unsettled problem.  #1: Rumor is that KPOJ is planning to pick up Mike Malloy from the new syndication network he is now affiliated with.  I assume this to be the case.  #2:  Rachel Maddow should be moved from her dead-zone to the light of day, not simply because I want to hear her but because I think she fits Portland’s personality.  #3:  Ed Schultz will be obliged and moved to 9:00.  Smart bastard, that asshole.

The matter of Randi Rhodes is a tricky one.  Which trade-off is the better deal: live — and, mind you, directly competing against Lars Larson — something that apparently pleases her local fan base, or on drive-time.  With her in mind, I have 2 schedules:

2-3: Mark Riley
3-6: Young Turks
6-9: Thom Hartmann, local
9-12: Ed Schultz
12-3: Sam Seder, 6 hours delayed
3-6: Randi Rhodes, 3 hours delayed
6-8: Rachel Maddow
8-11: Mike Malloy
11-2: Thom Hartmann, nationl

OR

3-6: Young Turks
6-9: Thom Hartmann, local
9-12: Ed Schultz
12-3: Randi Rhodes
3-4: Politically Direct
4-6: Rachel Maddow
6-9: Sam Seder
9-12: Mike Malloy
12-3: Thom Hartmann, national

I may have bungled the “Politically Direct” / Rachel Maddow block.  In that scenario, it is preferable to slot Rachel Maddow to 4-6, for better drive-time cohesion, but if not possible, oh well.  It does make an interesting NPR-ish slot up against… NPR at the time they are doing the news.

Also, it may be pushing it to have a somewhat too-stale by then Sam Seder delay on the prime-slot of noon to 3.

Thom Hartmann’s national program becomes a bit of an after-thought, but that seems appropriate enough because he has six hours here.

None of this is perfect, but I think it makes more sense for their bottom line than what they have now.  Mind you, this is mostly a parlor game on my part — I’m not listening to Ed Schultz or Randi Rhodes.

Before dashing Jonah Goldberg’s latest editorial to the scrap-heap, I pause and reflect on this very simple question which Golberg wants everyone to answer:

Existential Threat?

It’s a simple question without a simple answer.  Use the Cold War as an example.  For most of the Cold War, Russia and the Soviet Union was not an Existential threat to the United States, and for the part that it was an existential threat, it was only a potential existential threat.  The proof of the non-existential threat is shown when at that famous point where a Russian watched as his computer screen showed that nuclear missiles had been launched from America.  Protocol said that he launched countering-missiles, he did not.  He did not because the idea that the United States would launch nuclear missiles at Russia was absurd, as was the case with the Soviet Union at the United States.

But, we spent half a century in intermittent terrifying fear.

al Qaeda?  Existential Threat?  It’s something that we focus our foreign policy around, sure.  I run around in circles at this:

no terrorist attacks on our soil since 9/11.

… Europe is a lot closer to their general bases of concentration, and the nations in Europe generally a bit easier and better monitored by the state (London, anyone?) with which they were hit than the United States, you know…

… and …

Never mind.  Answer the question for yourself, and delve into it a bit deeply.

In honor of Presidents’ Day, here’s the whitehouse.gov’s biography of Chester Arthur:

Dignified, tall, and handsome, with clean-shaven chin and side-whiskers, Chester A. Arthur “looked like a President.”

The son of a Baptist preacher who had emigrated from northern Ireland, Arthur was born in Fairfield, Vermont, in 1829. He was graduated from Union College in 1848, taught school, was admitted to the bar, and practiced law in New York City. Early in the Civil War he served as Quartermaster General of the State of New York.

President Grant in 1871 appointed him Collector of the Port of New York. Arthur effectively marshalled the thousand Customs House employees under his supervision on behalf of Roscoe Conkling’s Stalwart Republican machine.

Honorable in his personal life and his public career, Arthur nevertheless was a firm believer in the spoils system when it was coming under vehement attack from reformers. He insisted upon honest administration of the Customs House, but staffed it with more employees than it needed, retaining them for their merit as party workers rather than as Government officials.

In 1878 President Hayes, attempting to reform the Customs House, ousted Arthur. Conkling and his followers tried to win redress by fighting for the renomination of Grant at the 1880 Republican Convention. Failing, they reluctantly accepted the nomination of Arthur for the Vice Presidency.

During his brief tenure as Vice President, Arthur stood firmly beside Conkling in his patronage struggle against President Garfield. But when Arthur succeeded to the Presidency, he was eager to prove himself above machine politics.

Avoiding old political friends, he became a man of fashion in his garb and associates, and often was seen with the elite of Washington, New York, and Newport. To the indignation of the Stalwart Republicans, the onetime Collector of the Port of New York became, as President, a champion of civil service reform. Public pressure, heightened by the assassination of Garfield, forced an unwieldy Congress to heed the President.

In 1883 Congress passed the Pendleton Act, which established a bipartisan Civil Service Commission, forbade levying political assessments against officeholders, and provided for a “classified system” that made certain Government positions obtainable only through competitive written examinations. The system protected employees against removal for political reasons.

Acting independently of party dogma, Arthur also tried to lower tariff rates so the Government would not be embarrassed by annual surpluses of revenue. Congress raised about as many rates as it trimmed, but Arthur signed the Tariff Act of 1883. Aggrieved Westerners and Southerners looked to the Democratic Party for redress, and the tariff began to emerge as a major political issue between the two parties.

The Arthur Administration enacted the first general Federal immigration law. Arthur approved a measure in 1882 excluding paupers, criminals, and lunatics. Congress suspended Chinese immigration for ten years, later making the restriction permanent.

Arthur demonstrated as President that he was above factions within the Republican Party, if indeed not above the party itself. Perhaps in part his reason was the well-kept secret he had known since a year after he succeeded to the Presidency, that he was suffering from a fatal kidney disease. He kept himself in the running for the Presidential nomination in 1884 in order not to appear that he feared defeat, but was not renominated, and died in 1886. Publisher Alexander K. McClure recalled, “No man ever entered the Presidency so profoundly and widely distrusted, and no one ever retired … more generally respected.”

I direct you to the very end of this clip from “Hannity and Colmes” which shows the Rush Limbaugh / Ann Coulter bit of the new half hour “counter-balance to the Daily Show” comedy program “Half Hour News Hour”…

…the banter between Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter.

Which somehow tells you all you need to know about the strange relationship between Sean Hannity and Alan Colmes.

Alan Colmes points to the superfluous character of the secretary who is named by President Rush Limbaugh “Rosemary” and makes an obscure point “Couldn’t be Rosemary Woods, could it?”  Hannity makes a sort of disinterested expression, and says “I don’t know.”

Alan Colmes will make such obscure points about much more important issues from time to time, which I suppose is by way of by-passing any “balance” in a supposed balance directed for the benefit of Republicans.

For the interested, Rosemary Woods was Nixon’s secretary who lied on his behalf about how the tapes were destroyed, resulting in an iconic photograph where she strretched to show how those minutes were accidentally deleted.  I have no idea if the writers of “The Half Hour News Hour” were making an obscure reference, or how that is what pops up as most illuminating from the sketch to Alan Colmes.

I was surprised, a bit, that Ron Paul voted for the non-binding resolution. It seems to strike against Ron Paul’s stance against meaningless Congressional measures — the most cited being opposition to granting Charles Schulz the “Congressional Medal of Honor”.

David Broder, in his latest inside the beltway stratified piece — the theme of which posits Bush’s upcoming Political Comeback — guides us to the dangers of the “non binding resolution”. “Non binding” is by definition meaningless. An act of Congress which, if ignored by the Executive Branch would not result in a Constitutional Crisis, has no meaning. Barney Frank (and I think it was Barney Frank. It might have been Charles Rangle. I wish these things would appear on youtube.) provided the useful rationalization in his floor speech to why this isn’t just wallowing in the impotence that the legislative branch has carved itself — that is, the jarring Susan Collins — Republican Senator of Maine — and her less than Jeffersonian ideals (“Congress shall have the power to declare war”) of “Congress has the duty to speak out”. We have arrived at a certain frame-work with which our political actors are working, and that is that is where we must proceed from.

I understand the rhetorical tools this hands the Bush Administration and his attendent party. I notice that commentators from The Weekly Standard, National Review, and Fox News are throwing out favourable references to Dennis Kucinich, similar to praise Republican pundits have given Ralph Nader for the past decade. They slide themselves behind Bush who is “changing the course” in his troop “surge”, against the Democrats becoming the party of the “status quo” for settling on continuing to fund what we have.

I suspect that the best course of action is, within a three day span, the impeachment of Dick Cheney, the Congressional nomination of Jim Baker — the man whose name is behind that famous “Baker Report” which was supposed to be the tenuous steps forward in Iraq and had the David Broder-esque commenting of “Why Bush Will Listen” as the News magazines’ cover articles last December — as vice-president, and then to impeach President Bush. All this will do is place the nation in a position to see the practicable application of what the conventional wisdom on proceeding with Iraq had turned out to be — which puts us ahead of having to be straddled behind Bush’s commitment to his Guts.

After hearing drabs of right wing radio, this commitment is to win the Vietnam War — by not making the mistake we did then of ending it. As Mark Levin has it, if disaster befalls Iraq now, and if the US is hit by another terrorist attack, from this point on, this date, this vote, on this non-binding resolution, and this Democratic Congress minus 2 Democrats plus 11 Republicans, is what is the cause, the source, the agent of resposibility and blame.

So we have posited in Congressional floor speeches that this Resolution will Force In Muhammed we trust to be stamped on our currency. And so Alaska Representative Don Young mis-quotes Abraham Lincoln, which I note give the Lincoln – haters grist for the mill. (Remind me to get back to that quote… I have a few things to say about it.)

Nothing that forces Congress-critters to air out these opinions can be entirely meaningless.

Working with a debased sense of congressional authority burrows us deeper into the games of politics. Bush might have avoided this by combing through the Baker Report, and I suppose to a true Believer in the Righteousness of Spreading Freedom and Stopping Islamo-Fascists from that this is arguring bi-partisanship as giving into the other party.

Never mind. Ron Paul votes for a non-binding resolution, which shows that the non-binding resolution isn’t meaningless.