“There is one Socialist in the House of Representatives. But he’s more or less a liberal Democrat. Why doesn’t he run as a Liberal Democrat?”

“How much credibility does that bring if he runs and wins as a Socialist?”

I mention this because Jim Jeffords, the ex-moderate Republican turned Democratic-caucusing Independent, has announced his retirement. Bernie Sanders, the Socialist Party Democratic-caucusing Representative of the state, is the front runner for this newly open seat — and probably the only Republican who could possibly defeat him is current Republican governor Jim Douglas.

Which means in 2006, more than likely, the Republican Party is going to have a new “Most Hated Senator” to take the place of Liberal Ted Kennedy or constantly-triangulating Hillary Clinton.

As per Bernie Sanders, he hasn’t been a true Socialist since his days of Mayor of Burlington. Or so I once saw a scribbling from either a Sanders supporter or a Sanders detractor. (And I don’t believe he has any weight from an official national party, thus… he’s always labelled in the media as “Independant”.)

HIS TRUTH IS MARCHING ON!!

Country music legend John Conlee has been added to the FRC Action’s ‘Justice Sunday – Stopping the Filibuster Against People of Faith,’ a live nationwide simulcast event that will be held at Highview Baptist Church in Louisville, KY on Sunday, April 24 at 7 PM ET.

…

Conlee joins a line-up of prominent figures for the event, including FRC Action President Tony Perkins; Dr. James Dobson, Founder and Chairman of Focus on the Family Action; Dr. Al Mohler, head of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary; and Chuck Colson of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

…

Fun for all involved. Watch Senator Bill Frist on TBN and educate yourself on how liberals are destroying people of faith.

Radio stations switch format in the middle of the night, with no advanced warning. I flipped on 910 AM at about 8 last night to hear some Phil Hendrie. What I got was, apparently, a casualty to a brand new innovation in corporate consolidated music radio programming, as another station becomes something else, and this station becomes the old station:

Entercom Market Manager, Jack Hutchison, said in a release, “Charlie is a brand new approach to free radio today,” which the station says “will borrow a page from the random music approach so many people enjoy with their iPods and MP3 players today. This format has taken the country by storm and promises to be equally as exciting and fast-hitting in Portland.”

KKSN’s oldies programming will return to its original position at 910 on the AM dial, replacing KOTK (Max 910), Talk Radio for Guys.

The soullessness of Radio programming continues unabetted, as we introduce a new format called “Random Voodoo.”

As for Portland radio… Rick Emerson is gone. Clyde Lewis is gone. Phil Hendrie is gone. If you want to stretch a bit, Imus is gone. (Also some material I have no interest in hearing ever, such as, say, Tom Leykis.)

The silver lining being that the annoying “Talk Radio for Guys” promotional positioning — replete with all that comes with such a concept — that came when Entercom bought the corporation that previously owned the stationed (then at 1080 AM) is gone, too. (That having been the first warning sign of disaster looming.)

What you’re left with on the AM dial in terms of talk radio is a handful of Right-wing talk stations and one liberal talk station.

620 AM, KPOJ “Portland’s Progressive Talk Station” I suppose will end up continuing whether Air America ultimately fades away (the author of “South Park Conservatives” had an editorial published in the Oregonian yesterday that it would fail yet, and the network is not quite out of the woods), it being the most successful “Air America affiliate” and hence “liberal talk station” in the nation… picking up what liberal talk stations there are in this nation. (Maybe I could get Lionel back.) The station recently introduced a local show… though, a transplanted local show to be sure, in the name of Thom Hartmann… the transplanting coming across as a little strange. (The commercials for the new timeslot to “The Morning Sedition” coming across as rather odd — ‘Intention Mark and Marc fans! Now you get to hear The Morning Sedition LIVE!” (at 3:00 in the morning, which for a show that does few call-in segments sort of means there’s no advantage to a live show, and a big disadvantage in being on at 3 instead of 6.)

What do I make of Portland radio now? Well, there’s one fewer good one to mix and match from a tiny supply of stations that one mixes and matches with.

From 9 to noon, it’s … Al Franken? If I must. Weekends at 10 pm it’s… Art Bell? If I must.

Thank you, radio Gods. Now go to Hell, Entercom. You may have bettered the alternative rock station in Portland, but that just means you’ve one feather in your cap and two socks full of poopoo. (Three if you count learning about “Charlie”.)

Somewhere in the summer on an Internet message board (easily findable by careful reading of this blog), I ran into a sort of Bill O’Reilly-esque Conservatoid. I say “Bill O’Reilly-esque” in the sense that he claims Independence and obviously thinks of himself as “Independent” (heck, he voted for Gore! And he listens to all sides… defined by him as both right wing radio talk and NPR!!!). But his big halla-balos: stark hawkism with regards to war matters (at first defending the Abu Gharib Torture scandal, then realizing it was basically an untenable spot and calling them “a case of a few bad apples” — beyond which these were “the worst of the batch” they were torturing, and then at the same time trying to justify Torture as an effective means to an end — which goes back to defending the Abu Gharib Torture scandal. News items saying that these weren’t the “worst of the batch” apparently the “liberal media”.)

A screed against “Politically Incorrectness”, this weird item of concern that I am never sure what is being debating. (Take, for instance, the attacks against Christmas that I was completely unaware was happening sans Bill O’Reilly and Fox News last Christmas. And in the end, all I can really tell you is that it’s a good thing that White Americans are no longer going around using the “n” word. [And I have a certain Bill Cosby-esque discomfort in Black Youth using the word, too.])

And… the Republican Talking Points on John Kerry and his “flip-flopping” ways. In the end Kerry striked me as a politician who doesn’t flip-flop any more or any less than any other politician, and some of them made sense. But I was going to take a few of them apart. I got through one of them, for me the most important and flawed objection on the list. (I would have gotten to a sort of half-way point on the War Resolution Vote a little later, half way in that I don’t find Kerry’s positioning kosher, but at the same time his statement “I actually voted for the $87 Billion before I voted against it”, as asinine as it is, makes sense in that: IF SENATORS AND HOUSE MEMBERS DON’T VOTE FOR BILLS BEFORE THEY VOTE AGAINST THEM AS OBJECTIONABLE CHANGES ARE BEING MADE AND VITAL CHANGES ARE VOTED DOWN, THEY’RE NOT DOING THEIR JOB.)

What you had here was a person who described himself as a “hardcore Agnostic” (a term that striked me as an oxymoron, and he left before I had the opportunity to throw only the cursory jab at the term), and was — upon discussion – “pro-choice” saying he was a flip-flopper because voices within the Catholic Church were saying not to give Communion to pro-choice Catholics. He used the phrase “His own church says…”

And thus it went from there, to my pointing out that half of Catholics consider themselves “pro-choice”, for good or for ill to the Catholic Church I don’t particularly care. From there the comment is made that “I don’t care how they justify and rationalize their faith, but John Kerry…” To which I said, “Why should I expect John Kerry to be any holier and up on Church Doctrine than any other Catholic lay-person?” At which point, I pretty much won that argument hands-down, the other more unabashed Bush-supporter chiming in with a “yes, but it doesn’t matter. The rest of Kerry’s flip-flopping is naseating.”

I bring this up by way of getting to the new Pope. The new Pope, as it turns out, was the Catholic Bishop who started the whole “Communion-Gate” by issuing the suggestion that perhaps Catholic pro-choice politicians shouldn’t receive Communion.

A curious selection as a pope. I should have written down my prediction as to who the new pope would be. My prediction had been: (1) an arch-conservative. (2) A man of advanced age to the point where he will probably die within a half dozen years. As it turns out, he may be in poor health right this minute.

The last factor is kind of similar to the final decades of the Soviet Union, where the leader was an aged man who was not going to make any waves within the government.

Not that anyone is expecting the new pope to favour contraceptions, legalized abortion, favouring porn… Anyone who wanted that would be sorely disappointed, and will forever be sorely disappointed (I hope.)

Jeezus Keerist!:

Bonilla said liberals believed the U.S. should emulate countries such as Belgium, Germany and Mexico.

People in the crowd — boys in camouflage, women pushing strollers, men in hunting shirts with blaze-orange sleeves — rose to their feet. The message, many attendees said, had gotten through.

I’ve basically followed the lead of, say, Lewis Lapham in saying that that it is the politicians in control of the nation right now that want to turn our nation’s government and economy into the model of Mexico’s. As for Belgium and Germany: what does that even mean? (Does Mexico have strict gun laws?)

David Adams, an NRA election coordinator and recruiter, and his wife, Kim, are both life members. So are their two children — 4-year-old Abigail and 3-month-old Reagan, who is named after the president.

Members for 4 years and 3 months respectively.

Musician Charlie Daniels, who served as emcee, launched the convention by calling the political left “silly and unrealistic, a cadre of save-the-whales and kill-the-babies pantywaists.”

Yes, but what does that have to do with guns?

Ted Nugent?:

Speaking at the group’s annual convention in Houston, Nugent said the NRA’s current record-high membership of 4 million was nothing to get excited about. He said each NRA member should try to enroll 10 new members over the next year.

“Let’s next year sit here and say, ‘Holy smokes, the NRA has 40 million members now,”‘ he said, adding NRA members should only associate with other members. “No one is allowed at our barbecues unless they are an NRA member. Do that in your life.”

How do you recruit new members if you are to only associate with other members?

Nugent, who walked onto the stage with a large assault weapon in each hand, said those who support gun control aren’t the enemy.

“They are a joke,” he said. “Our enemy is the gun owners that don’t belong to the NRA.”

“The whole world sucks but America sucks less,” he said to laughter and applause. “And we can eliminate that sucking sound altogether if we all would actually be hardcore, radical extremists, hardcore radical extremists, demanding the right to self defense.”

Nugent and his family moved to Crawford, Texas, from Michigan about two years ago.

Someone look up the definition of the phrase “self parody” for me, please.

A strange dichotemy:

Mellencamp is the most politically niave, knee-jerk “populist” rocker since… hmmm… since Springsteen. Or the Dixie Chicks. Or Pearl Jam. Or just about every other one of their pop peers from the past half century who have lapped up liberalism because That’s What A Good Artist Is Supposed To Do.

It’s irritating, to be sure, but the best antidote is a Rush album and a copy of Fred Goodman’s book “The Mansion on the Hill.”

The best antidote to John Cougar Mellencamp is a Rush album?

I’m not sure why this comment flummoxes me. Certainly in a political sphere, they are on different sides of a multi-dimensional spectrum… but why does one listen to music purely for political buttressing? (Surely there is something to a lament to losing your family farm. As an aside, I like Green Day better as its current political incarnation than when they sang about masturbation.) As for the artists… I don’t like John Cougar Mellancamp or Rush, but I don’t hate them either. Thanks to repeated play on classic rock radio, their hits are pretty well burned into my mind to the point where I no longer have to hear anything by Rush or by John Cougar Mellencamp ever again. If I wanted to hear them, I could just click a song from my mental jukebox, and wind it on through. (Of the two, I’d probably pick a Mellencamp Greatest Hits album over a Rush Greatest Hits.)

Some highlights of Rush:

A modern-day warrior
Mean mean stride,
Today’s tom sawyer
Mean mean pride.

Followed by 3 and a half minutes of pretentious prog-rock mist, before we move to the next lyrics. I hear that the 30 minute song they have on a latter day album, as Rush travelled ever more forthright into exploring the concepts of Ayn Rand, is even worse in this regard.

For his part, I have a few lines to add to John Cougar Mellencamp’s “Small Town”:

Went to some oddly hyped-up high school football game or other in a small town.
Shopped at a god-forsaken Wal-Mart and gained this vague sense of hopeless desperation in a small town.
And I ran the only stop light due to exasperation at the light not turning to green despite the fact that there is no traffic whatsoever in this same small town.

And on and on it goes.

I don’t know what politician would incorporate Rush thematically into their pander/ appeal. Mellencamp rebuked Reagan for using him. John Edwards took up the mantle of Mellencamp (Dean’s statement of his admiration for Wyclef Jean was a much more forced pander), and supposedly now In many respects he needed to lose the last run for the nomination – because in running for President, he found, not only himself, but who his people are. … which one can only muse on, trying to make sense of one single term in the US Senate (began in what had once looked like the comeback for Democratic chances in the South — 1998) and a vice-presidential run that ended without winning a single southern state.

I bring up John Edwards as a pointer to these woes of the Democratic party. On election night, you had Chris Matthews (I believe, but it might have been Tom Brokaw) saying something to the effect of “When you start off by taking the states where people speak in a Southern Accent and the states where everyone wears a cowboy hat off the table, you’re stuck having to win every other state, and good luck doing that.”

The North Carolina Senate race of 2004 ended up with two candidates pandering against NAFTA-type free trade (the manufacturing sector of the economy disappearing). I say pander because neither candidate had much credibility in that regard. The Democratic candidate, Erskine Bowles stood as a member of the Clinton administration… who, of course, pushed NAFTA through.

What you’re left with is, for any meaningful Democratic Party (as opposed to one who’s political instincts is to meet a Republican Party half way): for the west, as I posted earlier, the examples of Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer, Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold, and Oregon reprentative Peter DeFazio. (I say that knowing that the state of Wisconsin isn’t Wyoming.) And, purely stylistically and not politically, John McCain. The south? We’re stuck considering the case of John Edwards. (Virginia, suddenly the most Democratic southern state at the moment, seems to be a case of Yuppie-ist cultural distancing.)

“Well I heard, uh, a minister the other day talking about, uh, the great injustice and evil of the men in white robes, the Klu Klux Klan, that, uh, roamed the country in the South, and, uh, they, uh, did great wrong to, uh, civil rights and to morality, and now we have black robed men, and, uh, that’s what you’re talking about.”

…………….

For what it’s worth, Mark Levin provides a… smackdown???

They dismiss the early history of the Court, legitimate criticism as provoking threats against judges, and so forth. They’re so enamored with and committed to government by the judiciary that the same critical thinking they use in analyzing the elected branches is absent here. This is simply intellectually dishonest. So, they prefer to demonize Dr. Dobson, or Tom DeLay, or John Cornyn, or whomever. But it’s time to engage on the substance.

John Cornyn, you remember said this.

A DK posteth to this:

What if it was Hitler? By-the-way, Bush II may be the most destructive force on the planet…wouldn’t you and I have an obligation to save the planet?

Just curious…

Considering the case of Germany circa 1930s through WWII. On the other hand, if s/he stepped aside and let the bullet hit Adolf Hitler, considering one’s own life more valuable than the head of state, the German society at large would be asking for his/her head. (It might be a minor historical footnote circa 1930.) But the case is pretty well settled according to Nazi ideology as to which is more important — the individual or the state — all in the state’s favour, of course.

A Hitler Assassination attempt is comically dramatized in Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator.

Bush, incidentally, curiously seems as though is receeding into history very early in his second term. The general effect sort of mesmerizes me, as the political whirlwind shifts to other figures who at least supposedly control the balance of the future.

In consideration of the Larouchite who is challenging Mississippi Senator Trent Lott for 2006, Eric Fleming (response found in a post a couple days later, and a couple blog entries up)…

A choice between a person who sayseth:

In all fairness, let’s start with the truths. In the past, I have attended LaRouche events, as have several of my legislative colleagues. I have actively participated in causes with LaRouche, like fighting the closing of DC General Hospital and stopping the country of Mexico from selling their natural gas and oil rights to Enron. I have even given a glowing endorsement for his candidacy for President of the United States.

,a glowering endorsement of a Lyndon LaRouche presidency… versus a candidate who sayseth:

“I want to say this about my state. When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years, either.”

… a glowering endorsement of Strom Thurmond’s 1948 Segregationist Campaign.

One candidate is excoriated, rightly, for his associations. And will receive less than 30% of the vote. The other is the fourth most powerful Republican Senator (downgraded from first most powerful due to those comments), and will receive over 70% of the vote… following his declaration of adoration for such a “problem solver”.

Two nutballs. One mainstream. One not mainstream.

Is there a third-party candidate Mississippians can vote for?

……….
UPDATE: The state Senator replied over at Politics1.com. The relevant postings:

Rep. Erik R. Fleming: I have enjoyed reading the comments posted about this issue, yes even yours, Corey. It is good to see people expressing themselves in a forum that is not driven by advertising dollars or other limitations. I am happy that Ron wrote that article because I know there is another forum out there devoted to true political discourse.

Thank you for allowing me this opportunity. If you would like to directly ask me questions about this, or anything else, feel free to e-mail me anytime.

Corey: Rep. Fleming,
If you see this and would like the opportunity to bring a sense of closure in a public venue to your association with Lyndon LaRouche, you can choose to answer this simple question:

The opportunity now exists for Rep. Fleming to choose to bring closure to his LaRouche associations once and for all.

Rep. Erik R. Fleming: Yes

Curious tidings about all this. A protest “support” for anyone else on the ballot instead of the Democratic standard-bearer would make more sense in, say, 2000 or 1996 when there’s literally no one else on the ballot instead of Clinton or Gore. (Thus, I can point you to a guy I know who voted for Lyndon Larouche in the 2000 Democratic Primary due to disgruntlement at Gore/Lieberman.) I don’t know what was on the Mississippi ballot… but I’m pretty sure a Dennis Kucinich was on the ballot, who looked as good a protest (and an authentic one at that) instead of the figure of Lyndon LaRouche.

It probably doesn’t matter all that much. If Lott retired (which he isn’t, having made noises as of late about regaining a spot in the Republican leadership), the Mississippi Democratic Party (what of it there is) would then find a “top tier” candidate and run him (her?). As it is now, there’s probably a party prescient captain or rich businessman who can get the nomination. (I firmly believe in a matter of principle that a political party — whether Republican or Democrat — for its survival has to contest every seat, even unwinnable ones, as a basic show of support for what party members there are to continue their basic fight. And to avoid nominating a stench of, say, LaRouchitism that would cripple the party forward. Beyond which, lightening sometimes does strike… Scandals befall a candidate. We almost had a Democratic Senator from Kentucky defeat Jim Bunning. Had the Democratic Party not managed to replace Torricelli with Lautenbergh at the last minute in 2002, Republican Doug Forrester would be the current Senator from New Jersey.)

I have it on good authority that the citizens of Red State Country (or, if you’re Jeff Gannon with a lousy printer — Green State Country) curse more than their Blue State counterparts. If you don’t believe me, please consult your “redneck” and “urbane sophisticate” stereotypes.

Or consider the lattee-drinking conservatives, who fly from New York to Washington Los Angeles, staring at the window at Flyover Country, marvelling at the Wal-Marts and the Nascars and the farming and the ranching and the religiosity and the simple values that need to be exalted off the rooftops.

I’m thinking of this in context with the supposed meaning behind the Election of 2004. The “Values Voter”s, an idea that you have to wonder hasn’t been squashed a bit as of late. If you notice — the Republican’s two Great Political Attempts post-election haven’t taken them anywhere. Social Security Privitization has stalled, and proven unpopular — there’s your Club for Growth Grover Norquist contingent stalling. (In the meantime, the one party state changes the Bankruptcy law to make it easier for corporations to get by and harder for regular citizens to, but we’ll ignore that sort of stuff for the moment.) And more directly, the Religious Right who have supposedly been declared the most mainstream Americans off of that last election has been proven a bit less than overwhelming by the whole Terri Schiavo fiasco.

There’s a point to which a Democratic Party ends up buying the hype a little too high, and loses sight of the situation. Excise sin, find Jesus, and obscure yet more differences between the parties, and you will find the road the redemption.

But the mythology of the most Republican part of the nation, the West, brings us to an opposing conclusion. Cowboys run around with their herds of horses. They then take their off days and booze and pick up a hooker and gamble away their money. Where is the religiosity there?

Consult the “Montana Example”, the modest bright light on a dark Election day for the letter “D”, particularly within the rural red states. Aside from electing a Democratic governor and a Democratic state legislature, the state legalized medicinal marijuana. A great day for Montana pot-heads? Who knows? The new governor, while running, didn’t touch the Initiative with a ten-foot pill (I imagine it to have been passed with a coalition of Libertarian-minded conservatives and counter-culture types), to avoid the charge of McGovernism, but the message is delivered.

The tranjectory of the Montana politics within the framework of our national politics: a rebuke of the Patriot Act. A request to bring Montana’s National Guard soldiers home from Iraq so, where they will be dealing with the summer’s forest fire season, traditionally the domain of… your National Guard. (Actually, come to think of it, that’s “Homeland Security” right there!)

Beyond that, there’s the idea that environmental issues as connected to hunting issues, and the prototype for your Red-state elected Democrat begins to emerge… (a bit of the “Get off My Land” aesthetic thrown in) at least in the West. I don’t have a clue what the letter “D” can do to churn itself around through the South.

Some conversations with my dad. He receives a batch of material from the State Employees Union. “They always support the Democrat, no matter what.” My response, “Interesting about their support for NAFTA-supporting Clinton.” “Weird how that works.”

Or, “The Democrats sure aren’t any good at explaining why you should vote for them these days.”

That’s sort of a swipe at Kerry’s obfuscation regarding the war. I came out and said that there was no difference between Bush and Kerry on where Iraq is going… and, to tell you the truth, I still believe that.

You burrow all that in with the “What’s the Matter With Kansas” thesis and a basic attack on the DLC, who took the Democratic Party out of the barren landscape the party found themselves in in 1984, and delivered them to the barren landscape the party finds themselves in in 2004. (Except there’s a peculiar sideswipe with which I’m going to explore in one of my next three posts.)

One last commentary, found circa after the election, a Montana voter saying: “I think we’d vote for a Democrat who forthrightly supports gay marriage, if they don’t pussy-foot around the issue.”

This is basically a case of Attitude.

As for gays and lesbians in the frontier… hell… Lynne Cheney wrote a book about it! Today? Maybe convert the issue in with the gun issue, and declare that you will not take away the right of every gay and lesbian their godgiven Constitution right to own firearms? I don’t know.

For the moment, just consult Representative Peter DeFazio of Oregon and Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin…