Yeah, well: Just found larouche Twitter day ruined. It is just celebrities in their own mind, people you would not know if you did not actively look up — just as any other “[fill in the blank] twitter.”

When I think of people who are serious about winning, I definitely think about people who are trying to rehabilitate Lyndon Larouche.

Larouche people be like “that’s wild, to learn more you should come to my webinar for the Committee of the Correspondence of Coincidental Continentalist Confound Convening Variables of Derision” and wonder why people call them a cult among other things.

They call it “triggering” the “libs”. I guess.

Basically: CPIUSA, Maupin all run on the LaRouche school of thought namely civic nationalism, big government spending, schizophrenia and glowing in the dark

Arguments! Pro! Con!

Point: (against this). They believe that the Jews rule the world through the British royal family. They also believe that capitalism is infinitely sustainable, and that opposing this is Malthusianism — No they don’t wtf, stop spreading lies about LaRouche’s beliefs. Counterpoint one: Yeah bud, he really does. He says it right here at 3:49. (From BBC documentary on Jeremiah Duggan). Counterpoint two: Wow. Who does the money go too? ((Them))? Three parentheses, indeed.

This here is a new twist on an old classic that “Larouche predicted all 50 of the last two recessions” — a comment like all other points willfully bounces past larouchies’ heads — this is good too: correctly predicted 34 of the last 0 “hyperinflationary blowout” events. The interesting thing here is that the response from “anti dinosaur Larouche Twitter” is to define “hyper-inflationary” “dark ages” downward — When I was lad a burger cost $1. Same burger now cost $4. Minimum wage is the same — Throw up your hands. Yeah, and … computers and cell phones are cheaper than ever. Though I guess more necessary for societal existence. Funny thing is — even if tomorrow we did have Weimar Germany Inflation and Dark Ages unemployment … The Larouche movement have already shot their load on the topic.

Also good: We will have fusion in about ten years. Just like we have for decades. That one at least has sympathetic argumentation about “cause we are not spending on research!!” — but then you run right up against the stance for same type of argumentation against “green energy”.

Counterpoint: I see the Larouche movement isn’t ambitious enough to build bridges between the Indonesian archipelago and Australia. Fake Prometheans if you ask me.

Point. Counterpoint.

Point: Putting LaRouche in the same boat as Andrew Jackson shows how much you actually know about Lyn and his policies. Counterpoint: Trump is standing in the foreground before Jackson and then Larouche. It is fair to compare Trump with both of them — Trump has occasionally done so with Jackson, leave others to do so with Larouche — up to and including larouchepac.

Point: (responding to) Ukrainians are ready to die for the European perspective. with Hitlerian. Counterpoint: this will do.

Elon Musk referenced by third party as Hero of Larouchepac, and then placed in the front of the Grand Historic Narrative (in a tweet that I have lost which has Musk and Larouche versus Zuckerberg and some evil figure in history) . He receives a slide into the establishment “gate keeping the trumpists” claim with his endorsement of Desantis.

Hm. . No one talks about the strange connection between the rise of “raves” and theosophical and Masonic influence on culture. Response: Nothing’s stopping you.

Communists?

Skipping back and forth between being the real Communists and being… Not communist. Anti-marxists not heeding the Marxist messaging, heeding some other message of these parts. The Canadian trucker convoys are Maoists, I guess. Rather disturbing that all these years after LaRouche did his bid in Federal prison, the cult rebranded as the most Marxist Marxists that ever Marxed. (Counterpoint.)

Jacobin Magazine is ” Operation Mockingbird”. One point of contention for that point, coming up in twitterland , damned that, Solidarity Movement! (I will have to figure out where everyone stands on that “Stalin Question”, but we are in that weird sphere of Stalin icon Larouche fan twitterers.)

Here we find them In support of Ali Khamenei. Odd, in that they backed up the Shah during the Revolution — but maybe they were part of an elaborate move to quell the leftist revolutionaries in favor of the religious.

On to that Larouche – Xi – Stalin axis. (I think the “ultra Leftist” response on this is to curse the Capitalist Chinese government.)

The sometimes bizarre hard to get into the mind insult theory of Larouchies: this Maoist has other interests beyond her politics — draws cartoons. I have little idea of what I am supposed to be replying on. Maybe it has something to do with falling short of a “New Renaissance”?

Memories

I was handed a pamphlet on the street in St. Louis by LaRouche “The Contract with America is a Contract on You”

Lyndon LaRouche was a family joke when I was growing up.

Please don’t say Lyndon LaRouche. He haunted late night TV with his bizarro ads when I was in my 20s (pre-cable). Come home from a party at 1 am, turn on some crappy B movie to wind down, and there he was talking utter weirdness.

Now there’s a name I thankfully hadn’t heard in years. Growing up in NH we got more Larouche than is healthy.

also a cult. The approach of society to simply not speak about LaRouche, media blackout, gave him infinite credibility among the poor souls who were sucked into his nonsense, and still are.

When I was in grad school in Baltimore his acolytes used to stand on the corner in dress clothes and handout literature. I ran a lot then and when I was bored I’d yell “Larouche suxs!” as I ran past just to see how far they’d chase me. Two blocks was the norm. I mean seriously — dudes in badly fitting suits and women in dresses and pumps would try to catch me. In Baltimore though that wasn’t abnormal enough to draw attention. I learned a lot about propaganda watching his late night tv ads when he ran for president in 84. He started perfectly normal but then lead you along slowly until you arrived at a totally insane conclusion.

the time I tried to force a large crowd of angry LaRouchies outside my high school to sing the school’s terrible alma mater song, while belligerently accusing them of not having any school spirit, until my friend Liz suggested they might kill me, after which we went to Chilis. there used to be a regular crowd of them haranguing people standing on line outside the DMV and I has to hand it to them: they really knew how to get people when they were at their most vulnerable

Im honestly stoked that people are trying to rehabilitate Larouche because more insane people is fun and also I wish they were politically relevant

The fact that LaRouche cultists are still around after first encountering them IRL like 25 years ago blows my mind. Also, while I’m at it, Caleb reminds me of the weirdo Trotsky and Stalin stans we’d run into irl back in the day. Typical conversation with these types on the street in 1998… Weird guy: Support China read my paper Me: why? WG: because they oppose the United States. Me: yeah but why support them? WG: because they oppose the US. Me: They seem simultaneously to be supporting thier own capitalist class while embracing the worst aspects of authoritarianism. So why should I support them? WG: because they oppose the US Me: that seems like a shit argument and how about we just don’t support either one? WG: you wouldn’t understand and your liberal, “petty” bourgeois ideology will doom the working class. (Dude literally lives in a million dollar suburban city adjacent house, with his own parent provided wing) Me: yeah ok great, here’s your paper back I’m good on toilet tissue. And so it goes I guess.

one time my wife ran into some proselytizing LaRouche people, and she confused him with David Duke, and said “what about [a racist thing David Duke did]?” and they parried it like, “no no, that’s a very normal thing for LaRouche to believe” without skipping a beat

Hugh D. Young was my favorite professor and it was a great contribution to my success that I had him in my first semester. Besides his teaching, it was campus legend about how he confronted an abusive Lyndon Larouche activist haranguing students going between classes.

got reminded of coming across some LaRouche-ites in Paris in 2013 and one of my homies kept heckling them. “we hate you in America too!“

I lived in Beaverton 1994-2016.I would see Kingsley at the Burger King one day, then he and his crazy friends wave signs by the Fred Meyer the next and sometimes he would be in front of the Post Office with the Looney Larouche people with pics of Obama as a Nazi.

I met a LaRouche person during the W era and the sheer size of the stack of literature I was handed made 100% clear to me that these people were not to be engaged with in any way. Lyndon LaRouche’s final acts before he died were to endorse Martin O’Malley for President and then to write an essay about how O’Malley’s defeat was orchestrated by the British and their puppet Obama to start WW3. (Why or why do neither part of Larouche reference O’Malley anymore?). I mainly know of them from this (Jeremiah Duggan Wikipedia page linked) but nobody else seems to. My favorite LaRouche bit was him accusing Jimmy Carter of working with High Times and NORML to use pot for MK-style mind control while at the same time working with Rolland McMaster, an alleged associate of Tampa mob boss and heroin trafficker Santo Trafficante Jr.

I had no idea the Lyndon Larouche people were still around until I saw them in a NYC suburb trying to influence an election in the early 2000s. Saw them again in 2017 on the Upper East Side set up on a street corner on Madison Ave, largely ignored, with a “Defend Trump” sign.

The method for dealing with LaRouche fascists has always been to drive them away from demonstrations and events, and otherwise to ignore them.

I have a cousin who lived on a LaRouche compound for a bit. His mom gave me my first copy of the manifesto lol.

Oh is he a Larouche guy? Man I have those dudes my email when I first moved to LA. Big mistake. LaRouche has always loved tractors.

Jurassic Park part of the same conspiracy as Star Wars?

Somewhere within a vast array of boring Larouchie politicking around climate and energy, this nugget gets tossed out — Dinosaurs did not exist.: They were created as a concept by the Rockefeller’s. There is 0 evidence for them at all. There’s even far less evidence that somehow oil is made of Dino bones when oil can be found miles and miles beneath where there are any fossils.

For some reason, the YouTube algorithm lobbed me a video titled “10 Things All Flat Earthers say” — I did not click as beyond the perhaps idiosyncrasies of pro basketball player Kyrie Irving, I did not know there were any flat earthers in the news saying anything I was obliged to be hearing. A tad more mainstream as someone society is obliged to hear as it slides into “small d democratic” school board fights, creationists. I can not decide whether young Earth creationists — believers in the 6 thousand year old Earth — are more nuts or less nuts than a Dinosaur denier, but at least the former has more popular support. Btw, dinosaurs obviously are fake. The founder of the dinosaur myth Henry Fairfield Osborn was the nephew of J.P. Morgan and the founder of the Eugenics society. Perhaps it is the idiosyncrasies of “space larouche” — and we are in that “follow the trail of Rockefeller cover-ups” and the trouble where “folliw themoney” goes back to people spraying money in trusts good and bad to lead off on to every which conspiratorial undertaking — to “kantbot”. In sum: The Mesozoic Era was MKultra, man!”

Wait. It so funny that the most offensive thing you can do today is say that Dinosaurs were made up in the Victorian imagination of Richard Owen to explain fossils, & then they became the mascots for “Fossil Fuels”. Redefining ” offensive” as too “most offensive.”

So the query out in the wilds of twitter: is this an orthodox larouche line or is this just a haz troll they picked up and ran with? Some evidence that the dinosaur line is a joke — he moves on to that “annex Canada” line. (I doubt the Canadian Trucker Convoy has much use for that one, but then again they are the faves of lpac and not necessarily lorg).

Methinks this guy’s misnomer came from tripping over the “dinosaurs were a plant” line. Though, again: Creationism is more mainstream than Dinosaur denialism, and I am simply stuck on the question: was, maybe, an article submitted but put on the chopping block in old 21st Century Science and Technology?

Weirdly enough, this Twitterer deleted an “anti-woke” point I’d largely agree with — along those lines of Why do I care if a Marvel movie is “underperforming” and then get cornered into figuring out the great political ramifications? Why is this deleted while the dinosaur nuttiness remains? If at first I think it may be the horrible revelation that he is relating to popular culture — this post shows a liking of two movies of violent spectacle.

International

Automated tweet: BEING ANTI-LAROUCHE IS ANTI-INFRARED. SUPPORT OUR MOST STAUNCH ALLIES COWARD. From there we turn to such “anti-imperialist” Russia Imperialism cheering chest thumping— judging the veracity of the statement beside the point. The weirdness of seeing your name in Larouchian literature — Small correction: not “infighting” as much as clean split into two entities. And the explanation for the cults’ continued existences.

Keeping you abreast of Russia TV during its British censorship. Larouche has informed for the last 50 years UK is the leader in NWO together with the globalist jew pharma and media, with French Mossad and Jew Mossad.

And Burke does not answer the question. Or maybe Peter the Great wasn’t imperialist? Helga has an odd sense of history: (the British) or slowing down the US wish to open the western front to join the USSR vs Hitler — Yeah, somewhere a few years after selling Britain out and pacting with Hitler.

Accidentally correctly ascertaining the basis of Michael Billington on iran’s Press TV.

The crown of England was Lyndon LaRouche and his French-speaking foal, Jacques Cheminade. If the latter still had any importance, I think that certain speeches would have taken up his obsession to attract him, a sort of conspicuous call. A jerk.

The assassination of Abe Shinzo equals the umpteenth millionth firing shot at World War 3. Says Daniel Burke. Not tweeting. And if at first I can grant “maybe it is big enough event to warrant comment violating his ‘I’m off’ — no, he continues a fishing around for usual spiel-ing. Twitter is addictive, I guess. The line moves into that ” Tell the British to Quit Assassinating our Presidents” territory, and an odd historical reach around. On the facts on the ground — I can’t pretend to be up on Japanese domestic politics but I gather Abe had the backing of the Moonies and the killer was upset that the Unification church (cult) was taking up his mom’s life and money. I guess there’s an alignment issue to charge at with that one. Beyond this, it resulted in an ever larger landslide victory for Shinzo’s party — and what is their policy? Military armament, stronger posture against the Chinese government, defend Taiwan?

History

RIP… Joyce C. Lashof… At the height of the AIDS epidemic in 1986, for example, she set her sights on defeating Proposition 64, a California ballot initiative spearheaded by the far-right political agitator Lyndon LaRouche that would have mandated mass testing for AIDS and, critics feared, mass quarantines.

Interesting how and where peoples peg Larouche. Dancing With The Devil – A Music Censorship Documentary From 1991. A Channel 4 exploration of Christian hysteria about the evils of rock music. Sure, Larouche dug around in that ground. But so did Falwell and Gore.

Who still knows the EAP (European Workers’ Party, chairwoman Helga Zepp-Larouche)? They once put up a poster saying “Create peace with beam weapons“.

the rhythm is gonna get you…

Leftist?

Always had a thing against Star Wars.

Blast from past — the Jane Fonda / whales bumper sticker within a collection.

Paul McCartney — Beatles trashing out in the wild. (Larouche adjacent and corrupted twitter). Here, it is actually worth pointing to the Soviet conspiracy theorizing surrounding the Beatles — starts with that premise of “How can some Schlubs from working class Liverpool create this?”, and taking the leaps of complexity in music toward Sgt Pepper, filled in the ” capitalist imperialist plot” to corrode the youth. Certainly not Larouchian this, as it gives the music credit. Oh, and incidentally — the photo is a fake. No, they used to consider Verdi tuning a major issue. They were a ridiculous cult, but they used to prey on smart people with taste. Now it’s gullible streamer consumers who like dopey Europop, apparently.

A YouTube video passed by me — I never clicked on it — about “finding the greatest play for the lousiest team” in a NFL football video game. (In the distant past, kind of reminiscent of me — who was not a video game player at all — willing to take someone up on a suggested game of Sega’s nfl2k only if they had the handicap of slotting Ryan Leaf as their qb from out of his spot as 3rd stringer on that Chargers team). Anyways, This is reminiscent of those challenges.

By way of Kautsky.

“Most historical gays have been fascistic or libertine” –– “Space Larouche”.

Also: The Anglo elite are nearly all homosexual and pedophiles, much like the ruling elite of the romans they model themselves after.

This is the odd example of someone getting the presidential candidates running from prison” list up from the two always referenced — Eugene Debs and Lyndon Larouche — up to three — Keith Judd — but not getting the fourth — Leonard Peltier who was the ballot in 2004.

Connecting the dots to find the historical founders of Israel the same clique that were out to get Larouche.

Boers versus British. In the early part of this century, denizens of “free republic” would spot media internet polls in the wild and call attention to everyone to flood it, thus making for — say — a 2004 Bush approval rating of 80 percent. I gather the Larouchies aren’t following this tactic, otherwise there would be more than eleven responders here.

Odd statement: Only the LaRouche organizations were at the forefront of opposing the new fascism represented by Newt Gingrich and his Contract on America! Huh. Agreed, Clinton “triangulated” a tad much but… I gather he represented some form — even if one disagrees with its form — to Gingrich and his program. Then there is Nader. Who and what else? Marcy Kaptur?

Lyndon LaRouche fundraise off of a Big Lie and then keep all the money? Answer: repeatedly.

Comparisons

People’s Party. Charles Murray. Mike Lindell. dialysis propositions. Presidential hopeful Jimmy Dore — the grift… Hinkle. Claire Hunt. Usual gang. Jeff Clark and Michael Avenatti. Greg Lopez. Benito Mussolini. Bob Avakian. Yelling at a frequent Larouche compared figure, as though she matters. To be sure, this is following through lpac circa 2008. Random Democratic voter not in support of Democratic establishment pick, I assume the alternative one of the “progressives”. Trump and his fundraising techniques. Beto O’Rourke — politico whose time has passed. And — Was Harold Stassen ever ” broke”? Kolleen Carney Hoepfner. Pence / Cheney. Vladimir Zhirinovsky. Lowering of the mound in 68. Muammar Gaddafi’s Green Book. Some guy at a whiteboard. Bob Avackian by way of Sunsara Taylor in current abortion protest movement. Herschel Walker.

This guy hadtahave read the appendix in the early Larouche history at laroucheplanet — Technocracy, Inc, huh?

Yeah, I hate those signs.

Trump?

TEXAS is LPAC Country

I wonder if this is a thing where anybody can come up and talk or if the Texas gop is legit insane enough to let larouche people speed at it’s convention.

I note that according to the Libertarian Party in Harris County, when Larouchite Democratic candidate Kesha Rogers popped in unannounced, they let her say her piece and moved on. Maybe just as well, as the write -up in the Larouche literature printing her speech before the Libertarian Party in Harris County did not much travel beyond Larouche-land, and their YouTube clip clipped right at the speech.

Sounds more like Bircher, but whatever.

Texas is lpac country, as lorg badly needs to hide their (in Twitter land at least) Marxist fueled rhetoric. So sayeth: Frankly in Texas, I think the strategy will have to take on as much more Christian approach. In Texas, we should probably call communism “Christian economy”. I mean that’s what communism is anyway. I’m open to disagreement here

New York is LORG land

Making friends and influencing people. Today’s Britain is nothing more than America’s 51st state and not worth the poster he wasted his time on. LaRouche heads are so odd. Am I understand correct, US is the dog of Britain, not the opposite? LaRouche era um idiota

I’m not going to look it up but I’m guessing you know what “The Larouche Organization” is. I had never heard of them but they had a table and signs outside our local grocery store and the stuff I could see looked pretty kooky.

Selling

… Always be closing…

Sarah Palin is making a comeback with a Congressional run in Alaska, so I suppose now is as good a time as any to pluck up her terminology. “Lame stream media“.

Paging Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Inwood, West Virginia

An attempt to page and lure prospective talent.

To Elon Musk fans. To be sure, Republicans derided her as much.

Unremarkable statement made by Nader and others, which a Larouchite tries to tie to Larouche. The question I have is what does it mean for a computer program to gauge the Twitter account as 51 percent troll? (Grasping at such a this.)

LaRouche is the answer to avoid Mad Max?

Podcast Ville

Odd little amateurish boring, podcast. For commentary on dealings with Larouche organizers, go the start of the second file. More interesting is some non-Larouche related commentary on the Canadian Convoy thing and January 6. Some decent thoughtful perspective and technical glitches to suffer through.

I have the grand opinion that I will be able to judge the success or failure of a Joseph Biden presidency on what the next Republican president is. To be blunt, I have always taken it as a given that he would endure low opinion ratings — the only possible respite would come with a “comparison” re-election campaign at the expense of an unpopular foe —

— whoever that might be —

which could only mean a fooling from a wide part of the electorate, accepting the swallowing of hot air. A bubble then bursts.

An article passes by musing that we are in an era where the president has low opinion ratings as a given. I can’t escape the question — should this not be the case? As it were, Bush the younger had a span of high approvals in the “War on Terror”. Clinton was amicably popular with a booming economy. Obama was clipped a tad, but broadly had his times there.

And none of that was too long ago, as we settle into the view of a large base seething at “Vote Harder!” when confronted that the country’s politics are not what they so wish they were, and large numbers of people advocate things they wish were not in the realm of acceptable.

So… You wanted Roe v Wade to endure — you should have tied Ruth Bader Ginsburg down in the sixth year of Obama’s presidency and not left until she announced she was retiring…

Though it probably just results in the ever attempting to compromise Roberts dredging it to the lines of Germany’s highly restrictive abortion laws … I guess without their social welfare and health support that is the saving grace argument I see in some political panels.

… And Which country in Europe is the Green Day frontman going to emigrate?

After that part of the problem of weakness for the politician in power, at the moment I just do not see things going “well” enough to override that. To be sure, things are a lot more interesting when you poke at things — we got McConnell cursing the “Great Resignation” of labor shortage as byproduct of covid relief funds — unpack this at your leisure.

Ponder that Romneyville land with a Seattle Times endorsement of a Pence – Cheney ticket. Are these figures “Trumpian”, and if not — how do you split the difference on the reaction shots over enactments of policy objectives they have advocated? In a hypothetical world where they are the next president, how do I then rate Biden by my somewhat idiosyncratic criteria!

And what fresh hell is this little ad?

Ron Desantis apparently has “friends”, paranoid about buses. And Delaware is a curse word. If he is the next president, how do I rate Biden?

I think the polls show about 90 percent of Americans give two rips about 90 percent of Abortions (ie: welcome to the first tri-mester, or even earlier with how Virginia’s government is curtailing things), whether they understand it as such or not. We are also stuck in the unwillingness to mediate that ten percent — and so in the show of force now get those curses to Bill Clinton and the terminology of “safe, legal, rare”. And on to a great mass of false notes editorials lecturing in bad faith to assume bad faith in that duo of ten percents — Do I wish to read the article “Think the Bible is anti-abortion? Think again!”.

What Fresh Hell is this?

Curious item in Google news. I have not clicked to read this salon article, as I kind of just want my imagination to fill in the details of what it means to “make sex fun again”.

Amongst the big questions — and just who stopped sex from being fun? (Don’t answer that. You move in multiple directions.)

Interesting this line of thought gets opposed by the other tongue-in-cheekish response: sex strike! Bring out your Lysistrata. And then the ironic pledge toward abstinence. Most of the news references to the “trending on twitter”, random signs and shouts, and celebrity musings come from right-wing media chortling — consult your stereotypes and old George Carlin monologue on sext hating puritanical ” pro-lifers”. If it is hypocritical and simply a public face, so be it, but this is that weird show of frames of references — give them exactly what they say they want — that will show them! It is difficult to decide whether or not to even drag this line of thought up — to even mention its existence is inflating its presence — easy to find the handful of tweets and comments and shuffle it into a story to mock in “bro-comedy” styling.

Sometime early in this century I saw a flip of the old moral panic — “What the He’ll is wrong with the kids? They are having more premarital sex, and doing more drugs than ever!”. — to a new one — ” What the Helll is wrong with the kids? They’re having less premarital sex and doing less drugs than ever!”. The two moral panics now lay side by side — dip into both when inconvenient. (Sex down because boys are zonked out on more available porn and so now what is suggested by such statistics is a new lack of intimacy and personal connection. You… Just… Can’t… Win.)

A few years back, Katha Pollitt writing for The Nation — confronted with this and that state restriction — posited the question of “where would we be without Roe v Wade?”, and came to the answer ” right where we are”. It is an intellectual argument against Roe, likely shared with more gusto by George Will, and probably abandoned in full by Pollitt in the next paragraph or article. Still, having been made, it does land on some nuances for a bottom line point:

Oughts nostalgia act Pink has stated that she does not want her to listen to her music anymore. It does occur to me that the technology is probably such that a “denial of service” can pop up for someone downloading Pink songs if the computer has links to antiabortion links and materials in the cache — if that is what she or her corporate contracts want.

We all know how this is going to end. There will be a movie with a pro-choice message, perhaps animated. It will do relatively lackluster business. So there will come a few editorials and a bunch of tweets angry at Misogynistic America’s unwillingness to support women’s narratives. A tragedy, this.

And skipping into the Oregonian / Oregonlive photo collection –– a few Damned Commies.

On the other hand, at least they aren’t the “black blocks”– ” antifa” –the rioters, smashing things up for the cause. You look about, and find them in there. These three make their point — what it is — within the broader group — advertising that they themselves are not the voting pool from which the Democratic Party would chase, even as they are surrounded by them.

Note: Stalin implemented a ban. But I guess these are Trotskyites? Not that I don’t suspect there is no difference (to use a triple negative) — as events warrant, a Premier Trotsky would adjust policy lines for the needs of the ongoing revolution.

I note they fit a definition of “moderate” — the radicals, as I define it here, are the ones breaking windows, or just as much — and there things blur into one incoherent mess over scattered points in time — a Starbucks here, a DNC headquarters there, a “Crisis Pregnancy Center” then. Mostly whatever is in the way at the end of a winding path. I have no idea on if I were to venture through into downtown Portland if my favorite graffiti slogan — the one that showed up after the big outburst post – Floyd — that “Riots are my Gender” — is back. Mingled as we are with “pride month”, I guess that would make more sense now than it did then.

That “Chris pregnancy center” smashing is interesting — demonized here and there but where I just land on the simple problem — manning (womaning?) these things a productive use of their time in providing that “acting on their ideals” line (on the lecture on what “pro-life” ought mean). Shutter them down and their only option then available is to stand in front of a Planned Parenthood or abortion clinic and yell, which strikes me as a less productive and more antagonizing use of their time.

… Or, there lay another defining for “moderate” and “radical” based not one whit on political and policy platform.

I more or less sympathize (though not exactly relate) with this gay Republican, even if basically anyone in public life will be able to portray a victim stature and we get that with such people as this politician (what is the equivalent term for “Uncle Tom” a gay population may blast him as?), but then things get warbled round about here:

“Stonewall was not about shoving into the face of society the agenda of same-sex relationships,” he said in a recent interview with National Review, referring to the riots that are often considered the start of the gay-rights movement in America. “It was, ‘Accept me and leave me alone and let me be free.’ And that’s how we should do it.”

That is debatable. It seems to me. It had as much to do with not viewing everything and the very existence as an act of shoving it in the face as, with many participants therein — and here it was the “unrespectables” jumping in the foreground past the “respectables” — who were content to proceed with the ritual dog and pony show that were these busts and disperse — the “unrespectables” stay by wanting to shove it in their face. Dissect the phrase “We’re here. We’re queer. Get used to it” at one’s leisure. Though there does appear to be some retroactive mythologing to fit approved radical narratives — there’s some activist the transgendereds claim who simply wasn’t.

The next problem with this politician comes in staring at the Texas Republicans’ platform — if we think we have modulated to a point where one can comfortably jump over to a new right side of the culture wars one where you throw out a giant raspberry at kvetching at the underperformance of the new Buzz Lightyear movie, or nod in understanding at the drag queen commentator (a minor celebre for the “right”) who asks the question “What is your obsession with having us read storybooks to your kids?” — the Texas Republicans jump in to remind us the spirit of Roy Moore lurks and looms.

The genius of Donald Trump was always that, quote – in – quote “Trumpism” fits both these sectors and segments of “anti-wokism”. Trump being, after all you know, the first President coming into office favoring gay marriage. And the man who may help facilitate the overthrow of Obergefel — and there I can only state that the politics of that differ from the politics of Roe — unless, I guess, the window breakers of various ” pregnancy crisis centers” and disruptors of Catholic masses (Note the headline at The Nation — “People who have abortions versus The Police. It’s time to pick a side“. A hoary rhetorical split to be sure.) have their way in an alignment of sorts with the Texas Republican party and Clarence Thomas.

I am a little bit surprised that this National Review article doesn’t dip into the problem of the rehabilitation of Romney to fit a narrative on posts Trump horror — they click this New Yorker segment and fail to point out what was happening with Romney’s candidacy —

Republican leaders have made a calculated choice in recent decades. As their reliable cadre of white voters shrank, they realized that they could either try to attract more minorities or try to motivate white citizens who rarely voted by tapping their racial insecurities. When Romney ran, he rejected the latter strategy, Stevens told me. Then came Trump, who embraced it and won. “The G.O.P. has become a white-grievance party,” Stevens said. DeSantis, he believes, is following the Trump playbook.

Romney’s immigration policy and rhetoric … promising that “self deport”ion. We have retrofitting happening here regarding Romney’s actual strategy and policy advocacy. Seemingly just because his next political act is to impeach the bastard. Or because of the Republican postmortem that came after the damned election — not before it.

The Washington Post has an editorial weighing in on Lightyear, which I cannot quite wrap my head around:

Lightyear,” Pixar’s latest attempt to frack its “Toy Story” franchise for profit, is not a very good movie. But it is a useful barometer of the current conservative backlash against LGBTQ rights. If people are truly angered by the lesbian relationship depicted in “Lightyear,” then maybe what seemed like a huge leap into a more tolerant future was just a moment of calm in an ongoing, and intensifying, culture war.

So the logical trajectory of this opinion is something like — (1) This movie sucks, (2) but because you watch a lot of movies that suck in the ways this one does and make them box office successes and get corporations lots of money, that (3) since you are not watching this sucky movie with some LGBT sub or over text in it, you are a bigot. I think that is what Alyssa Rosenberg is saying? More or less?

And the culture war swirls onward and upward.

The teapot dome scandal investigations occurred to largely a public yawn. But that plausibly disengaged president was deceased and his attached cronies were successfully detached from his successor — so the public could mentally shake it off to the past. Though Harding left office with sky – high approval, the public could now retroactively lower them without accruing this to the high approval for Coolidge.

It has been a while since we have had a popular president. Not that any presidents deserve such a thing.

Currently we have something called a “January 6th committee”, by definition a partisan prosecution since it is an accounting of the issues of one party that can’t take a variant of the Harding to Coolidge move. That Cheney sits on the committee — serving a role Republicans had taken in the Watergate hearings for a public face to wash out the partisan jabs of the Democrats — gets fingered by the Trump base as a sign of her perfidy. The descriptions of the account by partisan Republicans — and for that matter some independents compelled by the suggestion — lay out the basic political challenges of the manuever. Democrats and Biden are not popular. This presents a funny hypothetical — imagine there was an assassination plot against a sitting President hatched and carried out by members of Congress. Imagine that the President had an approval rating of 30 percent in the polls. By the implication of the point made here — should any investigation of this be assumed a partisan ” wag the dog” act of misdirection, and further implication can only be done if the President had an approval rating above 60%? The other kind of amusing jab is to posit the “slick my produced tv” programming. Sure — and they would be more damned if it were shortly produced.

In a year we will enjoy the repeat of the Benghazi hearings, only this time with Hunter Biden centered stage.

Alaska shakes the game up with a convoluted election process — it is a “top four” primary and “ranked choice instant run-off” special election general. Now, thanks to Washington and California, we have the practical nuances of top two primaries. Maine and San Francisco are giving us the practical nuances of Ranked choice instant run-off.

It strikes me that for the third party gadfly messenger, a top two basically shuts you out where a top four gives you one decent in — at least to canvass and campaign for a while — and a spot you have to at least prove yourself somewhat electorally.

Sarah Palin leads — a political comeback after a bizarre gubernatorial stint years’ back. Nick Begich follows, the Republican successor to a long time statewide Democratic Party dynasty — a good sense of partisan head winds I suppose. Al Gross follows, the “independent” Senate candidate who the state Democratic party threw their support behind. This is a lot of name recognition pushing the top three to the top. Behind them was the race for the fourth slot. It appears that the actual Democrat, Mary Peltola, made her way to the slot — a slight surprise — in an instant runoff situation Al Gross recall beating a campaign.

The big news is that Santa Claus, an elected politician — on the city council for the North Pole, Alaska — and one if them “Democratic Socialists” who pundits suspected may make it off of name recognition — is saddled to sixth place. I suspect the electorate thought it bad form — shady gimmicky name changer.

Most likely we are about to see Palin back — kick her around, I guess. It is as though she never left — popping up here and there to campaign for this and that candidate, and singing on a reality tv contest. I suppose the one thing on ranked choice is that if the majority Republicans do split a ticket, the minority Democrats will shift the third votes into Begich — but the splitting between Gross and Peltola adds that extra step which may not track a handful of votes fully through.

Down goes San Francisco’s DA, and the kvetching reads like this:

Property crimes, which rose during the first year of the pandemic, are generally moving back toward more normal levels, with some exceptions like car thefts.

Car thefts and smash and grabs are more notable and aggravating than a business getting robbed. Years ago a bar / restaurant I frequented had been broken into, a makeshift board placed over glass so the business could continue opening. The co-owner / manager of the establishment was semi-indifferentand could piece together roughly what probably happened — at any rate, the thieves grabbed something that seemed as though it should’ve valuable but really wasn’t. In terms of police reports, this would keep getting shuffled to the bottom of the pile. He imagined when the motion activated video footage was shown, the thief would have a bandana over him and would be unidentifiable — at least, he hoped he would be as the case was not worth it and better to get the insurance money for minor repairs and steel themselves from further misdemenors.

If this crime is down while car thefts are up, that is not good and to phrase it as such is a tad tone deaf.

But regardless of the numbers, Boudin’s opponents have pointed to specific high-profile incidents as a way to bolster their case that the district attorney has failed to keep people safe: After a parolee named Troy McAlister killed two women during a hit-and-run on New Year’s Eve 2020, some residents blamed Boudin’s office, which previously referred McAlister to parole agents rather than filing new charges after some of the man’s prior arrests. Other San Franciscans argue Boudin has not done enough to hold perpetrators accountable for violent attacks against Asian American elders in the city.

Boudin’s office is also just one piece of a complicated legal system: The city’s police department has been arresting far fewer people than it used to, with its lowest clearance rate in a decade.

More sophisticated progressive analyses has it that this is a case of one guy who deserved to be gotten rid of regardless of how other cities shape up, and I can imagine the case is… Probably. You would like elections to be taken in a vacuum, and some counter-veiling realities to permeate: Biden beat out the “defund the police” contingent to win the nomination, did he not? An ex-Republican cleared into the top spot of a “Top two” primary for mayor of Los Angeles. Good for him — though the only thing this gets portrayed as is a victory for Kevin McCarthy as Speaker in November. (Ted Wheeler, I should point out, the much mocked in conservative circles mayor of Portland, was an ex-Republican.)

Another fine moment for the Democrats comes in Colorado, as the strategy of “pick the opponent” brings up Ron Hanks so Michael Bennett will win. I suppose it is not quite as big stakes risk as Pennsylvania’s gubernatorial race, but one senator who will toss aside electoral results is one Senator who will toss aside electoral results. Meantime, I note a Twitter thread from a self described “middle of the road”-er not much caring for the January 6th hearings when crime and mass shootings and inflation need addressing — this a person who, mind you, was all agog against Trump during the events. This is the dilemma of the hearings — and always would be — we live in a world of problems and that happens to be one of them, address it and less oxygen exists with these other problems. Perception wavers against the Democrats. Though it is probably not taken in with the general public, Democratic Party’s cynical actions in Pennsylvania and Colorado undercut their message on January 6, and lead into the ” partisan hatchet job” counter-attack.