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EARLIER TODAY, JUST AFTER BREKKIE, YOUR CORRESPONDENT CAUGHT THE TAIL END OF A BBC WORLD SERVICE DISCUSSION on whether the American automotive industry is "essential" enough to be deserving of the $25 billion bailout that Ford, General Motors and Chrysler are pleading and caterwauling for, notwithstanding some in the "free-market-as-Great-White-Father" camp of the GOP suggesting that Detroit should clean its own house first of mismanagement, waste and inefficency prevailing throughout.

One listener from The Netherlands was suggesting that public transport was more deserving of the bailout monies than the automotive industry, especially after years of complacent hard-wired acceptance of the auto as essential to American mobility requirements.

Your Correspondent could not agree all the more.

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WHEN IT COMES TO TAKING THE "HERBAL SUPPLEMENT" GINGKO BILOBA FOR MEMORY, the new advice in this respect is that of one Tony Soprano: "Fuhgeddaboudit!"

This in response to a newly-released clinically-controlled test which had groups of elderly people with memory loss taking gingko or a placebo ... same revealing that gingko had no effect on reversing the effects of dementia or memory loss common with old age.

Meanwhile, speaking of memory loss, it's worthwhile to note where the ancient Greeks swore by the herb rosemary to help refresh the memory and fortify the brain.

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MEMO TO THE NEAL BOORTZ CROWD, what with his notoriety for suggesting that women in certain Unfortunate Circumstances ought turn to Mrs. Warren's Profession as their only meal ticket (so to speak) out of State welfare: The British Government is proposing to Parliament legislation to outlaw the old in-out-in-out with such prostitutes who are either:

• in the known employ of a pimp or drug dealer; or
• was lured or coerced into prostitution by fraud, trick or deception, regardless of whether or not force, fear or intimidation was used.

Further, under said legislation, it will not be a legal defence to claim ignorance of the fact that the prostitute he was caught with in flagrante delicto fell into either of the aforementioned categories.

Meanwhile, back in the "morally superior" United States, how many among the so-called "welfare queens and sluts" placed in workfare wound up themselves turning to prostitution after "reasonable attempts" to find work or jobs training through their Vocational Guidance Counsellors led to repeated dismissals based on potentially spurious grounds that employers are, perhaps, using as euphemism to excuse the lapse of special tax benefits absent incentives to retain former welfare cases on the payroll?

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YOU COULD JUST IMAGINE DR. JAMES "FOCUS ON THE FAMILY" DOBSON BEING AN ENEMY OF, AND ANATHEMA TO, MICHAEL "LIBERALISM IS A MENTAL DISORDER" SAVAGE based on the following item from Right Wing Watch as reveals just how deep into doublethink the Religiopolitical Right's propaganda masheen can get:

I don't write much about Michael Savage here, mainly because Media Matters covers him so well but also because I think he's an insufferable jerk and a fraud.  But today Media Matters has a typically stupid quote from him that is actually kind of relevant to the things I write about here:

Discussing "children" on the November 14 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show, Michael Savage stated: "I'm as good an expert as any. I have found in my life that most of the Ph.D. experts on children are either gay or crazy and were never married. Or if they were married, they either tried to kill their wife or were in rehab for a few years, and then came out and went into psychotherapy to find out why they killed, or attempted to kill. And then they washed it all away, and suddenly they're experts on childrearing."

Interesting.  Which category would James Dobson fall into?

James C. Dobson, Ph.D., is founder and chairman of Focus on the Family … [and] a licensed psychologist in the state of California and a licensed marriage, family and child counselor in both California and Colorado. Dobson was for 14 years an Associate Clinical Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Southern California School of Medicine, and served for 17 years on the Attending Staff of Children's Hospital of Los Angeles in the Division of Child Development and Medical Genetics. He has an earned Ph.D. from the University of Southern California (1967) in the field of child development.

And since I'm already writing a post about Savage, I guess I may as well just go ahead and mention this as well:

Nationally-syndicated talk show host Michael Savage is set to interview former German member of the Hitler Youth, Hilmar von Campe this Tuesday, November 18

The program will focus on similarities, which von Campe sees between the rise of totalitarianism under Hitler and the current social and political trends inside the United States.

"Every day brings this nation closer to a Nazi-style totalitarian abyss," writes von Campe, now a U.S. citizen, and author of "Defeating the Totalitarian Lie: A Former Hitler Youth Warns America."

Meanwhile, how can we be sure that this "Hilmar von Campe" is the real McCoy, and not some fraud cooked up by the Religiopolitical Right (especially through careful and deliberate coaching) to deceive and mislead especially the ignorant and vulnerable as are too easily led to hate, bigotry, jingoism and misguided hyperpatriotic excess?

(As for Savage's tactless remarks referenced as above, you can hear them here, thanks to Media Matters' transcription thereof:)

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STAYING WITH THE RELIGIOPOLITICAL RIGHT'S DELUSORY WORLD FOR A MOMENT, Your Correspondent would like to ask if their designs on Kulturkrieg in response to the election of Barack Obama to the Presidency include seeing the so-called "music shows" down Branson way--Die Bransoner Muzikschaukultur, as it were--as the One True Centre and Perfection of Amerikanischer Volks- und-Leikultur ("The Defining Culture of the American People," as it were).

One as is, sadly, rooted in lily-white delusions staright out of 1950's-vintage TV sitcoms whose real premise (according to @ least one social historian) was obescient service to the Red Scare-enforced belief in free-market capitalism with American characteristics being one with America's Antient and Pecuilar Soverignty and Soverign Identity, and the defence thereof (and that the two were somehow mutually intertwined by "unwritten tradition").

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"Money is the root of all evil."
Why not invest yours in United States Savings Bonds?