Dowbrigade

According
to the Starts
& Stops column in today’s Boston Globe, since
Sept. 11, 2001, the aviation industry has received $18.1 billion from
the Federal government in subsudies and security funding. Since Sept.
11, 2001,
the US public transportation industry received a paltry $250
million.

That’s 72 times more for air travel security than for mass transit security.

This in spite of the fact that 16 times more people use urban mass transit
each day than use all of the nation’s airports.

Could the reason have anyting to do with the fact that congressmen and
women average three or four flights a week, and haven’t taken a subway
or bus, outside of campaign photo-ops, since, well, in most cases, since
ever?

That, and the inexistence of a subway industry, or subway lobby in
any way equivalent to the Airline industry. If they existed, they could
offer free trips on the Red Line, but this would hardly be competitive.

statistics from the Boston Globe

As
predicted in this space as early as last November, the moderate wing
of the Republican party ("Rational Republicans") is feeling its way towards
a
"Middle Path" strategy in preparation for an eventual split with the
"Evangelical Republicans" and a strong run at the Presidency in 2008.

Under the inspirational, if egomaniacal, leadership
of John Mc Cain, they are reaching out to moderate Democrats, "Realists"
who realize that the traditional Democratic party is dead in the water
and taking on bilge faster than they can bail.

We continue to believe that Colin Powell is a major
player in this emerging coalition, but as astute observers will note,
he is nowhere to be seen. In the considered opinion of the Dowbrigade
he is laying low publicly but extremely active behind the scenes, pulling
strings and praying he didn’t stay aboard the Bush battleship too long
to avoid being infected
with the Bush plague in the minds of the electorate.

He is obviously
praying for that salvation of career politicians in the age of sound
bites and rapidly revolving news cycles – the impaired memory of the
electorate – but his dog and pony show in front
of the
United
Nations is going to be hard to forget, and easy for electoral opponents
to drag out of the archives in all its self-righteous prestidigitation.

Unless,
of course, that opposition is the Bush Regime itself, which would
be put in the contorted position of exposing the
perfidy of the ex Secretory of State while avoiding the fact that
said perfidy was at its own behest.  We look forward to an entertaining
and amusing campaign…

WASHINGTON — The caller could barely contain his
anger. ”Who appointed Mc Cain to be head of the Republican Party?" he
asked.

”The media," responded conservative talk radio host
Laura Ingraham.

For at least a decade, the political right has dominated
Republican primaries, making it difficult for moderates such as Mc
Cain to emerge as the party’s nominee for president. But with the Monday
night
agreement, greeted with dismay by interest groups on both the left
and the right, the Arizona senator threw down an early gauntlet, openly
defying
the party’s conservative base.

”The strategy all along is to transcend the swamp
fever of the right, and build a different kind of coalition — with
fiscal
conservatives, national defense hawks, and moderates who are discomfited
by the influence of the religious right," said Marshall Wittmann,
a former top Mc Cain aide and onetime legislative director for the
Christian Coalition.

from the Boston Globe

Unholy Alliance – related analysis from the Dowbrigade

WASHINGTON, May 20 – Laura Bush said today that her husband should
have been interrupted on a bicycle ride last week and told that an off-course
plane had prompted a frantic evacuation of the capital. Her comments
were the first in public from the White House to question the Secret
Service’s decision to keep President Bush in the dark.

The president was not informed of the incident until 40 minutes after
the single-engine plane had been forced turn away, a decision that
gave ammunition to Mr. Bush’s critics who view him as out of touch. The
plane,
which violated the restricted air space regulations put in effect around
Washington, prompted the Secret Service to move Vice President Dick
Cheney, Mrs. Bush and Nancy Reagan, who happened to be visiting, to the
underground
complex of the White House.

Thank goodness he wasn’t informed! There’s no telling how he
might have reacted, drunk on power and flush with endorphins and adreneline.
He might have actually thought Laura and the girls were in danger and
started
issuing
bizarre,
panicky
orders to the military, declaring martial law, grounding all aircraft,
who knows,
invading
some unsuspecting small nation against which he holds a grudge, real
or imagined.

Much better to know that cooler heads were in charge, the grownups
were at home, no need to call little Georgie who’d gone out to play
with his
friend. Frankly, the danger that Geroge is going to be at home
one of these days, at a crucial moment in national
history, and convinced now that he is really in charge, scares the shit
out of us.

from the New York Times

In the
ebb and flow of American politics, or of any truly free political system,
organized groups of shared-interest activists, known as political parties,
are born and die, as do their leaders.

Since before the Civil War, the Democrats and Republicans have alternated
in power as they became more institutionalized, more entrenched in the
halls of power, and fostered political families on each side of the aisle
bred to power and privilege. We sometimes forget that there is nothing
in the Constitution mandating
these
two parties,
or even the primacy of TWO parties, or even any parties at all. 

Let us also not forget that the currently dominant parties WERE once
part of the same party. Andrew Jackson, a Democratic-Republican from
Tennessee, was elected president in 1828. His party had great support
in the South and West.  And who can forget successful American parties
like the Whigs, Federalists, Know-Nothings (our personal favorite) and
Bull Moose parties?

At least since before the last election, several deep political thinkers,
prominent among them Joe
Trippi, have been predicting the demise of one
of the political dinosaurs who have dominated the American political
landscape for the past 150 years. Given the current ascendancy and dominance
of the Grand Old Party at all levels, it seems obvious which
of our present parties is headed to the dust heap of history.

The Dowbrigade is among those who feel that 2008 will be the swan song
of the Democratic Party as a viable counterbalance to the triumphant
Republicans. As to who will replace the Dems, we have our theory about
that as well. Only one organization could realistically challenge the
primacy of the Republicans – the Republicans themselves.

Since late last year we have seen the 2008 election shaping up
as follows: The Bush junta, aka the Evangelical Republicans, will nominate
Jeb Bush, with Condi Rice as VP.  Attractive ticket. Sure to lure
in at least a smattering of women and blacks, just on general principal,
like Clarence Thomas.

The Democrats, we thought, were going with Hillary and some Southern
pretty boy or macho he-man, and hope for the best.  We saw this
as the kiss of death for the Democrats. We predicted that in a
hotly contested three way race, she comes in third.

Why do we say a three way race? Because we see the real threat to the
ruling junta as coming from within its own party.  There are still
plenty of old-school Republicans who still believe in evolution.  In
fact, there are millions of honest Americans who voted for George Bush
and
who are starting to have some serious doubts about the conduct of the
wars, both the military operations overseas and the cultural war here
in the homeland.

They would be ripe for a rational Republican alternative, like, say,
Colin Powell and John McCain.  How’s that for a ticket? They might
actually win.  They could call themselves the Real Republicans,
or the New Republicans, or the Rational Republicans, and they would defect
from the Administration with a sizable piece of the party organization,
fundraisers, career wonks and droids, and rank and file grassroots organizers.

This is key, as we are convinced that the realities of the modern American
form of democracy make it extremely difficult if not impossible for a
band-new, startup political party to seriously compete at any but the
most local level (all politics may be local, but economies of scale come
into play at state or national levels).  See, for example, the Constitution
Party, the America First Party, the Reform Party, the Green Party or
our own party, before we became a Republican, the Natural Law Party.

So
it is much more likely  that we see a realignment based on a
schism within one of the massive existing parties, and with its surfeit
of power and internal contradictions, the Dowbrigade nominates the Republicans. Stranger
things have happened.

For example, see the following
story from the front page of today’s
New York Times, about an unholy alliance taking form in Washington between
Hillary Clinton and Newt Gingritch.

Mr. Gingrich, the former House speaker, has been working alongside the
former first lady on a number of issues, and even appeared with her at
a press conference on Wednesday to promote – of all things – health-care
legislation.

But more puzzling than that, Mr. Gingrich has been talking up Mrs.
Clinton’s presidential prospects in 2008, to the chagrin of conservative
loyalists
who once regarded him as a heroic figure. Last month, he even suggested
she might capture the presidency, saying "any Republican who thinks
she’s going to be easy to beat has a total amnesia about the history
of the Clintons."

What is this coy eyelash fluttering? Does Newt know that he is now as
welcome in Republican circles as David Duke? Is Hillary trying to capture
some of that Old Republican Magic by reaching out to Newt? Could a
potential alliance between these uber-opportunists somehow pull Hillary
out of third place in the three-way contest we outlined above? 

We somehow doubt it, but it would sure make things interesting in what
is already shaping up to be the most entertaining election at least since
the guy
with the
ears. At the very least, combined with Bill’s heartwarming adoption by Poppy Bush (making Bill and George into some sort of twisted quasi-brothers}, this fraternization is returning both parties to their roots and true nature – the Democrat-Republicans of Andrew Jackson.

In politics, as in most of life. it’s all in the timing. When will
the
"moderate"
Republicans
make their break from the Evangelicals? They will probably wait for the
Bushites to invade another country or overstep themselves domestically
before acting.  They can always manufacture a crisis and get Cheney
and Ashcroft to freak out and declare martial law, or outlaw hip-hop
music, or arrest Howard Stern and shoot down his satellite, or something
equally over-the-top.

So get a good seat, folks, the show is about to begin.

article from the New York Times

Before we forget, there are a couple of additional
strands to the emerging tapestry of Citywide
Wi-fi in Boston. First, City
Councilor John Tobin and WAG are
sponsoring a Wi-Fi summit next month at the Science Museum. As far as
we know it is open to all but we have not been able to find
a Summit Web Page yet, just mentions in blogs and press releases.

BostonWAG is one of several local organizations involved in a special
task force formed to plan the WiFi Summit, which will be held on Thursday,
May 19 at the Museum of Science, Boston. The task force is now seeking
input from community residents on how they think wireless technology
could be used to make Boston a more attractive place to live, work, go
to school and conduct business. Representatives of local community groups,
grassroots organizations, and non-profit agencies are invited to participate
in the forum.

Also, and who knows whether this is all part of a subtle
public opinion campaign to influence public opinion in favor of the emerging
everywherenet, yesterday’s Boston
Globe had a looong article titled, "The
Year of Living Wirelessly":

Hotels, airports, stadiums, municipal buildings, hospitals, libraries,
planes, trains – our entire environment is being "unwired." Wi-Fi
is connecting whole neighborhoods and public parks, like New York City’s
Bryant Park, creating so-called hotzones and hotcities. The Boston
Foundation, a charitable group, has given the Museum
of Science $25,000
to study
unwiring swaths of the city, particularly parks and open spaces. Next
month, civic and technology leaders plan to meet at a Wireless Boston
summit to discuss the idea.

This is happening, folks. For better or worse, happening people will
soon be online, all the time, everywhere. At least in Boston’s parks
and open spaces.

from the
Boston Globe

The
much anticipated main attraction at last Thursday’s
meeting of the Berkman
denizens whom the lovely Norma Yvonne refers to
as "our cult" was a guest appearance by Boston City Council
member John Tobin,
an earnest, dyed-in-the-wool old-school political animal.  He
opened by telling us of growing up in a neighborhood where every other
person was an elected official and the other half were unsuccessful political
candidates.

He was convincing in a smarmy, student council sort of way. One got
the impression that he really liked getting out among his constituents
and finding out what their concerns are, in an attempt to do something
about them, within the system and its limitations. He found his way to
the Blogger’s Cabal thanks to inveterate group member and poster boy for
Video Blogging, Steve Garfield.

Turns out Tobin had the good fortune to run into Steve outside an ice
cream parlor
in Jamaica Plain, part of his City Council district. After introducing himself,
Steve went into his heartfelt spiel about how a good blog can transform an
idea, or a project, or a politician, making them accessible and understandable
to a whole new segment of the population.

Turns out Tobin also had the good sense to listen to Steve, and eventually
hire him to set up and maintain a blog, prominently featuring Steve’s
prodigious video blogging talent.

Early results are mixed. The site
itself is clean and well designed.
It features useful information for constituents as well as promoting
the activities of Mr. Tobin himself. Steve’s videos are, as usual, professional
and inventive, and show Mr. Tobin in some off-the-record and behind-the-scenes
moments to do convey a sense if intimacy and personal connection. There
are also intriguing links to an initiative Mr. Tobin is involved with
to bring city-wide Wi-fi connectivity to Boston. For this alone he deserves
support.

(The Dowbrigade will have a separate post on this topic at some point
this weekend, and will backlink to this when we do.)

However, if Mr. Tobin expected unqualified kudos for courageously entering
the blogging arena, he came to the wrong place.
The most important thing we personally noticed absent from his blog, and it’s
parent
site,
is any trace of Mr. Tobin’s own personal voice.

As we pointed out at the meeting, since the media frenzy of last fall’s
presidential election, every Tom Dick and Harriet
of an elected official, and scads of wannabees, have established blogs.  Almost
without exception, they simply went out and hired a blogger or other techno-weenie
or drafted a teenaged relative to actually write the damn thing.

We told Mr. Tobin on Thursday that if he wanted a "real" blog, one that
would connect with our constituents, he needed to invest
something of himself, and take the time to write regularly, not
delegate or dictate. And not just stale PR pap, we want
real insights into who he is, what it is like to be a Boston City Councilor,
the pressures he is under, the difficulty of the decisions he has to make, how
he goes about balancing legal, political and moral priorities. Like all bloggers,
letting his readers, in this case his constituents, get to know him as a person.
Scary stuff.

What we didn’t say, but fervently believe, is that any authentic, worthwhile
blogging involves some real element of risk. It can’t be faked, or copied,
or mailed in. The blogging audience is highly discriminating.  Anything
that is ghost-written, that is boilerplate, that is safe and bland, will
wither
on the blogging
vine.  Any
good blogging, maybe any good writing, involves taking real personal risks,
exposing
at least a part of the soul. Blogging is not for sissies, or hypocrites.  On
the other hand, it
is
hard
to
convince a politician to take risks, especially with anything related to their
public
image. Real blogging for pols is not an easy sell.

We know. We have tried. Since well before the elections last year one
of the ongoing group goals among the Berman
bloggers was to offer, entice, facilitate
and
support
politicians
who wanted to blog. As far as we can tell, Steve recruiting John was
the first real fruit this effort has borne. We personally have tried
to convince three pols (2 sitting and one candidate), to take the plunge.
After we
gave our impassioned rant on the impact and potential of the new media
movement, we noticed little besides the normal crude, cunning calculus
as they processed the stereotypical calculation – how could this help
me?

The only way to do it is to convince them of the truth – that the political
landscape has changed, is changing, and that the old recipes won’t work
anymore. For decades, centuries, politicians survived by maintaining very
separate public and private personalities. Outside of a handful of personal
aides and regular contacts, no one in the country actually saw the elected
officials, other than at highly staged campaign rallies at election time.

Before the invention of television, and the rise of mass media, no one
knew what their leaders even looked like, much less how they acted, walked,
ruminated, relaxed, ate, reacted to attack, behaved when sick, on little
sleep, or when surprised or angry. Before CSPAN and paparazzi and TV
"news" magazines and doggedly persistent blogs, a politician was wise
to present a public persona markedly different than the private man.

But today that is a flawed and doomed strategy.  The public has
too much access.  The coverage in constant, intuitive, all consuming.
The result is that people perceive the underlying falseness of the dual-persona
approach, and as a result distrust all politicians. The political class
can no longer get away with this deep duplicity as a way of life.  People
are on to them. Of course, the insult and indignation they feel is thus
far unfocused, because as of today there are no alternatives.

The closest we have seen was the instructional case of the daring Dr.
Dean, who really seemed to be speaking from the heart and letting us
all in on what he really thought.  And we all know how savagely
he was eviscerated by the mainstream media when they realized that he
really
did believe all that stuff and the eventual result, should he have been
elected, would have been the loss of their monopoly on the American consciousness.

The younger generation especially, and as usual, have highly developed
bullshit detectors these days.  The old politics will not fly in
a world where anyone who cares can follow a candidate or politician virtually
24/7.  The
new politics demands a new breed of politician – less consumed, more
transparent, more wysiwyg.

Perhaps, rather than getting politicians to
blog, it is time for bloggers to enter politics.

Eventually, someone will create a tidal wave in the new media of sufficient
magnitude and depth to withstand and overwhelm the evisceration that
derailed the Dean train. When such a figure emerges, the Dowbrigade,
and we suspect
millions
of others, stand ready to go to the mattresses when the the shit hits
the fan. But you’ve gotta know somebody pretty good, pretty intimately,
to get to that level of commitment. A lot better than we’ve ever gotten
to know anybody over our TV set.

Here are the notes
from the meeting, and here is Steve’s
Video of it

Just
when we thought it was safe to come outside, George Bush seems to have
solved the mystery of the "vision thing".  After
40 months of wandering the globe like a wounded hyena reeling from
the nightmare of 9/11 and lashing out in opportunistic anger at friend
and foe alike, the Bush Junta has finally had an authentic, collective
vision, and its a doozy.

Believe what you will about their methods and their motives, but who
can doubt the audacity of this vision. The Neo Cons aspire to untangle
the thorniest problem afflicting humanity during the entire past 2,000
years. They have opted to tackle the Gordian Knot of International Relations
– Peace in the Middle East. And their announced plan to achieve that
goal is through the Power of Democracy, unleashed upon totalitarian and
despotic republics across the region. A bold ploy, indeed.

Clearly, Bush has balls, if not brains. Democracy is a dangerous and
potentially explosive policy anywhere, let alone in a region we absolutely
must have on our side, or
at least within
our
trading
sphere,
if we hope
to maintain our present privileged position atop the fellowship of nations.
Democracy is a powerful, revolutionary ideology, especially in societies
long steeped in repression and lack of political choice or organization.
The simple fact is, if by some miracle we were able to hold fair,
open and equitable elections tomorrow in Egypt, in Iraq, in Lebanon,
in Saudi Arabia, in Chad, in Iran, in Pakistan, in Jordan, in Palestine,
in Libya
or in Algeria, they would elect governments which did NOT like America, and which America liked even less. In many cases these freely elected governments would turn out to be more problematic and confrontationalist
than the presently installed regimes they replace. 

In most cases, democratically
elected representative governments would be even less stable than
the dictatorships there now, which is not to be taken as an endorsement
of dictatorship in any way, shape or form. However, as the legitimate
aspirations of minority or plurality ethnic groups thrown
together in
these modern
artificial
states come to the fore, as they inevitably would, in national assemblies
and cabinets, deadly conflicts would result. In many cases these aspirations,
repressed for generations and leavened unevenly with lust for revenge
will form
the
shoals on which
these incipient democracies will flounder.

Eventually, these artificial nation states formed by the fancy of a
handful of power-drunk European political hacks at the time of the dissolution
of the Ottoman Empire, a mere 80 years ago, are doomed to fail and disappear
from the map.  Whether
they will be replaced by a region-wide fundamentalist Islamic state based
on a 14th century interpretation of the Koran or a series of modern
techno-Petro states based on economic and historical imperatives and
emphasizing existing cultural and religious cohesion is the key geopolitical
question looming over the region and the next piece of planetary history.

Perhaps as a result of the Bush Democracy Doctrine or
pre-existing pressures in the nations affected, we can see the first
tenuous steps being taken in a democratic direction.  Although
deeply flawed, the fact that ANYONE in Iraq would risk life and limb
to actually
go to the polls was astounding in itself. President
Hosni Mubarak is
proposing real (i.e. more than one party) elections in Egypt in the near
future. Lebanon is on the point of ending
25 years of Syrian occupation,
and all plans we have seen or heard about so far involve post-withdrawal
elections to create a new government.  Of course, Lebanon is a country
with a long history of open, if rigged, elections. Even bosom Bush buddies
the
Saudis have recently held elections, although their validity is in
questions since only bearded males able to pay a 25-goat poll tax were
allowed
to vote. Will these feeble first steps lead to the dream of a free, peaceful,
democratic Middle East?

Unfortunately, between here and there
lies many more chapters of the long-running human tragedy that passes
for political progress in the
middle east. The Bush Administration should be very careful what they
ask for, especially when they are throwing around charged terms like
Democracy, self-determination, and inalienable rights. But if the goal
is a series of self-determining independent states insuring representation
of ALL
of
the cultural, religions
and
political persuasions in the region, how can the spread of Democracy
in a totalitarian cesspool be dangerous?

The Dowbrigade sees parallels between the breakup of the totalitarian
logjam which has frozen progress towards peace and development in the
Middle East and the perplexing phenomena of the rash of suicides among
depressed teens on the anti-psychotic drug Prozac.

The human mind is like a powerful motor, running 24/7 to monitor and
control our behavior and cognition. When something breaks and it starts
to gyrate seriously off-balance it has but one mechanism to protect itself.  It
shuts down, and the affected person drops into depression, inaction,
inertia and sometimes autism or insensibility. It is as though the mind
recognized that should it continue to try to operate with a thrown rod
or a busted cam, so to speak, it would probably do serious, perhaps
permanent damage to the mind itself or the body that housed it.

The theory is that when Prozac is administered in cases like this,
it does indeed melt the frozen pressure points and breaks up the mental
and emotional logjams which prevent the person from participating in normal human interaction.  The problem is that the first thing that some of
these people want to do, freed of the chains and weights which stopped
them from doing ANYTHING during their crisis, is to kill themselves.

This is not excusive a Dowbrigade theory.  From US
News and World Report

Psychiatrists have long known that some people become agitated, anxious,
and have trouble sleeping when they start taking SSRI s. The speculation
is that this "activation" may make patients more apt to injure
themselves or others, because the drug has lessened the despair and
lassitude typical of depression. But there are no reliable data available
to support
this theory. And because suicide is an outcome of the condition that
the drugs are supposed to treat, it’s difficult to sort out whether
the disease or the treatment is at fault.

So the "unfreezing" of a teenaged mind must be done under the careful
supervision of an experienced professional, and should involve both drugs
and intensive face-to-face, "talking" therapy.  And the
"unfreezing" of political freedom in the Middle Ease must be done VERY
CAREFULLY. Although we believe strongly in the justness of the ultimate
goal, it gives us no pleasure to report we see things getting considerably
worse before they start getting better.

Egypt article from the New York Times

Lebanon story from CNN

Prince Saud interview in Newsweek ("Democracy is a Virus")

Catching up on odds and ends from the past week, we came across the
notes we took during the President’s State of the Union speech on Tuesday
night. We must say, we we quite impressed with his performance, from
a purely oratorical and dramatic point of view. The man has clearly been
woodshedding his pitch, we are sure with a host of major league pitching
coaches and Phded advisors, and the results were impressive.  He has almost
entirely eliminated the infuriating smirks (they did slip out two or three
times, like a naughty toddler sent upstairs to bed who sneaks halfway
down the stairs to eavesdrop on the grownups), and replaced it with a
warm and sincere-seeming slightly wistful smile, which he flashed with
great effect at various members of the crowd as he mentioned them. These
artful glances, combined with perfectly timed cutaways to the recipients,
created the impression of a caring, engaged leader, and combined with
much improved pronunciation and pacing put this speech head and shoulders
above the embarrassingly amateurish performances during the Bush-Gore
campaign
and the early years of his first term.

As to the content, well, given the willful suspension of disbelief that
is the hallmark of modern American culture, we were tremendously reassured
by the message of our maximum leader. The Neo-Con land of make-believe in which we live is a brave new world of enlightened political liberation theology.

Rejoice! We can save Social Security and the flagging stock market at
the same time! We are winning the war on terrorism, and will hunt down and eliminate
those opposed to our way of life like rabid dogs. We can create a culture
of life!

The beneficent government is protecting African Americans from AIDS!
Who knew? We are going to end tyranny in our times. We have no desire
or intention to impose our form of government on any other country. Nevertheless,
we are going to forcefully promote Democracy around the world.

We are going to achieve peace in the Middle East, finally, by respecting
the right to sovereignty and self-determination of all peoples, which may involve regime
change in Iran and Syria.

The President painted a masterful picture, picking and choosing from
a palate of liberty, freedom, democracy and the other core American values.
But as the speech wound up, we couldn’t help but notice a few key omissions.
For example, there was not a single mention of one key American value,
that three-letter linchpin of our economy and geopolitical policy these
past hundred years, and for the foreseeable future – O-I-L.

The reality of what the American political system has morphed into is
a new kind of representative democracy, which represents basically
the oil and defense industries. This is in accord with the most basic
principles of modern statehood, mirrored in various permutations across
the board of political systems around the world.

The business of the modern state is to build things and to blow things up.  Given
ultimate control of the highest level of generation and utilization of
capital, national governments are the biggest players in the first truly
worldwide integration of the productive capacity of the entire planet, which
we call the global economy.

Although in theory not profit-making enterprises themselves, national
governments nevertheless control the collection and spending of the majority
of capital expenditures around the world, and the companies that they
favor with their contracts and support are the richest and most powerful
on the planet. The owners of the biggest companies involved in building
(Haliburton), operating (the oil and energy industry) and defending what
we have built while blowing up what our enemies build (the defense
industries) have such a vested interest in the budgetary decisions of
the national governments that it is little wonder that they have, since
their inception, dedicated significant resources to influencing and if
possible controlling the politicians who make the spending decisions.

It is not only in the US and like minded capitalistic democracies where
the economic power centers tend to dominate the political policy-makers.  In
our erstwhile ally Saudi Arabia, for example, in an eerie mirror of our own petrolocracy,
the powers behind the throne are the self-same oil industry and the in-house
construction empire of the Bin Laden family. Build ’em and blow ’em up, and keep it in the family. Go figure.

Is it too much of a leap to conclude that the energy industry, near the
apex of its historical cycle of oil dependency and economic primacy,
would seek to move beyond influencing the politicians who arrive at
the top and actually groom and put into place their own wholly-owned
subsidiary in the form of an unabashedly oil-drenched and aggressively
expansionist administration?

They are at the top of the heap now, legitimately ensconced in power
and feeling their oats after their successful imposition of an apocalyptic
vision of an America under siege, but also under courageous leadership
determined to carry high the torch of liberty and justice for all. After
listening to President Bush Tuesday night, part of us actually wished
that his polished but hollow words rang true. What a wonderful world
it would be.

cartoon from Felbers.net

It
has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all
the others that have been tried. Winston Churchill said that, supposedly,
although you never can tell in this day and age of contested attribution.
The
elections going on as we write in
Iraq are a case and point illustrating
both the power and the peril of what we often forget was originally
a very revolutionary form of government. Potentially, it still is.

The true power and righteousness of a government by the people, for
the people and of the people is awesome to behold, although in the opinion
of the Dowbrigade it has been quite some time since Our American Breed
of democracy has been anywhere close to that Jeffersonian ideal. And
in terms of spreading democracy around the globe, the Bush administration
need be careful what they ask for, lest they get it – in spades.

It is bizarre to the point of surreal that the turnout
in these Iraqi elections is expected to surpass that of the recently
concluded,
most hotly contested US presidential elections in decades. This is a
country where just walking within a city block of a polling place means
the very
real possibility of being shot or blown up.  Where dozens of people
are being slaughtered in the streets every day just for trying to HOLD
elections. Where names are being taken and retribution is being promised
to anyone daring to exercise their democratic right! And they are expecting
over
70% turnout!

If voting meant risking your life and the safety of your family, how
many Americans do you think would go out to vote?

As far as the theory that exposure to American values
will foster the flourishing of democracy elsewhere it is interesting
to note that of the quarter-million
adult Iraqis living in the United States, only
10% even bothered to register for these elections, for which they
are indeed eligible.

The sad fact is that in truly free, open elections,
those that are hungry, those that are oppressed, and those who are suffering
will turn out at a higher
rate than those whose bellies are full and who are basically satisfied
with the status quo. For better or worse, this facet of democracy lies
at the heart of its radically revolutionary nature.

This is where America must beware. Let’s face it, if
free and open elections tomorrow created governments of, by and for the
people of Pakistan, Jordan, Saudi
Arabia, Iran, the UAE, Egypt, Algeria and many more, we would lose most
of those few allies and negotiating partners we have in that part of
the world. We would also lose access to over half of our imported oil,
which
would throw our economy into a tailspin it would take a generation to
recover from.

What has happened and continues to happen in Venezuela
is an excellent example of the dangers of rampant democracy. By appealing
to the hungry,
dissatisfied masses, who in a county like Venezuela are in a clear majority
(whether or not they agree with Chavez) he got elected by a landslide.
Almost the entire economic power structure of the county and their close
friends
and colleagues
in the US have been trying to get rid of him ever since, but thanks to
access to the oil income and that pesky philosophy democracy (he has
won two recall elections) the Chavez revolution rolls on. Somehow, though,
we suspect its going to end badly for old Hugo.

The point is, free elections are a tricky thing.  You
never know who might get elected.  Don’t forget, the Germans elected
Adolf Hitler in 1933. How’d that work out for them, and for the rest
of us? However, as the Americans have proven, managing elections
is both an art and a science. Obviously, they will be attempting to manage
the new Iraqi elections as artfully as they have managed recent elections
in this country, but it is more difficult in the hinterland, where the
mechanisms of control are not as sophisticated or ingrained.

The ultimate danger to the US Government of this whole
Proselytize Democracy strategy is the boomerang effect. If radical ideas
like transparent government,
official accountability, and participatory democracy with an educated,
involved electorate ever found their way back to the States and infected
the body politic, we could all be in big trouble. Democracy is a revolutionary
idea, especially when the power of a country is concentrated in the hands
of a corrupt regime or a privileged minority. Caveat emptor.

WASHINGTON, Jan. 23 – The Pentagon has created battlefield intelligence
units that for the first time have been assigned to work directly with
Special Operations forces on secret counterterrorism missions, tasks
that had been largely the province of the Central Intelligence Agency,
senior Defense Department officials said Sunday.

Wasn’t one of the identifiable problems contributing to 9/11 the duplication of effort by agencies doing the same thing and not communicating with each other? The interagency squabble between CIA and Defense has
been going on since long before the neo-cons got hold of the reins
of power.
What the military has against the CIA, basically, is that they are civilians,
which in addition to leaving them outside the warm glow of warrior male
bonding makes them susceptible to accountability and oversight by that
other most odious caldron of civilian interference – the US Congress.

from the New York Times

Despite
being registered to vote since the day we turned 18 and fifty years
of felony-free citizenship in this great country, the Dowbrigade has
never been called to Jury Duty.  Not once. Our dissolute teenage
son has been called.  Dogs get called to Jury Duty. As the recent
acquittal of Joseph Cousin for the murder of 10-year old Trina Persad
because five of the jurors lied about their criminal backgrounds shows,
many people with real criminal records get called.  But  not
us.

Personally, we believe that the FBI or the Department
of Justice maintain a secret list of people judged, through incidental
contacts
with authority in one of its many manifestations, as just too buck
wild loco to be entrusted with this sacred civic responsibility. A
threat to the continued functioning of the criminal justice system,
and therefore best kept as far from courtrooms as possible.  Actually,
we wouldn’t have it any other way.  Like comments on our postings,
Jury Duty is something only someone denied
it would
seriously desire.
Or someone
with
a
passing
interest
in the law,
like a Supreme Court Justice…

BOSTON (Reuters) – U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen
Breyer reported for jury duty this week in Massachusetts, where he is
a part-time resident, but was not picked for a trial.

Breyer, one of nine justices on the U.S. high court in Washington, walked
into the Marlborough, Massachusetts district court house on Tuesday unnoticed,
officials said.

Even the Marlborough court’s presiding justice, Thomas Sullivan, didn’t
recognize the tall and balding Breyer before discovering his name on
a list of potential jurors, one court official said.

Despite, or perhaps because of, his credentials, Breyer was not chosen
for a case. He was called to sit on one jury, but a defense attorney
had Breyer excused from the panel.

Breyer, who owns a home in Massachusetts and studied and taught law
at Harvard University, said through a Supreme Court spokeswoman he
did not
view the day of jury duty as a burden. "Jury duty is an important
civic duty because juries decide guilt or innocence," spokeswoman
Kathy Arberg quoted him as saying.

from Reuters