I’ve had a feeling ever since Dubya was declared the real President last month that things would be getting considerably worse in Washington for people who are interested in things other than the corporate bottom line. That feeling is extending into the wholesale substitutions going on among cabinet secretaries. With the exception of Condy Rice, the replacements have been a bunch of no names, but my instinct is that they won’t be a crowd of independent thinkers.

When Tom Ridge the first Secretary of Homeland Security quit, Bush picked a guy named Bernard Kerik whose resume was topped by a short term as a New York City police commissioner, to be the guy who wants to read your mail and strip you naked at the airport. Kerik decided just a couple of days later that he didn’t want the job after the background checkers found out about the nanny/housekeeper who worked for him, was an illegal alien and didn’t pay any income taxes. Where have we heard that scenario before?

I have to give the mainstream media credit for getting this one right. Right after the nomination, it was widely reported that between the time he left the police commission and the time he was nominated to the Cabinet, Kerik went from having rental property in foreclosure to being a mutimillionaire by doing business with companies that do business with Homeland Security. What bothers me is that it took an illegal alien in the kitchen to bring him down. No one seems to care that he would have been writing checks to the companies for whom he used to work. For that matter, it looks like no one bats an eye about the well reported Rice connection to big oil or the Cheney connection to Haliburton.

A lot of folks I know put the rap on the commercial TV networks and the major newspapers and news magazines for being in the government’s pocket, and I know that’s true to a large degree, but there’s no shortage of alternative information available in print, on the Internet and right here on this radio station for those who choose to look for it. It appears there are a couple of problems with this free speech/free press idea. First, the people who seek out better information than they can get from Newsweek and the Fox network tend to be the gentle souls who don’t take to the streets readily. Many of us did it in our youth, and we’re not anxious to do it again in our retirement. Jjust voting might help, but they also tend to be people who don’t vote because there’s nothing and no one to vote for. What they do instead is read, write and talk. The people who are erasing the distinction between government and the corporations for whom they work have figured out that free speech is the opium of the people. Let ‘em read, write and say whatever they want, then go right ahead and rip ‘em off, because they’re not going to be doing anything else.

This isn’t necessarily a call to any sort of action, but it occurs to me that it’s not enough to be free to say and write whatever you want when a government whose interests are quite different from yours has ABC, NBC and CBS on its side. The neo-cons like to complain about the liberal media, but that’s just the smokescreen, the hook to persuade you that the liberals are running the media, but the conservatives can win all the elections anyway. If you buy that line, you’ll be inclined to stay home on election day.

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Well, the Bush cabinet may be loaded with corporate lackeys, but I’ve never heard anything about any such connection for Don Rumsfeld, who is one of the few sticking it out for the second term, if he can hang on by his fingernails. Instead of being in bed with big business, I think Rummy is just a genuine, hard nosed shoot ‘em up cowboy. He really believes he’s making the world safe for democracy. He probably lives in a rented house and buys his suits off the rack.

When I say, "Hanging on by his fingernails," I mean his performance last week was shaky, to say the least. This administration is probably the least accessible in history, both to reporters and to the general public. Neither the President nor the Vice President ever is found in a situation where they might be expected to speak a spontaneous word, but Rummy got foot stuck pretty deep in mouth over in Kuwait last week, and reporters survived to tell about it. Most of the people in the administration are pretty arrogant about not hiding or denying their connections to big corporations, but as an ideologue, Rummy’s arrogance can reach even greater heights. He made the mistake of allowing spontaneous questions from the soldiers to whom he was speaking, and one them asked him why they had to scrounge junkyards for scrap metal to armor their vehicles. After a hesitation, Rummy said, "You go to war with the army you’ve got; not the one you want." That was the biggest blow-off since "Let ‘em eat cake," but I haven’t heard anyone calling for Rummy’s head on a stick, except of course the same people who have wanted that since he was appointed. It’s beyond my comprehension that a person in his position could toss off a remark like that and not make at least few new enemies.

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Finally, I saw that there are a couple of proposals alive the Legislature to make the California Secretary of State a non-partisan office. This is, of course, a reaction to the fact that the validity of almost every election in the world now is being challenged. Puerto Rico has joined the list. But designating the person who runs the election as non-partisan is an illusion if not a fraud. Local supervisors and council members are non-partisan, but their partisan leanings and affiliations are known by everyone, and all the candidates for those offices accept endorsements from political parties major and minor. The real tough question is not what designation you put under the name on the ballot, it’s how you get ‘em to carry out their responsibilities in an actual non-partisan way.