Considering all the ink and talking head time it generated, I guess you’d have to say that little event they called an election in Iraq was the big news this week. Had my country’s government not chosen to occupy this country with military force a while back, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t take any interest in such an election. I’ve heard that before the U.S. takeover, they held elections in Iraq, but there was only one candidate. Do you know if there were any more this time? Neither do I.

What we’ve been hearing from our media, actually, is that the people in Iraq don’t know either. It’s not like political candidates have been traveling around making speeches. If there are competing candidates, they probably have been doing just what the voters have been doing–laying low to keep from getting shot.

When I was much younger, I couldn’t have imagined how "democracy" could become a word subject to comparative interpretations. We all thought it was pretty simple. You go to the polls, you count the votes to see who wins and that’s democracy. It’s not even that simple anymore here in the cradle of democracy, where two indistinguishable parties, both controlled by corporate cash, have a stranglehold on the process to the degree that most people don’t even bother going to the polls. Then the outcome is likely to challenged in the courts anyway. Compare that to what we’re told just happened in Iraq. Guards with machine guns at every polling place, every voter under a death threat, and no one knows anything about the candidates anyway. In a way, it was very American; a two party system–Shiite or Sunni.

I expected to be here today predicting that this event would be anointed by the Bushwhacker as the historic day when the saintly Americans brought the hallowed institution of democracy to Iraq, but I can’t predict that. He’s already said it. If you regard what happened this week in Iraq as democracy, you’re probably ready for similar elections in your own country. I’m sure the Bush crowd hopes you are.

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The Supreme Court has ruled that cops can pull you over in your car or stop you on the street and let dogs sniff around you anytime they want, and if they find anything of which they don’t approve, you’re busted. I think that news serves as its own commentary, but I will say that if you don’t see a problem with that, you’re probably ready for elections like the one in Iraq earlier this week.

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The GV Union ran a short piece last week about a group of people taking public comment about growth and development. There’s a topic that hasn’t been discussed much before. I couldn’t tell from the story who formed this committee or why, but real estate agents were named. What stood out, however, was a sidebar with some very revealing statistics. The first one is a little outdated, but per-capita personal income in Nevada County was just under $33,000 in 2002, almost identical to the statewide average. Only about half that income, however, consists of earnings. The rest is interest, dividends, rents, retirements and so forth. People who work for a living in the county average about $29,000, compared to a statewide average of over $40,000, and 27% of the people who work for a living in the county do it in another county.

Finally, the median price of a home in the western county last year was $357,000. I glanced through a real estate supplement in The Union a few days ago, admired the pretty faces of all those agents and the pretty pictures of all those houses they’re trying to sell and concluded that 357 sounds a little low. All those pretty faces are peddling million dollar shacks. As Ross Perot used to say, "Now, here’s the deal, see:" if you’re household includes two of those average working people earning less than $30,000 a year, and you want to buy the average house, you’d need a down payment of about a quarter million to qualify for the loan. If you had a quarter million dollars, you could pay cash for what they call "affordable" housing in this part of the world. Once again, the story is its own commentary, but it makes me wonder who’s buying all those million dollar houses. I suspect all those pretty faces in that real estate supplement are tending bar somewhere for pocket money.

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Paper or plastic? Either way, you’re paying for it, and you might have to start paying more. In San Francisco, there’s a group of appointed officials called the Commission on the Environment which is considering imposing a 17 cent charge on every bag of either kind you take out of the grocery store. The idea, of course, is to encourage reusable bags and reduce the consumption of the materials in the bags the store provides. But wait a minute! You’re already paying for those bags. It’s factored into the cost of the products. The wholesale cost of the plastic bags is a penny apiece and three to four cents for paper. Furthermore, they’re all recycleable, but you have to take ‘em somewhere and give ‘em away. If I’m going to pay 17 cents apiece, I want the same amount when I take ‘em to the recycling center.

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There are always the letters. I got an Email from a listener with whom I’ve corresponded before saying he was weary of my Bush bashing and suggesting that I should skip all that and concentrate on personal, local and humorous commentary. He signed off as a recovering sarcastic. Okay. Chamba says the humor is the most potent part of Local Views, but I told my listener that I wouldn’t be joining that sarcasm recovery group. If I’m going to transition to humorist, I’ll need to crank up the smartass factor.