First time in ought six. Last week we talked about what did and did not happen in ‘05, so I guess this is reflection time. What did Local Views do in ‘05 and what might it do in ‘06. The answer, for sure, is "more of the same." I don’t see ‘06 as a year of great strides for people of the progressive stripe. I’m optimistic that the Bush gang and the right wing protestants will be declawed, but I agree with Chamba that impeachment is out of the question because we don’t have the votes. ‘06, therefore, will be a year of treading water and trying to pile up the resources with which to launch the big bang next year leading up to the Bush gang high tailing it out of Washington. Can we be ready? God help us, but we’ll probably have to rely on the Democrats. Can you suck up John Kerry one more time, or do you think we can influence the donkeys to do something a little more adventurous? It’s a golden opportunity, because the Elephants are not doing any planning for the future. They’ll be cleaning out the safe and clearing out of town, so why not force the Democrats to nominate Swami Beyond Ananda for President. We can’t lose and we might not get another opportunity like this for decades.

Any reflection on Local Views always settles on the "preaching to the choir" factor. I’ve worked in commercial radio where the listeners were not especially happy to hear what I had to say, and that’s a lot more exciting than talking to people who are likely to agree with me most of the time. Or is it? Sometimes the choir is a tougher audience than the congregation which knows exactly why it wants to rip your lungs out.

I was pleased to hear the musical duet called Emma’s Revolution which appeared with Holly Near and Utah Phillips in Grass Valley last month. They specifically attacked the "preaching to the choir" factor with the declaration that, "The choir needs us," and a song called Where is the Choir?. I seldom hear from the people who ought to be a little perturbed by Local Views, because they aren’t listening, but I often hear from people who are buying the same big picture but are upset by some detail which catches their eye along the way. I praised Cindy Sheehan to the skies, but I caught heat for mentioning that she is a skilled and sophisticated media manipulator.

There lies the great political weakness of the people who call themselves "progressive." While carving each other up over the insignificant details, their political adversaries, with at least as many internal struggles, spin a united face to the mass media and regularly kick the butts of the progressives who can’t even sustain an alternative political party. Why should the Democrats listen to the Greens. They don’t even vote. The Donkeys think the key to survival is stealing votes from the Republicans, and the great pitfall for the progressives is that it will be way too easy for the Democrats to do exactly that in the next general election. If the Greens were barely visible in ‘04, the real danger is that they’ll be completely invisible in ‘08. My great fear is that the country will elect a Democrat in ‘08 who promises a ten-year plan for pulling the military out of Iraq.

Speaking of Iraq, it’s interesting to note that the latest U.S. adventure in the cradle of human civilization now has been going on longer that the U.S. involvement in WWII. In other words, it’s taking longer to save the world from Iraq’s global domination schemes that it took to simultaneously stop the Japanese from dominating the Pacific and repel Hitler’s annexation of western Europe. That Saddam Hussein must be a pretty tough character. We’ve had him behind bars for about three years, but we still can’t beat back his armies. In case you missed it, the answer to that riddle is that the U.S. is not fighting Saddam’s armies in Iraq; it’s just fighting the people who want the U.S. to get the hell out of Dodge. If there’s just one Democrat somewhere who can see the solution to that little problem, let’s nominate him or her for President.

While we’re defeating international terrorism in Iraq, I note that the Department of Homeland Security, due to budget cuts, is slashing the amount of aid it provides to local jurisdictions for actually securing potential terrorist targets. I guess I should have mentioned this before, but I’ve been wondering for over four years why we’re sending the cavalry to Iraq, but we don’t appear to be circling the wagons around the "homeland." I mean, back in ‘01, some guys hijacked some airplanes which were supposed to be secure, then they penetrated some air space which was supposed to be secure, and they crashed those airplanes into some buildings which were supposed to be secure. Instead of securing those places which were already supposed to be secure, we sent a bunch of kids to the other side of the world to kill and be killed in the act of stealing some oil. Even the right wing protestant evangelists ought to be able to see something wrong with this picture.

Jack Abramoff agreed on Monday that he’s been bribing Congressmen, but that’s all the news cats will tell us, so far. We still don’t know who he’s agreed to finger. Safe to say it won’t be Bush, Cheney or Rumsfeld, although the Bush campaign people have been busy identifying money which came from Abramoff and redirecting it to charity. So Bush admits to being dirty. Big deal. It’s not the first time. He admits that he’s illegally wiretapping your phone calls, too. "Who’s gonna stop me?" is his reply, and I haven’t yet heard a plausible answer. There was a time when the President would have said, "I’m sorry," and "I’ll never do it again," but these days, the guy who thinks he’s the president says he’ll keep on doing it and starts looking for the despicable bastards who blew the whistle. Don’t be waiting around for the Democrats to do anything. Bush’s apologists can’t really defend what he’s doing, but they’re quick to point out, correctly, that the Democrats do it too. The rumor mill says that Abramoff is going after as many Donkeys as he can find in his little black book.