Who's this Krugman guy? He's got a really good blog:

As we all know, the Bush administration essentially brushed aside all notion of due process. It locked up and tortured people it said were “enemy combatants”; it engaged in warrantless wiretapping; and so on.

We weren’t supposed to worry our pretty little heads about this, because we were supposed to take it as a given that these were people we could trust not to abuse their power.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department was interviewing job candidates, and asking,

What is it about George W. Bush that makes you want to serve him?

In other words, there was a combination of power without oversight and a deeply creepy cult of personality (which was obvious long before we got the latest specifics.)

I think we were lucky to get out of this with democracy more or less intact.

Let's not count our chickens, OK?

Jeremy Seabrook has a very pessimistic but, I think, powerful column in the Guardian in light of Barack Obama's world tour. It centers on Obama but has wider implications for the way we consider political leadership in the global context. For those of us who regularly read Seabrook, it is a well know fact that he is vehemently opposed to corporate globalization (he writes for the New Internationalist as well) and is a subscriber to the Habermasian school of Crisis of Legitimacy in the political sphere. This column is no departure from this.

His starting point here is the focus on personality politics:  Read more…

I heard --what show, about what state, I dunno-- on the teebee the other day claim that the average age of poll workers in this country is 72. Their ranks have been augmented by one in California:

On Super Tuesday, I will join thousands of other volunteers across the state and serve as an election clerk for the primary. I've been assigned to work at the Women's Club of Hollywood, which is not my polling place but is close enough to home that I can ride my bike there.

Or maybe not. My bike -- it has a basket. My basket -- it has two bumper stickers. They read: "Peace Out Bush" and "Defend America: Fire the Republicans." Another rule comes to mind: No electioneering within 100 feet of the polls. I will lock my bike to something that is 101 feet away.

The really sweet part is down towards the end, talking about going to Nevada in '04 to work for Kerry. It's late and she's tired:

Insert your plan here. The candidates clearly need our help articulating this one. Friday night after a nice dinner with family and cards is the wrong time to do this, but the thought did occur to me. Step by step, what do you want the 'critters to do? Or, what do you dream of doing? No restriction, speak freely about what you think would/should/could work.

Via today's Juan Cole, a report cited to the LA Times, headlined

Thursday's session of parliament had to be cut short when a rancorous debate broke out.

The initial issue was Shiites displaced from Diyala province to the holy city of Karbala. Speaker Muhammad al-Mashhadani was accused of smiling at a time when grief was more appropriate. He was then upbraided by a fellow Sunni from a different party. He slapped the MP before pounding his gavel and closing the session.

Further research into specific names will be required in order to properly engrave the plaque on the forthcoming Preston Brooks Trophy for

Part 1 is here; Part 2 is here.
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Several years ago, in the pages of my first blog, ddjangoWIrE, I wrote an essay with the same title. When Blogger "accidentally" deleted my account, relegated ddjangoWIrE to a stripped archive, and "lost" some of my posts, the piece converted to disconnected bits in cyberspace and the essay was gone.

I'm really not going to use that disappearance as the primary excuse to post another brief essay on the same subject. Given the state of our nation, our democracy, and the inattention, malaise, and downright selfishness of its people, there are quite enough reasons to revisit this territory.

Contributed by special correspondent Evening Pilgrim

On November 4, 2006, four days before the mid-term elections, the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco sponsored a daylong event in the form of a discussion focused upon the idea of Democracy “as it originated in ancient Greece and as it now appears in America.” One of the key participants, Paul Woodruff, PhD, is author of First Democracy: The Challenge of an Ancient Idea. In that compact essay, Dr. Woodruff presents several observations that many Americans may find surprising. For example:

Given the nature of mass media in the USA is democracy possible in a http://wc.wustl.edu/eitm/qrevotenew.pdf "> Nash Equilibrium ?

In contrast to previous research, we find little evidence that citizens are mobilized by or learn from presidential advertisements, but strong evidence that they are persuaded by them. This research supports the contention that political communication is best conceived of as propaganda rather than a vehicle to enhance democratic accountability. We find that campaign advertisements are able to persuade voters to support one candidate over another.