Of Mice At Play And Beast-Men At Work

"Who wants to be the City's mayor? I am." I can't help thinking that's the tune that was going through Supervisor Daly's head last Wednesday as he swore in two members of his own choosing for the Public Utilities Commission in San Francisco. Daly was literally the last supervisor that Mayor Willie Brown would give the responsibility of being Acting Mayor to, but he did so as he went off on a trade tour to China.

Daly didn't like the look of the two people Brown had in mind to put on the commission - they smacked too much of political chit-cashing, being associated with major donors and the local Democratic committee - so he went his own sweet way. Not that Daly's running for mayor, but it puts his fellow supervisors who are running for mayor in a bit of a bind. The appointments have to be approved by at least eight of the eleven supervisors, so he has to have three others side with him.

It certainly made for fun viewing on the telly - news items showed Brown dressed up in a nabob outfit on an elephant in Tibet or somewhere, and then his enraged return to San Francisco having cut his trip short. Brown, aka Da Mayor, being famous for playing political hardball and infamous for dispensing favours, everyone was not-so-secretly delighted that he'd got his come-uppance, even while they anguished over whether such a blatant sticking to the letter of the law rather than the spirit of it was permissible. Daly had the power to do what he did. So he did it.

As far as the Democratic presidential primary is concerned, Wednesday was also the day that the tenth candidate had a worldwide webcast. He's been the tenth candidate since before General Clark got into the race and before Senator Graham got out of it. But you won't ever see him on any televised debates, because he's persona non grata with the Democractic National Committee.

Still, he expressed some interesting ideas in his webcast, so let me tell you about a couple of them. He would repeal the 1973 HMO legislation - which has turned health care into a bureaucracy so top-heavy with its own administrivia that there are more people trying to not pay out the insurance claims than there are doctors and nurses. He would reactivate the Veterans Hospital System, which is being closed down by the federal government at the very time that thousands of service men and women - including those who've been sent to Iraq from the reserves and the National Guard - are in need of that service.

He firmly believes that Dick Cheney should be impeached because of the mess he has led this country into and the loss of respect his obsession with empire-building has caused with regard to the United States' standing in the world. And he's convinced that a ginormous financial meltdown is on its way within the next year. Which wouldn't be a worry if he hadn't also once said - in early 1987 - that a financial crash would occur in October of that year.

Lyndon LaRouche is something of an oddball candidate - especially as he has a Youth Movement, and talks about Beast-men and Synarchists - but he has an understanding of the sweep of history that the other candidates don't seem to find it necessary to address. And if you don't find his account of events since the September 2003 inclusion of David (anti Oslo Peace Accord) Wurmser in Cheney's circle scary, then this coming Friday isn't Fright Night.

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