Some of my contributions in his aid were inadvertently syndicated here, with HTML not escaped properly, etc. I’ve removed those posts.

From the point of view of this writer, who witnessed the Washington, DC gathering near the White House, it was both muddy and a muddled thunder.

• The original Boston Tea Party was as much about representation as it was about taxes. Most of the folks in attendence in DC were from out of town; from actual states where they have representation.There may be a broader point to be made about government responsiveness, but that appeared to be lost here.
• A friend pointed out an interesting fact: that the colonists’ taxes sky-rocketed after the American revolution. They had war debt to pay for and representation didn’t help them much there. Truly, that is a significant part of the problem here too, and it seems that those protesting both taxes and the budget overall would protest a deescalation of US militarism.
• It seems to be an uncontroversial point of fact that most of these folks in fact will likely see a decrease in their taxes, as few are likely part of the single digit percentage that make enough to be subject to tax increases (no, I’m not counting the nicotine tax).
• In general the protest seemed to be aimed at straw men, built up by the organizers backed by lobbyists and certain Republican politicians and aimed at the Democrats. Unfortunately this seems to serve long-standing interests and doesn’t really threaten anyone, whoever you thought was responsible for whatever you thought you were protesting if you were a participant.
• With regards to the tea party theme, the unfortunate choice to announce use tea bags as part of the protest, and to use the phrase “tea-bagging,” further alienated this particular exercise from the mainstream.

Still, they stood in the rain, proud to exercise their right to redress their grievances — so long as they were at a certain distance (I’m told they intended to be in front of the Treasury, and got moved to Lafayette Park where I witnessed them later). They were reportedly cleared out of the park when someone threw something (tea bags?) over the White House fence. I’d argue this was largely ineffective, at least in terms of the best ostensible intentions of the participants, that their indigence was used — maybe even against their own interests.

Don’t read these observations as implicit support for Obama’s overall economic policy, or for the nature of the corporate media, this writer is a critic of both. Still, there was also a chuckle or two when viewing this clip from last night’s “Countdown” on MSNBC :

We could probably do with some links and other direct citations here, but this is literally a passing observation written down as both the event and the media of it was absorbed in the course of other business.

They plan another lap to disrupt rush hour later, I’m told.

Meanwhile, BoingBoing has a post citing the New York Sun’s reporting on some speculation that American gas prices will have to be more in line with Europe’s (approaching $10 a gallon) sooner rather than later.

It seems to me that the federal government has a motley and incoherent collection of economic policies given it’s so-called “free” trade stance: Inefficient and exploited subsidies, hypocritical tariffs, and taxes or tax policies that don’t make sense. The US is hardly the only country guilty of this, but it does seem to have the most significant amplitude of noise compared to the signal of its ostensible free trade goals.

The trucker’s seemed to mainly be campaigning for expanded exploration and exploitation of domestic fossil fuels, rather than increased fuel efficiency. At the same time, it seems like we’ll need to internalize more costs, that are currently ignored (although more and more acknowledged, most prominently, the ecological cost that also affects our productivity). Insofar as the state exists, surely it has some role in at least defining that.

It seems that in spite of the protest, all will have to get used to the idea of European-sized gas prices and the affect that will have on the price of other goods. Whatever’s left of the free market will answer with efficient vehicles and more coherent transportation planning, as well more tempered consumption in general.

Many things are intertwined with this issue and changing just one facet, whether you take it in a more free-market or in a more socialized direction, will not fix things with out other components changing in concert. The more unilaterally factors are changed, without conscious education about the ripple effect, the greater the disconnect and the greater the hurt for those of us who can’t afford the consequences in the short term.

I got a little abstract there, but I’m no economist so I can’t quickly dig into the specifics and it seems at a high level this is common sense, whichever ideological line you toe.

Catholic anti-war demonstrators marched on the White House today, setting off at noon from St. Matthew’s Cathedral. Today’s action was part of their observation of Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent and a tradition with a theme of repentence.

A flyer being handed out quoted Pope Benedict XVI as saying “Christ needs apostles ready to sacrifice themselves. He needs witnesses and martyrs.” This kind of quotation seems to be in line with other citations of church authority and scripture that this group uses to explain its non-violent activism.

Many of the participants also participate in a weekly Friday mid-day vigil outside the White House that has gone on since the United States invaded Iraq in 2003.

They were led by Art Laffin, a long-time activist and organizer with the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker. I’ve spoken with Laffin on a couple of occasions, including while doing a piece for Free Speech Radio News on the Friday vigil and the 3rd anniversary of the Iraq War, and I later witnessed him take part in a large march to the Pentagon that week. Laffin recognized and greeted me as he passed.

I encountered the march returning to my office during my lunch break. I was leaving the vicinity of the Lafayette Park as they approached, so I did not witness what happened after they arrived. Often this group engages in civil disobedience (I witnessed them engage in CD more than once, including during the previously mentioned march and on the anniversary of the Nagasaki bombings this year), but I hadn’t heard of any such plans this time around.

In Lafayette Park, on the North side of the White House, you could see signs of the processions imminent arrival if you knew what to look for. The uniformed Secret Service and Park Police seemed to have a few extra personnel on Pennsylvania Avenue and around the park. An elderly man sat down on a bench. He wore jeans and a reasonable jacket, but carried a priest’s cassock to pull over his other clothes, presumably to join the demonstrators.

Today he posted a brief analysis of the current conflict in Chad, starting with recent (but to some, long-forgotten) history of “development” efforts made by transnational corporations (ExxonMobil and ChevronTexaco), backed by the World Bank, in concert with an obviously corrupt government.

Analysis like this is part of what journalism should be: Giving credit where credit is due and identifying the disparity between the asserted policy, the allegedly intended cause and effect and what the evidence suggests the actual cause and effect may be and, depending on how policy-makers act in the face of the evidence, what actual policy may be despite rhetoric.

Complementing Silverstein’s more wizened and first hand observations regarding this conflict, I had my own brief anecdotal encounter with the issue. One Friday evening last August, leaving the Press Building, I encountered a small demonstration by Chadians of their Ambassador at the National Press Club. Here are a couple of shots and a summary of what I learned from them.