First of all, three cheers to Franko for scoring a job with the NY Dean campaign. Color me jealous. Not that I don't like my job out here, but he's getting into the belly of the beast for real. I maintain my involvement --though I've been having to ease my way out of many focal positions as my free time disappears -- but strictly as an amateur. I helped Howard2 get bayarea4dean.com up, but mostly I've been working on my own stuff.

Speaking of which, we did a big upgrade on the MfA site. Check it out; read our sterling and unvarnished analysis; groove to our tunes. Get excited.

I've been doing a lot of code lately, and not a lot of writing in english. There's so much content waiting to come out, but I'm not quite there yet. Blocked, stuck, stricken with some hesitation. Dean's rolling on course to the nomination, which I cheer with all my might from the sidelines. My political focus has broadened; the goal now is to prepare firtile ground for the general election, to drive the movement forward and usher new participants into the fold.

Oh, and Axiom is going on without me. Nothing could thrill me more.

Tom Friedman, the mustached man in the NYT opinion section, has weighed in with another of his bold realpolitik visions: because Saudi Arabia will pony up $1B in aid for Iraq and both France and Germany left us hanging, we are seeing the beginnings of the disintegration of "the West."

Perhaps. He makes a salient point that contemporary European politcs stem from 1989, by the fall of the Berlin wall, the end of the Soviet Union and a desire for multilateralism and shared authority, whereas America is defined largely by 9-11 and is casting about wildly for "security" as opposed to peace,denying the fact that our reason d'superpower has vanished. We are in very real ways on very different pages, and the question is open as to who's vision, if either, for the world will be the first to budge.

A good point, and one to ponder, but to return to the matter at hand, it seems obvious that he most salient factor in disparity of Saudi and European aid for Iraq is much more immediate: how will the money be spent? If we had an international open bidding procees for reconstruction contracts administered by the UN, something tells me that our traditional allies would be more willing to pony up the dough.

The shorter Tom Friedman: We're not war profiteers.

So in the face of dwindling time resources, my potential avenues of expression are expanding. I like to read and post over on the Daily Kos, and he's made the big leap to scoop, which means I now have my own diary there. While I'm currently using that for stuff that is more or less focused at that community, I may start doing more of my harder-core political noodling in that space.

I mean, it's not like many of you really need my two-bit advice on how to harnass the winds of change. Lots of places to go for that.

In addition to the Kos thing I'm going to also start pouring a lot of my pep-talk energy into my blog on Music for America. I might cross-post on occasion; I'll at least put up a link whenever anything good goes on. The point is that this spot is going to be more personal than anything else, back to the old ways.

Better Than Sex is the title of Hunter S. Thompson's book about the 1992 presidential campaign. As I find myself more steeped in the world of politics -- with fair to good results on my sum personal happiness -- I can't help but reflect where all this is leading.

Might I someday run for office? Michael Moore suggested it to the audience at Berkeley last weekend and that gives me the chutzpah to bring it up in public. I might be able to hack it at a low level, but that's rarely a paying gig and I don't come from money. Money is an obstacle to bigger things, but might be raised. But I tend to think that the seamy underbelly of my website might also be an issue.

It shocks me that people are still shocked that I put all this out there. I mean, why not? I did all these things, didn't I? No point in pretending otherwise. But it's a political liability, maybe. I sometimes do think I'm too radical a revelator to make people feel at ease. Perhaps that's just a lack of self-confidence. Sometimes I flip it and think, "fuck you and your obscurity; truth is a live wire dynamo that doesn't end." And then I think "Hubris, Koenig."

Maybe my role is more cultural. I wrote once in a fit of pique in my personal pen and paper journal, wrote as part of a lenghthy jag against Everything, the question, "where is the Hunter S. Thompson of my generation? Probably off somewhere blogging." I was thinking of Justin Hall, but maybe it's me. Somehow that doesn't seem right either.

I know that Frank and I (and others) have talked often enough about how public speakers at political events tend to really suck. I know that I care about a lot of things. I know that I'm halfway decent at articulating a vision if I take some time to figure out what it is before hand. I know that I can turn a pretty phrase, and have an abiding interest in humanity in all it's various kinky permutations.

The question is where does this leave me? I'm wary of the responsibilities of leadership, tending to hide behind my de-centralization mantra, the idea of being an inspiration to other people to be inspiring, to empower people to empower people. This kind of mantra isn't new; it's common to most hucksters. Not that I'm in it for the snakeoil by any stretch, but I look at the words that come out of my mouth and even I can't take them all that seriously. Too etherial. What about the last minute, the time when everything gets done?

No answers tonight of course, and none really needed. Just the stuff that's on my mind having no book to read. I finished Haruki Murakami's South of the Border, West of the Sun today... man does that guy spin out the romance. That triggers a whole other set of things to go on about, but most of it's predictable; think I'll leave it at this for now.