At a recent presentation, I told them of my reaction to the 2/8/09 color photo in the Post (M-13) of the U.S. Marine Band. In uniforms reminiscent of a production of The Student Prince, there were 122 musicians! Memory tells me that John Phillips Sousa got along famously with only 26 when he led it.

[This may not be new news, but for some reason the item showed up a couple days ago on my RSS news reader and I believe it's still worth thinking about.]

Nearly 100 years ago President Woodrow Wilson pegged the Senate filibuster for exactly what it was. Wilson asserted that the filibuster served only to enable "a little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own," to debase the Senate and turn it into "the only legislative body in the world which cannot act when its majority is ready for action."

It is because of this spirit — this great decency and great strength — that I have never been more hopeful about America's future than I am tonight. ['Never been more hopeful that what worked on the campaign trail can work again and again and again. Besides, I don't know any other way to relate to people than by being a huckster.']

Corporations will take their time to really begin to weigh in using their newfound First Amendment rights. They'll want to test the waters; none of them wants to become a sacrificial lamb, or scapegoat; and all of them are very much aware that hasty action risks galvanizing determined opposition. Moreover, nobody can foresee all the nasty unintended consequences of this revolutionary ruling. For an immortal entity, especially, it makes sense to take things slowly. Most likely they'll tinker in 2010; they'll put their thumbs ever so carefully on the scales in 2012; they'll be prepared to pursue some serious gambits by 2014; but, assuming everything else stays much the same, they won't fully open the money sluice before the end of the decade, if not later. Such corporate political calculations work two ways: the public probably gains plenty of time to mobilize but that same delay will lull people into complacency.

The Supreme Court's wholesale rejection of a century of statutes regulating corporate contributions to political campaigns is a breath of fresh air in a hypocrisy-ridden political process. It certainly ought to sweep away the tendency of timid rationalizers to deny the existence of corporate domination and control of every aspect of governance in the United States — a fact which should have already been made abundantly clear by the terms of the bank bailout and the health care travesty.