A few weeks ago I received a public email from Senator John Kerry that called for an urgent move to protect the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge from a covert Republican vote about to hit the Senate floor. The message's subject..."In 24-48 Hours."

Needless to say, the bill passed and the Senate voted 51 to 49 in favor of it. However, what shocked me the most was how fast this seemed to hit us. I am a follower of the news and I am a subscriber to www.johnkerry.com. I read the paper every day and watch the local news as often as possible. And yet, somehow, I heard nothing about this until "24-48 hours" prior to the vote. Even John Kerry didn't seem to have known until it was too late.

Is this what it has come to? Are we so blind to the workings of the Establishment that we know longer know when they are about to trash one of our nation's most precious resources to satiate our lust for black gold?

In short, yes.

Government secrecy has become an increasingly relevent issue over the past years, especially among the time of one of the most secretive administrations in history (and not to protect the public, just to cover their own trail of lies and corruption). And to think that in my local paper, on March 13, I read an article (Government secrecy, Chuck McCutcheon, Newhouse News Service) praising Senate Republicans for their less lenient policy on government secrecies as of late. The article discussed their attempts to update the 39-year-old Freedom of Information Act in order to increase public acsess to government information.

But not even a week later, seven of the little devils sneek past a bill to drill in ANWR, and it's passed less than a day after the public is made aware of it (If you could even say that!). Granted, this has nothing to do with FOIA, but it certainly tarnishes the Republicans' newfound record of "keeping the public up to speed." I guess that the public only needs kept up to speed when it's some "liberal scum" that we're trying to pass, right?

That's one of my biggest problems not only with Republicans, but with Americans in general: hypocrisy. People march outside of abortion clinics and Terri Schiavo's deathbed in support of life but they will fight to kill our prisoners and our wildlife. Republicans are trying to pass a bill that will prevent fillibusters on judicial nominations, but we know quite well that if it was Bill Clinton who was nominating a Supreme Court judge the Republicans would be up there fillibustering for days. I mean, at least Democrats stand up for what they believe. Republicans just wade through the murky waters of politics.

That's the thing about politics: it's all bogged down in logistics and bureaucracies so that we can't see anything but what we're told to see. Once you put politics into the equation there is no longer a "good" or "bad" but a game where people try to dart through loopholes without being caught, before their opponent. In this system, Satan could get elected President and we, the public, could care less.

But not everything has turned out badly. The day after the vote, I received another email from Kerry entitled, "51, 49 and 260,000." The letter opened:

"Dear Friend,

Yesterday, we saw a relentless Republican attack on one of our most treasured natural wonders sneak through the Senate on a 51 to 49 vote. But, we also saw more than 260,000 Americans act in less than 24 hours to add their names to our Citizens' Roll Call in favor of protecting the Arctic Refuge.

It was the first time ever that I or anyone else could stand on the Senate floor and announce that, in a day's time, a quarter of a million Americans had gone online to express their passionate support for a given course of action.

That awesome display of grassroots power rattled our opponents. They even railed against my e-mail message on the Senate floor and entered its text into the Senate record. So, think of it this way. The Republican leaders of the Senate have 51 reasons to celebrate today, but you and I have 260,000 reasons to do the same."

It went on for several more paragraphs, then closed. In the post-script, Kerry added:

"I told you that more than a quarter of a million people signed our Citizens' Roll Call in the first 24 hours after we launched it. Actually the news is even more impressive. As of this moment, there are over 400,000 signers to our Roll Call, including tens of thousands who signed after the vote to express their determination to keep fighting. Let's keep working."

CITIZENS' ROLL CALL