Kent I was there yesterday - don't know if you saw my post. Thank you for posting Grayson's petition. I am still in DC today before heading back to NYC tomorrow. I plan on walking back up the hill - it is a hill my calves are barking - and seeing who I can ambush! xxA

I'm trying to think of another Western nation that has a system which looks as dysfunctional as yours does today. So far, no luck.

Bonnie, happy if anything here helped. I was really sad I didn't have time to get the longer post I'd written up today but there's a bunch of research to be done.

Akopsa, yeah, the petition was the main thing I hope everyone picks up on.

Norwonk, yeah, it shows we're way ahead of those other countries on the evolutionary curve, eh? Well, look at the way it works in the market. First to market is rarely the market leader later. You don't see any Mosaic browsers leading the pack, for example. You don't use 1-2-3 for your spreadsheets, probably. For text editing you don't use MacWrite (nor actually I guess it was Bravo on the Xerox Altos, before the original Mac, if I recall right, that was the first or one of the first fully fonted WYSIWYG text editors). You probably don't use the first MP3 player (I want to say that was a Rio or something). The people who come to market after have the kinks out and avoid the major mistakes of the first. But the first still plays on, trying to compete.

Yes, pretty much a disaster. Could be the end of democracy as we have known it. (What's left of it anyway.) Thanks for the links.