Waiiit a sec. Stop. Hold everything. Shouldn't we ALL be madder than hell? I mean, really.. I pay 45% of my (not inconsequential) income. I bet you do too - whatever your income is. Or more. Unless you happen to be in the top tenth of a percent, you're kind of getting screwed on this whole tax thing..

And THEY CANT EVEN COUNT OUR VOTES?

WHAT? Waiiit. I pay many hours of my time.. many, many hours of my time.. to a government that can't even get proper voting systems? I thought this pretended to be a democracy, but it looks like the bald truth might be coming out on this one. You're being taxed without being represented.. remember why we started this country? What they taught you in elementary school? Well, they LIED! Yes, they really did.

And we're all adult, and we know that now, right? Okay? We get it, says the American People.

People, we have the internet to organize. We have our own media, we don't need theirs. We need central places to host those media, and we need to make sure they're safe from any kind of corruption.

And then we need to, in a word, kick the bastards out. This means all of us have to work together.. which means we have to decide what we want to work together on.

Here's my challenge. If you bothered to read this, write a email with your suggestions for a better government to sheer. I'll take the most interesting ones, and grind them through my mind, and if there's enough interest, I'll start a mailing list.

Hint: To fix the current problems, we must start out by stating them.

So, I'll take a shot at it. We were promised that the common man would be represented. That's the whole idea of representative government, and probably worked great back in days of lower population. But I bet you half the senators in the house don't read their own email. They have underlings to do it for them - underlings which are _all the same party as they are_. This doesn't give you a accurate representation, it gives you a party representation.

Parties, in case you all hadn't noticed, are bad. They force all issues to be binary, when in fact all issues are very clearly _not_ binary. Our federal government, which was supposed to exist to say 'Thou Shalt Not Interfere With Their Freedom', at least that's the theory they always sold us in middle school, instead plays 'I shall interfere the most, for I am king'.

Okay, so we need to fix that. Now how about the amount of money that goes into electing a leader - money that is essentially, almost any way you look at it, a bribe from the new leader to the media.

What do I mean? Okay, here's what I mean. Candidates pay for ads.. pay outrageous amounts of money, given that chances are, if they were a serious contender and they had something interesting to say, at least the public channels would carry them. Hence, what one is tempted to think they are doing is paying bribes to the media. In any case, the money is bound to influence the media, and influencing your media, which is your data transmission channel to the people, is a bad idea. It leads to broken things.

So, you, the individual schmo on the street aren't getting the proper data about what the representatives are doing. And, even if you were, you couldn't do anything about it because the government doesn't even measure your votes properly or accurately.. or think they count for much of anything. And after you've voted, you lose all control for several years.. because your rep sure isn't going to read the emails you send. Think about how many times you've gotten a form letter that wasn't even appropriate for the comments you sent in, or didn't really reveal how the rep felt about it or the data they had on it? And some senators aren't even allowed to reply to email except by postal mail. People, that is DUMB!

The system's broken.

We're paying a lot of money for the broken system.

Let's fix it.

Or stop paying.