Earmarks. While Bush was busy scooping up executive power for himself, Congress was generating record amounts of pork. The average Congressman these days can stay in power by simply delivering his district's slice of the bacon. Since this is all voters hold members of Congress responsible for, this is all they do.

In my native state of Louisiana, for instance, the entire Congressional delegation has been focused on Katrina recovery money. When you are going around begging for a few bucks to plug a levee, you don't have the political capital to stand up to the President on big matters like the FISA law.

Bush's promise in the State of the Union Address to veto any pork-laden fiscal bills is a blatant lie. Bush & Co. know that as long as they ladle out the pork, there will be no resistance on Capital Hill.

By the way, I thank you for your writing. You are the rare writer out there who sees the real evil in this administration.

I can understand (to some extent) politicians promising something for nothing. What I can't understand is why the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, who are appointed to 7 year terms and selected particularly for the economic acumen, do the same thing. How could the Fed think a 20% annual rise in housing prices is sustainable? How could anyone think dual income California families would continue to buy $800,000 houses for all eternity? The U.S. savings rate has been near zero for years, and how often did Alan Greenspan complain about that?

My check will pay down debt. Or here's an even better idea: Use the check to buy U.S. Savings bonds. That way, the government is giving me a stimulus check, which I hand back to them to pay the debt they incur by giving me the check, and I get paid the interest.

Now that's what I call a swindle!

Certainly there are better ways to choose elected leaders, but the public will never buy it. It's a little like evolution and global warming -- the scientific evidence is there, but it is too complicated to sell to the electorate. The advantage of the system we have now is that it is so simple everyone understands it. You vote for one candidate, most votes wins.

Try explaining to the unwashed masses why we should amend the constitution to allow voters to rate presidential candidates on a scale of 1 to 10. It works great on Hot or Not (a great site, by the way) but on Hot or Not the stakes are relatively low. If Hot or Not were rigged, who would really care? But awarding the presidency on the basis of best average score means the voters have to trust that the averaging is done correctly. Is anyone really going to check? Re-checking and crunching all those precinct numbers would be a daunting prospect.

So how do you convince 2/3s of the states to approve a constitutional amendment? Republicans are always suspicious of academics. They won't allow such a drastic change to happen just because a bunch of academics are arguing for it. Moreover, too many people have money invested in gaming the system as it is.

I do have one suggestion though. Some states could have parallel elections in which citizens vote once the regular way and then a second time the Hot or Not way. Then the results could be compared, though only the most-votes-wins method really counts. Maybe after a few mock parallel elections people would get used to the idea and go along with it. Maybe.

I scan and scan through this article trying to figure out what Stausbaugh means by "sissy." McCain is a sissy even though he is a war hero and, it seems to me, could be considered courageous because he is leading a charge against the extreme right and towards the middle. Reagan is not a sissy, although he was an actor who played the war hero in the movies and never really stood for much besides amorphous America.

He likes LBJ, who I agree is a tough guy, but also JFK, who, to be fair, died before he ever accomplished anything beyond giving a few very nice speeches. And he doesn't like Obama for exactly the same reason.

He says people who believe in global warming are sissies, even though they really stand for something (environmental responsibility) and advocate for drastic social changes to preserve the environment. If anyone acts on their convictions, it is green people.

As far as I can see, anybody Strausbaugh dislikes is a sissy, and anyone he likes is not. This is intellectual thinking that rivals the depth of a cistern in drought-plagued Atlanta.

He gives me hope. If anyone that lazy can get published in the New York Times, there is yet hope for me as a writer.

I think New Orleans has been through quite enough the last few years to be turned into a joke by a couple of feminists who are jokes themselves.

As for kufir77, the shit you smell is between your own ears.