Freedom of speech was instituted by the founders as a way of assuring that minority opinions and creative solutions would be allowed to circulate and be evaluated on their merits. Hence the value and even necessity of keeping candidates with small numbers of backers in the debates and news reports. The consequence of having corporate executives "prune" the possible candidate lists before the voters have had a chance is to censor the voices of those with profoundly different approaches to our multitude of problems and give us the nit-picking Tweedledee vs. Tweedledum candidates currently being offered. In this modern totalitarian state the corporate gatekeeper of media preserve the illusion of free speech and free elections by making "unpersons" out of candidates whose platforms are in any significant way hostile to continuing domination by corporate power. Anyone who voted for Dennis Kucinich, Ron Paul, Mike Gravel, or Cynthia McKinney can at least have the satisfaction of having flipped the corporate culture the proverbial bird.

A Hamiltonian conservative favors measures that assure the continuing dominance of the already wealthy and powerful. This includes a large centralized government with a "unitary executive", use of the military to use force and intimidation to secure resources and markets in foreign countries, giving tax cuts and no-bid contracts to big business, generation of a mounting government debt load, and allowing the government to monitor the flow of communications and information with an eye to identifying and possibly eliminating those whose ideas may become actionable threats to the dominance of the ruling class. The pre-Bill of Rights Constitution is in many ways a Hamiltonian vehicle.

A Jeffersonian conservative favors measures that broaden participation and empowerment among the citizens. This includes a relatively small, decentralized government dominated by the legislative branch, use of the military for defensive purposes only, using taxation to raise revenue and to help prevent the accumulation of vast wealth in the hands of a few, running balanced budgets and paying down government debt, and promoting the free flow of information while guaranteeing the security of private communications. The post-Bill of Rights Constitution, with is broadening of the voting franchise and enumeration of rights, is an increasingly Jeffersonian document.

The Republicans are currently in a tizzy because they are having a tough time figuring out which kind of conservative they are supposed to be. The Bush-Cheney neocons are the most extreme of the Hamiltonians, but they have taken this about as far as the American people will currently allow. Ron Paul represents the Jeffersonian ideal, but his trouncing in the recent primaries shows that the Republicans as a whole are not ready for his kind of enlightened approach. Probably the best thing for the party would be the kind of disintegration its Federalist and Whig predecessors experienced, allowing reformation along more consistently ideological lines.

We now appear to have a government that operates totally on expediency and not on principle. For the Federal government to borrow $150 million, mostly, no doubt, from China, so the politicians can send a paltry few hundred dollars to each citizen is the kind of false patronage that helped bring down the Roman Empire. I deeply resent the added burden of debt laid on future generations by this Administration, and it appears, this Congress. I'll probably put the money in some kind of investment or donate it to the campaign of a politician opposed to these kinds of shenanigans. Stupid-is-as-stupid-does.

My next question is, if the government is sending out checks to stave off this pothole of a recession, what will it do when we hit chasm of the post-peak oil mega-depression in two to five years?

And now she must reap the whirlwind. Neocon Bush/Cheney enabler Clinton can expect no mercy for her backing of the Iraq invasion and occupation and the infamously misnamed Patriot Act. I voted for Bill Clinton in '92 and '96, expecting him to pursue a Democratic agenda, then watched in dismay as he promoted the WTO and NAFTA at the expense of the American people. Hillary Clinton now has established an equally bad or worse reputation as a DINO, Democrat-In-Name-Only. We need leaders who will openly repudiate the immoral and destructive policies of Bush/Cheney. Barack Obama seems to be doing that.

Senator McCain's claim that the fight against Islamic terrorism is the "pre-eminent challenge of our time" is patently absurd. To be fixated on Islamic terrorism is like worrying about a biting mosquito while facing a charging tiger. For starters, one can't be regarded as serious about national security without a workable plan for checking the flood of illegal immigrants still coming across our southern border.

The REAL threats to our national security are not exclusively external, but are built into the warp-and-weave of American life. First, we have an infrastructure and economy that is totally dependent on a limited and increasingly expensive to obtain resource: petroleum. We need strong leadership to make the transition to a post-carbon future. Fresh water depletion is becoming a very serious problem, as much of our western states agriculture is based on irrigation using non-renewing aquifers. Global warming is intimately connected to the use of petroleum and coal and is a demonstrable threat to national security. Somewhat unrecognized in the press to date is the wasting of fertile soil due to erosion and the misappropriation of agricultural land to suburban sprawl. I am far more afraid of huge economic disruptions resulting in social chaos in the years ahead than the pimple-on-my-butt problem of Islamic terrorism.