There's a lot of talk today about the "new" progressive Barack Obama. Actions speak louder than words. I've heard a lot of soaring rhetoric from the president; now it is time for serious progressive action. The president has disappointed me greatly to this point, and I need reason to hope for a "change I can believe in."

The way to avoid a two-party system is not to have single-member districts.

Proportional representation is one way to acheive that, but it relies on the existence of parties and doesn't guarantee geographical representation (putting people in office who know your local issues).

Another way would be to have multi-member (or rather multi-vote) districts, where the district is represented by several votes in the legislature and those votes are given to the candidates proportionately to the amount of the popular vote that they receive in the election. Yes, the legislators would have various amounts of power, but this is like shareholders of a corporation having different numbers of shares, and that power is porportional to the size of the electorate that wanted to be represented by the respective legislator. It doesn't rely on parties and almost guarantees that every voter will have a legislator that, in one person, represents them both ideologically and geographically.

RE: LBJ

Here is a bit of "insider" history -- Back in the day (circa 1960's), my mother was the personal, executive secretary to a man name Rhea Howard. Now Rhea inherited, and all of his life ran, the only newspaper in Wichita Falls, Texas. As a result, he was a very close friend of Lyndon B. Johnson. LBJ would often drop by the paper and meet with Rhea. He came to know and called my mom by her first name, gave her flowers, candy, birthday gifts, etc. Often mom would sit in on and take notes of meetings that Rhea and LBJ had. The first time that LBJ came by to see Rhea, after he left office, mom was privy to the REAL reason he quit. As you may know, LBJ's political career was, beginning in 1941, completely financed by Brown & Root. When George Brown died, about 1962, Brown & Root was taken over by Halliburton. As you may also know, Halliburton/Brown & Root was one of (if not the only/main) contractor for the Viet Nam war. They were making fortunes off building bases, roads, airstrips, etc. in Viet Name. When Halliburton bought Brown & Root, LBJ was part of the package and he didn't like it worth a damn because Halliburton had NO intention of stopping the extremely profitable war. So, as LBJ told Rhea on afternoon, "The only way I could git out from under those hogs was to just quit suckin' on their tit." He saw that the longer he stayed, the more money Halliburton would siphon off from his "Great Society" and he REALLY wanted to leave a legacy for the poor and disadvantaged.