LOL! I was writing my response to the use of the word "loyal" just as you were and you posted one minute before me.

Like minds!

Bad figure of speech on my part palin, not funny, and yes I am believing more and more that 911 was an inside job. Building seven is one convincing piece of evidence To go along with many other things. We must resist government domination in our lives in order to strip them of over bearing power and our dependence on it.

Thom,

Did you misspeak? Loyal opposition? This has been the most DISloyal opposition in American history.

Here's the problem IMHO: Obama DID have a mandate in 2008. To have simply overcome the racial barrier was a phenominal achievement. He mobilized old white guys like me to actually contribute for the first time to a political campaign. He did it with lofty rhetoric and a level of intelligence and apparent sensitivity to all that was wrong with the Bush/Cheney fiasco. It didn't hurt his campain that Bush was an obvious cretin and pawn to the likes of Cheney, Rumsfeld and the Neocons. There is no denying that the Republican leadership threw down every roadblock at their disposal to ensure that he was a "one term president". BUT he had the mandate and the momentum. The Republicans were on their backs. He had both houses of congress, plus a super majority in the senate. He could have rammed through a single payer health care system and his base would have had his back. He could have unilaterally shut down Guantanimo, stopped warrantless wiretapping, prosecuted those responsible for the economic meltdown, restored the damage done to civil liberties under Bush .... etc., etc .... But no. He Retained Larry Summers (Mr. Wall Street insider) as his chief economic advisor. He named boy wonder Tim Geithner (head of the New York Fed while all the hankey pankey was going on) as Treasury Secretary, and he set his man Eric Holder off in a direction to consolidate and strengthen all of the agregious civil liberties violations started under Bush. Yes, he bailed out Detroit (and a lot of Wall Street elite including Mitt Romney got a very nice bonus in the process). Yes, he got some semblance of a health care reform package passed (and the Insurance companies got 30 million new customers that are now required by law to subscribe or pay penalties while big pharma continues to gouge US customers with impunity). He wound down Iraq but escallated Afghanistan. Now he's setting up bases in Africa and expanding our military footprint in the Pacific to counter some imagined threat from China. He's declared himself "Decider" when it comes to dropping a bomb on anyone, anywhere, anytime, without due process, if that individual constitutes a threat in his personal opinion. I'm not making this up! So I'm a little disappointed. I think Barack Obama is and never was what we had hoped him to be. This second term will tell the story. I believe the only hope for this country, long term, is for people to realize that neither of the two major parties is working in the best interest of the American People. We desperately need a third party to offset the process that started over 30 years ago to consolidate the wealth in the hands of the few and co-opt our political institutions and the media. God help us if we don't wake up.

Obama is a corporatist (much like his inauguration coordinator Chuck Schummer and his unequivocal support of hedge funders.) The underlying agenda of corporatist politicians is to preserve the plutocracy. While the Republicans would like us all to work in the plantation fields, the president and his Democratic cronies would bring some of us into the main house. While the two parties argue over who is deserving, in either poltical scenario they offer our status as Serfs remains fixed.

I am cautiously optomistic.

Today, Pres. Obama seemed to echo a line from his first inaugural address, using the opener, "We reject..." In 2009, he said "We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals."

1. Pass a Constitutional Amendment Confirming the Right to Vote

Most Americans believe that the "legal right to vote" in our democracy is explicit, not just implicit, in our federal Constitution. Despite two centuries in which the right to vote has been affirmed and expanded as a constitutional right, the U.S. system of elections still does not adequately protect voting rights. Indeed, Justice Scalia in Bush v. Gore claimed that, "the individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States." (Bush v. Gore, 531 U.S. 98, 104 (2000)). Because the Supreme Court made this ruling. It is easy for other citizens to interfere with your voting rights. We must work to adopt a federal constitutional amendment confirming every citizen's right to vote.

2. Guarantee a Voter-Marked Paper Ballot for All Voting verification

Every voting system in the United States must be equipped to facilitate a permanent, visible record of every vote cast, and to honor the right of the voter to mark their own ballot themselves. The public is the only realistic check on vote counts. Those in power cannot be trusted to count or process -- unsupervised -- the very ballots by which they come into office. Any system that allows secret and therefore unverifiable vote counting is unacceptable because it denies the right to vote.

Voters must know that their vote will count and make a difference. Every recent presidential election has been marred because commitees discounted millions of incomplete, provisional and absentee ballots. This discounting of votes has disproportionately impacted people of color. Election officials should wait until after any recounts have been completed to provide final certification of election results.

3. Make Election Day a National Holiday or an Election Week

Working people should not be forced to choose between exercising their right to vote and getting to work on time. Holding national elections on a national holiday will greatly increase the number of available poll workers and polling places and increase overall turnout, while making it much easier for working Americans to go to the polls, and give more time for the poll workers to count the votes. Every possible opportunity must be provided for citizens to vote, even by mail.

4. Make it Easier to Vote

Many citizens are discouraged from voting by unnecessary bureaucratic hurdles and restrictions. Our current system forces millions of voters to wait up to ten hours to vote. This is unacceptable, and it disenfranchises those who cannot afford to wait. We must not discourage citizens from voting with unnecessary bureaucratic hurdles and restrictions. To ensure equal access and minimize the wait at the polls, election authorities must allocate resources based upon the number of potential voters per precinct. We must put an end to the practice of allowing citizens to challenge the voting rights of other individual voters at the polls. Instead, the government must invest in campaigns designed to educate voters about how they can exercise and protect their right to vote.

5. Abolish Electoral College,

It is time to end the safe state/battleground state dichotomy and make all votes equal, no matter in what state the voter lives. We must amend the Federal Constitution to replace election of the President by the Electoral College with direct election by the voters. However, as long as the Electoral College existss, we must amend our state laws and constitutions to allocate each state's electors to the winner of the national popular vote.

We must replace the current system of partisan election administration, because partisan secretaries of state, county clerks, election commissioners, and other partisan officials are able to issue rulings and draw districts that favor their own political parties and themselves. Once the districts are drawn in favor of one party, that party may then make the rules and SPLIT the electoral votes of the state, between contestants. THIS PROCESS IS CURRENTLY BEING EXPLOITED TO DIVIDE THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE IN WHAT IS CALLED "RED MAPPING"!!

6. Replace Partisan Election Commissions with Proportional Representation

We citizens, must replace our current "first-past-the-post" system with Approval Voting. Unlike the current system, which forces voters to reject their preferred candidate in favor of a "lesser evil" who may have a better chance of defeating the candidate they most fear, Approval Voting allows them to choose both. In this way, it eliminates the so-called "spoiler" and "wasted vote" effects and gives voters a more democratic set of choices. Under Approval Voting, each voter may mark approval on her ballot for any number of the candidates that the voter chooses to. The candidate receiving the highest count of approvals from all voters combined wins the election.

The right of representation belongs to all citizens. The current winner-take-all elections award representation to the largest factions and leave everyone else, often the majority, unrepresented. The winner-take-all system unnecessarily restricts choice, polarizes politics and limits political discourse. WE MUST ADOPT PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION (PR) for legislative elections to ensure the fair representation of all voters. Millions of Democrats in Republican areas and Republicans in Democratic areas are unrepresented in our system, and the majority of Greens, Libertarians, and other independents are unrepresented at all levels of government. A new system for the US should PROVIDE FAIR REPRESENTATION to all voters, in proportion to their numbers.

When talking about electoral reform, writers and readers can usefully distinguish single-winner elections from multi-winner elections. Currently all elections in the US are single-winner. Unless some reform fundamentally changes the nature of the US Presidency, that office will continue to require a single-winner election. The appropriate reform for single-winner elections, including that for the Presidency, is Approval Voting. For the US House of Representatives and the State lower houses, a switch to Proportional Representation should be made, instead.

The right of representation belongs to all citizens. The current US winner-take-all elections award representation to the largest factions and leave everyone else, often the majority, unrepresented. The winner-take-all system unnecessarily restricts choice, polarizes politics and limits political discourse. We US citizens must adopt Proportional Representation (PR) for legislative elections to ensure the fair representation of all voters. Millions of Democrats in Republican areas and Republicans in Democratic areas are unrepresented in our system, and the majority of Greens, Libertarians, and other independents are unrepresented at all levels of government. A new system for the US should provide fair representation to all voters, in proportion to their numbers.

When talking about electoral reform, writers and readers can usefully distinguish single-winner elections from multiwinner elections. Currently all elections in the US are single-winner. Unless some reform fundamentally changes the nature of the US Presidency, that office will continue to require a single-winner election. The appropriate reform for single-winner elections, including that for the Presidency, is Approval Voting. For the US House of Representatives and the State lower houses, a switch to Proportional Representation should be made, instead.

LEARN MORE ABOUT Fixing VOTING at the Facebook Group, Equal Access Amendment Project https://www.facebook.com/groups/152631684794770

Remember also, when your water gets cut off, or your phone gets cut off, you call to complain. Well Our government is cut off from us. CALL THEM. Put the number in your phone. They have to write down what you say and keep a count of who is saying what. SO PLEASE CALL and VOTE in 2014 in the MIDTERMS!!!!

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The Voter Bill of Rights is a product of the 2001 Democracy Summer program, a proto Liberty Tree Foundation event. It was amended for the 2004 No Stolen Elections! campaign, and amended again for the No More Stolen Elections! campaign./ It was amended again by the Equal Access Amendment facebook group after education received from the Center for Election Science google+ group.

Did anyone hear CBS's Bob Shieffer say that Obama's theme was civil rights? I think he must have spent one day too long in DC journalistic circles. The President did mention the need for equality for everyone and of course civil rights is involved, but to attempt to define President Obama's 2nd inauguration speech as being mainly of a civil rights theme is, in my opinion, missing the major theme of his speech. President Obama spoke of we the people moving forward as a nation and a leader of democracy in a world searching for liberty and freedom as never before in history. The message I heard was that we need to move forward on the important issues of the day and that those unwilling to move forward will be left behind. The President did not chastise anyone or single out groups of politicians as a specific problem, but spoke in positive terms about how, working together, WE can move forward to benefit ALL people.

Maybe that is just the message I wanted to hear, but that is what took away from this inauguration speech.

Oh how exciting, four more years of Obamanomics and probably 6 trillion dollars of additional debt. Do you think the democrat senate will actually put out a budget? Don't know how you can classify his election as a mandate when over 63 million Americans voted against him. I hope some of these weak kneed politicians will stand up for the principles of individual sovereignty and stand against a totalitarian rule. We still have a constitutional republic form of government.

☯ ☮