Welcome

Hello, my name is Doug, and I have a love/hate relationship with American democracy.

I hate the politics we've all becoming increasingly familar with...the stuff you see on CNN, MSNBC, or Fox News: partisanship, uncompromising rigidness, laxed moral fortitude, hipocracy, and the increasing weight of special interests. I hate closed-mindedness, political apathy, and making decisions based by historical precedence or percieved expectation. I hate seeing peoples' actions and words taken out of their intended context and used to further agendas.

There's things we do right, though, to be sure, and the fact that laws can be created, changed, and repealed, and that we all have a voice in the process, is chief among those things. I love learning *why* a person has their opinion on a given political topic, and not just what that opinion is.

I tend to be a "big picture" type of thinker (and I love real world analogies). To me, your political outlook is much like planning a roadtrip...If you have a clear destination, the details can be made to fit into place. When I start planning my trips, I'm much more interested in where I'm going and what routes will get me there fastest than I am about what exit I'll be stopping at to have lunch on day 3. I think with politics we often get caught up too much in the details about how hard it is to do a thing, and we lose track of our final destination of why we *should* do that thing.

I'm brewing up some topics I want to touch on soon. I don't presume to think this will be interesting reading for anyone, or that anyone will ever even read it...but I intend to write it nevertheless, if only to have it to refer back to later.