In fact, given that no other country that I'm aware of has the Always An Election Always Campaigning US political style, let alone the SemiOfficial 18-24 Month Election Season, and they all manage to get their electioneering done in a couple of months at most, I'd have to say nobody is as dysfunctional as the US, no matter what else is going on.

That's just the European equivalent of the three unaffiliated undecided voters in Florida who have every candidate and every news media (yeah, i know, wrong use of plural) camped out outside their door for the entire election season because they hold the deciding votes for the entire country.

Did senators serve only at the pleasure of the state they were from, though? I.e. could they be recalled by the state government who appointed them?

I bumped my shopping cart into a woman's in the store and her fruit departed from her.
Not only that, my parakeet named Onan spilled his seed.

It's made quite clear in the Bible, that the Ten Commandments, along with most of the stuff in there, is intended to be Rules for Being Jewish, not intended for general dissemination. In fact, the current version of Christianity (according to Peter) is pretty clear that Jesus didn't view most of the Old Testament as required for all mankind
NonJews are judged by their own set of rules; Noah, for instance, who was considered a Good Guy though living generations before Judaism. These laws are mostly rules that seem self-evident and axiomatic; don't murder, don't steal, etc., the stuff you refer to above. As you point out, not working on the Lord's Day and/or not worshipping statues isn't exactly the kind of universal moral law that you'd require a person from another culture to abide by so as not to disturb the peace and upset the social order and injure citizens; they're just the requirements to belong to the club; if you're not Jewish and violate the fourth commandment by keeping your store open on Saturday or Sunday or whichever, the Bible isn't suggesting you be penalized, contrary to the religious right's desire to hang a copy of the Ten Commandments on every courthouse wall; that was never intended to apply to you as a nonJew.

Yeah, to expand on my previous verbosity, the move of the Dixiecrats to the Republicans and the Reagan Revolution and the reduced financial regulation resulted in that wave of corporate raiding, that basically raided the US treasure houses that had been the giant old corporations, largely northeast, that had financially supported the Rockefeller Republican types; Northeast based, financially conservative, socially liberal; and left the money in the hands of Reagan Republicans; southwest based, socially conservative, financially radically rightwing individuals. Aside from leaving the corporations hollowed out shells that could no longer afford luxuries like long term planning or loyalty to employees, it meant the funding and rise of the new Republicans (not to be confused with the New Republic), i.e. the radical right, with its offshoots the religious rightwing, and the Tea Party; and their hatred of government and regulation and so on.
But, that left the former Republican refugees from the new Republicans with enough money and power to move in on the Democrats and shoulder out the oldstyle Democrats, who never had the same corporate and wealthy resources and had been reliant on a lot of "little guys" from the south, now seceded, and couldn't defend themselves.
So you have the New Democrats, socially liberal as were the old Democrats and the old Republicans, but with the little guy liberalism replaced with old style Republican probusiness, proindustry, profinancial, promilitary attitudes. And the old democrats floating around in search of a place to feel at home; unionists, peaceniks, socially conscious.

That's more of a simplified hypothetical trend, than a law. Witness the NDP's comeback in Canada after being fringe of the fringe, vs the PC party's demise after having been dominant for decades. If there are multiple axes/spectra on which voters rate the parties, multiple parties can exist in a metastable state; one party wins on economic issues, one party wins on defense issues, one party wins or social justice issues, for instance, With just a one axis system, there will always be only one party closest to the centroid of public sentiment on one side, and a second party closest on the other side, and parties any further out will die away. (Basically, the same system commercial establishments tend to cluster near the centers of towns, or suburbs, rather than out in the middle of nowhere).
But if there is more than one axis, there isn't a mathematical requirement that one party be significantly further from the centroid that the others, so it's metastable.
That's actually the way the US worked, for years; if you hypothesize another "party", the dixiecrats at one time, generally the south/southwest; and two axes, one the general "liberal/conservative" axis of economics vs social spending, etc.; and the other axis kind of a minority rights axis. When the dixiecrats were tied to the Democrats, that kept the party as a whole kind of orbiting the centroid of the voters, with the Republicans floating around in response. But when they got severed from the Democrats and tied to the Republicans, that removed the counterbalance in the Democrats, and the Republicans didn't have the same counterweight in their party, so basically gravity broke up and both parties are flying out of orbit.

Used to be, you'd find liberal republicans in the northeast, and conservative democrats in the south. Then came the civil rights era, the 60s, and Reagan, and when the dust had cleared there were no counterbalances in either party and they're just incestuous little mutual admiration societies who enjoy spitting on the other guys,

The entire political process is slanted towards war, because the entire notion of government is slanted towards war, because the entire concept of a nation is slanted towards war. The concept of a nation which is fundamentally geared towards support of its citizens rather than defending the wealth and privilege of the wealthy and privileged is still in its infancy, and a lot of people can't quite grasp it.

Or, to paraphrase, "I wanna I wanna I wanna, you're not the boss of me, when I get bigger I'm not gonna have to listen to what anybody tells me any more again"

Capital-C Capital or small-c capital?

That sounds like the Individualists' Union.
" Republicans and Democrats agree on is that the citizens have too much liberty." Yeah; one party believes there is too much liberty to marry a partner who is not of the proper gender, the other party believe there is too much liberty to release gigatonnes of ______ (select element or compound of your choice) into the environment randomly, to save a buck. Same difference, eh?

Most people I know are utterly disgusted with libertarians. Chacun a son gout.

Sadly, no. It does send them the message, but it's a message that doesn't matter to them.
Consider: the actual election itself boils down to which party can send out an image that best registers with the centroid of American public sentiment. The existence of other parties on the fringes has the same effect as individuals too fed up to vote; i.e., it takes votes away which otherwise would have been cast for the one of the two major parties closest to that voter's philosophy. (And no, they're not identical. That's just a sound bite, which is impossible in reality, if for no other reason that there are different people in each party).
But worse: given the electoral college system and the winner take all electoral delegations of most states, the majority of states are a lock for one of the big two parties or the other, so it makes no difference if even a very large number of voters decide to sit it out. The only states that matter are the swing states.
And, just to add to that, the electoral representation of the states isn't directly proportional to population, due to the favoritism for small states baked into the system, so even if you live in a swing state, whether you cast a vote for one of the big two, or another party, or just sit it out has a different effect depending on which state you live in.
I'd say to have the most effect on the government, you need to influence a party's candidate selection process. That's the point where money, efforts, etc for a given candidate has a direct effect; moving to another candidate, or just bailing out, has a distinct negative effect for the candidate you'd otherwise back, and sends an unmistakable, unignorable message. Once the two candidates of the two major parties have been named, the majority of Americans might as well just go take a nap until it's all over and they get notified who the undecided voters in the swing states have chosen for them. Which is kind of scary, given that undecided voters are more than likely idiots.

Indeed; America's best growth years economically were under unbelievably tax rates for top brackets, and the slowdown of growth has been largely correlated with the reduction of top interest tax rates. Of course, it's always possible that it's an accidental correlation, but it sure doesn't demonstrate that high taxes kill the economy at all. In fact, it does suggest that the current conservative implicit philosophy, that poor people need to be motivated by taking things away from them while rich people need to be motivated by giving them more, is precisely backwards. Which is just as likely to be the case as not.