At the general election level; yes, you'd need a constitutional amendment. At the party primary level, however, such a system as you describe would be incredibly helpful, and probably for all parties.

For the same reason all American politicians seem interchangeable to a European: they don't hold your values, so their real differences are invisible to you.

Unless the big fish start feeling the pain of the current patent regime. If patent trolls get too greedy, they may undo themselves.

The only people talking about Sarah Palin are democrats. That's it. I never trusted her because I don't like populists, and I said so here at the time.

There are two kinds of people in political leadership: agitators and faces. Agitators are people who fire up the base and throw red meat. Sarah Palin and Michael Moore, for example, are agitators. Faces are the people you elect to interface with the rest of the country and represent you. Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton were faces.

The problem with the GOP primaries last several cycles is we have a lot of super conservative agitators and unconservative faces. I'm looking for a conservative face; someone who holds my ideals but doesn't express them like a kook. But if I HAVE to choose, I will choose ideology over eloquance; after all, if I'm going to lose anyway, I might as well stand on principle.

The shutdowns were bad theater by the administration. The administration paid overtime to staff unstaffed monuments just to "close" them. Turns out "shutdowns" don't actually affect the average American, so they made something up.

The point of a nomination process is choosing a candidate who reflects YOUR values, not everyone else's. I would never in a million years expect or demand that democrats choose a Republican as their candidate of choice. A vibrant democratic republic requires a choice between well defined positions. The problem is that the core Republican base does not believe they are being represented in the general election (and so often stay home, as they did for McCain and Romney). Whether you believe they deserve representation, or that their positions are too extreme, is irrelevant.

Another note for non-US readers:
It's always their fault, it's never my fault. When they throw a monkey wrench into the gears, it's obstructionism. When I do it, it's standing up for the little guy. Also, my political affiliation is basically like being a fan of a football club: my boys never foul and the damn referees are in their pocket!

Huh? No, all Republicans hate Republican leadership. We call them "The Establishment" and wonder how the hell Boehner and McConnell get reelected. We were pretty giddy about collecting Eric Cantor's scalp, though. See, party leadership manipulates primaries and "crowns" our candidates for us. Romney, McCain, Dole, even GWB were the least liked of all candidates in their respective years. The problem is the "Anybody but X" crowd never settles on one person, so the leasst-liked guy with the plurality of votes gets the nomination. The party is pretty fractured, and there is a lot of dissent.

This presumes that the oil will not reach the intended refineries, which is false. The oil is already getting there, albeit via a shorter pipe and lots of trucks and trains (ironically, less environment-friendly than the Keyston XL). The current pipeline is owned by some very deep pockets, however.

No, the textbooks of tomorrow will say we started the revolution out of a hatred of tea and stamps.

Hey, you finally get it!

...or maybe you can get your own private space.

Speak for yourself; I hired a crack team of Chinese gold farmers to find that sumbitch for me.

Don't worry; there is absolutely nothing stopping you from starting your own dick-pic blog. You just can't do it on Google's servers.

Your math assumes the artist gets the entire dollar from iTunes.

Again, speaking as a layman, but my understanding is that it isn't the rotation of the planet that creates the internal dynamo, but the fact that our cool mantle constrains the energy of our hot core, which can only then be expressed as an internal convection. Venus, unlike Mars, also has a hot core, but also has a hot mantle; heat energy from the core radiates out without constraint. The energy that would have been used to power the dynamo instead goes to heat up the planet's crust.