Heard about this?

http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/touchbook/

Supposedly they're shipping right now, but I'm waiting for someone to post a video review.

As it is, the only voice they hear are those of lobbyist for major media companies who want laws like this on the books.

Are you seriously making the argument that the poor little Congressmen's minds are confused about basic right and wrong because they're overwhelmed with the voices of lobbyists?

They're not confused, they're complicit. To be fair, so are the cops that arrest people for crap like this, judges that don't throw out cases like these, and juries who convict people on charges like these.

No.

See police, courts, and speeding tickets.

See patents and the patent office.

See the monstrosity called US Code and US Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Written by lawyers, which coincidentally, takes an army of lawyers to manage.

Well said.

I read someone here, can't remember who, talking about how another trick they use is passing things late at night with only a few members present. Of course, they all know it's happening and would stop it if they wanted, but it's a way to pass something and deflect heat from most of the legislators.

Things like this convince me that legislative rules should be outlined in the Constitution, even at the price of making it more verbose. The system should be biased against temporarily appearing to support something, then backing off.

An easy way to stop the problem of things passing with a handful of votes is to just require an absolute number of votes to pass. So if we want simple majorities, then each bill in the House should require 218 votes to pass. Abstaining the vote is effectively a NO vote, which is how it should be IMO.

Anyway, if you think the House is bad, I come from Texas, where the State Reps and Senators openly cast votes for each other.

It's only been a few weeks since the law dubbed Zugangserschwerungsgesetz (access impediment law)

Consistently separating words by spaces became a general custom about the tenth century A.D., and lasted until about 2009, when Germans abandoned the practice.

Slashdot has a char limit on sigs, but my original list also included left, right, and fascism. I wanted to compare them to "cracker" and how they've lost their meaning and are just used to balkanize people, but it would have been way too long with all of that.

FWIW, I wrote in Paul for President last time, as well as voted for him in the primaries (and had to register as a dirty Republican to do it), although I don't agree with everything he says or does. Even though he's not a Libertarian, both him and the Libertarians seem to think there really isn't anything that government does well. I don't quite go that far.

But he's the first politician that ever motivated me to vote, and that says something, I guess.