Georgia's regulation of electric utilities defines what it means to be an electric utility: if you produce electricity and sell it you're a utility company and subject to regulations governing same, with an exception for individual installations for local generation where excess might be sold to the grid providers. In Georgia, this messes up 3rd party installers who try to fund solar installation in one particular fashion. You can pay cash for a solar system and you're fine. You can borrow money to finance your installation and you're fine, even if you're borrowing from the solar panel installer. What Georgia says you can't do is allow a 3rd party to place solar panels on your roof and then buy the electricity produced by those panels from the 3rd party. That makes the 3rd party a utility provider.

I'm no fan of the PATRIOT Act nor of the Republican Party, but I do think it needs to be pointed out that the PATRIOT Act was passed 98-1 in the Senate (Senator Russ Feingold (D Wisconsin) was the only senator who voted against it). Every other Democrat in the Senate voted for the Act. In 2006 when the Act was up for renewal, little changed as it was renewed 89-10, albeit with 9 of the 10 nays being from Democrats. The yeas in the Senate reads like a who's-who of the Democrat Party: Harry Reid (D NV) and Hillary Clinton (D NY) voted in favor both times; Obama also voted Yea when he was in the Senate in 2006. It passed the House easily too, 357-66 (Nancy Pelosi was a Yea in 2001) and 280-138 in 2006. The opposition in the House was largely, but not entirely, from Democrats; however, D's voted for the bill more than 2-1. In 2011, Pres. Obama signed a reauthorization bill into law. That reauthorization bill passed the House 250-153 and the Senate 72-23, again with Democrats in the Senate voting nearly 2-1 in favor. It may be noteworthy that Rand Paul (R KY) was a No vote.

And many of those are the "Have you or a loved one been harmed by robotic surgery?"

These TSA security theaters provide a natural choke-point for future attack vector. Once AQ attacked the mall in Kenya, it was pretty clear they'd been reading Tom Clancy novels (Rainbow Six novel Teeth of the Tiger I think includes islamic terrorists who enter the country alongside illegal immigrants from mexico and attack a number of malls). I cannot recall where I read this, but in some other novel, the terrorists recognized that bombing airplanes or hijacking commercial airliners is not necessary. You can pack a lot of explosives into a civil-aviation plane and fly it where ever you want (I think NCIS did this last week). And you can attack the bottleneck that forms at security checkpoints. No need to fight through security at the airport when you can roll a few hundred pounds of C4 into the middle of the crowd that forms at the airport check points, taking out passenger and the security equipment too. That'll ground all flights for awhile. And how do you defend that? With a security checkpoint before the security checkpoint?