A favorite scene from a favorite movie, in which humanity and the prince of Peace overcame the State — at least for a night. The scene where the German singer grabs a Christmas tree and advances into no-man’s land singing will never fail to enrapture me. Merry Christmas! May one day men cease worshiping the State and alles Menschen werden Brüder. Scoot forward to the five minute mark or so if you’re not one for preludes…
Reading Freely 
Merry Christmas to you & yours. War is over if we *want* it!
Ah, we want it but Raytheon buys the politicians. Merry Christmas anyway!
The solution is simple then: stop companies buying politicians!
Merry Christmas to you & yours. Hope you’re having a fun one and keeping WARM! [lol]
Good luck finding a way to make that happen. The politicians sell themselves. Damned public choice theory!
BTW, when I received the email alerting me that someone had replied, it didn’t say Cyberkitten had replied. It gave me a name –not sure what’s happening there, because in this console it shows your username properly. I don’t know if it’s “your” name or some glitch….feel free to email me if you’re curious about the name itself. I pledge to banish it from my memory if it’s really yours.
My email would be smellincoffee @ readingfreely.com .
I think the ‘trick’ is to make the maximum amount of money any company or individual can give is $1,000. Of course the politicians would have to pass a Bill to make that law… which, naturally, just isn’t going to happen.
Oh, and just ignore the ‘name’. Nothing to see here… Please move along….
My thinking is that they’d find ways around that, though — creating other ways to contribute under the table, or with personal backroom incentives as opposed to the public connections. I wonder if there’s ever been a study on political corruption in the various West-democratic systems to figure out if there’s commonalities between the relatively legitimate ones and the dodgy ones.