Unless I missed something, GUEST,pdq, I don't see Alice standing there with a baseball bat, threatening violence to anybody who might want to post to this thread. In fact, quite a few people have, including you. That looks like an open forum to me.

I'm curious to know what you mean by by "despotism."

People who have been critical of the Bush administration are often called "unpatriotic" by some folks. Is "despotism" something like that?

Don Firth