Sorry, Don (and Ron?), I essentially agree with Guest on most of what he says. Both the Democrats and Republicans represent the same vast corporate ruling structure that funds them, and they both intend to pursue essentially the same foreign and domestic policy, with minor differences in outer style, that's all.

The Republicans deserve to lose this election badly, but it won't make a very substantial difference in what happens whether they do or not. It will just rearrange the outer show a little. The two party system as it now exists is a PR exercise meant to keep the deluded public under the impression that they still have a "voice" and a choice under the ruling $ySStem. They don't. It's a facade, a sham, a game, a ruse, a fraud, and a common delusion of people who were brought up taking it all for granted and imagining that it was real democracy. It's not.

And, yes, leftists and rightists CAN come full circle when they move toward heightened authoritarianism, and they do. They centralize power more and more, they greatly enlarge the state, the military, and the police, they extend the grip of the law on ordinary people's lives, they suspend civil rights, they work to create conformity and suppress dissent in any form, they concentrate power and money in the hands of a small elite, and they do it all in the name of freedom, security, nationalism, defence, and anything else whatsoever that will bamboozle ordinary people into lining up like good little sheep and serving the greater $ySStem.

I don't expect to see any solution to it, because I know the power of the forces behind what's happening, and there's very little that ordinary people can do about it unless they all united as one...and they won't. I just expect to get old and die before things get simply absolutely horrible where you live and where I live. Whether I'll be that fortunate, I don't know. We'll see.