I'm watching Al Gore on Keith Olbermann.

One of the reasons why so many Americans feel that their votes don't count, that their opinions aren't heard, and that they have no way of meaningfully participating in our democracy is because they know that... for example in the last election in November, 80% of the campaign budgets in contested races were spent on these 30-second TV ads. Those are one-way. They aren't based on facts and logic, and campaigns have never been entirely thus-based. But when the bulk of it is made up of these mass persuasion techniques that don't respect the facts and don't respect the people who are the objects of this persuasion, then we get the kind of serious mistakes that we see with the climate crisis, with the invasion of Iraq, with the mass warrantless eavesdropping on American citizens, eliminating the prohibition against torture that General George Washington laid down that's been respected by every president in both parties for more than 200 years... these things happen not just because one white house makes terrible decisions, but because we are more vulnerable to these kinds of sophisticated efforts to bypass reason and logic, to reach a preconceived policy that was decided before the facts were ever brought into play.