Big money has had a corrosive influence on our democracy. Corporate and wealthy interests are flooding our elections with millions of dollars threatening to drown out the voice of everyday Iowans. Legislators will tell you that they don’t want to spend every moment of their free time out begging for money, but they are forced to in the current system. In the past election cycle alone legislative races averaged $135,000 for a state Senate race and $50,000 per House race. Thankfully, we now have a chance to break the stranglehold big money has on our state elections. This week the state Senate began work on a bill (House File 43 & Senate Study Bill 1072) which would implement a voluntary public financing option for candidates statewide and place contribution limits on those candidates who choose not to participate. This is how we take our democracy back, by ending the campaign money chase and passing clean elections.

The use of drones to assassinate individuals deemed undesirable by the Executive Branch is wasteful of civilian life, constitutionally questionable (to say the least), and a dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a few individuals. It should end immediately.

The Shandaken Town Board, at its Feb. 4th meeting, presented and passed a resolution stating ""BE IT RESOLVED, that the Town Board of the Town of Shandaken does hereby oppose the enactment of any legislation that would infringe upon the Right of the People to Keep and Bear Arms and consider such laws to be unnecessary and beyond lawful legislative authority granted to our State representatives, as there is no documented correlation between gun control measures and crime reduction." This resolution, which was approved by three member of the Shandaken Town Board, will be sent to every elected official from President Barack Obama to County Legislator John Parate.

Let's take a solution oriented approach to curbing the epidemic mentally ill people committing violence. Get to the root cause of the problem.

Everyone knows killing people is against the law. Killing people with guns is also against the law. Laws do not stop bullets. Guns are not stopped firing by laws. I suggest more development of devices such as "Magna-lock" which does not allow guns to be fired by those other than the owner be developed, and required on all guns.

Our present education system is very outdated compared to most first-world countries. We have simply fallen behind. We need a fresh start.

On CNN News this morning announced that Congress is considering cutting soldiers pay. I have many friends in the military that barely exist on what they are paid. .

Petition is about the death penalty. Protecting the unborn is important, but letting criminals be executed is inconsistent with a pro-life stance,

All the children included my two sons attend Lowell Elementary School, funding for activities like chess club, music, etc. Our children's education should be our top priority, and these cuts should be stopped.

The 2009-2011 iMacs should be recalled immediately. Originally, several major tech blogs and main stream media outlets were covering a yellow screen issue from late 2009 to the first half of 2010 that took Apple several months to admit was happening. Then hard drives started failing and people were receiving iMacs with cracked screens. It was a mess, and Apple finally caved to pressure and admitted there was an issue with the yellowing iMac screen. People were advised to contact Apple if their screen had a yellow tinge or if there were any other issues with it. After that, every news outlet promised to drop the story since Apple finally addressed it. And Apple offered replacement screens for current iMac owners. You'd think everything would be solved then, but several users started reporting that they had gone through 3-5 screen replacements with the same or worse screen issues. I tried contacting tech news blogs to see if they'd start covering the issue of these iMacs again, but they told me to just contact Apple and get them to replace my screen. Obviously, that doesn't work. I'm a owner of the original late 2009 27" iMac, and I've been able to live with the yellow screen tinge in hopes that Apple will finally admit that this is not just a display issue but a flaw in the hardware design of the iMac. Recently, I also started noticing a stain-like appearance on the right edge of the screen and started googling the issue. Apparently, others had been seeing stains, condensation and strange grey smudges all over their screens. It has started becoming about as big an issue as the yellow tinge problem. Replacing the screen does not solve any of these problems, and I don't think it ever will. All these problems are a result of flaws in the hardware design of these iMacs. There is a newly designed iMac that just came out this year, so I don't want all of these iMac owners, including me, to be stuck with a defective machine. The screen is now shielded from the hot-running hardware, so I think the LCD screen will finally be protected. If this hardware re-design does solve the issue, I think we all deserve a free trade-in for the new iMac or a full refund of our current machines. A fellow iMac owner has already created a petition on here that asks Apple for a proper screen replacement. And while I support that petition as well, we really need to take this a step further. There needs to be a recall, so I beseech all of you—iMac owners or general mac users—to please support this cause. Even if you have an iMac that has none of these issues, they can develop over time, and by then, you're warranty or Applecare might be expired. So, please sign and force Apple to address this issue. I'm hoping with enough signatures, we can get the attention of major tech blogs and main stream media outlets once again and pressure Apple to recall these machines. Here's a few forums where these issues have been discussed for years now: 27", 21.5" iMac Owners, test your screen for yellow tint issue here http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=824940&page=140 Yellow tinge from bottom to top of the screen, 27" iMac https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2218213?start=0&tstart=0 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2381983?threadID=2381983%255D Greyish Smudge marks behind the glass screen: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2300580?tstart=0 And here is a link to the other petition as well: http://www.change.org/petitions/apple-inc-customer-support-provide-replacement-for-faulty-screens-in-imacs-from-2009-to-2011?utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=share_petition

We are all affected by Corruption. All the petitions I have signed or read over the decades are all significant, in their own light. But, it is the influence of money in politics, which is responsible for every single one of these problems. The political whores that we call lobbyists need to get out of our government, whether they represent the 1%, corporations, unions, Department of Defense, media monopoly, police state advocates or any entity other than the true interests of the People as defined by the common, intelligent, working class taxpayers.

Why must people get kicked out of their homes, only to let someone else in who pays a lower mortgage payment. Why can't this government work things out with the original homeowner and let him pay the lower payment and stay in his home? This kicking people out of their homes is immoral and is devastating to the homeowner. This would omit the problem of blight in certain neighborhoods.