My wife and I had a great vacation last week. We visited several beautiful beach towns in the Florida panhandle including a brief stop at Seaside, FL which was the location for the movie "The Truman Show".

During our drive we listened to Al Gore's new book "The Assault on Reason". The book was long winded but very good. It did much more than criticize the current administration. The information was a well written prophetic critique of government corruption and the media spin and influence over the entire process. This important book is less politically biased than you might imagine. Liberal and moderate Americans should enjoy this book and find many important points for consideration. The most important point is that American citizens are poorly informed about our government and this trend is getting worse. Democracy cannot work without well informed citizens and we are reaching a point where the volume of information is increasing but the accuracy and reliability of that information has vanished. Most citizens have lost trust in the information they are given in the media and the political process is so heavily influenced by lobbyists that it is not longer worthy of our trust.

Our Founders' faith in the viability of representative democracy rested on their trust in the wisdom of a well-informed citizenry, their ingenious design for checks and balances, and their belief that the rule of reason is the natural sovereign of a free people. The Founders took great care to protect the openness of the marketplace of ideas so that knowledge could flow freely. Thus they not only protected freedom of assembly, they made a special point—in the First Amendment—of protecting the freedom of the printing press. And yet today, almost 45 years have passed since the majority of Americans received their news and information from the printed word. Newspapers are hemorrhaging readers. Reading itself is in decline. The Republic of Letters has been invaded and occupied by the empire of television. - Al Gore