Project Vote Smart to the rescue!

Apathy is, arguably, the biggest threat of all to our country. We citizens need to be more involved, and to be more aware of what fat-cats are doing in our names with our money. Too many of us aren't.

Project Vote Smart is a non-partison, citizen-driven effort to promote and help enable American citizens to make more educated choices at the ballot box.

It is very easy to understand why people are confused, or bored, or turned off to politics these days. Most of us get our news from screeching, partisan harpies on the 24 hour cable channels. And what has Ann Coulter ever truly inspired apart from contempt from her foes, smugness from her admirers, and the need to turn the channel from everyone else?

And politicians certainly aren't falling over backward to encourage their constituents to wise up. It's easier for them when we're passive, ankle-deep in Doritos crumbs, on the couch, watching Elimidate. So long as their campaign ad is the one that we remember at the polls, it's all good, baby.

So the good people at PVS are doing a noble thing. And they deserve gratitude and support.

Here at Project Vote Smart, Americans young and old volunteer their time, take no money from special interest groups, and have committed themselves to an extraordinary effort that, if successful, will provide their fellow citizens with the tools for a reemergence of political power not known for half a century. Their idea is one you may have thought of yourself. It is a deceptively simple concept but enormously difficult to achieve and would not be possible without the collaboration of citizens willing to lay their partisan differences aside for this one crucial task.

This project is an historic undertaking. Citizens come together, not in selfish interest or to support one candidate over another, but to defend democracy. It is an extraordinary gathering of people committed to one purpose: to strengthen the most essential component of democracy -- access to information -- even as it suffers grave attacks from candidates and political parties, many who are now willing to manipulate information and deceive voters.

In essence, what Project Vote Smart's interns and volunteers have done is ensure that tolerance will no longer be the only option available to the millions of us who are tormented by the issueless rhetoric and often misleading attacks that define contemporary American politics.