After the cold war and the Starr Report, we at VAGUEpolitix asked ourselves: What's the greatest threat to Democracy now? And in our hearts, we knew: It's not the power of multinationals. It's not the intrusiveness of The State or the collapse of the Russian economy. It's Boredom-Ours.

To remain free, a nation's people have to stay up on the issues. But, after a full day at work, we don't give a glitch in a Zip disk what the Senate's position on ozone is. All we want is to space out and open our chakras, finish watching "The X-Files," pop a brewski.

So most of us end up channel surfing, shopping or re-reading "Goodnight Moon" while kids rot in poverty, sex scandals get blown out of proportion and creep after creep creeps into office. We feel angry at ourselves for being so passive. But we can't shake the blahs.

We realized that we could do something about this. So we organized raw, exciting political material from the Web and presented it so that you can go deeper into matters whenever you like. Our crime prevention edition links you to everything from smart fixes that work to ideas that are so stupid they're funny.

We asked our writers to deliver useful information concisely - but also to have fun with it. A little Jerry Springer goes a long way with us, so slugfests based on ideology, party line or pure theory instead of practical reality make us run for the remote. Arguments aimed at winning a point rather than solving a problem plunge us into deepest sleep. And heated disputes in which nobody means the same thing by the same words make us positively bulimic.

We made an effort to pull a lot of different voices in from the ether - high-paid media professionals, rebel leaders, Net-addicted amateurs with interesting ideas, Left, Right and Elsewhere. Then we evaluated their offerings from the practical, everyday standpoint of the average person - someone who isn't pulling an anchorman's salary or trying to extract a quote from a dying princess. Someone trying to get by, make a life, stay out of the Crossfire.

In our experience, once you get real with political issues, a lot of things that were clear in the demo model get, well, VAGUE. Logically fuzzy. Paradoxical. Inconsistent. Strange. Which doesn't mean easy, but means-at least to us-considerably less boring.

Lynn Phillips
Editor-in-Chief