At 19:17 12/29/95, jim bell wrote:

In my essay, "Assassination Politics," I pointed out that it would be relatively easy to deter such official-type actions if enough of us simply said, "NO!" and denominated it in terms of dollars and cents. After all, with four million Compuserve users, if they each were willing to donate a penny to see this latter-day Fuhrer dead, that would be $40,000. (Pardon me if I don't translate this into marks and other currencies.) [snip] WHEN, exactly, would it be appropriate to act?

This reminds me of a Science Fiction story by H. Beam Piper called "A Planet for Texans" where as part of the laws of the planet (and the oath of office) was a statement that the politician was representing the interests of ALL of their constituents. Every constituent had the legal right (and duty) to register any protests of the politician's actions _in-person_ with said politician. Such protest could take any form up-to-and-including killing the SOB on the spot. In the story, this right was illustrated by a small farmer being charged will killing a Senator by hacking him to death with a machete (all legal protests are required to be registered in person and use of long range techniques such as car-bombs or snipping with rifles is not regarded as a valid protest) and we are shown his trial. The charge is not killing the Senator (which is by law the farmer's right since he felt that the Senator was violating his oath of office by misrepresenting him) but whether, in exercising this right, he used excessive force out of proportion to the actions that was being protested.