As a child of the Cold War era I'd always been curious about politics and how things worked. My mom (and grandmother, for that matter) always warned me that asking those kinds of questions would mean that my name would wind up on a list someplace. They were never clear on what sort of list that was, or what effect being on one might have. The context was never a good one and it lead to no shortage of arguments, that was for sure. Those arguments mysteriously stopped when, in one of my high school civics classes (it's important to …