Political Observations with Friends

A lot of political discussion has been going on via e-mail with friends. I'll call them my hometown friends, because we all met in Middle School / High School and have been a big group of gaming friends since, and thank god we all keep in pretty good touch via the internet and in person as frequently as possible.

So, hometown friends discussions, and it seems like ALL of the vocal ones are psuedo-conservative leaning towards libertarian, and they're all talking about how they think the mortgage bailout bill was a hugely terrible idea. They seem pretty furious about it passing, and are making sweeping statements that congress needs to be fixed because it passed. I try to keep pointing out that the bill was only voted down at first by a 52% majority, and was then passed with more money added on by a 56% majority. In my view neither of these is a huge majority, and I try not to assume which decision is right or wrong until the facts are all on the table and the results are in (when it comes to votes like this, thankfully we can make voting for congress decisions after seeing results most of the time), but I don't really see this as a necessity to clean out congress and change everything.

I'm on the fence if I feel the people in politics are the issue, or the systems. One can definitely fix the other, but which one is of the most importance / significant?

(oddity: I typically pronounce the word "significance" with a second 'g' - ie: signifigance - and I've been doing it for so long that it now sounds more correct to me)