This caught my eye on C|Net''s news.com site.

Congress and tech: Little to show
Politicians in Washington, D.C., spent the last two years promising new laws on everything from Net neutrality to computer security and social-networking sites.

But when the 109th Congress finally adjourned over the weekend, ending 12 years of Republican rule of the U.S. House of Representatives, few technology-related bills had actually made it through the legislative process.

"If they were going to get a grade, it would be an 'I' for failure to complete all assignments," said John Palafoutas, senior vice president and chief lobbyist for the American Electronics Association, whose members include about 2,500 companies, among them Adobe Systems, Intel, Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard.

This is a pretty fair assessment about the total failure of the legislature to do anything substantial with regard to technology legislation in the past twelve years. I challenged presidential candidate with some questions during the 2004 election cycle (permalinked here). At that point, there was some dailog with Joe Trippi who ran Howard Dean's campaign. Governor Dean tentatively agreed to an interview. I lived in Vermont at the time and had done a lot of work with Dean's staff. But it never happened. No other candidate rose to the questions either. They remain unanswered and open to the next round of candidates, but so far, I'm not optimistic that any will rise to take them on.

This article speaks to the issue of pretexting (think HP's recent problems), and H1B visas (which Congress failed to increase to aid the tech sector). And pionts out that censorship and content filtering are emotional issue that politicians flog when they need visibility (but do nothing). The issue of net neutrality didn't do any better.

Will the next session be more productive? Will a presidntail candidate surface who can actually relate in some way to the tech sector? Time will tell