making TAB in text major mode just work

[jwithers <jpwithers@gmail.com>]

Folks,

In text mode, or in fundamental mode for that matter, if emacs decides
you are indenting to some point before a tab stop, it helpfully
decides that you want that indent on following lines. This is a real
pita when you are doing bullet points, as follows:

        |<-----the first tab stop
* This is a bullet point
* This is another bullet point

  This is a paragraph that is now indented incorrectly because emacs
has decided that my bullet points mean this line should be indented
two spaces.

I am looking for some way to stop this behavior, so that emacs doesn't
decide I need smart indentation, which is just ducky for coding, but
really sucks when I am writing reports. And doing a control-q tab
isn't really good in my mind. I don't want to have to keep remembering
to do something different than just type when I am in the flow of
working.

Any help would be appreciated, I have changed all the various
indentation settings I could find and looked on the emacswiki, but
havent' found a solution to this.

john withers