Presidential platform of Rick Hohensee, August 2004 I want to be President so that I can try to... Fire all Republican appointees and hire no Republicans. Replace the Pledge of Alliegance with daily recitals of varying paragraphs of the Constitution. Provide every public school student in grades 5 and up a copy of the Constitution every year. De-authorize all covert activities outside tactical operations in active war zones. Reaffirm that the "war on terror" is mostly diplomacy and police work when prosecuted by the competent, and only becomes all-out war when prosecuted by the incompetent and/or corrupt. Personal assessment of the impact of depleted uranium munitions with the full information-gathering power of the office of President. Call off The Crusades by isolating and peacefully dismantling Israel. Follow this up concurrently by demanding peace in Sudan and similar. Reduce legacy government secrets as close as possible to nothing. That is, I will massively reduce "classified information", particularly older documents, probably everything over 5 years old except for nuclear technologies and similar. Implement a closely controlled self-prescription program for adults to use such drugs as cocaine, heroin, marijuana and penicillin. That is, I will call off the corrupt drug war and de-glamourize narcotics. De-commission the CIA entirely, and un-authorize them totally, immediately. Out them all in about 6 months. Re-deploy them under INS. Remove the term "intelligence" from what it was the CIA used to do. Think "strinfo". Eliminate covert operations outside actual war zones immediately. Such behavior is well beneath the greatest nation ever. Biometrically identify every non-citizen on US soil I can get my hands on. One immigration rule. (Al Sharpton) Promote the vote for ex-criminals. Sue if necessary in support of this. Teach evolution as scientific fact and the Bible, Talmud, Koran, the Analects, the Tao Te Ching, Aristotle's Ethics, Machiavelli and so on as ethics studies. Foster an Ethics Channel on TV. Enforce the law with emphasis on the most priviledged facing the closest scrutiny. This is my affirmative action policy. I am quite fatigued with rich white men giving me a bad name. Prosecute George Walker Bush for crimes against humanity. Legalize insider trading. Investigate deportation of Sun Myung Moon for illegal donations to North Korea. Not to mention he quite literally thinks he's God. Get out of Iraqi cities immediately, including vacating the Green Zone, and retreat to functions of state and federal governments, until the cities form regional alliances analagous to nations as they see fit. Eliminate the "not for profit" designation for corporations, churches, schools, trust funds and anything else. Charity is taxable income. If the government wants to subsidize something it can do it accountably, by direct subsidy. Ensure voting systems accountable to the electorate nationwide, such as my own "votescript". Pardon Martha Stewart due to the brazen political nature of her prosecution. Invite the Congress to take over the Anthrax and Chandra Levy investigations using the U.S. Capitol Police and any Executive Branch law enforcement capabilities they may wish to avail themselves of, such as the Postal Inspector's forces. List all prisoners at Guantanamo and what they are accused of. (Most will probably be released) Eliminate economic status requirements, particularly college degree requirements, from positions and licenses granted by the government. Plead to the Supreme Court to exclude Florida from the Electoral College for the rest of JEB Bush's governorship plus 13 years. Prosecute Katherine Harris for treason. Prosecute the management of Diebold Corp. for treason. Make global support of secular democracy the keystone of foreign policy. For example, the USA can no more support a Jewish state in Palestine than an Episcopal state in Langley Virginia. I consider "secular" to be a fundamental aspect of "nation". Non-secular regions will not be considered nations, officially. Invite 70% of the US military above the rank equivalent to Sargeant Major in the Army to resign immediately, with congratulations on winning the Cold War. And with the idea that they will not contribute to the loss of the peace crucial to the finances of the Bush Crime Family. I'll keep generals with surnames starting with, say, F through L or something to maintain some continuity during The Big Stand-Down. Maintain a potent, progressive, but perhaps significantly smaller military in terms of active personnel. Return reserves to thier proper roles. (John Kerry) Hand over Halliburton functions in Iraq to the US military and mideastern engineering firms. Let Iraqis rebuild Iraq. Overhaul the White House press corps to exclude the major war infomercial networks, ABC, NBC, CBS and so on. Make it unlawful for entities other than individuals to contribute funds to political campaigns. Conduct a variety of political autopsies, such as on Nicholas Berg. Establish a position of national developmental sports promoter and invite Cal Ripkin to take his work federal. Make my life as President extremely public. The adult public will be able to monitor most of my personal activity via live motion pictures. Big Brother is already here. I give the people of the USA the option of keeping an unblinking eye on Big Brother if they are so inclined. Convert the Executive Branch to use of open-source computer operating systems, such as Linux, BSD, or Plan 9 From Bell Labs. The military will be ordered to do so. I hope they aren't waiting for orders. Make all publications of the government available by FTP download from the Internet in effectively non-proprietary data formats. Implement checks and balances on law enforcement such that no jurisdiction can monopolize the evidence pertaining to any death. Increase personal financial accountability of members of Congress and lobbyists and lobbying organizations. Task the FBI with a detailed study of every case of someone dying in police custody in the US in the last ten years. Implement a graduated progressive debt-monetization schedule for the Reagan/Bush National Debt to eventually eliminate the regressive debt costs left by fiscal incompetents. Generalize the definitions of criminal anti-competitive behavior to better protect small businesses and economic diversity. Lots of things Microsoft does legally will become illegal. Ensure that transportation policy emphasize pedestrians and other human-power transport first, then mass transit, then roads. I will encourage buses, in particular, publicly and privately operated. Establish a cabinet-level auditing office, with a general permanent mandate and authorization to eliminate corruption and improve efficiency throughout the Executive Branch. Reduce the implementation costs of the tax system and the welfare system by simplifying the income tax code to a single simple formula with a positive component, formerly mis-named as the proposed "negative income tax". Thus there will be no brackets. The top tax rate should be about 50% and the top positive tax rate should provide a homeless man with about $10-- a day. Eliminate parasitic "protectionist" tariffs, farm and other subsidies to the advantaged. Require all products bodily ingested by humans, such as cigarettes, have thier ingredients listed as is now the case for most foods. This will include products with long-standing exemptions from such requirements, such as COCA Cola. Improve employability and general functionalization services to the homeless, literacy programs generally, and many other areas currently exhibiting barbaric and outrageously costly neglect. Another area that I personally find emblematic of the neglect the USA bestows upon it's helpless, my pet peeve if you will, is the condition of the average public basketball backboard. A decent outdoor basketball goal is a very cost-effective thing. Expect to see full regulation-dimensions rectangular backboards with straight rims appearing when I am President. Maybe even nets. Expect neglect to decrease generally. Emphasise the Internet in education. I support statutes and regulations that result in a decrease in the gross bulk of statutes and regulations for the sake thereof, such as more use of parametric "schedules" such as the well-known "GS-16" schedule of government salaries. A quick glance at the US Code suggests that it could easily be smaller by a factor of 4 or more. Manage my legislative agenda like an open source software project, with input from the general population via an FTP site or web wiki. Gun control is a population density issue. A moose gun is insane in Manhatten. Being without one is insane in most of Alaska. A simple tax can be developed based on how many people are in range of a weapon. Let's say the tax is 5 cents a year for each human within range of a weapon. That's 20 cents for a moose gun in the outskirts of Nome, and hundreds of thousands of dollars for a moose gun in Manhatten. The details need some work, but therein lies the solution. There are a number of possible side-effects, like gun shops become inately rural businesses, which is a good thing. There's also a one-second factor, like 5 cents for each round the thing can fire in one second, times population density. Thus assault weapons cost more at about thier fire rate. I suggest several Constitutional amendments. This listing is not the exact language contemplated..... The President may not pardon his own minions. He may petition the Congress to do so. This is the Nixon/Ford amendment, long overdue. Growing any naturally bred photosynthetic plant species in any quantity is a basic right of adult citizens. Voting in all elections of the USA shall be by approval basis, one vote per voter per candidate. Plurality shall be the elective margin. Vote counting shall be by direct popular count. There shall be hard physical documentation of each ballot. All ballots in the USA shall include a "None Of The Above" synthetic candidate. If None Of The Above wins, the contested office shall be filled by a suitable lottery of voters for None Of The Above. Border States may secede from the USA. Border jurisdictions of States may change States. I favor the creation of at-large Representatives and Senators. The above amendment to allow growing any herb could be constructed so as to foster family farms and serve as a permanent seedbed for small businesses. Reassess the health risks of cyclamates versus aspartame. Note that Donald Rumsfeld was a key lobbyist for aspartame. Abolish diplomatic immunity outside embassies. The US doesn't have royals, and doesn't aknowledge them on our soil. Change the names of Blair Mansion, the Ronald Reagan White Elephant and Internationalist Boondoggle Center, Reagan National Airport, the J. Edgar Hoover Building, and the Herbert Hoover Building. Increase compensation to federal elected officials. Set up a history ftp/website in the Education department Promise MLB baseball games in Cuba if Castro adopts a constitution based on the template on my webpage. Marriage is not a federal concern. The proposed tax formula will provide positive taxes (back to the person) to dependants, not married couples per se. Establish a national blues jam on the South Lawn of the White House in the summer. The legal tradition of the USA has some fundamental quirks going back to English Common Law that need fixing. Malice, intent, custodial relationships, sanity and other subtleties are sentencing issues, not corpus delecti. There is no specific labor policy at this time. Labor interests should note the elimination of degree requirements from positions licensed by the government, the possible huge increase in manpower to the INS via the de-commissioning of the CIA, the improved immigration enforcement possible in the absence of a corrupt drug war, the reduction in impetus of Latin Americans to emigrate to the US in the absense of a corrupt drug war, the top tax rate of 50%, and other policies that help the working man, woman or family directly, but not explicitly. I oppose capital punishment. It's not cost-effective. The better tone of American foreign policy was set by the Monroe Doctrine the better part of two centuries ago. The USA must consider free nations it's allies, and less than free countries less than nations. In a sentence, A nation is a secular democracy, and other areas are primitive countries. This latter category currently includes Israel, and to my knowledge, the entire Arabian Peninsula, as examples. My policy is to side with Nature in all things, and to favor such regions evolving into nations, as is clearly the long-term trend of human history. Template constitution at http://linux01.gwdg.de/~rhohen As President I'll probably be able to get some things off the ground that aren't political per se, such as osimplay, cycluphonics, the Gitslik and Rixpik and so on. Life begins when you no longer blame everything on your mother. If I don't get the into White House, I blame my mother. Rick (Richard Allen) Hohensee independant candidate for President