I’ve jotted these down over the last three or four days since this post went up, but I’m sure I’ve still forgotten some big ones. I believe in:

Medical, drugs, and health care
- The legalization, regulation and taxation of cannabis

- The decriminalization of other harder drugs, adding easily accessible safe-needle programs for IV users and clean, safe drugs combined with addiction treatment programs for addicts

- Medical care for all citizens. This can be done through a combination private and public program, and it wouldn’t mean a decline in quality care, no matter what opponents like to say. This includes prescription drugs at affordable prices for everyone.

- Worldwide plans to address AIDS/HIV through education, prevention and treatment and to address imminent global disease threats such as bird flu

Education
- Free, quality public education for all children, with a plan that requires the completion of either high school or basic vocational school and allows everyone who completes high school/basic vocational school to have two years of subsidized junior college, university, or further vocational training (this would have an amazing effect on crime, among other things)

- Second-language education a basic part of all primary and secondary schooling from day one of kindergarten through the last day of high school so all native-English-speaking children will have language proficiency in at least one other language besides English

- Standardized educational testing that measures achievement but doesn’t encourage school systems to teach only toward those tests

- Non-government- or religious-influenced sex education, which include both contraception information and abstinence education, for all children during their school years. For teenagers beginning in middle school, encouragement (but without government mandates) of birth control, safe-sex practices, and vaccination against HPV

- Routine education about money matters and budgeting, saving and retirement planning beginning with school children.

Budgetary matters
- A balanced national budget and a requirement that it must stay balanced, even with war spending

- Proportional taxes. That is, the rich pay the same proportion as the poor and middle class, which is far from the way it is now

- Immediate attention to the disastrous financial course the U.S. is on now so we can get out of the deficit hole we’re in and save the programs we have currently, making Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid sound once again

Defense, military and anti-terrorism
- A strong national defense that has bipartisan agreement and support

- Functioning nuclear defense, then nuclear disarmament in steps

- A requirement that a diplomatic route always be the avenue of first resort before offensive military action is taken and that diplomatic approaches continue even after offensive action is initiated

- A biometric identification program for all travelers into and out of the United States modeled after those that are already in place in well developed Middle Eastern countries

Political, government, and election reform
- Ethics/lobbying reform and term-limits. Ethics reform would change the way lobbying, wining-and-dining of elected officials, and other lavish influence-spending is done. Lobbyists can still lobby but gift-giving, free trips, large contributions, and other types of financial influence would cease.

- Popular election of the U.S. President. Get rid of the Electoral College.

- Implement common, fair, across-the-board election procedures from state to state, with voting machines that also leave a backup paper-trail for recounts and to ensure fairness. Hold elections over weekends instead of on weekdays. Implement and promote combination voting-lottery registration that all voters are eligible to win

Private-sector ethics and business reform
- Private-industry ethics reform to stop the lavish influence-spending of pharmaceutical and insurance companies to influence physicians and hospitals. Further reform to prevent unethical practices such as ophthalmologists referring patients to their own doctor-owned eyeglass stores or neurologists and other physicians referring patients to imaging centers or other care facilities in which they have vested business interests.

- An expansion or offshoot of Sarbannes-Oxley laws to include even further oversight of corporate accounting practices and protection of employee pension assets and retirement plans, making those funds safer still from being raided, dipped into or dramatically altered in ways that change the ultimate financial benefits for faithful contributors

- Better SEC oversight of insider-trading and unethical business practices among corporate chieftains. Limits on stock and security options granted to execs and much tighter limits on the buying and trading of granted options by corporate execs

- Limits on golden parachutes/huge goodbye payoffs for departing C-level executives

- Assurance that earning power of high-level corporate executives is commensurate with company performance/bottom-line success and limit it so that is not so vastly out of line of individual-performer-level employee salaries

- Reform of our nation’s legal system in a way that doesn’t incent plaintiff action and plaintiffs’ attorneys

Environmental
- Strong encouragement of environmental responsibility, including tax credits/incentives for people, companies, educational institutions, non-profit organizations, and government entities or municipalities who go green

- Incentives for businesses for research and development of alternative, non-petro-fueled cars and for cities and states that develop clean-powered mass transportation

- A treaty that dramatically reduces greenhouse gasses and CFCs around the world (implemented in steps)

- Worldwide plans for how to address coming droughts and water shortages

Privacy/Freedom of Reproductive Access/Equality
- Government stays out of the business of sex and sex-resulting matters. This includes sodomy laws and, as I already mentioned above, abortion on the grounds of privacy and personal choice

- Reproductive rights and abortion access for all women, which, if the sex education plan mentioned in the Education category above is implemented properly, will be far less needed. An adoption-encouragement step is a routine part of the access procedure. Women who’ve been through the adoption-encouragement step and still want an abortion can then proceed to termination, but with better sex education, access to birth control, and the adoption counseling approach, this should be the exception rather than the rule.

- The ability for all people, gay or straight, to form contractual unions/marriages if they choose to

- Equality and anti-discrimination for individuals of all races, genders, disabilities, sexual-preferences, transgendered and other minority status (and here I don’t just mean racial minorities). Where applicable, enforce hate-crimes equally from group to group

Immigration
- Address the immigration problem with formation of a North American Union instead of walls at the northern or southern U.S. borders. The union would allow for free trade among countries yet would allow each country to maintain its own laws and unique identity. Each country would issue ID cards to all citizens. All employers ranging from large companies to small day-labor-hiring outfits would be required to check ID cards and adhere to specific hiring practices. Mexican, Canadian and U.S citizens could live and work in other NA union countries under visas and under the oversight of their employers, who’d be subject to alien hiring restrictions. Health and human services would be covered by citizens’ native countries or employers, not picked up by the countries into which people had immigrated. In rare instances where services were emergently provided to aliens/immigrant workers by host countries, those expenses would be billed back to the alien’s country or employer of origin. Free trade and regulated but open borders would benefit the three union countries in various ways, particularly with prescription drug and buyable good prices, and it would help liberalize our own country’s cannabis laws. A union approach would vastly improve the standard of living in Mexico, which would help stem the tide of immigrants coming to live and work in the U.S. The U.S. and Canada would have to help Mexico get its crime and corruption problems under control initially, but that could be done.

- - - - - -

I wouldn't be myself if I didn't have others on my list. We need to help prevent human rights debacles in other countries such as the Sudan. We need to completely revamp our country's approach to child and adult-protective services and need an overhaul of our foster parenting program, too. There are many many more but if I tried to articulate and solve all the world's problems here, I'd never get any studying or work done in my real life.