My fellow Americans: The state of the union is awful. Drastic measures are needed to take corrective action.
Read more below the fold on the measures we need to investigate wrongdoing by the Unitary Executive, to withdraw from Iraq, to counter global warming, and to enact Clean Money and the Fairness Doctrine.
The Unitary Executive has stolen our country. We cannot tolerate warrantless searches of innocent Americans. We cannot tolerate people being imprisoned without a chance to a fair trial. We cannot tolerate signing statements that override the laws of our country. We need investigations, not for retribution, but to protect our rights in the future. If the investigations find wrongdoing, we need to take action -- including impeachment -- not to be spiteful but to set a precedent that this must not ever happen again.
We must not escalate the Civil War in Iraq. We need to concentrate on ensuring that the war does not spread to other countries without taking sides in the war. Doing so will be better accomplished with fewer troops in Iraq, not more. Our country will be better protected with those troops being available wherever they might be needed and in particular with our National Guard troop serving back here in the United States where they belong.
We need to stop the destruction of life as we know it. It will be costly, but not as costly as it would be if we wait. We must impose strict mandatory caps on greenhouse gases. We must invest in research into alternative energy that does not use carbon. We must raise standards for gas mileage in our cars, imposing a tax on new cars that fail to meet the standards and a credit on cars that far exceed them. We must not exclude the types of vehicles that are the worst offenders. Hurricane Katrina taught us that we must also take action to be prepared for the disasters that result from the damage we have already done and cannot reverse fast enough. We must be prepared in various parts of the country for more hurricanes, blizzards, droughts, floods, etc.
We have seen terrible scandals in which lobbyists have bought our politicians. When faith in our electoral process seems like it can't get any lower, it manages to do just that. We must always run fair elections. Elections cannot be fair if the candidates cannot get their message to the voters. It is simply part of the cost that any democracy must pay to run fair elections to provide the means for candidates to be heard. The biggest bribes that contribute to the destruction of our political process are campaign contributions. We must enact Clean Money. We must make it irrelevant whether a candidate or the lobbyists in his or her pocket have the money to win office.
To avoid ever getting back into this mess again, we must always ensure that everyone has a chance to be heard. We must not listen to just one side. We must replace partisanship with cooperation. To accomplish this, we must restore the Fairness Doctrine, ensuring that those media corporations that use government protected monopolies over broadcast and cable frequencies will always allow both sides to be heard. In this way, we can restore civil debates over the tough issues we face.