Suggestion for the first 100 days

There's so much on the plate for soon-to-be-President Obama, it's a bit overwhelming. However, there are some things he can do in the first 100 days to improve our international standing and get the ball rolling domestically.

The very first thing he can do is make sure that every person the United States has confined around the world is transferred to a prison within the United States and brought to trial. If they are being held without charge or evidence, they must be released immediately. He can make this move entirely through executive order. Through this gesture, he will be showing the world that his administration will be a change from that of George W. Bush (and I'm sure we'll see many more examples!).

Some Republicans will see this maneuver as "giving civil rights to terrorists". However, holding people without charge or trial not only denies the American people closure regarding the terrorist attacks that took place on 9/11/2001, but also makes the United States look as though we've taken people prisoner to make it look like we're doing something about terrorism. Furthermore, it makes people suspicious that we have taken innocent people into custody. If we have potentially dangerous people imprisoned, they must be brought to trial and sentenced. If we have innocent people in prison, they must be released. It's that simple.

Besides, giving all incarcerated people the right to a fair and speedy trial is in the Constitution, and the President's duty is to uphold it.

Next, President Obama should work with Congress on infrastructure projects, starting with the construction of a new levy system in New Orleans. Infrastructure projects--not done with contracted, cheap labor, but with people given a living wage for the work--will provide the seed money necessary to get the economy moving again in areas where the infrastructure has deteriorated. New Orleans is a port city, and port cities are vital for trade and national security. It's not the only city we should rebuild, but the victims of Hurricane Katrina, who soon after became the victims of a derelict President and the FEMA people under his direction, need to get the hand up they needed three years ago.

The third thing President Obama should do is work out the redeployment plan for the troops in Iraq. Whether they are transferred to Afghanistan or put on a base in an allied country, they should be out of Iraq as soon as possible.

Finally, the new President's Cabinet members, after they are approved, must each be given a top priority issue to work on immediately:

• Secretary of State: The new Secretary of State should meet immediately with our allies and formulate diplomatic strategies with countries who are not.
• Secretary of the Treasury: The newly appointed head of the Department of the Treasury should meet with the nation's--if not the world's--top economists to figure out the best way out of our financial crisis.
• Secretary of Defense: The first task of the new Secretary of Defense should be to enumerate programs that are obsolete and cut them out of the budget.
• Attorney General: The Attorney General should immediately identify any Bush appointees who have litigated based on partisanship and replace them promptly. The next order of business should be to investigate whether war crimes have been committed and prosecute those who have committed them.
• Secretary of the Interior: The first order of business for this department is to get industry lobbyists out of the department and undo any damage that has been done to our public land.
• Secretary of Agriculture: Restore the export of food from the United States and end the import of it from China, in light of all of the harmful substances that have been found in that food. We have historically produced more food than we could possibly consume here; we should not be importing anything from anywhere unless it is not native to this country. It raises my hackles every time I see apple juice with "PRODUCT OF CHINA" stamped on it.
• Secretary of Commerce: This department head should focus on identifying markets where the United States could fill gaps in the world's supply chains with new manufacturing jobs.
• Secretary of Labor: The Secretary of Labor should identify the real numbers of unemployed and under-employed people in the United States, then make recommendations regarding the community service for education program. This program should be implemented in areas of the country where the most people are unemployed or not making a living wage.
• Secretary of Health and Human Services: This Secretary should identify ways to cut the costs of Medicare (renegotiating pharmaceutical prices, for a start) and how to bring the uninsured and underinsured into the program economically.
• Secretary of Housing and Urban Development: The immediate act that should be addressed by this appointee should be to put an end to HUD funds being routed to church remodeling and reconstruction. The intent of this money and this department is to make sure that people who need low-income housing get their needs served, not serving the needs of churches with empty pew syndrome.
• Secretary of Transportation: The Secretary of Transportation should identify areas where our highway infrastructure needs the most work and develop projects to rebuild that infrastructure, beginning with any major bridges that need report (we don't need another incident like the one in Minnesota).
• Secretary of Energy: Under Spencer Abraham (now it is Bodman, but Abraham was first), the energy infrastructure of the United States was tied together far too closely, causing more energy waste and the possibility of shutting down power for entire regions of the United States (remember the power outage that affected the Great Lakes region a few years back?). The first act of this department should be to come up with a plan to localize energy, preferably through a new infrastructure of green technologies. It's not just a matter of energy savings; it's a matter of national security. One accident or attack at one power plant should not be able to deprive an entire region of electricity.
• Secretary of Education: The head of this department should work out a four-year plan to get our students competitive with students around the world in areas where we're lagging behind (as in math, science, geography--and, well, everything else).
• Secretary of Veterans' Affairs: This Cabinet member should immediate work on de-privatizing the veteran hospitals system and make certain that every veteran who needs care is getting it.
• Secretary of Homeland Security: This department is the biggest bureaucracy in the Cabinet. As such, the new Secretary should work on how best to keep from duplicating efforts across intelligence agencies. Either that, or the department should be abolished altogether. I would also like the DEA rolled into some other department. We need to begin treating drugs as a health issue, rather than a criminal issue. We spend ridiculous amounts of money--billions of dollars--on drug law enforcement. If drugs were legal and we treated abuse as a health issue, rather than a criminal issue, and if we stopped treating all use as abuse, we could save billions a year in enforcement costs and in prisoner maintenance.

These are just my suggestions, based on my own observations. I could be missing some important issues. I would love to hear other people's opinions.

The Sarah Palin Hype

She's for more drilling for oil--in Alaska.

She doesn't even want victims of rape and incest to have access to safe abortions.

She's for teaching creationism along with evolution in the public schools.

She asked a librarian three times if she could have "objectionable" books banned. She never presented a list (the one circulating on the Internet started as a speculation and became "the" list--it was never real, because Palin only asked about the concept of banning books), but she asked the questions. Three. Times.

She's all for hunting wolves. People in Ohio and Michigan, at least, should know that the reason we can hunt so many deer every year is because our recent ancestors took out the timber wolves, so nothing was hunting them. That imbalance created by an absence of predation could have led to ecological disaster otherwise.

She doesn't want polar bears to be protected as an endangered species.

The above are facts, and they're all I need to know about Palin to dismiss her as someone I feel is not qualified to be President (let's face it: John McCain hasn't aged well. If he were in the same shape as my dad, I'd say he has a chance of living through his first term, but he didn't play soccer for forty years of his life). The idea that she would support banning books from a library at all tells me that she either hasn't read the Constitution, or that she doesn't care about it--and she has to swear to uphold it if she were to become McCain's VP.

So I hear all of these polls have Obama and McCain neck-and-neck, with indicators that show McCain is ahead.

Rubbish, I say. Rubbish.

That's putting it very gently.

What do we know about Sarah Palin, other than what I've posted above? Well, there are a lot of allegations and some more factual items I could post, but here's what America has heard out of her own mouth.

ONE FREAKING SPEECH!!!! ONE SPEECH SHE DIDN'T EVEN WRITE HERSELF!!!!

The writer was Matthew Scully, former speechwriter for George W. Bush. Palin didn't write it herself. She merely recited what someone else wrote for her.

I'm not saying that just anyone could do that. What I am saying that reading off a teleprompter can be done by plenty of people who shouldn't be President. Your local news anchor can read quite well off a teleprompter. Even if she memorized the speech, so what? I was in a musical and a play in high school, and I've memorized some Shakespeare and good poetry, and plenty of other people have, as well.

Remember how polished Dubya was during the campaign season in 2004? I stopped listening to him during the 2000 campaign after he said that the jury was still out on evolution, because that one phrase put my vote into the Democrat column for the first time since I began voting. I can't vote for an anti-science candidate. If both were anti-science, I'd have to go for the one who was going to do the least damage otherwise, but I'd have to hold my nose to do it. In any case, Bush was polished because he stayed on message--a message someone else wrote for him.

Now, remember Bush in the debates against John Kerry? Unless you were Rudolph Giuliani or Karen Hughes, whose spin came from Bizarro world, or unless you were anyone from Faux News Channel, there is no way you could come to the conclusion that Bush won.

Enter Sarah Palin's upcoming debate with Joe Biden. People keep talking about how people who watched the Kennedy-Nixon debate thought Kennedy won, and people who listened to the radio thought Nixon won; looks allegedly played a role. I say no. I think maybe the correlation is that radio listeners were more conservative than television viewers, since the TV viewers would be more technology-friendly and more likely to enjoy the entertainment offered on television over radio. Plus, Kennedy was very smart. I'm not saying Nixon wasn't, but Kennedy was sharp.

Can Palin think on her feet? We'll have to see. What I think is that she's going to speak in the abstract ("Victory is within sight in Iraq"), and Biden's probably going to tear her to shreds with details. She's going to look just as bad with Biden as Quayle did with Lloyd Bentson. Remember that moment? If not, view it here.

Yes, I know Bentsen was on the losing side of that election, but Dukakis was his running mate. What do you want?

Barack Obama isn't Michael Dukakis, fortunately. Sorry, Mr. Dukakis, but you didn't inspire me; Obama does. In fact, Obama has been the first candidate ever to have inspired me in any way. Wait--Dubya inspired me to work for the Kerry campaign, but that's just not the same, somehow.

In any case, Palin is meant to be a distraction--something to take any media scrutiny off of him and onto Palin. Not that the media has been doing much scrutiny where McCain has been concerned, but with it being all Palin, all the time, nobody's looking at the corpse-like John McCain. Nobody is paying attention to his lack of energy, his gaffes, his substance-free speeches. Nobody's looking at the old, bald dude.

Palin was a purely political choice. There are plenty of women--even in the Republican Party--who could have qualified to be John McCain's running mate. She was chosen because she's young, she's pretty, she's unknown, and she has the values of the rabid religious right. She's not there because she's qualified. Most women I know would be insulted by the choice of Sarah Palin as John McCain's running mate. What woman doesn't look at Sarah Palin and then say, "Is she the best you do? Really?"

Sarah Palin is nothing but a political choice, a marketing ploy. They're sheltering her from the media (until they can successfully coach her on the talking points), while the media is still gushing about how she "hit it out of the park" with her RNC speech--which contained lies and insults.

What person in their right mind insults community organizers?

And Obama's right: Palin's comment about reading terrorists their rights is a flat-out insult to the Constitution she wants to pretend to uphold.

My final word for tonight is this: do not worry about the polls. Please, please ignore them. First of all, national polls mean very little, especially if they're even; only state-by-state polls do, because that's how electoral votes go. Something else is skewing the polls this year, though.

It's the economy.

People who found themselves suddenly paying interest rates approaching 30% on credit cards--just because the issuing banks could do it legally, when it used to be called "loan-sharking"--also found that they couldn't pay the minimum payments anymore, and they defaulted. Since bankruptcy is harder to declare, thanks to Republican policy, these people find no recourse but to let the bill collectors call them incessantly with autodialers. These people no longer answer their phones, and their numbers are large.

When a study shows a seventy percent increase in water bills, it's an indication that there are a lot of people with bill collectors calling about other unpaid services.

What about people facing foreclosure? I hear 8,000 per day, 7,000 per day--does anyone have the real number? I heard a staggering figure: just over 6% of homeowners are either behind on their mortgage payments or facing foreclosure right now. Do you think these people are going to vote for another Republican? Let's poll them and see if McCain has support anywhere close to Obama's. Oh, wait--they probably won't answer their phones, either.

So...if 6% of homeowners aren't answering their phones, add to it the percentage of people with delinquent credit card debt who also aren't answering their phones, and you have a great many unanswered phones involved in the polling process. Perhaps someone from a polling company will tell me they correct for that, but I somehow doubt it.

I'm going to say that Obama is actually ahead, and it's more like 58% of voters supporting him. I'm not saying you should stop working hard--work harder!--but I think the polls are horribly skewed this time.