So, come my next birthday on January 21st, after all of the inaugural balls have come and gone, what's your wish list? What do we want from our shiny new President and our enlarged majority in both houses of the Congress? What's your wish list?
Care to see mine?
(These are in no particular order)
- An Aperture Science Weighted Companion Cube.
- A timely and gradual withdrawal of our forces from Iraq, with some smallish residual remaining (if invited) to assist the Iraqis in training and perhaps limited combat operations.
- A significant increase of our forces in Afghanistan.
- Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri dead or in custody.
- A massive effort to develop alternative sources of energy (nuclear, wind, solar, geothermal, alternative forms of ethanol, etc) and an equally massive effort to spur battery technology.
- Multilateral approach to fighting our enemies (Al Qaeda and so forth).
- A fitting successor to one of our finest members of the Supreme Court, Justice Stevens.
- Aggressive funding of international efforts to fight the spread of AIDS that also funds the distribution of condoms.
- Significant reorganization of the EPA and a return to "first principles." The EPA exists to keep our environment healthy and clean, not just for ourselves but for our children and our environment generally.
- Heavy but fairminded regulation of the energy and finance sectors of our economy.
- Universal healthcare, or as close as we can reasonably achieve.
- A massive effort to care for our veterans.
- A pragmatic and fair assessment of whether or not there is any "clean" use of coal. If there is - great! If not, we've gotta work our way off of it. There's some upsides (low cost and abundant domestic supply) but a whole lotta downsides.
- A restoration of our Constitutional rights, vis a vis the Fourth Amendment (and to a lesser extent the First, see Free Speech Zones).
- An end to Don't Ask Don't Tell.
- An end to federal meddling in state-level medicinal marijuana laws.
I could go on. This should serve as a decent primer. Folks, we're fighting for issues that matter! We have to win because we cannot afford any further backsliding.
What's your wish list?