The Party of Ideas? A Liberal Manifesto

George Bush says his party is the party of ideas. Umm, bad ideas. Well George, here are my ideas. The basis of my political beliefs is the idea that one should have personal freedom, so long as they do not violate the rights of others. Expanding from that, I believe we should protect things that are in the common good (through government regulation when necessary) such as our country's safety and the environment, we should create policy from facts, and we should not hide facts from the public (nor "spin" the facts to fit the government's agenda). Last, we should side on "the side of quality of life."

As noted in the comments, no this isn't necessarily ground breaking. But I think a start for us is to lay down what we stand for on paper so we can figure out how to communicate it.

Please turn this into a discussion instead of just being my own personal rant.

The issues touched by my philosophy are all intimately interrelated. A government would have to take on such an agenda in its entirety as much as possible in order to accomplish any of it. For example, if we supported a cleaner environment, one way to achieve that would be to seek a clean, renewable form of energy - making the war in Iraq unnecessary. The billions spent on Iraq might have been enough to pay for the research on this new form of energy. With so much money being pumped into large-scale, aggressive research, more people would have work and the economy would be improved.