Well as I am not registered as a Democrat I can’t vote in this Primary. But apparently the zealots outside the polling places can still harass me with their ludicrous ideals. Its very funny actually, because these people seem to think that because they are involved in someones campaign they know everything about the elections, and yet when you ask them a question, as I did of someone this AM with a Hillary T-Shirt on, outside the firehouse polling place, “Hillary was in charge of Bill’s health care policy, and could not get it passed then, why does she think she can now? And more importantly, she, as her husband did, if the polls change on what is important to Americans, will she change to the new subject and drop(thats the issue, things didn’t get finished [this happened to their health care]) the last subject?” They just give you a blind stare and smile. Or my favorite was one of her cohourts, “It’s better than Bush!” Well yes, it would be, but that is irrelevant, Bush isn’t up again, and too the candidates own admission we need someone who can run the place, not someone who is better than someone that isn’t even running. The problem is we are still too worried about who is to blame, and in fact all of the candidates are too blame for the problems with this country as they are all elected officials now, and have all partaken in getting us here, weather they want to own up to it or not. We have a tendency in the United States of thinking if we deny something, it is the same as wiping it away and it never happened. Not so. Hillary and McCain voted for the war, Obama wasn’t there. The whole, we were lied to to bullshit, is just that, if you look back pre-war you can find speeches of Bill Clinton stating that he was given intelligence saying Saddam Hussein had WMD. The fact is if we were lied too, it started over a decade ago, prior to W’s policies. Yes we shouldn’t be in Iraq, no, we never should have gone. But the fact is we are there, and no we shouldn’t run away from it, as Obama and Clinton think we should. And no we shouldn’t be there for 100 years as McCain thinks we should. What do you say? I oversimplified their arguments. Yes I did, to show another point, most of us know what Katie Couric, or whomever we watch nightly, if we watch, told us, not what these candidates actually said. And why? I think its because we are sick of hearing these sound bites. This election has gone on entirely too long, we need election reform, and these are my ideas:

1. Abolish the whole Primary thing. If the big parties think we still need it (who is running the show, the Parties or the people?), fine, 90 days prior to the election, on the same day for the entire country(everyone’s vote matters), we have a Primary. Everyone can vote, not just if you are registered Democrat or Republican, everyone. That way we see whom the people really wanted running. And to make it better, those running have 90 days prior to get their word out. We are in the 21st century now, we now when a candidate farts in a corn field, not ten minutes later. We don’t need years for the election, we need less than one.

2. The Candidates must have a better than 90% attendance rate at their current position. If they are not showing up for work now, who says they are going to once they are elected. Its that simple.

3. Ads. We will start with posters. Put your posters up wherever you want (public spaces), but 72 hours post election they must all be down. Hefty fines to be imposed on those who don’t take down their posters, lets say $5 for every standard letter size poster found. $10/every 4x letters size poster… Those fines to be paid by the party to the cities they are found in for their parks commission or such. Keeping the city green. Within 30 days. TV ads, everyone is sick of these things. All candidates are allowed 1 commercial per night, 3 during the day(must be used between midnight and 6PM, don’t you lose them, no banking), per day. Those ads may not be of the negative variety. If they are, there opposing Candidates will be granted 1 more Prime Time ad (even if the negative ad was done during the day), to be paid for by the candidate who did the negative one. These ads are to inform us why we are to vote for you, not why we shouldn’t vote for the other candidate. We, the people, don’t want to see your ads all the time, and hopefully with these ads you, the candidates will get out the information you want. These ads include those made by those extremist groups such as Move On. So if they put up a negative Democrat ad, all of the Republican candidates lose that prime time ad, thus they are hurting the candidates they supposedly support.

4. Debates. There will be 6 3 hour Debates during the election season. Approximately one every other week. This is the way you word really gets out. All questions will be sent in by the people, not the press, to be chosen randomly from a hat, during the debate. The candidates may see all of the questions prior, but will not know which of the thousands will be asked, during the debate. The time will be divided equally among the candidates, to answer the questions. All debates will be televised as well as shown on the internet and radio. Any station may televise all or any of the debates, but must be shown in their entirety commercial free.

5. Campaign contributions. This is a tough one, debated by all. First of all this is a government for the people, by the people, that being said, corporations have no business buying into the election, and all should be banned. Second of all, individuals have and should continue to have limits to what they can contribute, but what should be mandates is all contributions should be anonymous. If no one knows who gave what, benefits and retributions for those contributions can’t happen. How to do this? Well all contributions happen to a central “bank”, stripped of all information IDing the contributor, and then passed to the candidate.

6. Press. This country has one of the greatest things going for it, freedom of the press. But the press very proudly proclaims one candidate over another. The press in the US, does less reporting these days that editorializing things. For instance in one paper a headline may be “Firefighters Loose 2 to Fire” and another paper “Firefighters Save 3″. Its the same fire, but one chose to highlight the 2 that were killed over the 3 that were saved. The same happens in politics. In fact newspapers proclaim whom they endorse, TV has yet to outright do that. How to stop this? Well one way is to have them mandate the last page in the front section be a page where the paper has to print whom they have endorsed over the last 2 years. This way you can look, in the same place, to see where they are leaning, and they can still print whatever headline they want, without effecting it. TV is more difficult, maybe putting the D or R after the reporters name? I am not sure what to do, but that is the way I am leaning. Radio, maybe TV also, a special time a day a disclaimer played. Now this disclaimer can’t be at 4AM or a time when most are asleep, maybe at the end of the main newscast, stating the leanings of the station. I don’t really like doing this at all, but most people don’t understand that the news can, and knowingly does, lean one way or another.

…to be continued…