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If I were President

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  1. #1

    Default If I were President

    Assuming I had an unrealistic amount of political muscle...

    - The first major piece of legislation would be campaign finance reform. I would deadlock Congress until it passed. I'm not sure what the bill would look like, but its effects would be in making it impossible for special interests to donate to campaigns. All donations would be transparent and achieve a cap based in median income. If a president passed something this powerful, they would be one of the best in history because this is pretty much the only way to keep the country from eventually becoming a full blown Corporatocracy IMO

    - Universal health care. I don't give a fuck what anybody says, everybody gets care, and the richies are going to pay for it with their taxes. However, much high cost care/low effectiveness care will not be universal.

    - Drug war ends immediately. All drugs become regulated

    - Prostitution also would be legal, but very heavily regulated. Every unmarried man on the planet would try to move to the US since we would have an awesome business of the Girlfriend Experience, and everybody will find that intimacy is much easier with contracts. The GFE would become very respectable and lucrative, and probably one of the more popular businesses for both women and men to get into.

    - All foreign war ends immediately. Okay, maybe not immediately, but really damn quickly, and a majority of troops stationed everywhere (like Germany) are reassigned. But that doesn't mean that military spending decreases. On the contrary, all troops would be allocated elsewhere. I would push for greater cooperation with UN, EU, NATO, Russia, China, etc to end world hunger. We already have enough aid, but we don't have the means of protecting that aid, and that's what the our militaries would be used for. Also, all black site imprisonment ends.

    - The Patriot Act gets overturned. The correct response to 9/11 was to amend the communication barriers between intelligence agencies, not take away rights and invade a nation

    - Online poker obv legal

    - Illegal immigration ends, and Mexico is treated like a brother instead of the red-headed step child. The border would become completely locked down; no more US firearms reach the gangs in Mexico, and no more Mexican drugs and illegals reach the US. Instead, tremendous amount of financial, technical, and professional (even militaristic) aid would be provided to Mexico to help them clean up their streets and government and make that step from a second world country to a first world country from which it's citizens don't wanna emigrate.

    - Every school, no matter where they're located or how the children perform, receives ample finances to modernize their infrastructure and pay teachers very well. The teaching profession would experience a paradigm shift. Pay would substantially increase and class sizes would decrease. Maybe even incentive programs along the lines of the government paying the kids for performance

    - US would be put on a path to be completely green by 2030. This still won't be enough since all emissions could cease today, and the increased carbon would still continue to warm for a couple hundred years or so. Hopefully we would be able to create artificial trees, but even those may not work. I think that maybe capturing and sequestering carbon from the oceans may be the only actual way to beat global warming, but I don't think anybody knows how to do that

    - I'm not exactly sure how to fix this, but pretty much everything would become de-privatized to an extent. Things like war and prison would be completely de-privatized, and I would probably push for some kind of publicly run company in every area of business. This would be one of the many steps in decreasing corporate power by increasing competition and equality.

    - This will all be paid for by ceasing some stupid spending, raising assloads of taxes on those rich enough to own small islands, and a conglomeration of the Wall Street banks that caused the Crisis of 08 and the biggest shift of wealth in US history. They will be put on the hook for the trillions of dollars they killed. They will pay their dues for many, many years to come, it will all go straight to the public sector, and the populous would finally be treated correctly.

    - Jon Stewart would be my Press Secretary. He would take a series of questions every morning, and answer them in a succinct fashion, then by the end of the day, he would answer those same exact questions in a similar fashion as he does with Daily Show. I would also never take one ounce of shit from anybody. I would regularly call people like John Boehner and Michael Steele and Glenn Beck dumbshits who fuck the American people up the ass with their lies and hate on national television.

    - Also, abolish the Senate or at least the filibuster. It's called majority rule, not minority rule. And the Senate has kept the country in minority rule for a very long time. No more than 51 votes should ever be needed for anything because then all the power gets shifted into the minority like we are currently seeing. Imagine if the Senate filibuster required 99 votes instead of 60. Imagine that one lone Senator could basically dictate everything just by filibustering. Also, the Senate is highly disproportionately representative for the country. Nobody lives in Montana, but for some reason they still have two Senators, the same number that California has. Massive, massive minority rule going on here. The House is all we need on the legislative side of government.

    Feel free to add or criticize or post pictures of your mom
  2. #2
    ...speeches would be too long
  3. #3
    Quote Originally Posted by Warpe
    ...speeches would be too long
    Actually they'd be pretty short because the vast majority of my talking points would be 'So and so is a fuckface and is lying to you'
  4. #4
    I think a lot of your stuff is up in the clouds, but it definitely all sounds good. I really feel like the US could gain a lot from having an absolute dictatorship established for something like 5 to 8 years. Obviously this dictator would be a very specific person.

    An idea Ive thought about and your mention of military spending reminded me of: What would happen in this day and age if the US just completely abolished its military. Is someone really going to invade us? Obviously it would be easy for them to I guess, but would it really happen? Who would invade us? I mean, this isnt the middle ages anymore where you can go to war simply for fame, glory and booty. Sure there are boarder disputes in some areas in the world, but more or less the political geography of the world is set, especially in north america. Without all the military spending we could have a far more effective police force which can deal with contemporary national security threats (terrorist plots.) And also we could simply rebuild anything in a snap of the fingers without the military drain on our national wallet. Instead of lashing out, we could just be happy.

    I know this is even more "up in the clouds" than us adopting mexico or the war on drugs ending, but I just think its an interesting thinking point. Is china or russia really going to invade us?
    You-- yes, you-- you're a cunt.
  5. #5
    Quote Originally Posted by boost
    I think a lot of your stuff is up in the clouds, but it definitely all sounds good. I really feel like the US could gain a lot from having an absolute dictatorship established for something like 5 to 8 years. Obviously this dictator would be a very specific person.

    An idea Ive thought about and your mention of military spending reminded me of: What would happen in this day and age if the US just completely abolished its military. Is someone really going to invade us? Obviously it would be easy for them to I guess, but would it really happen? Who would invade us? I mean, this isnt the middle ages anymore where you can go to war simply for fame, glory and booty. Sure there are boarder disputes in some areas in the world, but more or less the political geography of the world is set, especially in north america. Without all the military spending we could have a far more effective police force which can deal with contemporary national security threats (terrorist plots.) And also we could simply rebuild anything in a snap of the fingers without the military drain on our national wallet. Instead of lashing out, we could just be happy.

    I know this is even more "up in the clouds" than us adopting mexico or the war on drugs ending, but I just think its an interesting thinking point. Is china or russia really going to invade us?
    Well obviously if we had no national defense then somebody would eventually try to take the land, but national defense isn't the same as this nation building, overseas regulation garbage. US could cut budget dramatically and never get invaded due to nukes alone.

    The reason for so much militaristic bullying in other countries basically boils down to war being good for politicians. Very easy to use to control people, but on top of that, maintaining militaristic superiority is paramount in US maintaining economic superiority. Eventually China will be toe to toe with US though, and if current trends exist for too long, they'll be kicking our ass. But that still doesn't mean there would be any kind of invasion

    When it comes to US upper-middle class specific, and not caring about the rest of the world, US military bullying and massive spending is actually pretty good because it helps maintain power. We do, after all, spend more than all other countries combined. Or at least we did until recently. I don't recall the numbers, but I wouldn't be surprised if China ramps things up gradually. China does seem to be on the long haul though.

    Another thing about spending and US military is that a whole chunk of that goes to expensive mercenaries. I recall one journalist claiming that about half of US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan aren't even on the books. They're just guys that US paid for and trained then they got out and now work for mercenaries like Blackwater. And that US death counts are actually double because they don't count them when mercenaries die. That could be the same with finances
  6. #6
    a500lbgorilla's Avatar
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    I would return to the isolationist policies that served us so well before wars started beginning with World.
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  7. #7
    Ragnar4's Avatar
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    All of this is bullshit, Each and every word of it.

    Because it didn't begin with.

    "I would bang "such and such a chick in the oval office, repeatedly" or "I would masturbate all over the lincoln bedroom until I died."

    So I'll start here. If I were president, I would bang "would hit girl" in the oval office, the lincoln bedroom, and the fountain.

    Then I'd commit to our war in a "we're here to beat the fight out of our opponent" mentality.

    By suggesting for the next 3 months, while we're de-mobilizing and leaving the middle east, but if ANYTHING happens and we come back in, wherever we invade becomes the 51st state... none of this tear it down and re-build it BS, it's ours now. Dare me.

    Then I would re-think the 15,000 gun laws we have in effect, and re-streamline them effectively.

    Then I would do the same thing for each and every other law grouping, following with tax laws, driving laws, economics laws.. etc etc.
    The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than average. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their mistakes
  8. #8
    Quote Originally Posted by a500lbgorilla
    I would return to the isolationist policies that served us so well before wars started beginning with World.
    Really? On the contrary, there's much to be said about the US isolationist policies promoting the ability for Germany to try to bully everybody. At least in WWII, Germany really didn't wanna fight the US, but because the League of Nations was so weak, and US wasn't involved in foreign policies nearly as much as today, Germany was given much more room to build
  9. #9
    k i would totally bang bria myles, zuzana drabinova, and salma hayek in the lincoln bedroom
  10. #10
    Lukie's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by wufwugy
    Quote Originally Posted by Parasurama
    I feel I am doomed to be unsuccessful in every endeavor that I undertake for two reasons. First, I do not actually want to be successful, at least by the traditional definition of success. My definition of success is having enough resources to get by while actually doing nothing. The problem with this mindset is that my intense desire to just do nothing will always prevent me from getting to a position where I can.
    Jesus Christ am I looking in a mirror?

    I could be awesome at just about anything. I could be the best poker player on the planet and make millions, I could write loads of screenplays and get them directed by guys like Cameron and Scott, but I just don't care. I think to myself that even if I cured fucking cancer, I wouldn't feel like that was an accomplishment.

    To me, meaning is in friendships and not really doing anything. But for some cruel reason, that's not how life works. It's hard to make something of yourself when you don't want to do that something. Just call me Peter Gibbons, I guess
    I'm glad you aren't the president.
  11. #11
    lukie, ragnar, well played.


    wuf,... so if we had a civilian defense league or whatever, it would seem that we could just chill out and relax. Esp if we could get away from foreign oil.. If shit hits the fan every able man (and woman?) would report to battle stations and we kill us some commie invaders. Otherwise we just kick back and enjoy the good times.
    You-- yes, you-- you're a cunt.
  12. #12
    Quote Originally Posted by boost
    lukie, ragnar, well played.


    wuf,... so if we had a civilian defense league or whatever, it would seem that we could just chill out and relax. Esp if we could get away from foreign oil.. If shit hits the fan every able man (and woman?) would report to battle stations and we kill us some commie invaders. Otherwise we just kick back and enjoy the good times.
    Sorta. However, I think that if we were to cut basic military spending, we would need to increase spending in other foreign policy areas. Because if we didn't we would eventually be left behind.

    The kind of thing that I'm getting at is that France and Germany no longer need to counterbalance each other with militaries because their relations have become interconnected enough that they're no longer capable of being enemies as easily as back in the 30s. This type of thing has been happening all over the globe, but not everywhere. I think we should increase spending in areas that involve cooperation and common interests with the other powers (China and Russia) instead of trying to hold onto our militaristic supremacy.

    In creating interdependent friendships with every important power on the planet, we would essentially not be able to be 'left behind' if we eased up on military technology
  13. #13
    FO'SHO
    You-- yes, you-- you're a cunt.
  14. #14
    a500lbgorilla's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by wufwugy
    Quote Originally Posted by a500lbgorilla
    I would return to the isolationist policies that served us so well before wars started beginning with World.
    Really? On the contrary, there's much to be said about the US isolationist policies promoting the ability for Germany to try to bully everybody. At least in WWII, Germany really didn't wanna fight the US, but because the League of Nations was so weak, and US wasn't involved in foreign policies nearly as much as today, Germany was given much more room to build
    not our problem.
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  15. #15
    If I was president...

    I'd admit that it was a mistake gaining independence from England and ask for them to take us back.

    Then the whole nation could start to spell properly again, play some proper sports and not "whoop" at every given oppurtunity.

    We'd knock down the Statue of Liberty and build a bigger statue of Her Royal Highness Queen Elizibeth II draped in a Union Jack.

    - but on a serious note, Europe is Americas "problem" rilla, as is the rest of world.
    and agree with Wuf. things have changed. America can't dominate with military might. Things have changed. China has a huge military, huge resources (haven't they bought up US debt?), etc.

    America would get left behing if they try and be isolationist.

    Europe, Russia, China will just move on together.
    Normski
  16. #16
    a500lbgorilla's Avatar
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    my isolationist point was not on a serious note.

    I used to bring it up in highschool class convos all the time because no one realized I was joking and a lot were surprisingly amiable to the idea.
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  17. #17
    Quote Originally Posted by a500lbgorilla
    my isolationist point was not on a serious note.

    I used to bring it up in highschool class convos all the time because no one realized I was joking and a lot were surprisingly amiable to the idea.
    I'd like to isolate myself with 'rilla and make sweet sweet love to him... not in a gay way... just for the sake of our nation.
    So you click their picture and then you get their money?
  18. #18
    Quote Originally Posted by a500lbgorilla
    my isolationist point was not on a serious note.

    I used to bring it up in highschool class convos all the time because no one realized I was joking and a lot were surprisingly amiable to the idea.
    yah soz. internets makes sarcasm hard to notice. I knew you were a commie bastard really.
    Normski
  19. #19
    Number 2 on your list is so obvious to the rest of the civilized world and yet in America you would be called a socialist or a Nazi (or both simultaneously - go figure).
  20. #20
    bigred's Avatar
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    Finally read it. +1 for John Stewart
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