'F I were King of the Forest ...

Ten Things I'd Do if I were king of the forest ...

1. Repeal the USA PATRIOT Act and all it's follow-on legislation. Including the latest suspensions of habeus corpus and the military tribunals.

2. Repeal NCLB. We need to do *something* about Education in this country but it needs to be centered on Learning, not Accountability.

3. Along those lines, we need to re-tool the Economy to the Information Age, not the Industrial Age. We are never going to get those factory lines back and that's a good thing. We need to replace/upgrade that whole thing.

4. Restore Copyright to Life +25 years for individually held works and maximum 25 years for corporate owned material. A century is too long and it's not fair to the coming generations.

5. Healthcare has to be overhauled. If that makes us Socialist, fine. We can't have poor people dying because they can't afford antibiotics. It's ridiculous.

6. Bring the troops home and apologize to the rest of the world for the madness.

7. Repeal the bill that authorized the Iron Curtain South. That's billions of dollars we don't need to pay to KBR that we might be able to use to actually support the INS with personnel and equipment.

8. Cut the military budget by 10% and put the money into Pell Grants. It's insane that fewer than 25% of Americans over 25 have a college degree. I don't care what they get degrees in. We need 'em all if we're going to out-create the rest of the world.

9. Network is infrastructure ... If you want to provide network, you don't get to say who can use the pipes. Charge for the load if you want, but the price has to be the same for everybody not just the people you like.

10. Alternative energy production. Why are there no diesel hybrids? Why does public transportation suck? Where's the bio-diesel? What happened to ethanol? Why do we allow 15mpg passenger vehicles on the road? Somebody has to have some answers here and I know it's neither the automakers nor the oil industry. It's time we dealt with this.

Your turn.