If you were running for president, what would your platform be? - Page 3

Why, did you get halfway through a response before you realized I'd just cut and pasted your own words from just a few posts ago?

Almost wish I didn't find this:

free (fr?)
adj., fre·er, fre·est.
Not imprisoned or enslaved; being at liberty.
Not controlled by obligation or the will of another: felt free to go.
Having political independence: America . . . is the freest and wealthiest nation in the world (Rudolph W. Giuliani).
Governed by consent and possessing or granting civil liberties: a free citizenry.
Not subject to arbitrary interference by a government: a free press.
Not affected or restricted by a given condition or circumstance: a healthy animal, free of disease; free from need.
Not subject to a given condition; exempt: income that is free of all taxes.
Not subject to external restraint: Comment is free but facts are sacred (Charles Prestwich Scott).
Not literal or exact: a free translation.
Costing nothing; gratuitous: a free meal.
Publicly supported: free education.
Not occupied or used: a free locker.
Not taken up by scheduled activities: free time between classes.
Unobstructed; clear: a free lane.
Unguarded in expression or manner; open; frank.
Taking undue liberties; forward or overfamiliar.
Liberal or lavish: tourists who are free with their money.
Given, made, or done of one's own accord; voluntary or spontaneous: a free act of the will; free choices.
Chemistry & Physics.
Unconstrained; unconfined: free expansion.
Not fixed in position; capable of relatively unrestricted motion: a free electron.
Not chemically bound in a molecule: free oxygen.
Involving no collisions or interactions: a free path.
Empty: a free space.
Unoccupied: a free energy level.
Nautical. Favorable: a free wind.
Not bound, fastened, or attached: the free end of a chain.
Linguistics.
Being a form, especially a morpheme, that can stand as an independent word, such as boat or bring.
Being a vowel in an open syllable, as the o in go.

but we all get your point chris.

I didn't. I recognized it right away.

My whole point is that pre-pending "free" onto any of these things is mis-leading to many people and serves only to exacerbate the delusion that they are actually free.

Although it is a mouthful, the more accurate term would be something like:

"Taxpayer-funded, publicly accessible X."

Where X = road, primary (or secondary) educational or health care system.

I think if these things were characterized this way, it would wake more people up to the reality and might give us pause on some things.

One final note...on the highway/road system example...you actually do get people to argue something like "No, I think the roads should be free." typically when comparing/arguing against toll roads.

( NOTE: I don't care much for toll roads either. )

Oh well, it's been real. On to other things. Later chaps.

Interesting. Can you expand on this and explain the rationale?

Oh, and it's not free.

Sure. For a long time now, I've believed that America could use 5 "flagship" national universities. One in the NE, the SE, the NW, the SW, and one in the middle of the country (someplace like KS). In my dreamworld, each one of these would focus on a specific area of knowledge, so the one in KS might focus on ag and ag-related stuff, the one in the SW might focus on something else, etc. Each of these would offer the full range of courses, of course, but they would emphasize specific cores of knowledge. In my dreamworld, they would be completely state-funded and would charge no tuition whatsoever of the students. They would also be elite. Only the cream of the crop would be allowed entrance, and so competition to get in would be fierce (think: they compete with the Rhodes and Marshall kids). This would also allow them to be relatively small (a few hundred to a few thousand students). Finally, they must be generously, generously, generously funded. Faculty should be the absolute rock stars of their respective fields and they should be paid like it, and so competition for jobs there should be just as fierce as it is for the students.

The rationale is pretty simple: I am increasingly coming to believe that one of the major problems facing higher education in America is that it is no longer an honor and a privilege to attend a university. This notion of the university trickles down (like money doesn't) so that kids think of the university not as a glorious place of learning and ideas, but as a hoop to jump through before they get their receipt at the end and get a job and get on with the important stuff of their lives. I believe that these kinds of universities could function as a beacon, as a possible goal, for every student in America, and could possibly help solve many of the vision problems of the public education system.

Thank you. And may God bless America.

I assume you're kidding, but I feel a responsibility anyway to point out that U Kansas is a top-notch school.


That's kind of what I was thinking (though I wouldn't limit it to the Ivy League), but hey, midwinter is president so he can do what he wants!

Damn straight! Now shut up, the both of ya.

I think you both missed my point that these schools would be smaller, more focused, and much, much more competitive than the ivies.

...and would be free of all the factors that give state schools the reputation they enjoy today. All the bureaucracy, grad students teaching classes, etc., would be swept aside, as there will be a steady stream only the best professors solely bent on 'teaching the students' --- beating the doors down, begging tearfully to be let into this panacea that abolishes all the normal pitfalls that plague schools staffed by mere mortals.

Where's my air-sickness bag?

I hate to break it to you, but if grad students don't teach classes, they won't have ANY teaching experience when they get jobs. Versus getting 5-8 years of teaching experience in grad school.

Of course, midwinter, the professors only sit out due to humanitarian concerns, and not because they are caught up in an ego trip, to get research grants, or published, etc.

Are you for real?

Professors sit out? There are tons of people who'd love to be real professors, but why pay a prof $50,000 when you can pay a pee-on grad student or other part-timer $5,000?

No need to be pissy.

Of course I'm for real. Universities have to offer more classes than they can ever possibly afford to pay professors to teach (even at our horribly poor salaries), and so they rely on adjunct and graduate student labor to teach large numbers of courses. When I was in grad school, ~70 teaching assistants taught about 120 sections of freshman comp, intro to lit, and staffed the writing center. The same is usually true for any of the big section classes (like math). The trade is that the university gets cheap (read: slave) labor and the grad students get much-needed teaching experience. This, of course, isn't the same for all disciplines. I run into people (usually in psych, for some weird reason) all the time who assume that I had limited teaching experience before I took my job, when in fact I'd been teaching for nearly 10 years.

I'm not talking about freshman classes at all, I'm talking about 3rd and 4th year classes -- when you really start to penetrate the holy of holies of the game. (!)

I find it difficult to believe that there's an epidemic of graduate students (unless they were very advanced PhD students or had some special knowledge) teaching upper-division classes in universities around the country, and when these things happen (and they do), they are the exception and not the rule.

With that said, I am very much for it. One of the problems with the current system is that exiting PhDs have little to no experience teaching the "advanced" stuff, and there is a world of difference between teaching a freshman comp or into to lit class in your sleep and teaching a 4th year seminar. I wish I'd had that kind of experience before I taught my first one, and I was certainly qualified to teach something like brit lit 2 or a survey in my area years before I finished up, got a job and taught my first one.

I actually understand giving the grad students the spit bucket in the freshman areas.

But, there is a seedy underbelly that needs to be adressed -- LONG before we propose whole new universities that are doomed to fall down the same staircase that all the other's have.

If by "seedy underbelly" you mean "barely paying people for the immense amount of work they do," I'm with you.

I can't believe that you guys spent dozens of post debating the meaning of the word "free" over and over again when you both knew perfectly well what the other person was saying from the beginning. Jeez louise, can't people make their point and then move on if they don't agree or is there some unwritten rule that if the other person keeps posting then you must continue as well? Make your point but then let it go if there is nothing new to add.
Top notch? Hmmm.

The higher education idea sounds fine. But overall I think restoring and enlarging Pell and other grants and loans would be much more useful. I'd also look to have some sort of training college more in line with science and tech curriculums. Some sort of amalgamation of the characteristics of community colleges, four year schools and places like ITT for those.

Additionally, while our higher ed can use all the help it can get, when you look at preschool, lower el, upper el, middle/junior, and high school it is pretty clear that the US lags a lot of other comparable countries in quality of education. That's much less true if it is true at all for higher ed especially when you factor in the fairly sizeable breadth of schooling in the US.

Yeah. An advanced grad student in most fields could teach an advanced (i.e., specialized) course better than an intro course. My first course was Cognitive Psych, a 300-level course, which I knew well, because grad training is so specialized. I would have found it much more difficult to teach Intro Psych, which has so much breadth. Maybe it's different in other fields though.

I'm very sceptical of systemic problems -- especially the 'no child left behind' business -- that we are told can be solved simply by spending more money.

It's completely analogous to small municipalties whoring themsleves out for every last Federal dollar they can get, while the city employees complain about Federal intrusion and high taxes.

I actually had that in there and took it out because of, um, pie.

A couple of things:

1) All problems are systemic if you look at them the right way.

2) The rebuttal that "spending more money won't fix the problem" assumes that adequate funding is being spent in the first place. It's not. I'd like to see military levels of funding for education.

midwinter, do you drive an M1 Abrams to work, or use an F-18 to put on your powerpoint presentations? I'd like to see pay for professors compared to pay for officers.

hmmmmm.....but then again, officers don't have tenure.

At any rate, we will have to bicker next weekend. Peace. Behave.

Not quite reductio ad absurdum, but you're getting there. Keep practicing. Meanwhile, I'll put together my bake sale to buy shelves for my office. Or buy office supplies out of my own pocket.


As would I, especially factoring in military health care (free), housing (free), cheap groceries (commisary), tax breaks, combat pay/hazard pay, and all the other nice things that people in the military get.


Why is it that the only people who bitch about tenure don't know what it is?


Will do. I'm back to this godawful Elizabeth Kostova novel.

Tenure schmenure. The military don't need no stinkin tenure, they got something much better. Stop loss. Why bother with a puny system like tenure? All tenure does is let the experienced and proven employees have a modicum of security via tenure provided that they want to stay with the school that employs them. Far better to do what the Pentagon does; make them stay even if their enlistments are over and they want to go. Think about how great it must be to work for Uncle Sam, an organization that not only has no desire to shed any of its fine fighting forces but in fact wants them to stay so badly that they aren't allowed to leave at all. Now that is job security, true tenure.

I hope your pie was cherry, provided that you're not a Freudian of course.

Invest lots of money and within 6 weeks build and get into place a giant space laser which can destroy anything and is powered by fusion. Have settings that can go from small as penny to big as a city. (the purpose of this will be come apparent later in my post)

Overnight national ID program. Everyone get in line. Everyone get a #. If you want to exist.. get a #. Illegal aliens welcome to apply. Do away with all other IDs.

Create national bank. Take everyone's money into an new account we can hold for them. Intrest rate locked steady forever. (no more venture money) Disband all traditional army. Transfer all troops to new massive civilian defense league. Take excess money into R&D.

Expand wildlife protections where practical. Eliminate those which are not. Expand antitrust & monopoly laws. Begin the deconstruction of mega-corps. Expand rural growth with the largest ever government work program. Food should be even more abundant, diverse and eco-friendly.

Eliminate borders. State and national. Drop all fences on said borders. Open commerce on all sided. One giant country. No statehood. Grid the sucker into quarter acre units. Use these for all further maps etc.

Create electronic voting systems with regional 'role up'. Make all voting one person one vote. No electoral college etc. Votes on local issues would pass based on density. (in other words, people could make laws where they could get enough of a threshold) That threshold would be 75% *subject to change*. All bills would have grids associated to them to designate where the law would apply to. Eligible people living in an effected grid would be granted a vote. Viola, the best voting system in the world... instantly created electronically and perfectly fair.

Move US capital to a un-disclosed location. De-centralize all federal agencies to similar location. Move all state property to be owned by the fed. Eliminate congress, house, etc.

Revamp courts to be vote based. Again.. the crime would be assigned a designated area. Guilt and Innocence would be voted on jury style with a massive jury. Court TV would be expanded to allow citizens to watch trials on demand. (this would now occupy 50-100 channels) and be tied in with the voting system. These channels would be rebranded the public information system. (cspan+) And also be used for all voting info distribution.

Immediate threats to our safety would be vaporized overnight. That includes anyone dissident. Schools to be state run and skill driven, art and science driven. Salaries of teachers made comparable to the work they do.

All tax code changed to support sales tax driven system.
Plan and dismantle private healthcare. Public healthcare for all. (Quantity over quality) New health research would be federally completed and tested. FDA expanded to be commercialized and purchasing technology from other countries.

Religious institutions regulated. (must apply for a religious licensee) Operating religious gathers without such permits and licenses would be a jailable offense. These licenses would allow for unrestrained random searches and seizures.

Create (or expand) civil liberties laws to make all races, religions, sexualities, genders etc. equal. Marriage for all, protections for all, vote for all etc.

Give all public libraries to private groups to maintain and expand. Encourage them with incentives to specialize their contents. Create a program of real social security. (Gov. Retirement)

...more to come...

Well that's a bit different I guess. You don't see many egalitarian-Orwellian politcos running for office do you?

He must be a South Park Republican.

It would be fun to be president if you didn't have to deal with politics. In an ideal world my platform would at least have:
Universal Healthcare
Legalization of pot and amnesty for those in jail for pot
Decriminalization of all hard drugs

Marriage for all

Real workfare, I would guarantee a job for anyone at a rate slightly above the poverty level.

Reduce the drinking age to either eighteen or nineteen
Tax code simplification

I would work hard to eliminate pork from the budget
Mandatory sex education in junior high

Eliminate all student aid for secondary education and instead give aid to the states with a mandate to lower the cost of state schools to an attainable level. Probably include some kind of summer job that a student can work at that will give them enough to pay their tuition and have a stipend.

Makeover the education system by having high school end at tenth grade and college start sooner for those going to college and create real trade colleges for those who shouldn't be in college. I think way to many people are going to college these days who could be much better served by different types of education.

Get tough on China initiate trade sanctions. Take away most favored nation status

Bring back the old FCC rules on media ownership

Introduce an amendment to make all earnings from the creation of art nontaxable

I could go on with my ramblings......

If I were President I would rule the day.

My platform:

-Replace graduated income tax with flat income tax
-Abolish all social programs except unemployment benefits
-Get the government out of marriage altogether. No government recognition of anyones marriage.
-Overturn Roe/Wade and send the issue back to the states where it belongs
-Repeal all dicriminatory laws on the books. They have no place in society today. Besides, they reek of socialism
-Cut the federal government in half (maybe even more). ABolish useless agencies like the EPA, OSHA, and EEOC.
-Make it legal to capture illegal immigrants at the border and contract them out to corporations no matter what the age. That will teach them to break the law. Watch illegal immigraton levels fall through the floor
-Make it legal for hospitals to turn away patients who cannot pay. Overtime as a result of my plan healthcare costs will go down. People will suffer in the short term but in the long term they will benefit

I think you forgot one:

- Free broadband for every citizen!

And

- No regulation of video games!

That "dust"?
Check your geiger counter.

In Jest,

Aries 1B

Heello? can we get back to the discussion of the word free?

Okay, alright -- It is possible I was being a little too hard on the university system.

(Not that I agree that an additional university system would solve the problem at all.)

Good. And I finished that godawful Elizabeth Kostova novel. 600+ pages. The woman needs to be hit upside the head with a delete key.

Poke fun if you want. My plan kicks ass and you know it.

-Reduce legal immgration to 250,000/year.
-Make Immigration more based on needed skills than family ties.
-Put the military on the borders until Border Control has enough men to do the job
-Declare English the official language of the US and try to make it an amendment.
-Ban any mass illegal alien amnesty and punish anyone who hires an illegal alien with a very large penalty.
-create a guest worker program for farm workers only which will not lead to citizenship.
-Make S. Korea pay for 100% of the costs of our military being there or else pull out completely.
-Put the FDA under civilian control. Noone who works for the FDA will be able to work for any company that has dealings with the FDA for at least 5 yrs.
-Ban the use of steroids, hormones, and antibiotics in the food supply.
-Impose the same price controls on drugs that Canada does.
-Put Labor Laws that would apply to every State, including paid lunches, a mandatory 1 hr lunch for those who work 40 hrs a week or more with 2 15 minute breaks, and a 1/2 hr lunch with one 15 minute break manadatory for those working at least 6 hrs a day.
Also, health insurance mandatory for anyone working at least 25 hrs/week.
-civil unions for gays.
-legalize marijuana for those 21 and over, but not in public.
-California EPA rules made nationwide.
-Pull back most troops from Europe.
-Allow Japan and India to join UN Security Council.
-Actively deport anyone who espouses violence against the West.
-Kill all 'Free' Trade agreements that are causing our workers harm. Impose strict rules on countries that we have current agreements with in terms of a minimum wage and environmental regs.
-ban the issuance of drivers licenses to illegals.
-ban the issuance of mortgages to illegals.
-ban house flipping.

I'm sure I will add more later

My platform would be simple:

Stop illegal immigration immediately by placing the national guard along the borders.
Win the the war in Iraq/WOT swiftly by using overwhelming force.
Institute a flat tax
Reduce government by 50%
Term limits on all elected and appointed government offices.

That would about do it.

Oh yeah, Withdraw from UN membership and ban it from the US.

Sig heil