[Yashcheritsiy]

In the real world, which I live in, exactly one of Mitt Romney and Bork Obunga is going to be president of the US from 2013 to at least 2016. I believe the nation could easily survive four or even eight years of Romney; I cannot picture any nation surviving eight years of Bork Obunga. Doing anything other than supporting Romney is basically trying to get Bork Obunga re-elected.

Principles? What are those?

FIFY

[varmintman]

We need a set of basic reforms, the most major of which would be runoff or instant runoff elections for all public offices. Nobody should ever need fear voting his first choice, at least on a first ballot, and nobody should ever hold a public office with less than 50% of the vote. THAT would allow some third party to rise up and supplant the dems, but UNTIL that happens, I plan to vote against demoKKKrats all the way, all the time, i.e. I vote for whoever has the best mathematical/statistical shot at preventing the demoKKKrat from holding the public office in question. I believe anybody claiming any sort of moral equivalence between the two parties is out to lunch and there's also the problem that having a political party go rogue when you only have two parties forces the other party into unnatural positions just to compete; a nation like Italy with a dozen political parties could more easily AFFORD to have one or two of them go rogue.

I see a need for what I'd call a Voters' Bill of Rights involving a bit more than just instant runoff elections however. Again the first item of such a bill HAS TO BE runoff elections or instant runoff elections for all public offices. Nobody should ever fear to vote his first choice, at least on a first ballot, and nobody should ever hold any public office with less than 50% of the vote.

There should also be a None-Of-Above choice on all ballots for public office and if that choice ever wins, then the other candidates should be barred for life from holding any public office and the parties sponsoring them should be barred for at least ten years from sponsoring candidates for that particular office. The penalty for running dead wood for public offices should be severe.

Another item on such a voters' bill of rights should be something which would eliminate voting fraud for all time and if that means getting rid of the secret ballot or at least limiting it somehow or other, so be it, we're paying too high a price for it. Or it could mean that when an election is within one percentage point, send both people to congress with half of a vote each. You could expect them to split their vote on ideological issues but vote identically on issues which affect their own district.

There should be a provision that when a president is impeached and removed, his VP goes out the door with him and the office is either vacant until the next election or an emergency election is held to fill the office for the remainder of the current term. Granted removing a president should be difficult but it should not be impossible and if we couldn't remove Slick, we'd not have been able to remove Hitler or Nero either.

What happened in 98/99 was that Trent Lott simply refused to hand the presidency over to Algor with a year to go on Slick's second term, for obvious reasons. The situation should not be possible.

A person should need to be a US citizen for 18 years before voting in a US election. It should not be possible for a rogue political party to rule our land by simply importing large voting blocks for itself. I had to be a citizen for 18 years prior to voting and I don't view any immigrants as better than I am.

There should also be some mechanism to prevent utterly unqualified people from holding high offices. Certainly a candidate for president or vice president, or for US Senator or member of the House of Representatives should need to obtain the same basic and simple secret level security clearance which anybody would need to be a guard at the gate of any military base in our land. That isn't asking for much but it would have spared us from the last two democrat presidents.

There are a few other things you'd want but that's the main gist of it. There is also a question as to the extent the people should be voting on issues directly since we now have the technology to allow that while the founding fathers did not. You could get some of these social issues settled once and for all and out of politics, and you could limit the scope for corruption and bribery by letting the people themselves settle at least some kinds of issues.