Lefties and moderates - can we agree on these things?

[welshTerrier2]

Instead of a "Contract with America", I'd like to see the Party create a "Democratic Party's Top 10 List" ... using a catchy title (and stealing an idea from Letterman's popular routine) would help the Party to get Americans to focus on a very specific set of ideas ... instead of constantly hearing "Democrats have no ideas", Democrats would point to their "Top 10 list" ... you can't argue there are no ideas when the list has a name ...

Also, healing the rift between lefties and moderates should not be as large a problem as it currently is ... Every constituency in the Party should put together a list of their most important themes and then every effort should be made to incorporate those themes into the Party's platform ... to do otherwise is exclusionary at a time where the Party should be as inclusive as possible ... "big tents", by their very definition, should be INCLUSIVE ...

Having said that, here is a list of 10 ideas ... some of them are just concepts; others are very specific policies ... Which of the following would you like to see included in the Democratic Party's platform? Please offer some discussion on why you agree and disagree ... lists that just say "i agree with 1,3,7,9" are really not very useful ...

And please feel very free to write your own lists or add or subtract from this one ...

1. Renew our democracy - citizens have little or no control over what their government and their party do ... we need to "renew our democracy"
2. Equal voice - there is way too much money in the political system ... corporations and the super-wealthy should have no more influence than any citizen does ...
3. No paid lobbyists - we should outlaw paid lobbying which is nothing more than legalized bribery ...
4. No imperialism and out of Iraq - we have an imperialist foreign policy ... everything our government does overseas it does to further the interests of a wealthy few at the expense of sovereign nations and the American people ... our military has become a private security force for big oil ... any "progressive platform" we build should include calls for the immediate withdrawal from Iraq ...
5. Party reform - our political parties have grown too big and fat and do not provide a sufficient diversity of ideas in the national dialog ... efforts should be made to reform the political parties ...
6. Campaign reform - candidates running for office should only be allowed to address the public themselves as "talking heads" ... no music, no flags waving, no kissing babies, no aircraft carriers ... these phony "settings and glitz" distort rather than inform and create an environment of fraudulent information about the candidate ... the public deserves better ...
7. Election reform - MSM should be required to provide free time to all "reasonable" candidates ... the amount of time would decrease for less popular candidates as the election grew closer ... the same for debates ... the first debate might include 10 candidates from all different parties, the second maybe the top 5 and the last one maybe the top 3 ...
8. Domestic jobs - capital gain tax "discounts" on the sale of stock would decrease pro-rata based on the percentage of a company's workforce that is US-based ... if a company chose to hire more employees overseas, their stock would become less appealing to shareholders ... shareholders in companies with non-US-based headquarters would receive no capital gain "discounts" at all ...
9. Better representation - elected Congressmen and Senators should have to spend a certain amount of time meeting with constituents in their districts in public forums ...
10. Media diversity - no corporation should be allowed to own more than 5% of radio, TV and print combined on a national basis and no more than 25% in any individual market ...