Adam’s Guide to making everything better

We recently talked about a test on how Kevin Drum/Atrios believe you could improve this country, with the notion that the more you agree with them, the more liberal you are.

So, I thought I would one-up them in self-indulgence, and just throw together a haphazard list of how I think you could make things better.

Take the test, and measure up just how deeply entrenched in AdamGurrism you are. Or, I suppose, how much of the opposite end of the political spectrum–a side which I will dub "jerkheadism"–you subscribe to. I understand that not all AdamGurrists will agree with everything that is said here, but I think that there's a pretty obvious consensus on the following.

1. Don't stop at simplifying the tax-code, simplify the laws. The problem with our legal institution isn't any activist judges, it's the language and length of our laws which have a great power to obscure any information. Allowing this to continue makes it easy for congressmen to make postures when in reality all they are doing is punting the real decisions to the courtrooms. Take Occam's Razor to these bitches, it's long overdue.
2. No financial incentives to sue for you! A cap on the sum of money that can be awarded, a flat fee for lawyers service rather than ever allowing a percentage of the winnings to fall into the hands of the lawyer, and the English Rule, or "Loser Wins" approach whereby whoever loses the lawsuit has to pay the legal fees for both parties.
3. Congressional term limits. Not a solution, I know, but an improvement–if you can't get it done in two terms or less, get your butt out of office and give someone else a go.
4. Vouchers and the choice of transferring to another public school. Also, just as most public colleges are mandated to have the majority of their students drawn from in-state, the majority of vouchers should be used for low-income households, not middle class, who have more resources available to them to begin with.
5. Kill McCain-Feingold. (The law, not the people)
6. Obliterate the CIA and other aging dinosaurs, harvest them for the information they do have collected, and then start fresh with talent and protocols that weren't built for the Cold War.
7. Deferrment to state governments on the bulk of domestic issues. If it doesn't have to do with voting, crossing a border, or the basic constitutional rights, then let people sort these things out where they have the biggest individual impact–on the local level.
8. No tenure. Academic freedom my ass. Professors are there to be skilled teachers to their students, and talented pioneers in the research they conduct. There is no reason to give them an unconditional sense of security; if they don't like how they're treated by one university, they are free to try one of the many others that this country has to offer.
9. Hospitals ought to be required to provide their patients with copies of their own medical records. That way, those records can be looked at by whatever other hospital the patient wants to go to; meaning rather than having the same procedure done repeatedly, they could just get a doctor who finds something that the first doctor missed in the results of the original test.
10. Medicare for some, tiny American flags for others. Medicare needs to be reformed just as welfare was; it should require that those who use it have a regular doctor, so that our emergency rooms can start being for, you know, emergencies.
11. Rhetoric and Oratory in the classroom. Seriously, people–basic articulation, speech writing and presenting, and logic. If you doubt that our country is in need of that, turn on C-Span for five seconds. Or a speech by our president.
12. A gigantic, golden calf should be erected, in a monument dedicated to me. Somewhere important. Like, next to Lincoln.