I am Running for President of the United States

That's right, I have finally had enough. So today, I anounce my candidacy for the President of the United States. I meet all of the criteria to run for the Office: I am older than 35 and I was born here. I also know that I can do a better job than any of the approximately 845 candidates who are currently running under the Republican and Democratic banners. Furthermore, I am quite sure that I can do a much better job than the man who currently occupies the Oval Office.

And here is the bonus. I am going to tell you exactly where I stand. That's because I don't have any corporate donors to whom I need to sell my soul, nor do I have any religious groups whose interests I need to mollify, and I don't really care what the media says about me.

What follows are my credentials and my platform for the 2008 election. If you like it, then by all means vote for me. If you don't, then don't complain when our Nation is even more of a mess in four years.

1. I grew up poor, so I know what it means to live in a single parent home. I know what it means to collect welfare just to eat. I know how it feels to own one pair of pants and two t-shirts just to get through a school year.

2. I have worked since I was 12 years old. First, I labored at a trophy shop where my boss paid me $1.00 below the minimum wage for two years. When I found out that I had a right to more money, I contacted the New Jersey Wage and Hour Division, started a civil action and collected the $2,895.00 that he basically stole from me. I have also worked as a bartender, a heavy construction laborer, and a personal trainer.

3. With the money from these jobs, I put myself through college at Rutgers University in New Jersey (go R.U.!), where I earned a dual degree in Political Science and Sociology.

4. Then I worked for a year at a large New York Law Firm (Latham & Watkins) to earn enough money to pay for Law School.

5. In 1991, I began Law School at Temple University in North Philadelphia. After my first year, I was ranked first in my class (of 400 students), so I took advantage of the opportunity and I transferred to the University of Pennsylvania. I graduated from Penn, cum laude, in 1994.

6. I then clerked for a Federal Judge, the late, great James McGirr Kelly, for one year.

7. After my clerkship, I worked for Weil, Gotshal & Manges, one of the largest and most prestigious firms in the country. Afterwards, I moved back to Philly and worked for two other large firms and then served as General Counsel for Hersha Hospitality Trust, which I helped build from a small company that owned 10 hotels into a huge publicly traded real estate trust that currently has a market capitalization in excess of $1 billion.

8. Then I got cancer. I went through chemotherapy and I recovered.

9. When I returned to health, I realized that forming corporations and handling real estate acquisitions was not my raison d'etre, so I retired from the law and became a professional writer.

10. I am far from perfect. I have been married and divorced. I haven't always been nice to all people. On occasion, I have done some pretty stupid and yes, illegal, things. I have driven drunk a few times, but never again. I have smoked pot. I think that is the worst of it.

11. I am now remarried to a wonderful, intelligent, lovely woman who would make a great First Lady.

12. I have no children and do not plan to have any.

13. I have never defrauded my business partners, I do not belong to any powerful secret societies, I have no ties to the oil industry, the Religious Right, the ACLU, or any media conglomerate.

14. I am one of three men in the United States who has not slept with Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie or Lindsay Lohan.

So far, I think that makes me a helluva lot more qualified to run this country than George W. Bush.

Unlike most candidates, I am going to tell you exactly what I want to accomplish during my four years as President.

On my first day in the Oval Office, I will issue an Executive Order mandating that all of the troops currently in Iraq will be brought home within six months of my inauguration. Yes, this will cause problems. It may result in that section of the world falling further into the hands of Radical Muslim lunatics. It could result in "the terrorists" following us here. It could. But it probably won't.

Regardless, there is no reason for us to be there anymore. No matter how long we stay, our troops are not going to improve the situation in Iraq. We will only make it worse. So why stay another five years, spend another trillion dollars and lose another 4,000 precious lives? Our soldiers -- and our treasury -- have much more important things to do than to continue to wait around as sitting ducks in the middle of a civil war that George Bush, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld created. Everybody comes home.

I promise you, ladies and gentlemen of these great United States, that my solution is better than the alternative. I know it. We all know it. So does George Bush, but he has way too many conflicts of interest to make the right decision. I have no such conflicts, and as an American Patriot, I will do what is in the interests of my constituents -- the People of the United States of America.

On January 21, 2009, I will begin working with the Congress to enact legislation that provides tax incentives for U.S. Corporations to keep American jobs in America. Don't tell me about "one world economy" and the necessity for globalization of all aspects of our lives.

Here is what I know. Every year, very wealthy people fire hard working citizens of the U.S. and ship their jobs to China, Thailand, Vietnam, Korea, Mexico and a million other places. Why? Because people in those countries will work for a dollar a day while Americans need to make $20 an hour.

When the Americans had the jobs, the owners of these companies were still making millions of dollars. They only shipped the jobs overseas so they could make billions. That is unacceptable.

Now, I understand greed. I have worked for some of the greediest people that you can imagine. So, I am not going to start a "class war" by forcing jobs back to America. Instead, I will provide tax incentives (and other financial inducements) to Nike, Chevrolet, the clothing manufacturers and hundreds of other Capitalists to bring these jobs back to the United States.

It won't be easy, but it has to be done, and it must be done soon. Just how long do you think our economy will last when it's based on running Starbucks and Wal-Mart franchises and rolling over cell phone minutes? Not very long, folks. We need real jobs again. The kind of jobs where Americans build real things. That's what builds towns, banks, communities, and holds together the family unit that conservatives are always talking about.

Thomas Jefferson, who knew a thing or two about how to build a Democracy, said there must be a "wall of separation" between Church and State in order for America to survive. That concept has not only been forgotten, it has been flushed down the toilet.

No more faith-based initiatives. No more outlawing abortion or the right to die with dignity just because some guy who I never met claims that is what HIS GOD wants. God belongs in the churches, the mosques, and the temples. He (or She) has no place in schools. the workplace, Congress or the Halls of Justice. When people swear to tell the truth before testifying in Court, they will put their hand on a copy of the United States Constitution.

I will return America to what the founding fathers envisioned. Everybody gets to worship whomever or whatever version of God they please. Nobody gets to tell anyone else who (whom?) to pray for or to pray to. No local, state or federal tax dollars go to churches or other religious institutions. None. Zero. Zilch. No wars will be initiated because "God told me to." I promise.

We already have alternative fuel technology. However, the oil industry has made certain that alternative fuel sources are kept in check because there is just too much money to be made in fossil fuels.

Again, as part of my Energy Task Force, we will set hard deadlines to lessen our dependence on oil and increase our dependence on alternative sources such as Solar Power, Wind Power, Ethanol, Safe Nuclear Power, BioDiesel Fuels, Methane, Hydrogen Fuel Cells and the many, many other sources of power that can heat our home, power our vehicles and light up our cities.

It may be impossible to completely give up our dependence on oil, but there is no doubt that other countries are already employing these technologies.

We are supposed to lead the world in techological developments. So why don't we?Primarily because our Administration is run by a man whose family and close friends have earned billions of dollars in the oil game. Why are we letting these people run our lives, ruin the environment, pick our pockets, and subject ourselves to business dealings with the very nations who sponsor terrorism?

It has to stop.

1. Because we will be developing alternative fuel sources, we won't have any need to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. So that won't happen, which should tick off a lot of the Bush crowd. Tough crap, boys.

2. Since he came into office, George Bush has repealed virtually every piece of environmental legislation that had been passed during the Clinton presidency. These laws provided safeguards for clean air, pure drinking water, and better emissions. They required factory upgrades to protect the environment and did a whole lot more. I will reverse the actions of GW Bush within my first 100 days in office.

3. Global Warming is real. I will appoint a Task Force to devise a comprehensive plan to curb, and hopefully reverse, its effects. This Task Force will report to me on a weekly basis and must come up with a plan that can be put into effect by January 20, 2010.

4. As Dick Cheney did, I will have an energy task force. Unlike Cheney, my task force will be well-rounded: It will include members from the oil, coal, nuclear power, solar power, environmental, scientific and educational communities. Also unlike Cheney, this Energy Task Force will have weekly press conferences and release monthly progress reports to the nation. This will be followed by a comprehensive energy plan that will be subject to debate and open discussion prior to being finalized.

5. My head of the Environmetal Protection Agency will be a person who is in the business of protecting the environment. What a novel idea.

It is not the Government's job to legislate what a woman does with her womb. Look, nobody wants to get an abortion. I am sure it is the most difficult and painful decision that a woman could ever have to make. So let it be an issue between the woman and her physician. For those of you who pound your chests and say that "life begins at conception," I will remind you that that is a religious belief. It is certainly not a scientific one. Viable life does not begin at conception. Viable life begins in about the sixth month pregnancy.

And as I told you before, I am not going to let some guy who thinks that he knows the mind of God make decisions for the American people.

However, If God does come down from Mount Olympus or Heaven or Nirvana or Valhalla and tells us all that life begins at conception, then I will reconsider my stance on this issue. Until then, it is a difficult medical issue that the government needs to stay the hell away from.

The War on Drugs has failed. Too much money has been spent, and too many otherwise good people are rotting in federal prisons because Nancy Reagan had a stick up her butt and decided to Just Say No for everybody. The war on drugs is a joke. It creates an undergound of criminal activity, it criminalizes the disease of addiction, it subsidizes the alcohol and pharmaceutical industries and it is just plain racist. Get caught with cocaine and you are black? Say hello to five years in prison. If you are white? A totally different story.

Instead of spending federal dollars on building jails, we will spend it on real drug education and effective and widely available rehabilitation. If given the facts and the choice, 99% of American will stay away from hard drugs. We aren't that stupid. Our government is, though.

As for marijuana, I will call for nation-wide legalization. My God, the majority of our lawmakers grew up in the '60s. Nearly every candidiate for president has admitted to using it. 80 million American adults have smoked marijuana. Can we really imprison people for doing something that almost half of all American adults do, or have done? Every single scientific study available acknowledges that pot is safer than alcohol and tobacco. Yet, those substances remain legal. So let's stop the insanity.

First, I will throw the No Child Left Behind Program on the scrap heap. (And by the way, when laws are made under my Administration, we are going to call it what it is. I mean, under Bush, almost every child has been left behind, for Christ's sake!)

Recall the autumn of 2001. Right after those evil, insane, rotten creeps took down the World Trade Center? We had the whole world ready to help us fight terrorists. That group included many predominanlty Muslim and Arab nations.

Of course, by invading and perpetuating a war in Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11, Al-Qaeda or state sponsored terrorism, we lost the world's support. Even the support of our traditional allies. Yet, terrorism continues to rise, and Al Qaeda has an easier time gaining recruits than our U.S. military.

So, I will redefine how we fight terror. By the way, it will no longer be called the War on Terror. My administration will not fight wars on nouns. Here is how it will be done.

1. Give Every Nation That Sponsors Terrorism a Hard Deadline to Clean it Up. If they fail to take care of it by themselves, then we will destroy training camps with our missile technology. Ground troops will be a last resort and will only be used to destroy training camps and known terrorist cells.

2. Find and Shut Down Every Al Qaeda Training Camp. By "shut down," I don't mean they get to have a Going Out of Business Sale.

3. Find and kill Osama Bin Laden. Hanging Sadaam Hussein didn't make me lose any sleep. He was a rat. But it didn't do a thing to slow down the growth of terrorism.

4. Examine our Foreign Policies That Are Causing These People to Hate Us. I am not a liberal softie. In fact, I believe in war when it is necessary. But we must be doing something that pisses these people off so much. Maybe I am wrong, but the issue needs to be examined and addressed.

5. Drastically Lower Dependence on foreign oil through perfection of already existing alternative fuels. Sorry, you oil guys, but your business puts our nation at risk by forcing us to deal with countries whose sole purpose seems to be destroying America. The party is over.

6. Use the CIA to conduct selective strikes against known terrorist leaders. The Bush Administration gave the CIA a bad name. But if you look at the evidence, the Central Intelligence Agency was less to blame than the Executive Branch for the 9/11 failures and the Iraq intelligence debacles. Plus, these guys are trained to do this type of nasty work. Let's put them to work. And let's not reveal their identities to sh*theads like Bob Novak.

One of the responses I get from Republicans who continue to support Bush is this: Well, at least the Republicans are fiscally responsible. Fiscally responsible? Are you kidding me? Let's look at the facts.

Jimmy Carter's last budget had a $41 billion deficit.

Reagan and Bush 41 Quadruple the National Debt Through Huge Annual Budget Deficits

Ronald Reagan's budget deficits began at $79 billion in 1981, and by his final year in office, his annual budget deficit had swollen to $153 billion. George Herbert Walker Bush then ran the dollowing deficits over his four years in office:

1989: $153 billion

1990: $221 billion

1991: $270 billion

1992: $290 billion

Because of these annual budget deficits, the cumulative U.S. National Debt tripled under Reagan and Bush the First, ran from $909 billion to $4.0 trillion.

Clinton Turns the Tide

Clinton inherited this mess when he took office in 1993. He fixed it. By 1994, his adminsitration had proposed and Congress passed a budget that had a $203 billion deficit, down almost $90 billion from Bush 41's final budget. By 1997, the deficit had dropped to just $21 million.

Then, he was able to do something that no Presdient had done in over thirty years. In 1998, the federal budget had a surplus -- yes, a surplus -- of $69 billion.

By 2000, the Clinton budget surplus had grown to $236 billion. $236 billion. He also offered a comprehensive plan as to how the Nation could continue his policies and continue to expand the surpluses and use them to eventually pay down the National Debt. It's right here.

Bush Turns the Tide, But Turns it Red

When G.W. Bush came into office, he immediately cut taxes for the top 1% of Americans. He did not cut taxes for the middle class, but instead, sent everyone a $300 check. Thanks, George. When he issued his tax cuts, he said that they would lead to greater revenue, more money for all, and that they would not result in deficits.

Here are a record of his annual budget deficits .

2004: $413 billion

2005: $318 billion

2006: $390 billion

2007: $354 nillion

These are the President Bush's own numbers.

As President, I will get this under control. How? I don't know There is an answer from a guy who isn't a politician. I don't know how to do it. But Bill Clinton and his Treasury Secretary, Richard Rubin do know how to do it. So, I will consult with these two, and seek their advice on who I need to appoint to fix this mess. I am sure they have a full rolodex of guys who can do the job. I mean, they already did it once.

That's it for now. As time goes by, I will, of course, need to address many other issues. I just wanted to let you all know that I am in the race, and give you some information on where I would like to lead the country.