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I would like to help solidify your platform.

• Abortion: Spot on, man. Making abortion illegal has the direct result of teenagers in bathtubs with coathangers, which are far more of a burden on our health care system. Besides, there's supposed to be separation of church and state, and anti-abortion is a religious stance in most cases.
• Taxes: Please read up on the FairTax initiative. My favorite part is that it taxes consumption rather than earnings, so those who reuse/recycle/buy used goods/consume less will end up paying less taxes.
• Death Penalty: Abolish it. If even 0.001% of the criminals executed are innocent, it's too many. And statistics show that it costs less to keep a criminal in jail for the rest of their life, than it costs to execute them. From both a compassionate and fiscal stance, eliminating the death penalty makes sense.
• Gun Control: This is a tough one. Why should someone be denied the ability (right?) to defend themselves and their family simply because of a mistake they made in their past? And requiring a license makes it easy to "round up the guns" which the Nazis did in taking over power. A disarmed populace is an easily controlled populace. The 2nd Amendment is important; however, there needs to be a balance because otherwise violence may get out of hand. Long story short I think I'd leave it the way it currently is, or perhaps put less restrictions on it.
• Space Program: Another post had a quote from Jerry Pournelle with a great plan: the government would give a tax-free reward to the first American company to cross a specific finish line. Here's a link to that post.
• Prayer in School: Your later response is correct: prayer should not be mandatory, led by school officials, or otherwise forced on students; and also, students should not be prevented from praying (as long as they don't do it out loud).
• Education: Web cams in classrooms will go a long way toward bettering the teachers; if the teachers are graded by the students then teachers might "dumb down" their classes so the students like them better. But having the parents grade the teachers makes sense -- the parents can watch the teachers in action through the webcams, and can also judge how well their child is learning by asking their child questions. Funding should be increased, and by funding I mean teachers salaries should be doubled (or so). Give financial incentives to enter a teaching profession and we'll get better teachers. So we can finally do away with the old saying, "Those who can't do, teach. (And those who can't teach, teach gym.)"
• War in Iraq: I'd like to say get out now, stop wasting money. We've spent $75 billion, and Bush is now asking for $87 billion more. Iraq oil could generate $12 billion next year and $20 billion/year for the next two years (can't find the article, I read it last week). Given this, we would need to appropriate 100% of Iraq's oil revenues for ourselves for 7-10 years in order to "pay for" our military action. I don't think we're going to see that money, which is why I recommend getting out fast and letting the UN clean it up.
• War on Drugs: Pot should be legal, agreed -- then we'd spend far less money enforcing laws that a majority don't want in the first place; and we'd also enjoy increased tax revenue. Treat it just like alcohol: enjoy your body and mind on your own time, but if you're in

that may be true in "oterh countries" but in the u.s. the death penalty seems to have the opposite effect. according to the fbi the states with the ten highest murder rates all have the death penalty. of the ten states with the lowest murder rates, only four have the death penalty.

look at texas. last year 33 of the 71 executions in the united states were in texas, yet texas has a murder rate well above the national average (6.2/100k vs 5.6/100k last year).

obviously crime prevention isn't solely a function of the threat of punishment. nobody commits a crime assuming they're going to get caught. everyone thinks they're going to pull off the perfect murder or hacking job or whatever.

Re to the OT question: The system is not working. Since 1963 a total of 102 now proven innocent people once were on death row waiting an average 8 years for their exoneration. (source: deathpenaltyinfo innocentlist) Joseph O'Dell was executed 1997 for murder after he was denied DNA tests to prove his innocence. Three Supreme Court Justices had doubts about the verdict in a 1991 review, obviously the case was never based on evidence "beyond any reasonable doubt". (source: deathpenaltyinfo innocothers) Being in the wrong place at the wrong time could just be enough to make you number 103. And stuff like CAPPS II makes it all the more likely, that people are falsely prosecuted, filed or even charged. This government is not defending freedom anymore, it's regulating and dismantling freedom every day a little more. Read the constitution! This is not patriotism, not at all.

Re to the OT question: The system is not working. Since 1963 a total of 102 now proven innocent people once were on death row waiting an average 8 years for their exoneration. (source: deathpenaltyinfo innocentlist) Joseph O'Dell was executed 1997 for murder after he was denied DNA tests to prove his innocence. Three Supreme Court Justices had doubts about the verdict in a 1991 review, obviously the case was never based on evidence "beyond any reasonable doubt". (source: deathpenaltyinfo innocothers) Being in the wrong place at the wrong time could just be enough to make you number 103. And stuff like CAPPS II makes it all the more likely, that people are falsely prosecuted, filed or even charged. This government is not defending freedom anymore, it's regulating and dismantling freedom every day a little more. Read the constitution! This is not patriotism, not at all.

See, e.g., the Death Penalty Information Center here. The page is annoyingly titled "Facts" again, but progressives aren't perfect either.

You're right. Character does matter. Lets look a little more closely at that paragon of morality and truthfullness, George W. Bush.

• He claims that "special interests" are outspending him, when he's broken pretty much every record there is for both fund raising and campaign spending.
  
  
• He claims that his immediate tax break of $1.6 trillion is a quarter of the projected surplus of $4.6 trillion. No wonder this guy accuses others of fuzzy math, he's not capable of dividing by single digit numbers.
  
  
• He's perfectly willing to sentence people to federal prisons their first drug conviction, but conspicuously refuses to answer questions about his own "youthful indiscretions" with cocaine.
  
  
• Texas has had three times as many executions this year as any state, including that of Gary Graham, who was executed on the basis of a single eyewitness, despite the fact that there were other witnesses who claimed he wasn't the same guy they saw. Is this what you mean by character? Killing people out of hand before they've been given due legal process? In most states this would be called accessory to murder.
  
  Note that this isn't about the death penalty itself, it's about Bush's approach to it. Taking a human life is the most terrible of responsibilities for any leader. It's a penalty only to be applied in the most extreme cases, and only when you're certain of the facts. Yet Bush applies it liberally, gleefully, and without the slightest awareness of the responsibility he holds. If he takes a "what, me worry?" attitude toward the actual killing of American citizens, what makes you think he's going to take any of his other civil responsibilities seriously?
  
  
• If Texas was its own country, it would have the highest percentage of its own citizens incarcerated of any country in the world. More than China. More than Iraq. More than Afghanistan. Do you want American society as a whole to be rebuilt along the same lines?
  
  
• Texas has "voluntary" environmental laws, which rapidly earned it the label of the most polluted state in the union.
  
  I'm always flabbergasted at people who argue for the rights of CEO's to poison them. Do you own a factory? Are you getting a big tax break on that oil well you just inherited? If the answer is no, then why in the hell do you think you'll be better off breathing poisoned air, drinking poisoned water, and eating food grown from poisoned soil? Do you want the rest of the USA to be as polluted as Texas?
  
  
• Texas is consistently rated 49th or 50th when it comes to health care. The idea that George W. will give you better health care than Al Gore is perhaps the dumbest idea I've seen in this thread.
  
  86.1% of Americans had health care coverage in 1999. Meanwhile, 75.9% of Texans did. Don't trust me, look it up yourself.
  
  
• There's a host of minor lies that more than equal Gore's stretchers. Like the idea that he supported the hate crimes law in Texas, when he actually let it die without lifting a finger to help it. A similar thing occurred to the instant background check for gun purchases which he claimed to support. He also said he believed in "equal rights for gays, but not special rights". Meanwhile, he opposed the addition of gays to hate crime statues in 1999.
  
  
• He claimed that the infamous "rats" ad was an honest mistake on the part of the ad's creators. Anyone that's done any work with animation knows what a tedious, pixel-by-pixel, frame-by-frame process it can be. The idea that a frame with the large word "rats" stretching across it could just somehow slip in to the final product without anyone noticing is perhaps the most ridiculous lie I've heard in this campaign. And Bush knows this, he's a veteran of the process of crafting political ads.
  
  In additon to being a lie, this incident gave a good indication of the kind of people Bush surrounds himself with -- sophmoric buffoons. Everybody knows subliminal ads don't work, at least not for something as abstract as a political campaign. But they did it anyway, just to be cute. It doesn't give me much confidence when it comes to Bush's selection of a cabinet -- and remember, that cabinet will be doing all the work, since Bush's philosophy is that a leader doesn't have to actually know anything. Similarly, his close affiliation with Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Bob Jones, and the like simply terrifies me, particularly when it comes to the influence they'll wield on supreme court appointments, which could have ruinous effects for the next thirty years.
  
  
• Bush has said dozens of times that he won't stoop to personal attacks, but his reponse to Gore's facts and figures is always the same. "The man's a liar! He has no credibility!". He has to resort to this types of attacks because that's all he has. He sure as hell can't dispute Gore's numbers -- or at least he hasn't so far.

So in short, Gore has told some lies about minor details of his anecdotes, while Bush has told lies about the sum and substance of his policies. Since you have the simplistic and childish viewpoint that you'll never vote for a politician that lies, I guess that means you can't vote for either. And you can't vote for Nader, either, since he's constantly telling the single biggest lie of all of this campaign -- that there's no difference between Bush and Gore.

I guess you'll have to stay home on Election day.