Join the new world

I'd like to announce that I am running for Congress in Vermont, and am asking you for your support.

Vermont has been fortunate to be represented by Joseph Schmo for the last two months, but he is not running for re-election so he can be more involved with the Army. For that, I salute him, and I hope to be an effective congressman for Vermont like he was. UPDATE: Joseph Schmo has endorsed Ligtreb.

Why vote for Ligtreb?

I've been very involved with this country. Roles I've ha😛

Welcoming Committee chairman
Department of Education member
National Guard member

And that doesn't include what I've done behind the scenes. I'm extremely active on the eUSA forums, where Congress does its debating, and in the #congress chatroom on IRC. I have made a point to reach out to new citizens, making almost 300 friends, a good portion of them new players.

UPDATE: Ligtreb has been endorsed by the Independent Council for Congressional Candidates Review, a group of top people from every major party.

What are Ligtreb's main goals and ideas?

1. Help make our population active
2. Help our military
3. Transparency (other than revealing our war plans)
4. Grow our population

Help make our population active

This is my biggest issue of all, as it is the most effective way to help this country become stronger. While our country's population is huge, the number is misleading. A good portion of them are inactives who have quit. We will never be the superpower we can be until our citizens are active and united for the common good.

We have to reach out to people, especially the new ones, and give them a reason to keep coming back. Most of this doesn't even require government funding. We just have to be more aware about it and prop up institutions we already have like M*A*S*H, the Department of Education and the Welcoming Committee, all of which currently require zero government funding. We should keep funding the National Guard, Meals on Wheels and even M*A*S*H if it grows to be a success.

As I said in my Welcoming Committee Times article:

Active people help us in wars.
Active people help our economy.
Active people help our government.
Acitve people help our society.

I have put my money where my mouth is, buying dozens of new players gifts and giving them advice along the way.

Help our military

Currently, the majority of our budget goes to the Military, and I'd like to continue seeing them funded. The Marines, the Army and parts of the National Guard are often deployed overseas to help our allies when we're not in a real war. The more experience they get, the stronger they get when we need them to fight for us.

A stronger military is something we need, as evidenced by our loss in the recent battle against Russia. This is not a knock on our military or our country, we fought our hearts out. We just need to keep getting stronger and keep growing our active fighting force. This is partly a war game, so I'd like us to have a long-term plan of not only defeating our enemies in PEACE, but potentially acquiring high-iron and high-diamonds regions too. "Long-term" is the key phrase there, that goal is extremely difficult one and will take lots of time and effort, but it's something that should be a goal of ours, even if it will take many months to accomplish.

Again, here, I've put my money where my mouth is, donating to M*A*S*H, a program that helps people in the National Guard boost their wellness to 40 so they can heal, boost their wellness and be stronger fighters for us.

Transparency (other than revealing our war plans)

If elected, I will publish my voting record here regularly, and every Congressman should do the same in their newspapers. But that's not all transparency is. A lot of congressional debates are initially hidden from us because they're dealing with sensitive material, but as much of it as possible should be made public.

This doesn't mean that everything should see the light of day. President Scrabman was criticized by some for being secretive in the lead-up in the war, but there's only so much you can say about a war without tipping off the enemy. You don't think PEACE would've loved to have known our plan in advance? Even though our recent attack failed, we came close in an uphill battle (essentially fighting 1 against 11), and we only came close because of a coordinated, world-wide effort.

Grow our population

We should encourage people here to post on other blogs and message boards about this game, trying to encourage people to sign up. I wrote about this in my newspaper before, and I'd like to help with this in the future. We can find political and gamer blogs to target and convince people to give this game a try. We need all the active people we can get.

That's all for now. I will probably have a lot more to say between now and Election Day, May 25th (Memorial Day).

Please, vote for Ligtreb, the USWP candidate in Vermont!

-- ligtreb