This is a reply to Molly Ivins, a great writer from Texas. Her article is at http://www.alternet.org/story/27674/.

I envision an America with no secrets. For starters, we should get rid of the CIA. One of the biggest gripes people in other countries have about the US is that the CIA funds right wing dictators and causes, both of which are generally unpopular with the masses. Getting rid of the CIA means also getting rid of covert ops.

As for the no secrets part, how about when ever we learns something about a conspiracy to commit a terrorist act, for example, we blab it to the whole world. When we learn about the whereabouts of a wanted terrorist, we tell the whole world instead of keeping it to ourselves (meaning only the intelligence community) and running a covert operation in a foreign country.

Next get rid of the department of defense and replace it with a department of peace, whose main tenet is that war is wrong. Instead of picking fights, prevent them. That alone should save the US government a ton of money.

Instead of dropping the number of nuclear warheads to a thousand, how about getting rid of all of them? Think about this for a second, besides the former Soviet Union, which no longer exists, what country do we face that could start a nuclear war with the US? Getting rid of all the nuclear weapons would save the US a lot of money and set an example to the rest of the world.