Raise your hand if you think the Supreme Court just passed Big Business the financial keys and secret passwords to the smoke-filled political back rooms of the nation.

The logic of the recent court ruling that corporations can spend freely in elections may be legally correct, but the consequences could turn America’s democracy into a fixed, high-stakes poker game. Or, with some inventive legislative rule-making, the consequences could be more interesting than scary. So here goes.

In the spirit of liberal talk show host and satirist Bill Maher, I propose four New Rules.

New Rule: Corporate campaign contributions must be spent only for the purposes of reasoned, formal and informal debates.

I say that after hearing President Obama’s question-answer session at the House Republican retreat a week ago. The President took some of the R’s points about health care legislation, the deficit and bipartisanship and exposed them for the non-factual, politicized, self-promoting mis-statements that they were. And he admitted his party, the D’s, sometimes use the same strategies. In the terminology of Facebook, I like this. The rascally Independents, the I’s, might like it too, since they are royally ticked off at both liberals and conservatives for the soul-sucking, eye-gouging version of democracy currently being practiced in Washington.

Enough hyphenation—and back to the point—debate. The event at the R’s retreat had some respectful and polite give and take, but it wasn’t truly a debate. The R’s got to ask the questions, and the President was preferentially allowed the last word. I like this too. But, while this rare deference to the President and his points of view was satisfying and fun to watch, I’d prefer a real back-and-forth debate. Let each side score its factual points with reasoned views and let the strongest argument win the most votes.

New Rule: Ten percent of all corporate contributions must be used to create an independent agency that hires out-of-work journalists as fact-checkers of our burgeoning media, public relations and propaganda outlets. Of course, fact-checkers will have to be hired to check the checkers, but that’s okay—more deserving journalists off the bread lines.

Lord knows, America has enough unemployed journalists to go around. Corporate dollars must put them to work independently fact-checking talk shows, Internet blogs, political ads, newspapers, public radio, TV news and corporation press releases. If the R’s aren’t the “Party of No,” the fact-checkers will give us examples of their bipartisan cooperation. If the health bill really does propose death panels, let’s hear about it right away from a neutral, authoritative source who gets the last word.

New Rule: Cartoon dialogue bubbles now used in comic strips will be electronically adapted to allow real-time response to media. If video bubbles are not available yet, a techno-wizard must invent them.

Imagine you’re watching Sean Hannity or Keith Olbermann spout some rabid nonsense, and the Authorized Authoritative Fact-Checker pops a dialogue bubble onto the screen with one of the following: “Stop interrupting.” “The vote was 25-75 not 90 to 10.” “Name calling is just rude.” “Obama WAS born in Hawaii.” “Attributing guilt by association is inappropriate.” “Sarah Palin’s head was pasted on that gun-totin’ photo.” Then we can all go to USAfersher.com for the rest of the story.

This will be so much better than wasting time and vocal-cord elasticity screaming at the TV or Internet video. Let the fact-checker respond, so we can nod calmly and go back to doing the Sunday crossword. Eventually, socialized to true debate involving taking turns, listening, exchange of facts, questions of clarification and legitimate disagreements, Americans could begin to make intelligent voting decisions based on reason.

New Rule: Internet users must learn an expanded set of abbreviations because, while LOL (laughing out loud) and FOFLOL (falling on floor laughing out loud) will work for what passes as current political dialogue, we need some inventive slang to use in corking the blather. Aren’t we sick of talk-Nazis over-shouting their guests, evading the issue when cornered and attributing bizarre motives to their victims?

I’d like to see an authorized fact-checker throw a bubble over the speaker’s head saying NNC (no name calling), MIF (move the debate forward), SFY (speak for yourself) or LIAR (you just made that up). Pretty soon all of America would be able to identify various unethical tactics and would be heard muttering to the television, “STTF (Stick to the facts)” and “NIK (No interrupting, knucklehead).

No, we cannot tolerate a government that is bought and paid for by huge multinational corporations, but we could have ongoing national debate paid for by them. I like this. And so would out-of-work journalists. Now, all we have to do is convince the legislature, the multi-national corporations and a gazillion spin-machine operatives to go along. Okay, everybody, FOFLOL.