Check out this excellent op-ed piece by Bruce Walker that explains the danger of letting lawyers run our country.  Excerpts:

… When politicians as lawyers begin to view some Americans as clients and other Americans as opposing parties, then the role of the legal system in our life becomes all consuming.   Some Americans become “adverse parties” of our very government. …

… America has a place for laws and lawyers, but that place is modest and reasonable, not vast and unchecked.  When the most important decision for our next president is whom he will appoint to the Supreme Court, the role of lawyers and the law in America is too big. …

Read the entire article here.

Liberal Alinskyites don’t have a monopoly on ridiculing political opponents.

If you need a refreshing break, watch the video below, as Evan Sayet asks (and answers) an all important question.

If the Modern Liberal is in fact as stupid as I believe him to be, then how is one to explain the fact that so many Liberals rise to the very pinnacle of their professions?  If Nancy Pelosi is stupid, how did she become the Speaker of the House of Representatives?  If Katie Couric is stupid, how did she become the most recent recipient of the Edward R Murrow award for “excellence” in television journalism.  If Henry Gates and Ward Churchill are stupid, how did they become tenured professors?

Sayet explains the inexplicable, and the clip ends with:

…and they hate religious folk, the most…  See, the idea of being a conservative is we try to better ourselves.  Liberals spend their lives just being themselves. And you would think they would love the Catholics because you don’t even wait until you’re born to start being yourself.  You were yourself in the womb.  And you would think the liberals would love you for that, because, what is the womb? Basically, it’s a liberal paradise.  Right?  Basically, you’re sitting in a hot tub, feeding off of somebody else.

More on Evan Sayet:

• Check out Sayet’s website
• See his book The Kindergarden of Eden:  How the Modern Liberal Thinks and Why He’s Convinced Ignorance is Bliss

By Mick Hunt

In mid-July the Republican governor of North Carolina dropped a bombshell, or so you’d think if you read any quotes from his natural opponents, the Lions of the Literary Left.

The Democrats of our state are still roaring because of the demise in 2012 of their 140 year dynasty, during which they controlled one or more of the two legislative bodies and/or the office of Governor. Since then we’ve been barraged by “Moral Monday” marches and rallies and other truly meaningless events across the state that captivate the attention of a discriminating media, discriminating against what’s really important.

by Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey

238 years ago today 56 men signed a document which would change history.

While many of us gather together to watch elaborate displays of pyrotechnics or quietly enjoy time off with friends and family, we must remember that today is a celebration unique in human history.

The world has seen many a nation rise and fall — but none quite like America. For the first time in human history, a nation was bonded not by blood or ancestry but by common ideals. America is not something carried in your DNA but something carried in the heart and the mind.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

Those words from the Declaration of Independence always give me chills. This revolutionary statement by our founders made everything that came after it possible. Everything we love about this nation sprung forth from that divinely-inspired text.

While many conservatives and constitutionalists like myself believe the United States government has strayed too far away from the revolutionary ideals of our founders, it is important to remind ourselves just how truly remarkable this nation remains.

Whatever of our federal government’s faults, we still retain the power to restore our country to its foundational principles. We just require the will. Because in the end, as the Declaration reminds us, our rights come not from our federal government but from our Creator.

I continue to keep the foundational principles of this nation in the forefront of my mind and I take great pleasure in the knowledge that many fine Tennesseans like yourself will be joining me in remembering the true spirit of this day.

Have a safe and restful Independence Day.

……………………………………….
FAB contributor Ron Ramsey also serves as the Tennessee Lt. Governor and Speaker of the Senate … in his spare time.

FAB contributor Newt Gingrich explains how life could soon be much better if we can overcome bureaucracy, over-regulation, and restriction of innovation and entrepreneurship.

“Poised for a Breakout”–from Obamaism
by Newt Gingrich

President Obama must have been cruising Amazon.com this weekend.  Or at least so it would seem from his remarks to the Wall Street Journal yesterday.

“In a lot of ways, America is poised for a breakout,” he said.  “We are in a good position to compete around the world in the 21st century.  The question is, are we going to realize that potential?”

If you’re a regular reader of this newsletter, that idea will sound very familiar.  It is the argument I have been making since last spring, and the subject of my new book, Breakout.

The President is right that America is poised for a breakout.  Advances in science, engineering, and technology offer incredible opportunities in learning, health, energy production, transportation, and many other fields.  These breakthroughs could mean we are on the edge of a dramatically better world in which many of our current problems simply disappear.

President Obama is also correct that the big political question facing Americans is whether “we are going to realize that potential”–whether we will choose to break out.

But what the President apparently doesn’t see is that he represents breakdown–the greatest threat to our potential future.  That government as bloated as our current one will inevitably break down may be the chief lesson of Obamaism.

There is a breakdown of big government bureaucracy, a breakdown of competence, a breakdown of common sense and defined purpose in government, and a breakdown of the rule of law.

Practically every day we are reminded that the government is simply incompetent to do all the tasks it has assumed to itself.  The disastrous launch of Healthcare.gov is just the latest example.  Even with three and a half years to build the website, the key people in charge failed for a variety of reasons–some legal, some bureaucratic, many political–and rather than admitting their failure, they foisted the broken system on the country anyway.

The same breakdown in competence extends across the federal government.  It’s the reason 20 to 25 percent of Earned Income Tax Credit payments by the IRS are improper.  It’s how the same agency managed to send “a total of 655 tax refunds to a single address in Lithuania, and 343 refunds…to a lone address in Shanghai.”  In the private-sector, we have systems to fight this level of incompetence.  In the broken down big government bureaucracy, the failure is simply expected, and it continues year after year.

In some respects, the problem is bipartisan.  We saw it in federal response to Hurricane Katrina under the last administration.  Yet only one party believes we should increase Americans’ reliance on broken systems.

Beyond the breakdown in competence, there is a breakdown of common sense in the federal government.  Programs continue decades after they have outlived their usefulness, like the national “raisin reserve” on which the Washington Post reported recently.  It requires raisin farmers to hand over large portions of their annual harvests to “a farm program created to solve a problem during the Truman administration, and never turned off.”  There are hundreds of similarly pointless programs hidden in the bureaucracy.

Finally, there is a breakdown in the rule of law, as we have seen over and over under the Obama presidency–from the IRS targeting conservative organizations, to EPA officials releasing personal information on thousands of farmers to environmental activist groups, to the Justice Department conducting criminal investigations of journalists, to the President’s unilateral suspensions of parts of immigration law, welfare law, and even his own health care law.

As the champion of bureaucratic, centralized, and often extralegal solutions, President Obama is the leading representative of the breakdown that could prevent America from seeing a breakout like the one he predicted yesterday.

As I argue in Breakout, I do believe life could soon be much better for all Americans, if we can overcome the prison guards of the past keeping us trapped in bureaucracy, over-regulation, and restriction of innovation and entrepreneurship.

There is enormous potential for learning science and e-learning, personalized and regenerative medicine, American energy production, breakthroughs in transportation such as self-driving cars, and even a private space industry.

But this will require big changes in how we organize government–changes that President Obama certainly will not make.  In fact, he’ll take us further in the wrong direction.  That’s why we won’t know the answer to his question–”Are we going to realize that potential?”–until the elections of 2014 and 2016.

Now that ObamaCare is proving itself to be the disaster we all feared … in fact, even worse than we feared … Ted Cruz is smelling like a rose.  People will long remember who stood up and spoke the loudest in protesting this train wreck.

It is good that there were no Republican fingerprints on this piece of criminal legislation.  But that is not enough.  In politics, messaging and timing are critical.  You have to make  your case in a memorable way at the right time.  If nobody remembers what you said, then what difference did it make?

Ted Cruz was one man who went out and fought hardest in those critical months leading up to the ObamaCare train wreck, while others were content to sit on the sideline and wait for the disaster to come.  Now that the disaster is becoming apparent to all, who will they remember fought against it?  Ted Cruz.  Well played!

Here’s an advertisement from the Conservative Campaign Committee:

Somebody sent me this.  Wish I had written it.

Why Carry a Gun?

I don’t carry a gun to kill people.
I carry a gun to keep from being killed.

I don’t carry a gun to scare people.
I carry a gun because sometimes this world can be a scary place.

I don’t carry a gun because I’m paranoid.
I carry a gun because there are real threats in the world.

I don’t carry a gun because I’m evil.
I carry a gun because I have lived long enough to see the evil in the world.

I don’t carry a gun because I hate the government.
I carry a gun because I understand the limitations of government.

I don’t carry a gun because I’m angry.
I carry a gun so that I don’t have to spend the rest of my life hating myself for failing to be prepared.

I don’t carry a gun because I want to shoot someone.
I carry a gun because I want to die at a ripe old age in my bed, and not on a sidewalk somewhere tomorrow afternoon.

I don’t carry a gun to make me feel like a man.
I carry a gun because men know how to take care of themselves and the ones they love.

I don’t carry a gun because I feel inadequate.
I carry a gun because unarmed and facing three armed thugs, I am inadequate.

I don’t carry a gun because I love it.
I carry a gun because I love life and the people who make it meaningful to me.

Police protection is an oxymoron.  Free citizens must protect themselves.
Police do not protect you from crime, they usually just investigate the crime after it happens and then call someone in to clean up the mess.

Personally, I carry a gun because I’m too young to die and too old to take a whoopin’

— Author unknown, but obviously brilliant

As we look around at our own country, we can’t help but feel like exiles.

We live in a land where most people seem willing to casually discard the dear freedoms that our forefathers fought and died to preserve.  In fact, the only freedoms that seem to mean much in our culture are the freedoms to (a) have sex without responsibility, (b) kill our own children, and (c) steal from others by force, i.e., collect taxes from others under threat of incarceration, to  buy free stuff for ourselves.

But God wrote a letter to His people in exile.  In Jeremiah 29, God sent a message to the Israelites in Babylon, telling them about his plans for their future:

1. I have a plan for you.
2. The plan is exile.  YIKES!  The exile will last 70 years.  (Bible scholars will be interested to see how this prophecy would be fulfilled to the very day, as detailed in the notes below.)
3. Build houses, plant gardens, and eat of the produce.
4. Marry off your children, and increase in number.  (The next generation of Christians must avoid the mistake of having small families.)
5. Seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile.  Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.

Check out this video:

.

Notes on the 70-year Babylonian Captivity
by Chuck Missler (taken from Jeremiah, the Patriotic Prophet)

Among his many prophecies, Jeremiah predicted that the duration of the Babylonian captivity would be precisely 70 years.

(In fact, it was when the captive Daniel was reading Jeremiah’s prophetic writings that he undertook serious prayer, which was then interrupted by the Angel Gabriel who gave him the famed Seventy Week Prophecy. Jesus later highlighted this very passage as the key to end-time prophecy. )

The reason the judgment of the captivity was to be exactly 70 years is highlighted in 2 Chronicles (2 Chronicles 36:20, 21):

And them that had escaped from the sword carried he away to Babylon; where they were servants to him and his sons until the reign of the kingdom of Persia:

To fulfil the word of the LORD by the mouth of Jeremiah, until the land had enjoyed her sabbaths: for as long as she lay desolate she kept sabbath, to fulfil threescore and ten years.

Apparently, for 490 years they had failed to keep the sabbath of the land; the Lord was saying, in effect, “You owe me 70!”

The “servitude of the nation” began with the first siege of Nebuchadnezzar in 606 B.C. and ended with the release of the Jewish captives when Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon in 539 B.C.

This 70-year period is not to be confused with a similar 70-year period, called “the desolations of Jerusalem,” which began with the third siege of Nebuchadnezzar. Each was fulfilled to the very day.

It is instructive to note the remarkable precision of the Scriptures: The city of Jerusalem was invaded on the tenth day of the tenth month, Tebeth, in the ninth year of Zedekiah in 589 B.C. (And for 25 centuries this day has been observed as a fast by Jews in every land.)

Scripture clearly indicates that this era closed on “the four and twentieth day of the ninth month, [Kislev] even from the day that the foundation of the LORD’S temple was laid,” which was in 520 B.C. This is an interval of precisely 25,200 days, or seventy 360-day years.

This lady has hit it right on.

Laura Hollis penned this analysis of the American electorate soon after the 2012 elections.  It’s still as current today as the day she wrote it, well worth your time to read it.  Ms. Hollis is a Professor of Law at Notre Dame University and a regular columnist for Townhall.com.

Excerpts:

We are outnumbered. … There are fewer of us who believe in the value of free exchange and free enterprise. There are fewer of us who do not wish to demonize successful people in order to justify taking from them. We are outnumbered. For the moment. It’s just that simple.
***
It wasn’t the candidate(s). No matter who we ran this year, they would have lost.
***
It’s the culture, stupid. We have been trying to fight this battle every four years at the voting booth. It is long past time we admit that is not where the battle really is. We abdicated control of the culture – starting back in the 1960s. And now our largest primary social institutions – education, the media, Hollywood (entertainment) have become really nothing more than an assembly line for cranking out reliable little Leftists. Furthermore, we have allowed the government to undermine the institutions that instill good character – marriage, the family, communities, schools, our churches. So, here we are, at least two full generations later – we are reaping what we have sown. It took nearly fifty years to get here; it will take another fifty years to get back. But it starts with the determination to reclaim education, the media, and the entertainment business. If we fail to do that, we can kiss every election goodbye from here on out. And much more.
***
America has become a nation of adolescents. The real loser in this election was adulthood: Maturity. Responsibility.
***
But what did win?  Sex. Drugs. Bad language. Bad manners. Vulgarity. Lies. Cheating. Name-calling. Finger-pointing. Blaming. And irresponsible spending. This does not bode well. People grow up one of two ways: either they choose to, or circumstances force them to. …  It is unpleasant to think about the circumstances it will take to force Americans to grow up.
***
Suffice it to say that the only “war on women” was the one waged by the Obama campaign, which sexualized and objectified women, featuring them dressed up like vulvas at the Democrat National Convention, appealing to their “lady parts,” comparing voting to losing your virginity with Obama, trumpeting the thrills of destroying our children in the womb (and using our daughters in commercials to do so), and making Catholics pay for their birth control.
***
It’s not about giving up on “social issues.” …  We defend the unborn because we understand that a society which views some lives as expendable is capable of viewing all lives as expendable. We defend family – mothers, fathers, marriage, children – because history makes it quite clear that societies without intact families quickly descend into anarchy and barbarism, …
***
The Corrupt Media – is the enemy too strong?  I don’t think so. I have been watching the media try to throw elections since at least the early 1990s. In 2008 and again this year, we saw the media cravenly cover up for the incompetence and deceit of this President, while demonizing a good, honorable and decent man with lies and smears. This is on top of the daily barrage of insults that conservatives (and by that I mean the electorate, not the politicians) must endure at the hands of this arrogant bunch of elitist snobs.
***
Small business and entrepreneurs will be hurt the worst. For all the blather about “Wall Street versus Main Street ,” Obama’s statist agenda will unquestionably benefit the biggest corporations which – as with the public sector unions – are in the best position to make campaign donations, hire lobbyists, and get special exemptions carved out from Obama’s health care laws, his environmental regulations, his labor laws.
***
America is more polarized than ever; and this time it’s personal. I’ve been following politics for a long time, and it feels different this time. Not just for me. I’ve received messages from other conservatives who are saying the same thing: there is little to no tolerance left out there for those who are bringing this country to its knees – even when they have been our friends. It isn’t just about “my guy” versus “your guy.” It is my view of America versus your view of America – a crippled, hemorrhaging, debt-laden, weakened and dependent America that I want no part of and resent being foisted on me. I no longer have any patience for stupidity, blindness, or vulgarity, so with each dumb “tweet” or FB post by one of my happily lefty comrades, another one bites the dust, for me.
***
It’s possible that America just has to hit rock bottom. I truly believe that most Americans who voted for Obama have no idea what they are in for.

Read entire piece here.

Insurance cost almost triples, from $333/month to $965 for this family.

Remember that the current version of ObamaCare is only Phase I.  Phase II comes later.  The purpose of Phase I is to create such chaos in the health care industry that people will scream for relief.

When that happens, the statists who created this mess will blame the insurance companies and demand a new round of changes to protect consumers from the evil insurance companies.  (What we really need is protection from evil government, but that will never be mentioned.)

Statists will insist that only government can be trusted with something this important, and they will attempt to force all of us into a single-payer, government-run, health-care rationing system.  This system will of course be “affordable,” because “somebody else” will be paying.  That’s Phase II.

Notice that the statists who created the mess will blame everyone but themselves and will claim that only they can fix the problem.  Will the American public be stupid enough to fall for it?  We shall see.

Rand Paul:  Senators should read bills before passing them.  Really?

One of my nieces asked me a few weeks back how ObamaCare would be different from the status quo of health care in America.  Good question.   Certainly the status quo isn’t optimal.  But it’s still the best health care system on the planet.  And ObamaCare will make it much worse.  Here’s a partial answer to her question.

The status quo is this:

1. If somebody needs medical attention, they can show up at the emergency room, the hospital is legally required to render assistance, and the cost is borne by the paying customers, and
2. Low-income people can apply for and receive needs-based assistance from Medicaid or one of its state substitutes, e.g., TennCare.

I have some second-hand experience with health-care delivery to a low-income person.  A friend of mine did not have insurance to cover needed cancer treatments.  He received the treatments anyway, as needed, and now he pays a little bit each month toward his bills.  He will never completely pay off those bills, but he will do what he can.  He is thankful for the life-saving medical care he received.  He has since qualified for Medicare.

I’m not arguing for the status quo.  I believe that for most Americans, the dominance of the third-party payers (either the Government for those on Medicare or insurance companies for everybody else) has driven the cost of health care much higher (in fact, many times higher) than it should be.  There are two big reasons for this.

1. First, there is zero cost competitiveness in the health-care delivery system.  If I wanted to look for a low-cost provider, I couldn’t do it.  The system wouldn’t let me.  When our son was one year old, we were told (falsely, it turns out) that he needed a test to confirm reflux disease, but they wouldn’t tell me what it would cost.  I needed to know, because insurance coverage for his condition was limited under a preexisting condition clause.  But they still wouldn’t tell me.  Is there anything else we buy where the supplier steadfastly refuses to tell us the cost before we buy it?  They get away with it because too few people have the slightest motivation to even ask, “What will it cost?”
2. Second, the nearly universal customer disinterest in the cost of medical care means that most of us will buy as much of it as is offered.  I have myself purchased several unnecessary and overly expensive tests because (a) the tests were offered and (b) I had no incentive to pass them up.  I guarantee that I would not have had those tests had I been required to put down a 20% co-pay.  We must find a way to reinstate cost incentives/competition back into medical care, but still provide health care to people who truly cannot afford to pay.  By health care, I mean health care, not wealth insurance for people who choose to forego health insurance premiums in order to purchase beer, cigarettes, cable TV, cell phones, etc.

Now, back to your question.  Here are just a few of the ways that ObamaCare will be different from the status quo:

First, it will hasten our decline into financial insolvency.  We don’t have the money in the Federal treasury to pay for it.  We know it will cost hundreds of billions of additional dollars to implement, and it does nothing to reinstate cost incentives back into the system.  Let’s step away from health care and look at the big picture.  Every election cycle, one political party makes it a point to claim that an ever-growing number of Americans are entitled — entitled, mind you — to a laundry list of free stuff.  Each election year, the number of “entitled” people grows larger and the list of free stuff gets longer.  And who is going to pay for all that “free” stuff?  It is to be paid for by an ever-smaller, ever more despised — despised, mind you — group of producers.  Can this continue?  Consult your own common sense.  If you need an example, see what’s been happening to Greece.

The ever-smaller group of producers couldn’t keep up with all of the Government spending even during the good economic times.  In the early to mid 2000s, the Government revenues were setting record levels, and we still had deficits.  During the more normal times, we have no hope of keeping up with spending.  And even less hope during the inevitable recessions that cycle around.  The cost of ObamaCare will only grow our debt even more, making our next recession even deeper and more painful.

As much as we would like to wipe away every human need in this country, there is simply not enough money to do it.  In the 1960s, it was estimated that if we “invested” 60 billion dollars into poverty programs, that poverty could be wiped out.  Trillions of dollars later, I could argue that the problem is worse now than then.  In fact, the Government instituted expensive programs that actually made poverty worse.  I have no reason to believe that ObamaCare won’t make health care worse than it is now.

Second, the implementation of ObamaCare will reinforce the belief that some people are “entitled” to the wealth created by others.  Without any incentives to limit their medical “needs,” they will demand more and more “free” services … “free” to them but not to those of us who will be paying the bill.  What is President Obama’s plan to deal with all the new demand for limitless health care?  Hire new doctors?  No.  His plan is to hire 10,000 new IRS agents.  (The CBO has said that the IRS would spend $0.5 billion to $1.0 billion to enforce the ObamaCare law.)

Third, it will create a new bureaucracy to administer all the rules.  The law itself was 1,000 – 2,400 pages (depending on who’s counting and what’s counted) of stuff that few, if any, members of Congress even bothered to read.  The final regulations will be tens of thousands of pages.  In fact, bureaucrats had generated 13,000 pages of new regulations as of July 2012, and they’re not done yet.  Who will be tasked with making sure all those regulations are complied with?  Just to simply stay out of jail, medical providers will be forced to hire additional compliance staff.  (Medical providers are already being forced to hire new staff to meet the ObamaCare electronic medical record requirements.)  Of course, the Government will have to hire their own army of enforcement officers.  After all, what good are regulations if they are not enforced?  And guess who will pay for all of that!

Fourth, you mentioned that you have yourself benefitted from the ObamaCare law, because it forced your parents to pay for the cost of your insurance for more years than would otherwise have been the case.  There was no net benefit here; there was only a shift in the costs from one person to another.  Plus, it only reinforced the idea that Government action could create “free” stuff for your benefit.  If you are getting “free” stuff, then others will line up to receive it as well.  I’m not criticizing you for taking advantage of the free stuff that you will eventually have to pay for — with interest payments and bureaucrat labor costs added on, you and perhaps your children will be forced to pay for it many times over — but I’m merely pointing out that “free” benefits aren’t really free at all.  You will pay dearly.

Fifth, ObamaCare drives up costs by mandating that all insurance coverage includes everything imaginable, even free contraceptives.  (The very idea that the guy down the street should be forced to pay for my contraceptives is foreign to me.)  The Government is deciding that you should have an unlimited list of free services, and they make it palatable for you by pretending that somebody else will actually pay for it.  Apply the same kind of thinking to your auto insurance policy.  Imagine that you could buy car insurance that paid for every imaginable automotive expense, including oil changes, new tires, minor repairs, major repairs, etc.  Would you buy it?  No way!  You would never buy that policy because it would be prohibitively expensive.  It would be great for the automotive repair shops, because you and all your friends would be lined up around the corner, demanding that the scratch on your door and the little rust spot on your fender be fixed, but this would drive up the cost of insurance so high, you would not buy it (unless you were forced to do so by law).  A free person acting in a free market would almost always choose a reasonably-priced automobile insurance policy to cover only the catastrophic losses, and accept personal responsibility to pay for everything else.  Most people would agree to pay for such nonsense only if they were forced to do so under threat of incarceration.  It is just as true for health insurance; the only way they can force this system upon us is to (a) lie to us by saying that “somebody else” is actually paying for it, and (b) force us to pay for it under threat of incarceration.  That’s what all those new IRS agents are all about.

Sixth, ObamaCare forces people — employees are people, too — to purchase abortions and contraceptives, a clear violation of conscience for many Americans.  People shouldn’t have to choose between closing their businesses (i.e., firing their employees) and violating their consciences.

Seventh, when this is all over, it will create a gigantic transfer of wealth to the abortion industry.  At $450 per abortion, the industry generates revenues of roughly $550 million (not including premiums for late-term abortions).  I’m convinced that ObamaCare will be manipulated to force that number up to more than $7 billion. (Link here for an explanation.)  Keep in mind that the abortion industry sells abortions at $450 apiece, not $5,472 apiece (the cost of a similar non-abortive procedure), because abortions, unlike every other medical procedure, are paid for directly by the consumer and thus are subject to the normal pressures of consumer economics.  When cost competition in the abortion market is gone, prices will rise accordingly.

Eighth, the cost burden to employers will incentivize them to hire fewer people, thus increasing the unemployment rate.  Who pays for that?  The greatest burden will fall on minorities and young people, because they suffer the greatest rates of unemployment.  But we will all pay a price, because the fewer people working, the more the rest of us have to pay to keep the ship of state afloat.  Worse than the financial cost of unemployment is the human cost: unrealized personal growth and development.  People who are not working lose the opportunity to learn, grow, and increase their value to some future employer.  They are stuck.

Ninth, by decoupling bad behavior from its costs, you only incentivize more bad behavior.  There will never be any shortage of human needs around us.  Some are due to circumstances beyond people’s control, but most are the result of bad behavior.  In this case, bad behavior can include laziness … simply deciding not to work and letting somebody else pay the freight.  When you make it easier for people to leave the ranks of the producers and join the ranks of the “entitled,” you can be sure that more of them will do it.  We all pay for that.  We all lose.  Such people lose their self-respect.  Their children learn dependency instead of self-sufficiency.  We lose their participation in the economy.  Our culture degrades.  We see the victims of degraded culture all around us.

Bad behavior also includes health-destroying activities like drug abuse, overeating, drinking, smoking, etc.  If we really wanted to improve the health of American citizens, perhaps we should spend the extra money (the trillions of dollars of money we don’t have) on programs designed to improve moral fitness.

Anyway, that’s all I have for now, just off the top of my head.  I suspect I have just scratched the surface.

Your loving but fearful uncle,

Fletcher

Ronald Reagan makes us all proud to be Americans.  I hope God will one day bless us again with a leader like that.  Some have said that we have the teenagers and politicians that we deserve.  In the 1980’s, we got much better than we deserved.  Let us pray that God will once again visit our land.

Ronald Reagan had the guts to tell it like it is:

The First Amendment was not written to protect people and their laws from religious values.  It was written to protect those values from government tyranny.

We must be cautious in claiming God is on our side.  I think the real question we must answer is, “Are we on His side?”

The morality and values such faith implies are deeply imbedded in our national character.  Our country embraces those principles by design and we abandon them at our peril.

Tennessee Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey is now a featured author at FAB!  (OK, he just blasted out this e-mail, but what the heck.)

Boldness in Education Policy is the Only Answer
by Tennessee Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey

When I first arrived in the state Senate in 1996, Republicans were in the minority. That fact didn’t bother me in the least. I’ve embraced challenges all my life. So when I got to the Senate, my primary goal was to build a conservative majority in the state Senate.

The guardians of the status quo had other ideas. Democrats, of course, pushed back against us. But even those on “my side” warned that talk of a GOP majority was “dangerous” and that I shouldn’t upset the apple cart.

It took a lot of hard work, but today we have not only a majority in the Senate but also a supermajority in both houses of the General Assembly.

Our road to a conservative majority comes to mind often when I am engaged in battles on education policy in Tennessee. The guardians of the status quo, it seems, are everywhere.

While our state is featured frequently at the top of various “best of” lists, there is one area in which Tennessee has historically lagged behind: education. We have ranked near the bottom of states by various different metrics. When Republicans finally got our majorities and captured the governor’s mansion, we moved quickly and deliberately to change that history. And we have.

We abolished the teachers union monopoly on collective bargaining so that teachers, not union representatives, have a voice and a seat at the table. We made test scores part of teacher evaluations so that our best teachers can be rewarded for their hard work. And parents now have more choices in education thanks to our expansion of the state’s charter school law. Most importantly, we have ended the tenure entitlement for teachers.

Results have been encouraging. Already, our schools have posted three consecutive years of gains on state assessments in all areas. Nearly 150,000 more students are proficient or advanced in elementary and middle school math and science than in 2010. And we are one of only two states making double-digit gains in high school graduation rates.

None of this could have been done without the outstanding education reform team we have in place. One member of that team has drawn the ire of the enemies of innovation and the defenders of the status quo.

Education Commissioner Kevin Huffman has been under fire for advocating a new salary schedule for teachers which, for the first time, would reward our very best or highest-need teachers with truly competitive pay. No longer would low-performing teachers receive higher salaries and benefits just for punching a clock. To the old education establishment, this is a revolutionary concept. To most people, this is just common sense.

I find it amazing that just because Commissioner Huffman stands up to special interests to create a better Tennessee for our school children, he gets pilloried.

Opponents can claim that teacher pay will be cut, but the truth is just the opposite. Gov. Bill Haslam and the General Assembly have added $130 million for teacher salaries over the past three years, compared with $22 million over Gov. Phil Bredesen’s last term.

Tennessee is changing the game when it comes to education — and change is not easy. The inertia of the status quo is strong. This “Race to the Top” is not a sprint; it is a marathon.

Fortunately, we Republicans are not immune to hard work. We thrive on it. I’m proud of our governor, our Republican legislators and especially our education commissioner for being willing to battle complacency and strive to do better.

This is about our children. It is about their future and the future of our great state. Boldness in education policy is not just one option among many. It is the only option.

Originally published in the July 20, 2013 edition of the Nashville Tennessean newspaper

Funny video from Debt Limit USA.  It would be funny, if it weren’t so true.