"A government that controls your mortgage, your student loan, your car loan, your retirement savings, your healthcare, your right to own property and to defend your liberties- with a gun if necessary- is a government that owns your liberty and just rents it back to you for a while at election time." -- This is the best, the most succinct paragraph describing the fatal flaws of big government I have ever read. I am putting it into an email - with attribution of course - and sending it out to my friends

Just to be clear, read the first sentence. I am familiar with the capabilities of the AC-130 as well as other airborne weapons systems. In that case, you have a human pulling the trigger. The point I was trying to make is that blowing someone up with a hellfire missile is pretty hard to hide, so there would be news coverage and outrage. If the government ever develops a stealth weapon that could be mounted on a drone that they could point at someone and, for example, cause them to drop dead because of an apparent heart attack; we would all be in serious trouble. Technology has far outpaced our sense of ethics. Mistrust of government is the reason we have a constitutional right to bear arms AND defend ourselves.

The basic question, as I see it, is; do you trust your government. I would say no. Unscrupulous leaders have acted in less-than-honorable ways in the past and will likely do so in the future. The one redeeming fact of taking someone out with a drone strike is that it is highly visible, and therefore unlikely to remain unnoticed. If the government ever develops a drone capable of taking someone out without a large explosion, we are all in trouble.

So according to your reasoning, it is impossible to quantify any objective measure of racial progress since only an African-American would be able to make that judgement. Turn that around and think about it for moment. How absurd would it be for only a white man to be able to judge if a law was fair for white people. How racist can a country be that has elected a black man for President not once, but twice.

Obama is not responsible for what happened the last four years. It's Bush's fault, it's the Republicans fault it is everyone but Obama's fault. You get enough people to believe that and Obama gets re-elected for another four years.

Loopholes in the Constitution? Have you ever read the Constitution? There are no loopholes. The purpose of the Constitution is to prescribe in great detail what the function of the branches of government are. It limits the power of government. If you want to live in a system where the "Executive Branch", meaning the President or someone like him has unlimited power; I suggest you move to Cuba.

For once, I agree with you. But it is far from easy.

Public education is not an entitlement. It is a monopoly run by the government and staffed by card-carrying union teachers who receive a paycheck whether or not they perform their job sufficiently to educate their students. We had a better educational system one hundred years ago than we have today.

If you define being racist as being opposed to social programs that lead to generational dependence on Government, then you are right. I guess conservatives are racist. If you mean being racist as being opposed to a system that defines fairness by the number of minorities you employ rather than looking at the quality of character in a person regardless of skin color, then yes conservatives are racist. If you define being racist as requiring the same aptitude for learning in all students regardless of background, gender or color; then yes, conservatives are racist. I plead guilty.

I believe one of the main reasons many politicians on both sides of the aisle oppose the enactment of the sequester is that virtually nothing will happen as far as the economy is concerned. And once people see that actually reducing the amount of spending does not result in catastrophe, there may be much more it to come. One can only hope.