SageSuggestions : 2014-05-18

Tuesday, May 20, 2014

Maybe It Is Size After All

Some news outlets are covering what may become the worst Obama scandal yet, the problems with our VA Hospitals. Yet I think there are actually more stories about gay marriage than about the care we provide for our veterans. The accusations are flying, as they tend to do, among our nation's politicians and the media charged with watching over them. I'm joking about the watching over part of course!

With all the calls for heads to roll and the declarations of outrage, I think everyone may be missing the point altogether. Firing a few people will not change a thing. You would have to fire a LOT of people and then I wonder what that would fix. The fact is the only people who could be fired are the wrong ones, the people who actually provide the hands on care the vets do get.

The VA System, like all of government, has simply gotten too large to operate. A popular saying today seems to be "too large to fail", but everything about the government we have allowed to spread it's tentacles into virtually every facet of our lives has become too large to function! The government is the largest landowner in the country, it dictates what our kids learn and eat in schools, it even tells you whether you can build a pond on your own land.

Franklin Roosevelt, one of the most liberal Presidents in history, until Obama cautioned us about allowing public employees to unionize. Of course we didn't listen and begun creating the mess we're in now. Whenever we have a problem we hear the government needs to regulate that! There are so many laws and regulations on the books we are strangling ourselves in rules. Our country is simply drowning in it's own red tape!

We won't be able to fix the VA or anything else until we wake up to the fact we have to somehow shrink government, cut rules and regulations, and return control of most things back to the states, just as The Constitution dictates!

White House official to visit much-criticized Phoenix veterans medical facility http://news.yahoo.com/white-house-official-visit-much-criticized-phoenix-veterans-173244263.html

The Declaration of Independence

When in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the Separation.

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 Format of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying it's Foundations on such Principles, and organizing it's Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate the time Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes, and accordingly all Experiences hath shewn, that Mankind more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinced a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security. Such has been the patient Sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the Necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The History of the present King of Great Britain is a History of repeated Injuries and Usurpations, all having in direct Object the Establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid World.

(The specific grievances are listed as is the Declaration of breaking the connections with Great Britain.

56 patriots (YOUR FOREFATHERS) signed the Declaration of Independence knowing they would be accused of Treason against the Crown and condemned to Death if caught!

YOU CAN READ THE REST OF THE DECLARATION ON LINE at: www.archives.gov>exhibits>charters

Gettysburg Address

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place--for those who have given their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate--we cannot concecrate--we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who have struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember, what we say here but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated to the unfinished work which they who fought have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion--that we highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain--that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom--and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from this earth.
Abraham Lincoln

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Tuesday, May 20, 2014

Maybe It Is Size After All

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