Don't need a library anymore thanks to our sponsor Audible.com. I'm fortunate to live in a "Will Issue" state (Indiana), so I already have a lifetime CC permit. What was the question again?

Good first post Philo, keep 'em coming. And Welcome!

Liberals love lofty concepts, not down & dirty reality.

I want government at all levels that performs the tasks it has been assigned well and efficiently and restricts itself to those things and otherwise leaves me alone. I am an adult and capable of deciding whether or not to smoke, use salt on my food, how much soda to drink, how many guns to own, where to live, what to do for a living, how much I want to spend educating myself and my children, whom I like and whom I don't, whom I will hire and whom I will not. . . et alia.

Basically, I want to be left alone to live my life as I see fit and on the rare occasion I might brush up against the government it will be a rational exchange with another adult. One can dream can't one?

People that live in glass houses . . .  comes to mind here.

Have fun filling it out as "creatively" as you can. One white, one Puerto Rican, one Kenyan. Operates as a house of ill repute. has sixteen bathrooms and one bedroom and six kitchens. Historical stop on the underground railroad. Once owned by Billy the Kid. All members of the household are permanently and totally disabled. I think you get the drift here. They said you had to fill it out. They didn't say you had to be accurate nor that the best of your knowledge couldn't be a little off kilter, did they?

If I were given the City of Detroit, I would do the only rational thing I could do . . . I'd give it back.

May I suggest Indiana. I've become a Hoosier by marriage and find this well managed red state an oasis from the madness I fled in Garden Grove, California. It's a will issue state, tends to vote conservative except for the bigger cities, and has real seasons, ample churches, friendly neighbors, and pretty reasonable home prices.

I'm using Firefox with No-Script and it is currently blocking 17 java scripts and Albine's DNT is currently blocking 6 tracking cookies here on NRO as I type this. If I couldn't stop all of this garbage, I would no longer visit this site. If I click thru to a site to see a video or an article and it won't appear without temporarily enabling the site itself and nothing else, I just close the window and move on. This is an annoying trend internet wide, but I will fight it 'til my last breath.

No Captain. Congressmen don't have to abide by OSHA regulations, the minimum wage laws, indoor smoking bans, and a plethora of other laws rules and regulations that they feel perfectly free to foist on the rest of us. They have their own health care system, their own retirement system and many other perks that isolate them from the effects of their "enlightened" ideas.

Further, in constitutional parlance, the People are the citizenry.

Sorry Manfred, but we're going to get skewered in any case. That is the primary response of the left. They never engage the actual argument when it suffices to simply ridicule or demonize the opposition and ignore the argument entirely. I applaud your effort to find a way to change things; I just find it a bit naive is all. Government is not the solution, it's the problem. While you seek to tweak the knobs and dials of the leviathan, you overlook that the leviathan grows ever larger, usurping more and more and becoming ever more difficult to direct. We need to shrink the government, not direct it toward our own ends instead of those of our opponents.

@Ryan: My point wasn't that all attorneys are bad. Rather it was that if a profession with high social esteem such as doctors can be looted, it will be all the more difficult for a profession with much lower social esteem such as lawyers to avoid a similar fate. Your post makes it clear that we are already on the slippery slope in that regard with respect to lawyers.

@indaba: Don't you think the Steyn case makes the point that the legal profession has priced itself out of the market when a trial costs a litigant close to two million dollars to defend what is manifestly the better side of the argument? It's not like someone devoted an entire career to this matter, yet one trial ran up costs greater than most people make in a lifetime. If that sounds like legal representation is reasonably available to the average citizen when it runs afoul of a government bureaucracy with unlimited resources to you, we must inhabit different planets. Hence the lack of sympathy from the common man once the legal profession falls in the cross hairs of the "champions (and creators it seems) of Rights!"

Manfred,

The alternative is to continue pouring money into a cause that we've already lost. No tenure board is ever going to allow an openly conservative professor on the faculty. No teacher's union is going to represent the interests of its conservative members. My advice would be to encourage alumni to stop pouring money into the endowments of colleges at odds with their beliefs and to direct it to institutions like Hillsdale College (or perhaps create new ones) and have the federal government absent itself from education altogether. We do have local school boards, don't we? How does letting the feds extract a dollar from us only to make us dance to its tune to get it part of it back improve education more than having the whole dollar directed locally as we see fit from the beginning?

Did you think the looting was going to stop at usurping the services of doctors with Obamacare? Next we'll hear "legal services ought to be a civil rights issue too! How could any ordinary person afford proper legal representation unless the government steps in and becomes the single payer for such services. After all, we're talking about peoples freedom and their lives here! This isn't a service, it's a right!"

And on down the slippery slope we'll go counselor, one group pitted against the other without regard for whether what replaces what we have actually works or not. As for lawyers, it'll be hard to work up much pity for a group that's been looting without producing for decades and levying a 40% tax on every auto accident settlement in order to enrich themselves in the name of helping the poor. Wait until the poor themselves start deciding what help you're going to provide! Do you think your profession is immune to what we are currently watching doctors go through? Now that the tipping point has been reached, you will find an increasing number of poor people fervently looting the remaining rich.

I sent my secretary to the post office today to get an extra post office box key. She returned and informed me that we had to order three keys and that they wouldn't arrive for four to six weeks.

Now imagine Obama care {shudder}. You have to order an entire case of nitro tablets and you'll have to wait a month to receive them. If the same people run both, could anyone explain why this isn't a logical expectation? What do we do with this case of pills that came for grandpa? Throw them out, he died of a heart attack two weeks ago.

Strike thru control of half and replace with halve the in your headline -- free lance editor (you're welcome)

Step two, repeat!