People and organizations other than doctors increasingly are assuming power to decide which medications to prescribe or procedures to undertake. More and more, decisions about personal healthcare are no longer made by the treating physicians in consultation with their patients, and based on the doctors' expertise.

Courts have long recognized the federal government's robust power to inspect people and goods entering the country. After all, the very foundation of national sovereignty is a nation's ability to protect its borders.

The Tea Party knows that continuing to delay charting a course to spending reform hurts everybody.

It is high time for some congressional oversight backbone.

I sense that conservatives have largely already tuned out to the coming elections, after six years of burgeoning federal spending and inaction on key issues, such as immigration. The Republican Party has become the party of the government status quo, and conservatives see no reason to reward it with their votes.

The main international problem facing America is our lack of - our loss of influence in the world and our lack of an ability to define what U.S. interests really are.

MoveOn loves government. It remains enamored of government spending as fuel for its liberal agenda; and anything that threatens to close that spigot in any degree is perceived as a dire threat - worthy of Chicken-Little warnings that the sky is going to fall.