Universities have failed in their function of the pursuit of academic excellence by having dumbed down classes and granting degrees to students who are just barely literate and computationally incompetent.

If grade inflation continues, a college bachelor's degree will have just as much credibility as a high school diploma.

Try this thought experiment. Pretend you're a tyrant. Among your many liberty-destroying objectives are extermination of blacks, Jews and Catholics. Which would you prefer, a United States with political power centralized in Washington, powerful government agencies with detailed information on Americans and compliant states or power widely dispersed over 50 states, thousands of local jurisdictions and a limited federal government?

Malmo, with its 280,000 residents, is Sweden's third-largest city. To see a physician, a patient must go to one of two local clinics before they can see a specialist. The clinics have security guards to keep patients from getting unruly as they wait hours to see a doctor. The guards also prevent new patients from entering the clinic when the waiting room is considered full. Uppsala, a city with 200,000 people, has only one specialist in mammography. Sweden's National Cancer Foundation reports that in a few years most Swedish women will not have access to mammography.

I believe in helping our fellow man in need. I believe that reaching into your own pockets to help someone in need is praiseworthy and laudable. Reaching into somebody else's pockets to help your fellow man in need is despicable. And, or those of us who are Christians, I'm very sure that when God gave Moses the commandment Thou Shalt Not Steal, he did not mean ...unless you get a majority vote in Congress.

So what's the difference between republican and democratic forms of government? John Adams captured the essence of the difference when he said, 'You have rights antecedent to all earthly governments; rights that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws; rights derived from the Great Legislator of the Universe.' Nothing in our Constitution suggests that government is a grantor of rights. Instead, government is a protector of rights.

It was Thomas Jefferson who said that we should not allow the courts to have a monopoly on the interpretation of what is constitutional and what is not.