“As I watch government at all levels daily eat away at our freedom, I keep thinking how prosperity and government largesse have combined to make most of us fat and lazy and indifferent to, or actually in favor of, the limits being placed on that freedom.”

True! Lyn is a great sage!

Nowhere fits that sentence more than Europe.

Right on.

If ONLY you were a part of Dubya's government. Dubya's allies be warned: I'm a Republican who will vote completely for Democrats in the next election. You've shamed yourselves and your party. Let Freedom Ring in spite of you.

The government of the last 8 years has eaten away at the largesse and prosperity of the middle class and the poor while giving greater liberty to some (Iraqis and Afghans) and the American rich. Here Nofziger sounds like Herbert Hoover. "Prosperity is bad for the Americans character" is usually said by those who are prospering very well thank you, and get some kick at looking down on those who are not. If welfare is evil because it is "money for nothing" then is not inheritance the same thing - welfare for the rich. The Kuwaitis, Saudis etc are fat, rich and lazy and we defended the hell out of them

Amen brother.

Ah, the Bushs and the Clintons equally eroded our freedoms -- The Bush admin couldn't have done what they did without building on the Clinton admin. When lobbyist groups show up at both party conventions -- while supporting, funding, promoting, and chanting for both sides -- something is terribly wrong in this country. Democracts and Republicans today are merely two sides of the same coin of usurpation and tyranny.

So true! Where is the individual spirit today? Welfare, entitlement programs, etc., foster followers not leaders.

A constant in human history........"Augustus won over the soldiers with gifts, the populace with cheap corn, and all men with the sweets of repose, and so grew greater by degrees, while he concentrated in himself the functions of the Senate, the magistrates, and the laws. He was wholly unopposed, for the boldest spirits had fallen in battle, or in the proscription, while the remaining nobles, the readier they were to be slaves, were raised the higher by wealth and promotion, so that, aggrandised by revolution, they preferred the safety of the present to the dangerous past."---The Annals of Tacitus

Nofziger is right on. Ken hits the nail on the head -- that is politics defined.

and we trade extensively with and thus prop up with prosperity and largesse welfare states like China, and Sweden (by purchasing Volvo's) and as some would say socialist Germany by buying Benzs and BMWs. Why do we have a double standard that makes our competitors fat and prosperous and denies our own people the same equal treatment.

Two George Orwell quotes: "In our age there is no such thing as keeping out of politics. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia". " Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give and appearance of solidity to pure wind".

RE: Nofziger ... amen and amen.

Waffler, again you speak out of both sides of your mouth, misrepresenting the whole while spinning a most fine line of accuracy. The government of the last century and a half or so has eaten away at the largesse and prosperity of the middle class and poor. Not until Amerika's expanding implementation of socialism began in earnest (1913) has real social slavery been known. With almost half the work eligible unemployed, funny money deleting wealth, more companies failing than starting and industry leaving because of socialism's regulations, taxes, and ANTI-condusive atmosphere, government at all levels daily eats away at freedom, liberty, prosperity, justice and the laws of nature and of nature's God.

Mental health is a continuous laborious effort.  One cannot afford to become fat and lazy. Freedom of thought and action is established on a sound mental health foundation.