What are you going to do to shrink the bloated federal government and get focused on its original mission? That is the most important question we should be demanding an answer to from the bevy of suitors for the highest office in the land.

I am tired of reading pap about this crop of Presidential candidates. I don’t care about Mitt Romney’s family trip in 1983. I don’t care about whether Barack Obama is a smoker. I am not in the least interested in what women see when they see Hillary. John McCain is a war hero. Don’t care. Tommy Thompson has gigantic ears. I don’t want to read a story about that. John Edwards’ wife’s body is riddled with cancer. Not my problem. I could go on about all the things I do not need to know about the various candidates, but I think you get my point.

What I want to know is why I should vote for any of these fools? Not a single one of them is going to get the government off my back, out of my affairs and away from my pocketbook. Not a single one of them is going to tread lightly in my life. They all want a bigger piece of me, and for that matter YOU!

They can all go to hell as far as I am concerned. I don’t want them to do anything for me. I can do what needs doing myself, please and thank you. All I want from a President is strong national defense, secure borders and an occasional speech about how great it is to be free, and maybe the President could throw in a reminder or two regarding the awesome responsibility that comes with liberty. I’d like that speech to be based on reality. Can we work on that?

Sometimes I think we are becoming a nation of tranquilized zombies. What can I say to convince you not to vote for another power mongering, empty promise making lying sack of crap?

I listen to XM satellite radio every morning on my way to work, and every evening on my way home from work. Since I have a 70-mile one way commute, I get more exposure to news and politics than I would imagine a typical commuter does.

It occurred to me this morning while listening to ABC News that the United States of America has turned into a panic factory. We are fed stress all day long from hundreds of sources. You would think the world is about to end any day now based on the clamor coming out of my radio every day. Television is no different. Everything is designed and presented in a way that enhances or overstates whatever issue is being discussed. Here are some examples of the issues as presented through the eyes of ABC this morning:

Global warming - we’re all going to die underwater SOON! Luckily we have hundreds of artists who will sing about this issue until you are sick of it.
Iraq - no hope. It’s well past time to give up and get out. Nothing but death and destruction over there.
Health care - 47 million Americans are dying in the streets because we don’t have socialized hypochondria and unlimited free pills for everyone.

Man, I just don’t know how I’m going to get through my day. Everything is horrible.

McCain-Feingold was conceived and enacted under the false premise that it is the federal government’s job to protect Americans from political speech by censoring that speech. And now that idea is being flushed down the toilet. I couldn’t be happier, as I have been preaching against this fool’s legislation from day one.

McCain-Feingold restricted what and when you could say about politicians - a horrible law that was and is completely unconstitutional. In case you have been asleep every American is guaranteed the right to free speech and there is nothing in that promise that says anything about limited censorship of certain types of speech. To a typical American politician in 2007, the Constitution is a piece of paper to be ignored, so what it says hasn’t really mattered. Since Americans are by and large lazy and uneducated about politics, it has been fairly easy for politicians to enact tens of thousands of caches of garbage legislation that ignore every principle this nation was founded on.

McCain-Feingold is one of the worst of these dishonorable little control documents conceived in the spirit of nannyism and birthed by a group of people who hide behind good intentions and the raw, lumbering power of a massive bureaucracy that would have made most colonists pick up their muskets and assemble in the town square for a good old fashioned tarring and feathering, if not a lynching or two.

That is the message being sent by this study, which reports that teenagers affected by Hurricane Katrina are more likely to smoke than teenagers who didn’t have to live through the horror of George W. Bush’s indifference to black people in New Orleans, or something like that. I am not sure if the main stressors came from the hurricane or the idiots who populate the city and vote criminally inclined incompetents into office over and over again.

“The physical damage was easy to see, but the psychological damage from the hurricanes was pretty well hidden,” said Alfred L. McAlister, a behavioral scientist and an author of the study. “The hurricanes had an emotional impact on the youth and we need to recognize that and give them the help they need. Otherwise, they use tobacco as a crutch and then they become addicted.”

Almost 38 percent of students who reported they had a family member hurt or killed in the 2005 hurricanes also reported that they now were smoking, according to the study. In comparison, 13 percent who did not endure a death or injury in the family said they smoked.

Smoking rates were also higher among Jefferson County students whose homes were damaged or destroyed or if they had family or friends with damaged or destroyed homes, according to the study.

Students who still were living in temporary housing and who were absent from school for more than two months due to the hurricanes were two times more likely to smoke than their counterparts.

About 22 percent of American teenagers smoke, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

McAlister said the study shows teens turned to smoking to cope with the disruption.

“Raised stress levels lead to more smoking,” he said. “It was not shocking to find that relationship after the hurricanes.”

OK, fine, so stress leads people to smoke more. That’s not a news flash! It is still your fault you tried it in the first place. I am not sure why we spend all the time we do hyperanalyzing this kind of crap. I smoke, and I don’t blame anyone but me. When I am ready to quit, I will. Same thing applies whether you are a giant fatty, have a gambling problem, beat your spouse or have sex with anything that moves. It is your choice, and it is your fault, and you will only quit when you get sick of yourself. Quit blaming the hurricanes life throws your way for every stupid behavior you repeat on a daily basis. Put down that 2-pound cheeseburger or throw away your pack of Camels if you don’t like yourself, but don’t think it is anyone else’s fault that you ended up where you are.

That is one of the questions currently being discussed in the U.S. History to 1865 class that I am taking. The vast majority of the class feels that states do not have the right to secede under any circumstances. That makes me sad. When the majority of the population of any geographic area is no longer being served by the dominant government, then citizens not only have a right to secede, they have a moral obligation to do so.

There are two major facets to the secession question: 1) morality and 2) self-interest. These two items do not necessarily align with one another. When the U.S. Civil War began, the rationale for war on both sides was highly complicated. The North entered the war for two primary reasons: 1) Keeping the Union from dissolving by force and 2) forcing the issue of slavery. The first reason was immoral and the second was moral. Yet the first reason was Abraham Lincoln’s primary reason for using force to bring the Confederacy back into the Union. Lincoln felt slavery was morally wrong, but he did not declare war because of slavery. He declared war because he believed the federal government should be the highest authority in the land, and that states had no right to self-determination. Abolition was not his primary goal. Lincoln himself said this:

I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races - that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And in as much as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.

Some Southerners, to be sure, fought in the Civil War to preserve the immoral institution of human slavery, but many enlisted in the war effort because they felt that the North was trying to dictate how they should live.

The outcome of the Civil War was never really in doubt. The North had vast superiority in numbers and had the industrial base. Technology is amoral, and the North held the technology - it was therefore destined for victory. While the end of the war settled the question of slavery, it did not grant equality to blacks. That issue would not be settled for another one hundred years, when the Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s forced Americans to reexamine racial inequalities in their society.

What the Civil War did accomplish was the growth of government, and the mitigation of liberty for all American citizens and residents. From the end of the war until the present day, the Federal government’s role in decision making for all Americans has grown to the point where a large segment of the American population is completely or partially dependent on theft by taxes for its well-being.

Back to the original question, though! Do states have a right to secede? What circumstances, if any, justify a declaration that a state no longer wishes to be a part of the union called the United States of America?