Do you think the government is too big, taxes too much and regulates your lives more than it should?

Polls consistently show that most Americans think there is too much government. Nevertheless, those in the majority who say they want smaller government continue to vote for people who ultimately give them larger government.

All too many are willing to vote for those politicians who promise more benefits to some to be paid for by others, without understanding that they will eventually become the "others." The American Founders clearly understood the danger. As Thomas Jefferson said, "When the people realize they can vote themselves benefits, all is lost."

What has gone wrong and why? In an incisive, new book, "Terms of Engagement: How Our Courts Should Enforce the Constitution's Promise of Limited Government," Clark Neily lays much of the blame at the feet of the judiciary.   

Mr. Neily is the senior attorney for the Institute for Justice, and is perhaps best known for success in the Heller case, where the Supreme Court held that the Second Amendment protects an individual's right to own guns.

There are 435 Congresscritters, and choosing who is the biggest jerk among them is not easy, for there is a multitude of choices.

Many would opt for John Murtha (D-PA), but he's just the most senile.  That's not a joke - he's age 74 and actually going senile.  In a recent interview with Tim Russert, he thought Okinawa was close to Iraq, so our troops could be "redeployed" there.  Okinawa is 6,000 miles from Iraq.

He's reached that stage of senility called second-childhood, where the patient acts increasingly juvenile - like saying the most outrageous things possible in order to get attention, even if they are treasonous and spits on his own military record.

Some, of course, would choose anti-American racist screwballs like Cynthia McKinney (D-GA), Barbara Lee (D-CA), or Maxine Waters (D-CA).  But they're just bit-player kooks.

If you took a vote among the Congress members themselves for the biggest jerk among them, the most likely winner would be James Sensenbrenner (R-WI).

For most Westerners, Turkey is a hard nut to crack.

How can you understand a state sponsor of terrorism that is also a member of NATO?

How can you explain Turkey's facilitation of Kurdish independence in Iraq in light of Turkey's hundred-year opposition to Kurdish independence?

What is Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyep Erdogan trying to accomplish here?  The answer is chaos - just like Iran albeit with a very different objective.

On the terrorism support front, today Turkey vies with Iran for the title of leading state sponsor of terrorism.  Here's the explanation.

Where's the pony?

Ronald Reagan was fond of describing an optimist as a kid on a farm happily digging through a huge pile of horse manure, yelling, "There's got to be a pony in here somewhere!"  What would he say about a week, or a time like this?  Knowing him, I think he'd say, "Well, sometimes there just isn't any pony."

Yes, there will be days like this.  But three more years of days like this??  One thousand ninety-eight more days?  (See the Countdown Clock to the end of the Zero Presidency.)

And realize there is a high probability that those 1098 days are going to be progressively worse.  With each passing day and week and month, we're going to have more fascism, more unemployment, more dependency, more cultural depravity, more corruption, more crony capitalism, more liberal hate, more Enemedia lying and cover-ups of Zero scandals, more persecution of Tea Partyers, and more surrender to America's enemies like Iran and the Chicoms.

So - how can we possibly stand it?    What in the Diety's name are we going to do? 

First, we'll review how grim it's been this week.  Then we'll discuss six alternatives to dealing with it.  (No fair skipping ahead, but one of them is following the advice of Josey Wales.)

Should government employees have privileges and legal immunities that the rest of us do not have? The government shutdown battle is, in part, a dispute about the extra subsidies members of Congress and their staffs are slated to get from Obamacare.

Civilian government employees often whine about the lack of respect they receive from their fellow Americans. Part of the antipathy many feel toward the government class is because they, on average, are paid more, receive more benefits, are almost impossible to fire, and are rarely penalized for abusive, rude and even illegal conduct that would get civilian workers fired, fined and, in some cases, sent to jail.

It can be argued that it is unfair to paint all government workers with a charge that they are impertinent slackers when, in fact, many government employees work very hard and take many risks to help their fellow Americans. If civilian government employees were put on a more level playing field, where the real slackers and abusers were either fired or forced to shape up, the respect for all government employees would grow.

So what can be done to achieve this?