As we celebrate our nation's birthday this week, it is important to remember and teach our children the Founding Fathers were declaring our independence, not creating a culture of dependence.This is an especially important lesson, given the Supreme Court's ruling last week on Obamacare.

The Readers Digest version of the Supreme Court's decisions last week is this - The Government can require proof of insurance, but not proof of citizenship.

Here is the big picture situation in America today. Success used to be measured by how many people we could get off the government dole, but now, under President Obama, we measure success by how many people we can get on government programs.

We have it 100 percent backwards in America today. We should celebrate people getting off food stamps, off Medicaid, and off government health care.

We are at an inflection point in our nation's history. We have to decide whether we want to revive our economy by growing the private sector or expanding the public sector, to continue our culture of self-reliance versus a culture of dependency, to provide our children with opportunity or a sense of entitlement, and to pursue the American model or give in to the European model.

I have vowed not to implement Obamacare in Louisiana, especially creating the exchange and expanding Medicaid, because this November we're going to elect a new President and a new Congress who will repeal and replace the terrible law.

One more calamity to freak out about now, it seems, is an impending “pandemic” of the Asian Bird Flu virus known as H5N1.  Every day we read about five billion more chickens or turkeys or geese in China or Romania or some other country being infected and killed.

A batch of folks in Vietnam have died of it, and the scare stories mount about how any day now, the virus will mutate, enabling not just bird-to-human infection but human-to-human.  Then, the stories claim, the pandemic is on.

There are some protective measures you might consider to shield yourself from a H5N1 pandemic should it occur.  I don’t want to be dispensing medical advice, so I’ll just say that this is what I am doing myself.

It was Jeane Kirkpatrick at the 1984 Republican Convention in Dallas who identified the Liberal Democrat compulsion to “blame America first.” In any confrontation between America and any other country or disaffected group, liberals could be trusted to say it was their own country’s fault.

This compulsion seems to be a defining characteristic of liberals to this day, from Baghdad Jim McDermott (D-WA) to Dick Turban Durbin (D-IL) to Howard Dean and Teddy Kennedy. What’s not widely recognized is how this compulsion has infected the brains of certain conservatives.

A case in point is how Pat Buchanan and his American Conservative magazine are swooning, along with the New York Times and the Liberal Media, over a new book - Dying to Win -- by a goofy University of Chicago professor named Robert Pape.

 
New Gallup polling shows that bringing abortion back into the national debate may not be a bad political call for Republicans.

Whereas public opinion has moved in recent years against the conservative position opposing same-sex marriage, the opposite is true on abortion. On abortion, Americans have become decidedly more pro-life, moving in the direction of conservatives.

A just released Gallup poll shows that 50 percent now identify as "pro-life" compared to 41 percent as "pro-choice." This is a complete reversal from 16 years ago in the mid-90s when 56 percent were "pro-choice" and 38 percent "pro-life."

In fact, the Gallup headline for the poll results is:  "Pro-Choice Americans At Record Low."

The Kabuki Dance now underway between Soon-To-Be Justice Alito and Senate Democrats makes me think of Shakespeare’s Henry V.

The Democrats (and pro-abortion Republicans like Arlen Specter) will be desperately trying to get Alito to forswear any overthrow of sacred SCOTUS “precedents” such as Roe v. Wade, while Alito will genuflect before the precedent shrine and mellifluously commit to nothing.

Both sides will assiduously avoid any discussion of how these precedents were established in the first place – by overthrowing previous ones – what justified their establishment, and what would justify replacing them with new ones today.

Instead, there will be monotonous droning on about the legal concept of stare decisis (Latin for “to stand by that which is decided”), and how it makes Roe v. Wade set in unquestionable stone.