Over on HotAir, this comment has been blocked by the automated software:

This is where I disagree. Yes, the entire union would have been destroyed with or without the growth of government had the Southern states successfully seceded. However, the North could have continued in existence even had the South seceded. Why government needed to grow in order for the Union States to survive is not clear to me.

MeatHeadinCA on January 24, 2010 at 2:12 AM

Ah, but the United States would have ceased to exist.

That's where we differ -- I, as Lincoln, count the United States as being all those states in the Union. Any attempt to leave the Union breaks the Union, and denies the citizens in the faction breaking away the protection of the laws of the Union.

Again, the Union was designed to be far stronger than a Confederation, and the Constitution shows it. Once in, you cannot leave.

The South presented a military threat to the Union. It had fired upon the Union, had occupied its military installations. War was inevitable. With war comes government growth. Each war we have fought has been fought by taxing the citizens; each war requires supplies, transport, and men, and none of those three are free.

My response to Michelle urges Palin: Don?t campaign for McCain!. This response must have contained a "bad word" and was stopped by HotAir's comment software:

And he was spectacularly wrong in teaming with the open-borders lobby to push a dangerous illegal alien amnesty

Nope. The amnesty is in no way "dangerous". And I'm proudly an "open borders" lobbyist -- like our First Republican, Abraham Lincoln.

Make them pay taxes. They want to work -- let them work and pay their fair share. That's the issue with illegals right now -- we've made them part of an underground economy.

Give them the path to citizenship. Make them wait enough time to prove that they can be productive and non-criminal citizens, and then allow them to swear allegiance to our country.

Again, the Republican words on the Statue of Liberty, which do not mention an expiration date:

"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

And these words from Abraham Lincoln:

I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor or degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that "all men are created equal." We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except negroes" When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics." When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty -- to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy [sic].

If you examine history, the people who have been opposed to immigration have historically been so on racial and ethnic grounds, whether it was the Know-Nothings Lincoln mentions, or the Democrats trying to stop Chinese immigration under Chester Arthur.

My wife's family was split by the Democratically enacted Alien Exclusion Acts -- her grandfather was able to enter the United States, but her grandmother was not. That sort of experience (trying to prevent the procreation of certain races and ethnicities by prohibiting the importation of their females) has left a mark on our country, and it is not a good one.

Those Republicans, who have forgotten our heritage as a party committed to the natural rights of the individual, will be foresquare against any path to citizenship for those who entered our country illegally. As for the rest of us who do remember this heritage -- well, we're on the other side on this one.

Today was a bellweather day -- a Republican, Scott Brown, just won the Massachusetts Senate seat formerly occupied by the late Democrat Edward Kennedy.

Here's Nancy Pelosi's take on that victory:

Going forward, Pelosi said Democrats will continue to pound "Main Street" issues, while Republicans will continue to represent the insurance companies, the wealthy and Wall Street.

American voters will be reminded "the Republicans in Congress ... weren't for Social Security, they weren't for Medicare," she said.

I'm not sure what Main Street issues the Democrats are pounding. They've gone in exactly the opposite direction they should go, with taxes on "Cadillac healthplans" and medical devices such as pacemakers. The direction they should have been going in is to make healthcare a deductible expense for all Americans. The wealthy Cadillac plans are what underwrote the development of procedures and equipment which is now standard fare in American healthcare -- the lowly cardiac pacemaker amongst them. Any system which is over-taxed labors under the strain of that tax, and our country's medical professions are certainly laboring now.

The Democrats attempted to "balance the budget" (so that the OMB would find their bill to be "revenue neutral") for their ambitious healthcare plan by decreasing the reimbursement rate for Medicare. With Medicare reimbursement rates slated to fall, many doctors were preparing to curtail their Medicare patient load, or to shed that load altogether.

As for Social Security, the Republicans tried to tell the Democrats that it was going under, and that repairs were needed. No matter that many pay for Social Security for their entire career and die before they ever collect. This denies to their children money they could have invested for retirement. The Republicans were against Social Security because it was doomed to failure from the moment of its inception, because it relied upon an ever increasing number of children to pay for the retirees on the dole, and such a population growth model was unsistainable in the long term. Now that most families have about two children per couple, we have both children required to pay social security at a substantial rate to cover their parents -- with no guarantee that the money will actually go to cover them if death comes early.

The Republicans tried to fix Social Security by gradually converting it from a pay-as-you-go plan (in which young people pay for old people) into a plan which would pay-in-arrears (in which young people pay for their own retirement). To convert the plan would have involved at least one generation taking on an added tax burden, and I wish it had been mine, but I suspect it will be my children's, for it is in the middle of their lives that Social Security is expected to go insolvent.

With respect to insurance companies, they were well represented by the Senatorial Democrats in this Congress -- for is there any other reason to put into law a mandate that all citizens must purchase healthcare from private companies?

In every market where the Government intrudes, the market becomes bloated -- distorted. Healthcare is one place. College is another. There is a very good correlation between the availability of student loans and the rapid rise in tuition costs. Colleges are very good at guaging what an education is "worth", and an education which was once a good value for the middle class is now out of their reach, as the Government funds lower income students with grants which no middle class family can match with their assets. The costs of education have risen so much that the average student graduates expecting to use a decade of their life to pay back what used to cost one year of earnings. Such is the distortion in the educational marketplace caused by the Democrats.

With regard to Wall Street, the failures there can be readily traced to the mechanations of the Democrats. I use the chant "Obama, Franks, Waters, LLC -- Destroyers of the nation's economy" to describe what Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae did to the housing market. When I bought my house at the age of 26, the sum of my mortgage was about three times my salary. A mortgage in my neighborhood for the average 26 year old is now about fifteen times their salary. To put it bluntly, even now, in this era of deflated house prices, I could not afford to buy my own home if I had to do it now. How did this market become so super-heated? The answer is simple -- easy money from the government. There's a term for how easy it was during the "bubble" to get a loan -- NINJA, standing for "No Income, No Job or Assets".

With so many of us patriotic Americans having our retirement funds invested in Wall Street, Wall Street's problems are our problems, and the problems on Wall Street are not big bonuses paid to executives -- it's the cost the Government has exacted on Wall Street for doing business.

Why is Citigroup in such trouble? One might ask a young lawyer named Barack Obama why he chose to join a team of ACORN activists extorting NINJA loans from Citi? Why did so many banks get into trouble with bad loans? You might ask Senator Barney Franks, or Rep. Maxine Waters, why they protected the damaging behavior of Freddie and Fannie, in which the Government committed to buy bad loans which the Government obligated the banks to make as a condition of keeping their operating licenses.

Ms. Pelosi needs to rethink what her "Main Street" needs, and she needs to rethink it fast if she wishes to remain in office. The young working people in this country have examined their tax bill, and they are not happy.

Here's Democratic Senator Jim Webb's take:

In many ways the campaign in Massachusetts became a referendum not only on health care reform but also on the openness and integrity of our government process. It is vital that we restore the respect of the American people in our system of government and in our leaders. To that end, I believe it would only be fair and prudent that we suspend further votes on health care legislation until Senator-elect Brown is seated.

Well put, Jim. Nancy may not get the message, but well put, anyway. [Sadly, the Senate has already passed its healthcare bill, so the ball is in the House. If the House passes the Senate bill as-is, Obama has indicated he will sign. ]