Conservative Party (Massachusetts)

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Edwin F. Buckley

God has blessed me in ways I would never have thought possible.  He has provided gifts that I never knew I wanted or needed.  I am very thankful for all these things, of course.

As I write this, I find myself being most thankful for family and friends who now reach from California through Arizona, to Texas, up to Kansas, across to Illinois, down to Louisiana, up to Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, down through North Carolina and then to Florida.

I wish for all of you the celebration of your thankfulness for God’s blessings in your own circle of family and friends.

We have known each other only a short time, but the things we share, our Conservative political beliefs and love for our Nation, make all of us the kinds of friends we cherish for a lifetime.

In 2003, one of the blessings I enjoyed most was spending some time in our mother country, England.  I lived in a village just outside Canterbury called Petham.  As Thanksgiving rolled around and I began talking about my turkey and dressing, those poor people had no idea what I meant.  I decided to show them.

I prepared a typical Southern American Thanksgiving Feast and invited seven of my closest British friends.  We had the traditional turkey, dressing, cranberry sauce, vegetables, pecan and pumpkin pie and a big glass of iced tea.

We sat around the table with them asking questions about why we celebrate the holiday with this or that and for many of their questions I had no answer except, “we’ve always done it that way in my family.”

The one answer they all seem to remember most is why we have the feast in the first place.  I smiled and told them that the Pilgrims who had come from England seeking religious and personal freedoms had wanted to celebrate the bounty of goodness from God to honor the wonderful land He had provided.  “So we are thankful that we are not British living under a crown and a state sponsored church,” I told them.

We all still talk about that evening that we shared our thanks with and for each other.  They were very impressed with our tradition.  Everyone shared the things they were most thankful for. One terrific person said that he was glad America had split from England so that I could eventually show them what good Southern cooking is all about.

What I have come to call my British Thanksgiving brought a whole new meaning of this holiday into my life with the warmth of the true meaning of the holiday now forever in my memory.

As you celebrate your own family traditions on Thanksgiving Day, I wish you the same warmth of companionship with friends as you acknowledge the blessings of God in your own lives.

God bless you………. And God bless America!

Marie A Cole

An article by a new member to our site, Robert Light:

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While people may have lots of views on the advisability of establishing some kind of Government-supplied, taxpayer funded universal health insurance – the debate itself leaves a lot to be desired. Most of the mis-information and confusion comes from the lack of understanding of what “insurance” is.

In short, health insurance is a “pooled asset” that is used to pay for things in one very narrow case only – when you are sick. To understand this sentence, let’s take an example.

If you had several billion dollars, would you need medical insurance? Probably not…. you could pay for any care you needed “out of pocket”… your finances wouldn’t show even a blip under almost any circumstance – no matter how much care you needed. This condition is sometimes referred to as “self insured”.

The (sad) fact is that most of us don’t have billions of dollars – so we “pool” our assets as well as our risk into a bigger group so that statistically, in the off chance that we need to spend lots of money to restore our health we can appear to be worth billions in only this one aspect of our life. The “pool” is a pool of assets – (our money) and a pool of our risk (the chance that some of us will get sick) so that we can be eligible to get service “in the off chance event” of our illness.

This is the way all “insurances” work – people pool their money so that they are eligible to “look rich” in in a single type of circumstance. For example, “homeowner’s insurance” allows us to “look rich” in the single event of where our home is destroyed – we can rebuild it. How many of us could rebuild our home in the off chance that it burned down – with insurance we can.

There are many areas where government asks us to “pool our assets” by taxing us. The most obvious area is in defense – where we “pool our assets” to fund an army to defend our country…the primary and most ancient obligation of government.

Not many would argue that pooling our assets for defense doesn’t make sense…so how is health insurance different from pooling our assets for defense?

The answer: the fact that you are defended from foreign attack does not diminish me in any way. Even if you don’t pay into the “defense pool”…I don’t have to pay “extra” for you to be defended. The fact that you are defended is essentially a free by-product

Pooled health insurance only makes sense if everyone is contributing the same for the same level of insurance. Otherwise I am diminished by the fact that you are in my pool and you didn’t pay anything and are getting the same benefit that I’m getting.

Being able to get health care is quite valuable – and it costs lots of money. There may be ways of making the care cheaper…but giving it away to those who can’t afford it dimishes me (at a minimum, by taking more of my taxes and worse by potentially limiting my access to care) – and this is a cost that I get absolutely no benefit from.

If you claim that it is my “responsibility” as a fellow human being to care for the less fortunate – this argument I can understand and in fact is a the only valid argument. But then it is quite a major move to force me to accept a responsibility that I didn’t have before, especially when taking this responsibility puts my family at risk either by excessive tax burdens or by reduced access to health care. This is probably where all the “backlash” to the idea of universal coverage comes from – it threatens me, it threatens my family.

But in the end, if each of us as individuals accept it upon ourselves to help our fellow human being – it is definately a courageous and laudable act…but we should call it by what it is and not confuse matters. This is not “insurance” … it goes by another name: “charity”.

What would Jesus say? You have to love the irony of the question. After all, the same people who are constantly telling us to keep religion out of, well, just about everything, are now asking what Jesus would say when it comes to the health care debate. Inasmuch as our President told the Arab world, not all that long ago, that we are not a Christian country, one might ask, why would you, the political Left, care what he has to say? (more…)

Even the best of marriages have rocky times.  Some say, there is always more love from one partner than from the other.  Unfortunately, the relationship between the Republican Party and Conservatives has been on a downhill slide for far too long for it to be saved.  The Republican Party, it seems, spends far too much time flirting with ideas it claims to disdain.  No need for an attorney here, throw the bum out! (more…)

“You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom.  What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.  When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation.  You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it.”
~ Dr. Adrian Rogers, 1931-2005 ~