The First Amendment Center has since 1997 annually surveyed Americans' attitudes toward and knowledge of the First Amendment. Last September, on Constitution Day, the Center released its 2008 results, sadly demonstrating the worst level of awareness amongst those surveyed ever.

• 39 percent would extend to subscription cable and satellite television the government's current authority to regulate content on over-the-air broadcast television.
• 54 percent would continue IRS regulations that bar religious leaders from openly endorsing political candidates from the pulpit without endangering the tax-exempt status of their organizations.
• 66 percent say the government should be able to require television broadcasters to offer an equal allotment of time to conservative and liberal broadcasters; 62 percent would apply that same requirement to newspapers, which never have had content regulated by the government.
• 31 percent would not permit musicians to sing songs with lyrics that others might find offensive.
• 68 percent favor government restrictions on campaign contributions by private companies, and 55 percent favor such limits on amounts individuals can contribute to someone else's campaign.

The survey found that just 3 percent of those questioned could name "petition" as one of the five freedoms in the First Amendment. Only "speech" was named by a majority of respondents, 56 percent. Less than 20 percent named religion, press, or assembly.

The State of the First Amendment 2008 survey, including questions and responses, as well as survey methodology, is available online at FirstAmendmentCenter.org/sofa_reports/.

It is boiling down to this: How meaningful is the United States Constitution to Americans, and are the founding principles still relevant, let alone worth fighting for? It is that simple. The U.S. Constitution is the single most revolutionary document in the history of governance, bar none, and through its establishment created the most innovative and prosperous nation on Earth.

When are Americans going to stop suffering the politicians' talk in favor of indicting their walk? Obama's and Bush's administrations, in tandem with Congress, have given all new meaning to the term "passing the buck." Each of these political entities has managed to take not a scintilla of responsibility for any of it. And there is no end in sight to the cycle of spending and taxing.

Our elected officials continue to vote up legislation that allocates trillions in subsidies, in what amounts to pure pork disguised as bailouts for unworthy enterprises. What enrages most is the blame game that continues between the political parties' leadership, including the mainstream media according to its party affiliation, with the full participation of the congressmen themselves, who transparently feign outrage over what Wall Street is still getting away with. Meanwhile, these largely incompetent legislators consistently try to disassociate themselves with the outrageous lack of accountability and transparency.

The Quad-City Times' management, most especially the disgraced editors, get to evaluate whether their decision to smear local appraiser Mark Nelson was worth what it has cost them -- the last vestige of credibility they had in the community as reliable news providers. In what it tried to pass as a news story in its print edition on Tuesday, March 3, the Times disparaged Nelson with myriad unsubstantiated claims about an alleged cover letter he sent with an appraisal that discouraged Royal Banks of Missouri from approving a loan to Amy and Amrit Gill of Restoration St. Louis for the redevelopment of the Blackhawk Hotel as a boutique hotel.

It's time to lift the fog of denial and party pride to restore our patriotic footing and all that it requires of each of us. We have strayed so far from the core founding principles that distinguished our country and made it great. We must acknowledge our errors and correct them on several critical levels?politically, economically, and in no small measure, morally. Americans have to embrace that it is with this generation that the fix must begin in earnest or we will lose our freedom forever.

Political Errors

First we must accept that the current two-party system is no longer in our best interest as a nation. We can no longer indulge our political/socioeconomic troubles as the fault of either the Democrats or the Republicans. The fault belongs to both parties in equal measure. It is both democrats and republicans who have tandemly legislated Americans into the mess we are in.

In the past decade alone, Clinton's administration commingled the Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid funds with the general fund allowing him to declare a budget surplus. This act was an accounting trick, but one that allowed congress to spend our retirement and healthcare savings into oblivion. Clinton's congress sacrificed the futures of the elderly and disabled, then boasted it had not only balanced the budget, but also had a surplus. Now Wall Street has been doing the same thing to us ever since. In other words, Clinton's congress set the precedence for ponzie scheming?robbing Peter to pay Paul.

Shortly after, when the Bush administration and Republican controlled congress were elected, they did nothing to reverse this deceitful act, instead doubling the budget deficit in eight short years. It was his administration that began serious excesses with executive orders, defying the US Constitution he promised to protect. However, it was a feckless congress that turned a blind eye to it, giving Obama the same opportunity to continue this disgraceful betrayal of political trust.

And make no mistake: it took both democrats and republicans to thrust us into an expensive and, if one goes by the facts, unwarranted war, and to sanction the beginning of stimulus/bailout spending that did nothing to stimulate the economy. Instead, the Republicrates have rewarded obscene excesses on the part of executive management of both private and public entities that went largely unchallenged and when exposed, unpunished. Democrats and republicans are equally culpable for the lack of accountability, but why should that come as any surprise? Neither have voters held them remotely accountable. As Congressman Barney Frank recently stated on Meet the Press, after being asked how to stop corruption in Washington, "The voters have to get tougher. After all, we didn't just parachute in [to office]." Mr. Frank exemplified the Congress' contempt for American voters with those few arrogant words.

In the last two years of the Bush administration, when democrats controlled congress again, it enacted a string of unprecedented bailouts of billions of tax dollars that benefited an elite list of favored financial entities, most of who contributed tremendous sums to the political coffers of many, if not most, of the legislators in office then...and now.

Now we must suffer the same outrageous activity by Obama and his same democratically controlled congress by nearly matching the same dangerously expansive financial bailouts for favored entities, including a huge percentage allocated strictly to governmental departments?in just one month! Coupled with additional expenditures Obama is seeking beyond the recent $787 billion, his congress will do in six months what Bush and his congress took eight years to accomplish.

Economic Errors

The deadly part of all this spending is that all of it?100 percent?is borrowed either from the Federal Reserve Bank (Fed) or from foreign countries such as China and Saudi Arabia. Common sense tells us that more borrowing does not solve money problems of this magnitude. Curtailing spending is mandatory for fiscal soundness, yet neither democrats nor republicans even pretend to support such policy. It is so irresponsible, so inane that it begs the question: What is really going on here?

Americans are being told that the solution is to nationalize/socialize banking and healthcare in order to stabilize the economy. Recall that first we were given ownership stakes in AIG (80% ownership for $85 billion), then we bailed out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for $200 billion ($100 billion each?an entity already owned by taxpayers). Following these three subsidies, which merited none of it to begin with, Congress passed the Bush-backed $825 billion bailout on October 3, 2008 (The Economic Stabilization Act of 2008?$700 billion dedicated to banks and financial institutions and the remaining $125 billion were last minute bribes in the form of earmarks for democratic support). None of that unprecedented spending improved a thing. In fact things only got worse. Even with 400 of the nation's top economists' collective recommendation against the October bailout, congress, ignoring their warnings, fast-tracked the bailout to no avail. So why didn't the new leadership learn from this monumental mistake?

Instead, this Congress again fast-tracked the Obama-backed $787 billion with 9,000 earmarks for over $5Billiion in pork. Reports are difficult to confirm, but this may have been reduced down to 4000 earmarks.  This additional bailout (referred to as a "stimulus" bill in the same way that Bush's bailout was referred to as a "stabilization" bill) came on the heels of another $20 billion bailout for the auto industry weeks earlier. Some are forecasting the auto bailout to exceed $100B eventually.  To add to what has now become incoherent spending, another $50 billion is about to be given to the banks again in an effort to encourage home mortgage relief. This reckless legislation has no rational basis, therefore stands to reason that all this urgency reflects the covert continuation of what Clinton and Bush started?a transfer of wealth and power so enormous and irreversible to advance a globalists' new world order agenda. Even the mainstream media is finally admitting that this is the case. Sadly, it seems to have no problem with the end of a sovereign America with the new world order's plans for the North American Union, much like the European Common Market, delivering such horrifying news with business-as-usual apathy.

This legislation passed without a single congressman having even the read the bill before he/she voted on it. That is because it wasn't made available to them until 11pm the night before the vote. So much for Obama's promise of transparency, or a mandatory five-day review period for the public before voting on any bill before Obama's congress.

Ask yourself, where is the money going to come from to pay this mind-bending debt back? Obviously from taxpayers, but there are only so many of them?182 million at last report?and that will not cover it, folks. So the government must tax future generations' earnings for the next millennium to just make the interest payments on the national debt it is creating today.

Add to that the unconscionable burden of the ever-burgeoning size of government thanks to both Bush and now Obama. Bush created the largest governmental agency in the history of the Union with the Homeland Security Department, and Obama's stimulus package has just added exponentially to a majority of government departments. (The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act or 2009 can be found at www.Thomas.loc.gov/ under bill H.R.1.)

Since federal withholding income taxes are strictly reserved for paying the interest on national debt, taxation will have to come from other places.  Therefore, the government intends to collect mainly from unprecedented increases in usage, manufacturing, and other such indirect taxes. For example, in addition to increased gasoline taxes, cars are being manufactured whose GPS systems will act as a reporting device for mileage, allowing for drivers to be taxed on the actual miles they travel. If drivers don't pay, their engines can be shut off.

The concept of nationalizing the banking and healthcare systems comes from European and Asian economies, which are taxed in one way or another, taking nearly 80 percent of each citizen's income. 80 percent! Do you honestly believe that under such a system that corruption will be less, or that the wealth gap will get any smaller, or that individual standards of living will be better?  To the contrary, there is abundant evidence demonstrating the stagnation of such economies, more often than not.

Capitalism gets much of its criticism from its inability to account for greed. Well here's a flash: there isn't an economic model in the history of man that accounts for greed. It can be argued that the more socialized an economy is, whether through communism or fascism and everything in between, the more corruption thrives.

Capitalism is the only economic model that has a prayer of evening the economic playing field for an entire society, clearly evidenced by the foundation and growth of the American economy. There isn't a more inspiring economic history anywhere, but could not have occurred without free market competition embraced and protected by a republic of laws. And there is the heart of all of it?the United States Constitution, with its Declaration of Independence the Bill of Rights, and Proclamation of Emancipation.

Not only is this document profound in its intellectual understanding and reverence for individual life and freedom, it is deeply spiritual in its express acknowledgement of a Creator and man's rights as more than privilege bestowed, but as divinely endowed. The US Constitution openly declares the immutable connection between God and man, and constructs its principles from this core belief. It is an inspired document that built a country of deep patriotism and rare moral character.  How is it conceivable that we have a congress that no longer considers the US Constitution sacrosanct?

Had we practiced capitalism, and other enacted legislation by measuring each via the US Constitution, rather than by the whims of the countless self-serving agendas that plague our nation, perhaps we could have avoided all this loss.  Corruption of capitalism, or of the Constitution itself, happens as a result of government interference through legislative intervention and influence by special interests because it undermines fair competition, the non-negotiable ingredient of capitalism.

Moral Errors

Think. Every generation, until this one, had a chance for a better life than the one before it. Until now, we enjoyed an upward trajectory relative to increased standard of living per capita.

Suddenly we've devolved our economy so much that we are actually considering abdicating our US Constitution in favor of some hybrid economy referred to as the New World Order, controlled by an international government comprised of primarily of central bankers and their military and corporate loyalists, who have been planning this scenario since at least 1913, when President Wilson and that congress handed its constitutional authority to print and control the US money supply over to the Federal Reserve Bank. That act, done in virtual secrecy, was 100 percent unconstitutional, but has never been reversed, and rarely even challenged. I doubt most of our current congress even understands the magnitude of this historical treachery.

What most Americans do not know is that the Federal Reserve Bank is not a government institution. It is essentially a private bank, whose ownership is made up of private shareholders, many of whom own positions in the central banks of other countries. It is time for Americans to wake up and learn the truth about some of the fundamental realities of the current American Economy. A lot falls into place once you do.

For example, you will learn that the primary purpose of the Revolutionary War with England was to free the American Colonies from the tyranny of the central banks of Europe, which imposed a grinding control over the lives of the citizens of that time.

You would also learn that when congress handed over its constitutional mandate to print and control the money to the Fed, it also gave away the ability to earn the interest on federal loans made. Think about it. If the Congress still held that authority, all governmental loans would actually initiate from the US government, thus we would earn the interest instead of a privately held bank acting as a federal facility?the Fed. Interest on many of the billions of dollars that constitute our national debt would actually be coming back into our own national coffers as revenue! Instead, we owe it all to the Fed, who prints the money as it sees fit, constricting or expanding credit to all of us in whatever way it chooses?without the backing of gold or silver or anything concrete value. That is why our currency is referred to as "fiat," because it is baseless.

As the founding fathers explained in numerous documents, whoever controls the money, controls the people. What I cannot fathom is why our own congress gave this authority away except by some insidious agenda so foul and corrupt as to be beyond the comprehension of most all the other lawmakers from then, even through today.  They had to know it was unconstitutional, so why it went unchallenged is a complete mystery to me, especially when it was done in secrecy with the thinnest quorum possible.

It is said that signing the 1913 Federal Reserve Act was the single worst, emotionally crippling, regret of President Wilson's life.