[Hoot Gibson]

There are also reasons that I am not a true Republican. Too many Republicans govern too much like liberal Democrats.

Capitalism is the only economic system that has ever lifted billions of people out of poverty. Even China and Russia reached that conclusion after decades of central planning by their governments produced nothing but poverty and a corrupt ruling class.

As TRT pointed out, unfunded liabilities in this country exceed a decade's worth of this nation's total GDP. There are not unlimited funds available to give every special interest group the wages and benefits to which they believe they are entitled. American citizens are entitled to the freedoms guaranteed them by the U.S. Constitution, nothing more and nothing less.

While public school systems in Chicago and Washington, DC, show that any state's schools can get worse, Kentucky's public schools, taken as a whole, are not exactly setting the pace for high standards, and the same is true nationwide.

I work with many foreign nationals and it troubles me that American college graduates leave so many highly paid technical jobs on the table. The truth is, not only are American schools not preparing students to compete in a global economy, they are not preparing students to compete for the best jobs in their own country.

As for not caring who is responsible for the current mess, the old saying that those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it comes to mind. If politicians and the parties who spawned them are not held accountable for poor results, then how can anybody expect that the next administration will do anything but make matters worse?

(Although I don't consider myself a Republican, it is pretty clear that the biggest messes in this country have materialized under the leadership of liberal Democrats...Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, Baltimore, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Washington, DC, Memphis, Little Rock, San Francisco, the rest of California...the list is almost endless.)