Smelling The Coffee: 2010

This is, of course, complete and utter nonsense, albeit an popular bit of nonsense among conservatives. It has nothing to do with facts. Let's take alcohol consumption, for example:

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Drink was everywhere in early America. Liquor at that time, recalled the Massachusetts carpenter Elbridge Boyden, was used as commonly as the food we ate. Americans drank in enormous quantities. Their yearly consumption at the time of the Revolution has been estimated at the equivalent of three-and-a-half gallons of pure, two-hundred proof alcohol for each person. After 1790 American men began to drink even more. By the late 1820s imbibing had risen to an all-time high of almost four gallons per capita.

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There is no real quality of life measure that I can think of - life expectancy, crime rates, literacy, child mortality, poverty - that justifies the claim that "things were so much better when we were a more Christian nation." As a matter of fact, research shows that there is a significant corrolation between how religious a society is and how low the quality of life is for those who life there.

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Dr Rees also confirmed that, more religious nations have more indicators of social disharmony, with lower life expectancy, higher infant mortality, higher murder rates, more corruption, and a higher number of abortions. They also scored worse on the Global Peace index, that is, they are less peaceful both internally and in their external relations. What’s more, the research shows that nations with high levels of belief in God, Hell and the Devil ('passionate dualism') have higher murder rates.

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So please don't try to assert that lack of school prayer had led this or any other country to ruin. And by the way, it wasn't prayer in school that was disallowed anyway. Kids are still perfectly free to pray in school whenever they want, as long it's not disruptive. It's only mandatory, school-sponsored prayer in public schools that got tossed out.Try again.

Do you have any idea what legislation actually entails? Consider this.

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The average statute passed by the 109th Congressthe latest session for which figures are availableclocked in at around 15 pages, according to the Senate Library. And the recent law authorizing President Obama to give gold medals to the Apollo 11 astronauts on the 40th anniversary of the moon landing filled just two pages. But major spending bills frequently run more than 1,000. This year's stimulus bill was 1,100 pages. The climate bill that the House passed in June was 1,200 pages. Bill Clinton's 1993 health care plan was famously 1,342 pages long. Budget bills can run even longer: In 2007, President Bush's ran to 1,482 pages.

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Over the last several decades, the number of bills passed by Congress has declined: In 1948, Congress passed 906 bills. In 2006, it passed only 482. At the same time, the total number of pages of legislation has gone up from slightly more than 2,000 pages in 1948 to more than 7,000 pages in 2006. (The average bill length increased over the same period from 2.5 pages to 15.2 pages.)

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Now you can blithely argue that not all of that legislation was necessary, and I won't be inclined to disagree, but right now that's what it takes to govern the US. To think even for a moment that the public is going to have any idea at all what is in those 7000 pages each year is crazy. Members of congress don't even read the bills they pass themselves - they have aides for that. Moreover, I think that in fact it matters very much who writes it. Self-appointed adminstrators? Or - just maybe - elected representatives? In that case, how is your proposal substantially different from what we have now?

The rest of your post deserves a more thorough response, but I'd thought that I'd add my 0.02 regarding term limits.I immediately think of a joke that Jay Leno told a while back that about the whole notion that we always need to get "outsiders" and "mavericks" into government, people who haven't been "corrupted by the system" yet. (I paraphrase from my imperfect memory.)"Why is it that we value inexperience so much in government? We don't in other jobs. Do you think that you'd go to a doctor who was saying: 'You know, I've never done surgery before, but I've got some really good ideas!'"Fact is, we already term limits for every single elected official. They're called elections. If someone's in office, it's because people voted for her or him. No matter how entrenched someone becomes, they still have to get support every two or four or six years.