This outrage can be traced directly to February 27, 1951.

That’s the day the 22nd Amendment was ratified, limiting Presidential terms — and thus throwing off kilter the “balance of powers” dictated by the Founding Fathers in our Constitution. Why? Because the 22nd Amendment did nothing to limit term limits for members of the Senate, House of Representatives or Supreme Court.

Our nation’s founders never foresaw the “career politicians” who roam the halls of Congress today. Rather, they envisioned political office as a dedicated period of public service in the course of one’s life, not an end-all primary vocation. A bit Utopian, perhaps, but a desireable ideal for our American democracy.

And (I can’t believe I’m saying this) that’s why I’m cheering for South Carolina Republican Sen. Jim DeMint. Quietly last November, he introduced a “Term Limits for All” Constitutional Amendment that would limit every House member to three terms (6 years max), and every Senator to two terms (12 years max).

Says DeMint:

Americans know real change in Washington will never happen until we end the era of permanent politicians. As long as members have the chance to spend their lives in Washington, their interests will always skew toward spending taxpayer dollars to buyoff special interests, covering over corruption in the bureaucracy, fundraising, relationship building among lobbyists, and trading favors for pork – in short, amassing their own power.

Is it possible to ratify such an Amendment? I doubt it. But the 22nd Amendment is proof that term limits can be achieved, though its ratification in 1951 was primarily a measure to prevent the Presidency from becoming a monarchy after FDR was elected to four consecutive terms.

Perhaps if a splinter group of Tea Partiers (under a different name, please) embraced term limits as their sole mission, it could truly be called a movement.

And more moderates like me might just join in support.

Health care reform in its current state in Congress is as dead as my once white-hot passion for a Barack Obama presidency. (More on that another time.) Depending on one’s political perspective, the bills that made it out of the House and Senate either cost too much, don’t go far enough, or are just plain socialist.

In response, I’d like to propose a three-pillar bill that I defy anyone to find fault with:

1. Make it illegal for insurance companies to deny coverage because of pre-existing conditions.
2. Make it illegal for insurance companies to drop coverage on any patient just because he or she gets sick.
3. Allow individuals to purchase health insurance across state lines.

There. What’s so difficult about that? Such a bill may not provide universal coverage, but it would be a major advance from where things stand today. Insured patients no longer would have to worry about losing their home because of an illness. That long-ago visit to the doctor for a headache won’t lead to denial of coverage when you have a brain tumor removed. And most importantly, we’d open up health insurance to the free, capitalist system, which would certainly drive down costs.

Do you see this three-pillar bill adding to the federal deficit? I don’t either.

Methinks the health care debate is pushing me toward liberterianism.

Now, excuse me while I head back to the living room to watch the Gators continue their thrashing of Georgia’s “basketball team.”

Let me say something right up front. I’m a Gator, and as such I am very proud of Timmy’s accomplishments as a Gator.

But I must side with my first editor as a sportswriter, Sam Cook, now a columnist for the Fort Myers News-Press, who recently wrote:

Religion — except for the ‘Hail Mary’ pass — has no place in sports. In Tebow’s case, he should play football and forget about us sinners for 3 1/2 hours every Saturday.

Amen, Sam.

The fact that you win or lose does not mean Jesus Christ, or any other mythical diety, is or is not on your side. You are not being rewarded, punished or challenged to do better.

You simply won. Or you lost.

Or, as Crash Davis said so eloquently put it, perhaps it just rained.

So leave your biblical passages in the locker room.

That goes for you too, Timmy.

P.S. It sure is interesting that the controversy is being stirred as Tebow plays the worst football of his career, isn’t it?

Twenty years ago, as a 34-year-old grad student at Pat Robertson’s farm for churning out fundie nutbags, Regent University, McDonnell wrote a master’s thesis charmingly titled “The Republican Party’s Vision for the Family: The Compelling Issue of the Decade” (those grad students, they sure love them some colons in their paper titles!). In it he trumpeted all the tired hash those hacks always go on about: contraceptives shouldn’t be legal for unmarried people, women should be in the homes raising kids (seriously, no shit!), gays should have no legal rights, blah, blah, blah.

Unfortunately for him, Virginia’s pretty purply these days, and he’s been trying to appear kind of moderate, but this ain’t gonna help. To be fair to him, it sounds like he’s come a few steps out of the 4th century, considering one of his daughters fought in Iraq and both have master’s degrees, but the article I read didn’t say nothing about whether they have JOBS or anything.

Anyway, he’s already put the smooth spin on this, trying to turn it around on his democratic challenger, some guy named Creigh Deeds, but we’ll see how it goes for him. The other guy who posts here probably ought to say something about this, since he lives in that state and all.

Imagine this scenario: a 17-year-old Christian girl starts a Facebook friendship with a Muslim family in another state. After the girl has a fight with her mother, she runs away to that Muslim family (let’s say about 900 miles away) where she takes up residence and says that her father will kill her if she goes back home. The Muslim family insists that the Bible calls for killing a child who disobeys (hey, see Deuteronomy 21:18), so they are duty-bound to not return the child to the parents. In the meantime, the child’s parents insist they love their child and have never threatened her. But also in the meantime, the governor of the state in which the Muslim family lives says he’s committed to protecting this child and will put the full weight of the state’s power behind that commitment.

Implausible? Sure it is. That Muslim family’s home would be surrounded by gun-toting Christian yahoos before you could burn a Koran. Oh, and there’d be some Koran burning, too. Glenn Beck would shed tears and express his terror for the girl’s soul, and Bill O’Reilly would ball his fists and talk about how he’d personally kick the asses of the every Muslim in this great country before he’d let this girl be brainwashed. And presumably the government would come down on them like a whirlwind.

But, on the other hand, make that a Muslim girl running away to a Christian family, and you’re talking Florida reality. Riqfa Bary, 17, ran away from her family after a fight with her mom from Columbus to Orlando to live with the crazy reverend Blake Lorenz, head of the Global Revolution Church (which believes that the end times are upon us,  that the red cow coming into Israel portends the beginning of Armageddon, and other retarded bullshit). Lorenz and his nutbag Jesus-fuckers insist that the girl will be honor-killed if she goes back, despite the fact that the Bary family is from Sri Lanka (hardly a home of hard-core muslims, historically) and seems pretty secular. The girl is an honor student and cheerleader, and as local Orlando columnist Mike Thomas opined, it’s unlikely that a father who would allow his daughter to wear a cheerleader outfit in public regularly would be the type to kill her.

Anyway, the girl was remanded to a foster family by a judge, and we should find out on Sept. 3 what will be done. Charlie Crist will try desperately to hide his homosexuality and general moderateness by continuing to offer to defend the girl if the judge insists she’s to be sent back, and the yahoo blogosphere will explode in crazy indignation if that happens. If nothing else, it will be fun to watch. But it’s sad to know that there are parents back in Columbus who probably miss their daughter terribly and are unlikely to get anything like a fair shake in this whole mess.

PS–I’m back, bitches!

PPS–Fuck you, Christian wingnuts!