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Columbus took a chance and broke new ground. But Columbus was not an adventurer or just a sailor willing to gamble. Columbus was the premier cartographer of his time. Ship Captains were willing to trade their own private self-discovered valuable navigation information with Columbus in exchange for Columbus's navigation charts which were the most current and best of their time. I don't know whether Columbus believed the world to be a globe or not, but it is fairly simple and common to pick up a large sheet by the edges and hold them together for moving to another location. How difficult is it to grasp the concept that two locations at the opposite edges of a chart can actually be adjoining when you hold the two edges of the chart together?

Now it is time for FreeRepublic and Jim Robinson to "take a chance" and examine the potential of joining the edges to chart a new course for the United States. The United States and freedom are in serious decline. Many Americans might have difficulty in seeing that the end of the United States is actually in sight. Some will not believe that we have only three elections (2004, 2008 and 2012) in which to solve America's two major problems. Nations do not generally survive the complete collapse of their currencies or their credit. We in the United States face both and it is unlikely that we will remain solvent and credit worthy until 2020. If we don't fix our financial problems before 2016, I don't believe there will be a Presidential election in 2016 because the United States will become the "untied states" through a rapid series of secessions by individual and clusters of states.

There is an alternative solution. Instead of changing nations, we change the attitudes of politicians and political parties, particularly the platform and leadership of the Republican Party.

Americans For A Free Republic have some ideas that should appeal to the members of this forum. Here are few excerpts from their mission statement linked above:

Gold Money and Equal Tax Rates!
Creating a Viable Challenge to the Demopublicans

The two levers of power that have allowed Gargantua to grow into such a hideous beast were given to it in 1913 with the enactment of the Federal Reserve and the progressive income tax. These two institutions destroyed the idea of "limited government" that the Founders had given us in 1787.

These two institutions were the death knell of a free and prosperous republic. With the ability to print money and confiscate our incomes, the Federal Government was thus able to grow exponentially over the past century -- well beyond the strictly constrained power that the Founding Fathers intended it to be.

Its power has been greatly exacerbated along the way by the merging of our two parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, into carbon copies of each other. These two supposedly separate institutions have become nothing but two divisions of the same party -- the Demopublican Party. They never oppose each other on fundamental goals, only on specific details on how to implement the same goal. And their common goal is to expand the power of the Federal Government via more and more taxation, spending, pork and privileges.