"The people of this continent alone have the right to decide their own destiny." Untruer words may not have been spoken. In 1845, for President James Knox Polk, they presaged the Mexican War. In 2008, for true Americans who inherited the scrappy personas of independence, it should be a battle cry again. Polk felt that taking the Southwest would be OK if the residents gave their consent. Perhaps he lied us into the war or started the war with a questionable shooting as a cause celebre because he felt that if we didn’t take hold of our Manifest Destiny, some other country would. But Polk would have approved of HEAP. 150 years after the victory at Chapultepec, Mexico, we have the national Home Energy Assistance Program. It has migrated from help for home heating bills to home cooling bills. This season, it will have a shortfall of funds and will be able to hand out only $100 not $175 vouchers. Where do these vouchers originate? They come from the citizens who pay taxes (usually not the recipients). They would never be approved if the contributors were provided the truth about government takeover of their freedoms and their paychecks. They would never approve of their country, re-distributing wealth built up in this nation by hard-working, scrapers. Settlers, by the way, rushed to make their fortunes in California once gold was discovered in the new ‘land’ a year after the end of the Mexican War. Liberalism, progressivism, socialism have replaced self-reliance. They were unknown war games in Polk’s time. Citizens would have rejected HELP from HEAP. Has Manifest Destiny for America come to this?