I was about 4 or 5 years old when I remember my mother locking the front door. She said something to my dad about people "out and about" on the road we lived on in the country.

Our community was safe but occasionally we heard about somebody wandering around who sounded creepy. She and dad determined it was time to lock the doors of our house.

Today, many Americans lock their doors even in the daytime. No one wants to be surprised by someone suddenly appearing in the house. If someone comes by our residence, they can call ahead and make an appointment or politely knock as respecting, humane people do.

People who desire to enter America must come respectfully and legally. We don't owe people from other countries entrance into America. People do not have a God-granted right to enter our country to be housed, educated and fed. I realize that the work of churches and non-profits is helping and healing the hurts of humanity, but America is not a church. We used to be a Christian nation but about half of America no longer wants that label.

People from any country must come with passports, visas and fill out all the required documentation when entering our country. Be prepared to answer questions. It's a different world and we need to know as much about them as possible.

Almost every day or week brings more and more people to our country who want to immediately have everything that Americans have. That's not possible. People from Syria and other war-torn, ravaged lands cannot come here and expect to immediately have everything that Americans have worked 30 years or more to achieve. America is not responsible for granting to the rest of the world the American dream status as soon as they parade into our nation. Our forefathers came legally and worked hard to achieve the American dream. It took time.

Most of us are happy to welcome people from the world if they knock on our doors, identify who they are and fill out the required documentation. We don't want people who hate, resent and want to hurt us. We have to be honest and know that a lot of the world hated America long before President Donald Trump. Securing our borders, asking questions of those who want to enter in order to be safer is the right thing to do.

Thousands have been flooding our country.  It's only smart to lock the doors. It's tough on some people. It will be much tougher if we make a mistake that leads to someone entering our country and inflicting carnage on our people. Obviously, we have people already living here who are capable of carrying out something horrendous. Someone can be born and raised here and still hurt people. However, taking some precautions to try to head off any potential problems is prudent.

May God give our president wisdom and may we as Americans please try to calm down and work together during these difficult times.

Furthermore, never enter my house without me opening the door and inviting you.

Glenn Mollette is an American syndicated columnist and author.

This article originally appeared on Crestview News Bulletin: Lock America's doors — and please knock politely

In search of any plausible, positive legacy item — even if they have to manufacture it — Democrats have advanced the false narrative that President Obama “saved the economy.”

It would be a neat thing if it were true.

Let me parse out the facts of this spin, echoed by the media and academia, as it relates to Obama's self-proclaimed "top" legacy item.

We are supposed to believe that the community organizer, with zero business experience, led us out of a recession and kept us from a “great depression” with his financial savvy.

Two very inconvenient truths refute this.

First, the economy officially came out of recession in June 2009, about the time members of the Obama administration had just completed their confirmations and about had all their boxes unpacked in the West Wing.

Second, they did nothing that the Bush administration had not already set in motion to right the economy. This included, if you believe they all worked (and I do not), TARP, bank and GM bailouts, quantitative easing, federal backstopping of some investment products, and finally some $750-odd billion in “stimulus” money.

In short, our government threw a lot of our money at a financial crisis it helped to create with the Community Reinvestment Act, which decreed that anyone who could fog a mirror or fill out fake bank loan paperwork could get a subprime home loan. Like all economic excesses, the markets corrected it and punished financially the bad actors who participated.

To prolong the middle-class misery, the Obama administration added mountains of job-killing regulations. And if the Community Reinvestment Act had not done enough damage, Obama let lefty Elizabeth Warren start the expensive Consumer Protection Agency. It proclaimed it would force lenders to make more "fair" loans to folks with bad credit and would not allow them to charge interest high enough to offset the risk. Sound familiar? I called the agency the "Department of the Cause of the Next Recession."

Using his infamous motto, “Never Let a Good Crisis go to Waste,” Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and his boss set about playing the blame game and using money the federal government was throwing around with those not-so-shovel-ready jobs to shore up their political base. I don't know about you, but I know of no federal project in the area I live in that came from that political boondoggle.

Once passed, Obama had the checkbook of stimulus money, often called the "Porkulus Bill." In the important swing state of Wisconsin, in fact, 80 percent of “stimulus” money from the Obama administration went to public sector unions, the ones whose members had job security and who showed up at his mid-day political rallies in any T-shirt they were told to wear.

Waste was everywhere. The DHS sent $30 million to Medicaid recipients who were dead. These dead people were important to Democrats, as they represented a large voting bloc in the 2016 presidential race.

The key thing to remember is that the USA has a recession every five or six years, and we always recover. In our history, we have survived about 50 recessions, a couple of depressions, and numerous boy bands. Coming out of that recession would have happened no matter who was president. Taking credit for it is like taking credit for sunshine after a two-day rain.

In fact, depending on how you interpret pre-Depression economic numbers, the recession Obama came in on in its last few months was not even in the top 20 in our nation’s history. Peak-to-bottom GDP during this so-called “Great Recession” was only 5.1 percent. We tend to over-dramatize events that happen to us, but the USA has endured about 20 business slowdowns of over 15 percent from the Panic of 1785 until now. Americans were just less dramatic back then. Nowadays we panic when our free Internet is slow.

Obama did nothing but dampen the recovery by raising taxes and adding unnecessary regulations. He used the opportunity to make more people dependent on government welfare. His real “economic legacy” was doubling the U.S. debt from about $10 trillion to $20 trillion — with nothing to show for it.

The other big legacy item Obama claims is “killing Osama bin Laden.” He had, indeed, been president for two years when Navy SEALs found and killed Osama bin Laden.

After years of tracking him down, our government found bin Laden — in his house.

Ron Hart, a libertarian op-ed humorist and award-winning author, is a frequent guest on CNN. Contact him at Ron@RonaldHart.com or @RonaldHart on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Crestview News Bulletin: Obama’s claim that he ‘saved the U.S. economy’ is demonstrably untrue

The new medical insurance premium for my wife and I will be just a few dollars shy of $2,000 per month for 2017. This amounts to $24,000 for the year. Should either of us have a serious illness or medical procedure, our out-of-pocket expenses will be $11,000. Therefore, we could potentially be out $35,000 in medical expenses in one year. I hope we aren't, but the potential is always there.

Of course, that would be better than a $100,000 medical expense or being shoved into bankruptcy because of medical bills. It is easy to rack up several hundred thousand dollars in medical expenses.

President Trump appears to be moving fast on his promises. I hope he acts fast on affordable health care because it's killing me.

I continue to hear from people who have achieved Social Security disability status. They were declared disabled by a doctor and were eventually legally approved. This not only means a nice monthly check from Social Security but it means medical care provided by American taxpayers.

I'm for anybody who is truly disabled to have this help from the American taxpayers. Sadly, there are many reports of people who have obtained crooked attorneys with connections to crooked doctors who know a crooked judge who help them be approved for disabled Social Security. It's bad for America when people lie and fake an illness to get a disability check. Unfortunately, when the government is writing checks, multitudes line up to get their share, whether they deserve it or not.

If I live a few more years, I can apply for a full Social Security check and I will have Medicare. We will only have to pay for my wife's medical insurance for a little while and thus life will go on. The point is that most of us are feeling the pain of health insurance costs.

Mr. President, we need help — fast.

Hospitals and doctors have been gouging the government and insurance companies for a long time. For years, the government and insurance companies have paid it, but things are changing some. Insurance companies are no longer paying for everything or paying the full price they are being charged. One doctor recently told me that he has to bill the insurance company about three times more than he would normally charge a patient to just receive close to the amount he needs for a procedure.

While our new government leadership is supposedly working on a plan to fix medical care, they need to fix the rising cost of a college education. Too many college graduates are racking up $60,000 to over $100,000 in debt with horrendous interest rates being charged by some lending institutions.

Colleges know they have a gravy train. Thousands of students across the country who meet the conditions can receive $5,815 in government money paid directly to their college of choice. Colleges then tack on thousands of dollars more that families or the students often have to borrow. Colleges, in turn, build bigger buildings and incur more debt that in turn requires more and more tuition from struggling students and families.

Many federally funded colleges pay big salaries. One college president in Kentucky made about $400,000 a year at a tiny private Christian college. That's not that huge, as some presidents today make close to a million dollars a year. What is interesting is that his board of trustees promised him this same salary package upon his retirement for the rest of his life plus medical insurance, an apartment, a car and even his cell phone.

Where does this money come from? The money comes from federal grants that we the taxpayers pay — and from struggling students who rack up big debts so that a retired college president can receive almost $400,000 a year and additional perks for the rest of his life.

Sadly, many academic institutions are crumbling across this country. There are numerous cases of campuses closing and being sold to bigger institutions or closing altogether.

Average Americans can't handle what we are being handed in medical and college costs. We need help fast.

Glenn Mollette is an American syndicated columnist and author.

This article originally appeared on Crestview News Bulletin: Americans need help fast, Mr. President