God-fearing, red-blooded, Roman Catholic, pro-life, 2nd Amendment supporting, former USAF officer, certified financial planning practitioner, very fond of own opinion, dogmatic, persistent, Raider-fan, loyal American patriot. Husband of my best friend and father of the two most beautiful children in the world (no, yours don't even come close).

Education:

Aeronautical Engineering (major)--USAF Academy
Arabic Language (minor)--USAF Academy
Political Science (honorary major)--USAF Academy
Accredited Asset Management Specialist--College for Financial Planning
Certified Financial Planner Program--College for Financial Planning

Multiple interests: Faith; Truth; National Security; Islamic Jihad; Education; American Heritage; Economic Issues; et al.

Major Pet Peeve: Ignorance (and the exuberant display thereof).

Note: I'm primarily a daytime poster. Home time is family time.

Second Note: My daytime firewall may not allow me to use Freepmail. I'll see that I have it and get to it when I can. I'm not necessarily ignoring you.

Authored Threads:

Forming the Consciences of Catholic Voters
Another Letter to US Conference of Catholic Bishops (Immigration)
Open Letter to US Conference of Catholic Bishops
Why Should Christians Vote For Democrats?
The Proper Role of Government
This isn't actually a thread but a post... Explaining the Catholic Gospel

Favorite Quotes:

"The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government."

-- Thomas Jefferson

"The Declaration of Independence dogmatically bases all rights on the fact that God created all men equal; it is right [to do so].... There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man."

-- G.K. Chesterton

"...We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven. We have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power as no other nation has ever grown.

But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all the blessing were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own.

Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace too proud to pray to the God that made us!

It behooves us then to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins and to pray for clemency and forgiveness."

-- Abraham Lincoln's Proclamation for a National Day of Fast

"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banners openly.

"But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their garments, and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men.

"He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared."

-- Marcus Tullius Cicero

"If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen."

-- Sam Adams

"We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution."

-- Abraham Lincoln

"Because power corrupts, society's demands for moral authority and character increase as the importance of the position increases."

-- John Adams

"The highest glory of the American Revolution was this; it connected, in one indissoluble bond the principles of civil government with the principles of Christianity."

-- John Quincy Adams

"It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the gospel of Jesus Christ! For this very reason peoples of other faiths have been afforded asylum, prosperity, and freedom of worship here."

-- Patrick Henry

"We have staked the future of all of our political institutions upon the capacity of mankind for self-government, upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God."

-- James Madison

"The moral principles and precepts contained in the Scripture ought to form the basis of all our civil constitutions and laws. All the miseries and evil men suffer from vice, crime, ambition, injustice, oppression, slavery, and war, proceed from their despising or neglecting the precepts contained in the Bible."

-- Noah Webster

"Providence has given our people the choice of their rulers, and it is the duty, as well as privilege and interest, of a Christian nation to select and prefer Christians for their rulers."

-- John Jay, first Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court

"We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other."

-- John Adams, Oct. 11, 1798

"God who gave us life gave us liberty. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure if we have removed their only firm basis: a conviction in the minds of men that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath? Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever."

-- Thomas Jefferson

"Those people who will not be governed by God will be ruled by tyrants."

-- William Penn

"We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debt, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our calling and our creeds . . . we [will] have no time to think, no means of calling our miss-managers to account but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers. And this is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent . . . till the bulk of society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery. And the fore-horse of this frightful team is public debt. taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression."

-- Thomas Jefferson On Taxes and Debt

"In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person's becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American ...There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn't an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag ...We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language ... and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people."

-- Theodore Roosevelt 1907

"When all government, in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the Center of all power, it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated."

– Thomas Jefferson

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government.
It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury.
From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over lousy fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.
The average of the world’s great civilizations before they decline has been 200 years.
These nations have progressed in this sequence:
From bondage to spiritual faith;
from faith to great courage;
from courage to liberty;
from liberty to abundance;
from abundance to selfishness;
from selfishness to Complacency;
from complacency to apathy;
from apathy to dependency;
from dependency back again to bondage."

-- Alexander Fraser Tyler, Cycle of Democracy (1770)

"If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquillity of servitude than the animating contest of freedom, — go from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen."

-- Sam Adams

"If you will not fight for right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory is sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves."

-- Winston Churchill

"War is an ugly thing but not the ugliest of things. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."

-- John Stuart Mill

"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free."

-- President Ronald Reagan

"In any compromise between Good and Evil, it is only Evil that can profit."

-- Ayn Rand

"You can’t make socialists out of individualists. Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society, which is coming, where everyone is interdependent."

-- John Dewey, the father of modern American education and co-author of the "Humanist Manifesto."

"There is another class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs....There is a certain class of race-problem solvers who do not want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease holds out they have not only an easy means of making a living, but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public."

-- Booker T. Washington

"We have therefore to resolve to conquer or die: Our own Country's Honor, all call upon us for a vigorous and manly exertion, and if we now shamefully fail, we shall become infamous to the whole world. Let us therefore rely upon the goodness of the Cause, and the aid of the supreme Being, in whose hands Victory is."

-- George Washington, 1776

"A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.”

-- Thomas Jefferson

"The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money."

-- Alexis de Tocqueville

"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat."

--Theodore Roosevelt

"I find it fascinating that our Protestant friends who revile us Catholics for our "vain rituals" and disagreement with "sola scriptura" commit a more vain and empty ritual everytime they celebrate their communion services. For if it is not Jesus's Body and Blood they are consuming, then they discount Christ's own words as recorded in Scripture and simply play-act an empty ritual as a scene from the life of Christ--lacking in substance. While Catholics "walk by faith and not by sight" in trusting what Christ has told us, protestants denounce what they can't personally sense and prove."

-- Me, 2006

"I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents."

-- James Madison

"Being a lover of freedom, when the revolution came in Germany, I looked to the universities to defend it, knowing that they had always boasted of their devotion to the cause of truth; but, no, the universities immediately were silenced. Then I looked to the great editors of the newspapers whose flaming editorials in days gone by had proclaimed their love of freedom; but they, like the universities, were silenced in a few short weeks... Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler's campaign for suppressing truth. I never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel a great affection and admiration because the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual truth and moral freedom. I am forced thus to confess that what I once despised I now praise unreservedly."

-- Albert Einstein, 1940

"If you want total security, go to prison. There you're fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking... is freedom."

-- Dwight Eisenhower

"Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power."

-- Abraham Lincoln

"If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'."

-- George Orwell

"It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather, we should thank God that such men lived."

-- George Patton

"Of all the dispositions and habits, which lead to political prosperity, Religion and Morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of Patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of Men and Citizens. The mere Politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connexions with private and public felicity. Let it simply be asked, Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths, which are the instruments of investigation in Courts of Justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition, that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect, that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle."

-- George Washington, Farewell Address, 1796

"Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important."

-- C. S. Lewis

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."

-- "Our Deepest Fear" by Marianne Williamson

"A stupid man’s report of what a clever man says is never accurate because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand."

-- Bertrand Russell, The History of Western Philosophy

"Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."

-- C. S. Lewis

"[D]emocracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and have, in general, been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths."

-- James Madison (Federalist No. 10, 23 November 1787)

"It appears we have appointed our worst generals to command forces, and our most gifted and brilliant to edit newspapers. In fact, I discovered by reading newspapers that these editor/geniuses plainly saw all my strategic defects from the start, yet failed to inform me until it was too late. Accordingly, I am readily willing to yield my command to these obviously superior intellects, and I will, in turn, do my best for the Cause by writing editorials - after the fact."

-- Robert E. Lee, 1863

"Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty."

-- John F. Kennedy

"From the hammer of Charles Martel to the sword of Jan Sobieski, Christianity owed its safety in Europe to the fact it...could and would fight as well as the Mohammedan aggressor."

-- President Theodore Roosevelt, "Fear God and Take Your Own Part" (1916)

"If you can find it in the Yellow Pages, then government ought not to be doing it."

-- Lamar Alexander

“I cannot find any authority in the Constitution for public charity. [To approve the measure] would be contrary to the letter and spirit of the Constitution and subversive to the whole theory upon which the Union of these States is founded.”

— President Franklin Pierce’s 1854 veto of a measure to help the mentally ill.

“It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man who knows what the law is today can guess what it will be tomorrow.”

— James Madison, Federalist no. 62, February 27, 1788

“We must confine ourselves to the powers described in the Constitution, and the moment we pass it, we take an arbitrary stride towards a despotic Government.”

— James Jackson, First Congress, 1st Annals of Congress, 489

“The government of the United States is a definite government, confined to specified objects. It is not like state governments, whose powers are more general. Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government.”

— James Madison, speech in the House of Representatives, January 10, 1794

“...the opinion which gives to the judges the right to decide what laws are constitutional and what not, not only for themselves in their own sphere of action but for the Legislature and Executive also in their spheres, would make the Judiciary a despotic branch.”

— Thomas Jefferson

“ [The purpose of a written constitution is] to bind up the several branches of government by certain laws, which, when they transgress, their acts shall become nullities; to render unnecessary an appeal to the people, or in other words a rebellion, on every infraction of their rights, on the peril that their acquiescence shall be construed into an intention to surrender those rights.”

— Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782

“Were we directed from Washington when to sow, and when to reap, we should soon want bread.”

— Thomas Jefferson, Autobiography, 1821

"... the term "democrat" originated as an epithet and referred to 'one who panders to the crude and mindless whims of the masses.'"

-- Joseph Ellis from "Founding Brothers"

"The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism, but under the name of liberalism they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program until one day America will be a socialist nation without ever knowing how it happened."

-- Norman Thomas, six-time Socialist Party presidential candidate and one of the founders of the ACLU

On Gun Control Specifically:

"The great object is, that every man be armed. [...] Every one who is able may have a gun."

-- Patrick Henry, speech of June 14 1788

"Such are a well regulated militia, composed of the freeholders, citizen and husbandman, who take up arms to preserve their property, as individuals, and their rights as freemen."

-- "M.T. Cicero", in a newspaper letter of 1788 touching the "militia" referred to in the Second Amendment to the Constitution

"That the said Constitution shall never be construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of the United states who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms..."

-- Samuel Adams, in Phila. Independent Gazetteer, August 20, 1789

"The danger (where there is any) from armed citizens, is only to the 'government', not to 'society'; and as long as they have nothing to revenge in the government (which they cannot have while it is in their own hands) there are many advantages in their being accustomed to the use of arms, and no possible disadvantage."

-- Joel Barlow, Advice to the Privileged Orders, 1792-93

The Bill of Rights, then, as any history book will confirm, came into being to satisfy the single most suspicious, vociferous, and relentless foes of the new federal government.

That is the all-important context in which the Bill of Rights was created. The Anti-Federalists, men filled to varying degrees with fear, mistrust, and loathing of the new federal government, insisted on a bill of rights as additional shackles imposed on that new government. Knowing this alone, knowing that the famous Bill exists only to please those most apprehensive of the new government, definitively ends any confusion or debate surrounding the meaning of the Second Amendment.

There is simply no way on Earth the Anti-Federalists would have surrendered to the new and mistrusted government the right to own any gun they wanted at any time they wanted in any number they wanted.

To believe differently, to believe that the Second Amendment actually gives the federal government the authority to regulate firearms, one must believe the absolutely unbelievable. One must believe that the Anti-Federalists, fearing and loathing federal power, compelled Madison to compose this laundry list of rights, this list of things over which the government was to have no authority, and very near the very top of the list, these people in fear of the federal government desired a clause that reads, “Despite the fact that Article I, Section 8 prohibits you federal government people from infringing on our firearms rights, we hereby correct that mistake and surrender to you a right which we previously held, but wish now to give away.”

We must further believe that James Madison was such a monumentally incompetent and abysmal writer that, when trying to give the federal government this new authority to regulate the private ownership of firearms, the last fourteen words of the amendment read, “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

We must also believe that revolutionary American history conceals some hitherto unknown and utterly undocumented groundswell of public desire for gun control.

Picture in your mind for a moment the rough-and-tumble individualist who gave birth to this nation, a man who had tamed a wilderness, fought Indian wars on and off for 180 years, and successfully faced down the world’s mightiest empire. Hold a picture of that man in your head for a moment and then try to imagine him being told that this new federal government would have the power to regulate his ownership of firearms in any manner it saw fit, including imprisoning him for possession of any firearm for any reason at any time. No honest or serious man could ever claim to believe that any part of the American electorate desired federal gun control, let alone the Anti-Federalists who forced the creation of the Bill of Rights.”

-- From an article in the Philadelphia Bulletin

Regarding the Early Slate of Republican Nominees for 2008:

There are many ways for my "enemy" to gain advantage over me. Some are overt and some are more covert. There is the overt means of having an absolute 180 degree bassackwards ideologue (like Hitlery or Bustabutt) in power over me. There is also the covert means of continually giving me "the lesser of two evils." Over the years, as the bar lowers with each "lesser", I have to accept less and less. Somewhere, I either stand up for my beliefs or I never get the opportunity to vote for them again.

Conservatives should take great notice of this election. The Republican party decided to swing left to "win" this election. Those who thought we stood for something bigger than that, were apparently wrong.

The absolutely outrageous thing in this election is that there was a choice who wasn't the lesser of two evils but a near carbon copy of what we claim to want here on FR. However, we on FR chose to be pragmatic and turn our backs on "our" candidate out of fear of the bogeyman. Does anyone here feel they were led around by the nose by the media we so hate? THEY chose Arnold. THEY declared Tom unelectable. THEY gave all of the election oxygen to Mr Schwarzenkennedy. Those of you who said they would only vote for Tom if he were ahead in the polls on election day doomed him to failure by the very "tainting" of polls you routinely decry. YOU GAVE THEM THEIR AMMUNITION.

Your principles tell you to vote pragmatically, pushing the better choice to the side in favor of the one you've been told can actually win. Who told you this? The very party leaders and authorities we continually rail about on FR? The very media establishment that canonized Arnold as the Republican frontrunner (like Wesley Clark) as soon as he announced his candidacy?

Why is it that Tom can't win? Well, let's first see what it takes to win... To win, Tom needs more votes than his opponents. It takes us to vote for him. What will it take for us to vote for him? We have to know what he believes and see if it jibes with what we believe... he has to get his message out. What will it take to get his message out? It will take a lot of support. What does he not have? Support--not from the party, not from the media, not from you. Why? Because he's unelectable... it's a circular argument.

It's all moot now but my principles as an American say to vote my conscience. I shouldn't worry about my neighbor's vote. To game my vote or to vote strictly party line is to vote like a Democrat and a political lemming--not a man of principle.

At the end of the day, I will be who God called me to be. You can be what God called you to be. However, I am not less than you because I choose the better candidate and you choose to vote with the pack.

-- Me (Post #4,143 on the California Recall Live Thread, 10/7/2003)

Do Democrats Really Want the US to be Victorious?

"I don't think increasing the troops helps us get our foot out of the trap--it just puts 20,000 more targets on the ground. ... My going-in strategy would be to disengage, not on a known timetable because it gives too many options to the enemy, but set a course for disengagement out of there, knowing full what will follow will be a disaster. But there is going to be a disaster anyway."

-- Ret. Gen. Merrill A. McPeak, former USAF Chief of Staff (Regretfully), Southern Oregon Mail Tribune, 1/10/2007

Just think for a moment the joy we would all feel if tomorrow, Al Qaeda announced that "If we haven't driven the Americans out of Iraq by the end of '08, we will quit."

THAT is how you know withdrawal timetables are a bad idea.

- posted on 03/26/2007 7:09:52 AM CDT by RayStacy

• Democrat Barack Obama, Jan. 2007: “I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraqis going to solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse.”

• Democrat Barack Obama, Jan 2007: “I don’t think the president’s [surge] strategy is going to work.”

• Democrat Barack Obama, Jul. 2007: “My assessment is that the surge has not worked.”

• Democrat Barack Obama, Oct. 2007: “[The surge is a] complete failure... Iraq’s leaders are not reconciling. They are not achieving political benchmarks.”

And now for something completely different:

Your results:
You are Superman

Superman 90% The Flash 65% Spider-Man 60% Green Lantern 60% Supergirl 55% Robin 52% Hulk 45% Iron Man 45% Batman 40% Catwoman 35% Wonder Woman 30%

You are mild-mannered, good, strong and you love to help others.

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Test