THE FOUNDATION

“The great object of my fear is the federal judiciary. That body, like gravity, ever acting, with noiseless foot, and unalarming advance, gaining ground step by step, and holding what it gains, is ingulfing insidiously the special governments into the jaws of that which feeds them. … It has long, however, been my opinion, and I have never shrunk from its expression…that the germ of dissolution of our federal government is in the constitution of the federal Judiciary; …working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and a little tomorrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief, over the field of jurisdiction, until all shall be usurped. … The judiciary of the United States is the subtle corps of sappers and miners constantly working under ground to undermine the foundations of our confederated fabric. They are construing our Constitution from a coordination of a general and special government to a general and supreme one alone.” –Thomas Jefferson

INSIGHT

“The real problem is in the hearts and minds of men. It is not a problem of physics but of ethics. It is easier to denature plutonium than to denature the evil from the spirit of man.” –Albert Einstein

ICTUS IMPRIMIS

“The choice before us is plain: Christ or chaos, conviction or compromise, discipline or disintegration. I am rather tired of hearing about our rights and privileges as American citizens. The time is come – it is now – when we ought to hear about the duties and responsibilities of our citizenship. America’s future depends upon her accepting and demonstrating God’s government.” –Peter Marshall

FAMILY

“The gay-lesbian-transvestite crowd wants to smash gender categories and obliterate the social norms within those categories. They say gender is artificial, a mere invention of society. So, they want your school to teach that kids are free to adopt any sexual identity. It’s a militant political agenda aimed at steamrolling all moral opposition to perversion. It’s also a sexual agenda. And the more gender confusion teens experience, the more vulnerable they are to the seduction of the movement. However, no matter how loud the propaganda, the universal truth of creation remains unshaken: In the beginning God created human beings; he made them male and female, by design. God stamped our gender in our chromosomes and coded our unique sex characteristics into our DNA. No surgery, no costume, no amount of paraphernalia can alter our inherent, God-given nature. Parents and students need to guard creation’s order in public schools by strongly protesting the gender-smashing policies and events that would try to overthrow God’s natural order.” –Charles Colson

CULTURE

“Radical environmentalism, romantic multiculturalism, and authoritarian utopianism all reflect a rather smug idealization of the disadvantaged and nature in the raw. Central to this creed is identification with the supposedly anti-Western world of the universal downtrodden – and, really, almost anyone or anything else in the past three centuries that has come up against the juggernaut of the dominant culture of Western industrial capitalism.” –Victor Davis Hanson

LIBERTY

“The United Nations gun-grabbers don’t care about our Constitution and they don’t care about national sovereignty. The UN always wants to expand its power, and global gun control goes hand-in-hand with global government. Every American who cares about the 2nd Amendment should oppose this latest UN attempt to dictate our domestic laws. There is no question that the UN ultimately seeks to impose worldwide gun control, although it has no legal or moral authority to do so.” –Rep. Ron Paul

THE GIPPER

“Freedom is the right to question and change the established way of doing things. It is the continuing revolution of the marketplace. It is the understanding that allows us to recognize shortcomings and seek solutions. It is the right to put forth an idea, scoffed at by the experts, and watch it catch fire among the people. It is the right to dream–to follow your dream or stick to your conscience, even if you’re the only one in a sea of doubters.” –Ronald Reagan

OPINION IN BRIEF

“A belief in moral absolutes should always make us more, not less, critical of both sides in any conflict. This doesn’t mean that both sides are equally wrong; it means that since we all fall short of moral perfection, even the side whose cause is truly righteous may commit terrible acts of violence in defense of that cause – and, worse, may feel quite justified in committing them. That is the difference between being righteous and being self-righteous. Moral standards are absolute; but human fidelity to them is always relative.” –Joseph Sobran

EDITORIAL EXEGESIS

“A national ID card – complete with an encoded computer chip and biometric ‘tags’ such as fingerprints or retinal scans – came one step closer to becoming a creepy reality … when Reps. James P. Moran and Thomas M. Davis introduced legislation that would require their adoption by all 50 states and the District of Columbia. … Their bill would give the federal government unprecedented access to information about our daily lives that ought to frighten any sensible person. Every transaction we make, every trip we take, every time we produce a driver’s license to conduct business would be noted and recorded in a government database. And with the national ID ‘smart card’ almost certainly being linked – at first, or after Americans get used to the idea – to our financial lives in every critical respect (checking accounts, credit cards, etc.) there won’t be anything the government, its myriad agencies and even private-sector contractors, won’t know about us except our never-voiced thoughts – the last realm of privacy that may be left to Americans a decade from now. … What Messrs. Moran and Davis have proposed is, in fact, ‘a system that will erode individual freedom and increase governmental power without significantly improving safety,’ as Chris Hoofnagle of the Electronic Privacy Information Center puts it. He and other civil libertarians ridicule the government’s straw man – that a national ID will prevent future terrorist attacks. They argue, convincingly, that well-funded criminals and would-be terrorists will always find a way to get around such a system. Only the average citizen would find himself under the ever-present watchful eye of government. As with gun control, the national ID will result in diminished freedom and privacy for law-abiding citizens who pose no threat to honest government but are objects of these ever escalating, police-state tactics. The national ID card is a terrible idea, perhaps born of good intentions – which should nonetheless be dropped before we get more than we bargained for.” –Washington Times

GOVERNMENT

“But with the adoption of the income-tax amendment in 1913, the amount of money people retained as their own became totally subject to the will of the government. Congress might set the percentage high or low, but that wasn’t really the point. The point was that by granting public officials the unfettered power to determine the percentage of income tax, government became the determiner of how much of their income people would be permitted to keep. The Sixteenth Amendment effectively nationalized people’s income and placed them on a government allowance.” –Jacob G. Hornberger

RE: THE LEFT

“The editorials and op-ed page of the Times are monothematically left-liberal. Among its columnists, there is not one centrist or conservative. … The Washington Post, by way of contrast, is editorially much less strident, and has regular columnists such as George F. Will, Michael Kelly, and Charles Krauthammer. This makes the opinion pages of the Post considerably more interesting. It is a liberal paper that knows it must engage opposing arguments. The Times, on the other hand, is a smug and self-contained world, run by people who seem truly to believe that not only do they publish all the news fit to print but also all the views fit to print, and that what they publish defines what is fit.” –Richard John Neuhaus

POLITICAL FUTURES

“…[T]oo many conservatives either don’t understand or don’t care about the fundamental importance of the public’s business being done in public. Without this basic requirement for accountability in government, democracy is impossible, yet too many of us can’t be bothered when the politicians pull a fast one like a private committee vote on a legislative proposal with big-time implications for every American. Most conservatives would agree that our core principles include individual freedom, limited government, a strong national defense, free trade and free markets. Collectively, we spend millions of dollars and countless hours working to advance these core principles. It’s time we add open government to the list.” –Mark Tapscott

FOR THE RECORD

“In 1996, Britain banned handguns; since then, gun crimes have risen by 40%. … Australia also passed severe gun restrictions in 1996 and made it a crime to use a gun defensively. In the subsequent four years, armed robberies rose 51%, unarmed robberies by 37%, assaults by 24% and kidnappings by 43%. … The problem with these harsh gun laws, experts say, is that they take guns away from law-abiding citizens, while would-be criminals ignore them, leaving potential victims defenseless. The U.S. has shown that making guns more available is actually a better formula for law and order. … In the U.S., 33 states have right-to-carry laws. In those states, deaths and injuries from multiple-victim public shootings fell on average by 78%.” –National Center for Policy Analysis

SELECT READER COMMENTS

“The Federalist doesn’t seem to share the same Humanistic veiws as did the original Federalist Papers. Why does one need to believe in God to be a Federalist? I’m a pro-choice Libertarian. May I also be a Federalist? Belief in God or any kind of faith based system strikes me as irrelevant.”
Editor’s Reply: Of course you could be a Federalist Patriot – unless you think our Constitution is a “living, breathing document” to be interpreted and amended at will by an activist Leftjudiciary in order to find such things as a “right to privacy” – making the Constitution comport to their particular worldview. We disagree that the original Federalists were humanists; they were by and large Christian or inspired by Biblical worldviews based in natural equality and rights of individual humans “endowed by their Creator” – so they would also disagree with your conclusion that a “faith-based system is irrelevant.”

“Federalist 02-18d quoted Larry Kramer as saying ‘parents should not consider pederasts as rivals or competitors.’ I agree; if they mess with my kids, I will consider them ‘targets’!”

“Federalist No. 02-19c awarded its ‘Clintonista Hollywonk’ Award to Alec Baldwin for this comment: ‘I am a hope-to-die, carry-me-out-in-a-box Democrat.’ Let’s do our part and get him a box!”

“Federalist No. 02-19c notes Cokie Roberts’ concern: ‘Having some pilot who’s gone off his nut for some reason running around with a gun does not make me feel safe.’ If a commercial pilot is ‘off his nut for some reason,’ she better be worried about aircraft trajectory – whether the pilot is armed or not!”

“So Judge Rakoff seeks ‘evidence of the constitutionality’ of the death penalty? He can look at the very 5th amendment he believes prohibits it. It states that no person shall be ‘put in jeopardy of life … nor be deprived of life …without due process of law.’ The plain language of Amendment V makes clear that the Founders accepted the death penalty. And, in line with the rest of Constitution, it seeks to rein in the government to ensure that the ultimate punishment isn’t handed down casually.”

“Federalist No. 02-19d quoted Bill Clinton: ‘The road to tyranny… begins with the destruction of the truth.’ This was not a BIG LIE – he was just reminding his Clintonista Cadres that they need to destroy the "truth” in order to achieve the Left’s goal of tyranny!“

THE LAST WORD

"Cultural conservatives can be forgiven their overenthusiasm for Celine Dion. Dignified, classy, and talented, she embodies public virtues long absent from mainstream pop. Married, maternal, and monogamous, she embodies private virtues too. And her lyrics are as free of expletives as her flesh is of tattoos and piercings. What more could Republicans want in a diva? … In a word, art….” –World Magazine