We offer nothing more than the opinions of an ordinary man.  We all have different experiences and often view the same events from quite different perspectives.  The best we can do is to explain the source of information used to develop these opinions, so that readers can determine, for themselves, whether these opinions are reasonably formed.

Terry McNeil

Folsom, CA

“We are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, not to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.

Thomas Jefferson    Letter to William Roscoe [December 27, 1820]

“While the people retain their virtue and vigilance, no administration, by any extreme of wickedness or folly, can very seriously injure the government in the short space of four years.”

Abraham Lincoln     First Inaugural Address [March 4, 1861]

“If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem.  It is true that you may fool all of the people some of the time;  you can even fool some of the people all of the time; but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”

Abraham Lincoln     To a caller at the White House.  From Alexander K. McClure, Lincoln’s Yarns and Stories [1904] 

“Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right … and a desire to know; but besides this, they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean of the characters and conducts of their rulers.”

John Adams     A dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law [1765]

“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the      dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”

John Adams   Argument in Defense of the Soldiers in the Boston Massacre Trials [December 1770]