We need legislation that encourages increased competition and tort reform and combats fraud, waste, and abuse. This would drive down health care costs, provide more 'bottom line' for our small businesses and lead to more private sector job growth.

The decision to use military force should always be one made with the utmost caution, with U.S. interests at stake, and with the consent of Congress.

This is what my calling is now. I'm here to try to help our party.

Mary Jo and I have three teenagers who are in their last years at home. In addition, I was just offered and accepted a position with Williams College as a visiting lecturer on leadership beginning in February 2017, and anticipate accepting other academic positions shortly.

History demonstrates that previous military drawdowns invited aggression by our enemies. After World War I, America drew down forces until the U.S. Army had fewer than 100,000 men in uniform. That weakness invited Nazi aggression in Europe and the imperial Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor.

It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail.

Sometimes we see the Civil War in movies and imagine these neatly aligned rows of men with muskets, walking in line to shoot each other. In reality the things that fascinated me were how absolutely ruthless and violent so many engagements were, how much suffering and how men were not prepared.

Well, you know, I was through the whole of the Second World War and saw all my friends killed.