I used to be a print reporter.

At the White House, everybody works for the same person. They're all part of the same company. But on Capitol Hill, they're all independent contractors. They all work for themselves. That's a formula for getting news.

It's no longer just reporting the headlines of the day, but trying to put the headlines into some context and to add some perspective into what they mean.

But if you're going to go out on a military unit, you've got to allow yourself to be under the control of the commander because you really could put the troops in danger.

The government's view is that the best time to announce bad news, news that it doesn't want the public to dwell on is late on a Friday, when it will wind up in the Saturday papers, which if you were readers, then the week day editions. A holiday weekend is even better.

The Iraq war was fought by one-half of one percent of us. And unless we were part of that small group or had a relative who was, we went about our lives as usual most of the time: no draft, no new taxes, no changes. Not so for the small group who fought the war and their families.

But if you don't enjoy doing something, you'll be miserable no matter how much money you make.