Day-to-day life is as simple as it is routine - though my days are often long and very busy.

The press and free speech landscape has totally changed. There is far less news reporting today. Instead, we have this endless stream of - largely meaningless and speculative - analysis by sideline commentators and self-proclaimed "experts."

I lived a few miles outside of a tiny town in central Oklahoma. I would often run amok though the fields of wheat, the patches of trees, along the railroad tracks, and on red dirt roads. This had a profound effect on my view of the world - vast, open-ended, full of opportunity, and ready for exploration.

Day-to-day life is as simple as it is routine - though my days are often long and very busy.

As Iraq erupts in civil war and America again contemplates intervention, that unfinished business should give new urgency to the question of how the United States military controlled the media coverage of its long involvement there and in Afghanistan.

As a young kid, I spent a lot of time exploring the world around me.

I think it's actually kind of sweet how there is a reciprocal effect that our stories can have on each other.