Recently the country has seen too much of our legislators, seeing them as a gaggle of check-kiting, judge-smearing deadbeats who don't pay their restaurant bills but raise their pay in the middle of the night. Many Americans-this columnist included-hitherto said tax increases are justified by the budget deficit now say: Give that mob more money? Never. Not a nickel of new taxes until term limits change the political culture on Capital Hill.

According to the University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.

Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time tells the story of a cosmologist whose speech is interrupted by a little old lady who informs him that the universe rests on the back of a turtle. Ah, yes, madame, the scientist replies, but what does the turtle rest on? The old lady shoots back: You can't trick me, young man. It's nothing but turtles, turtles, turtles, all the way down.

Leadership is, among other things, the ability to inflict pain and get away with it - short-term pain for long-term gain.

It is no exaggeration to conclude that the Internet has achieved, and continues to achieve, the most participatory marketplace of mass speech that this country - and indeed the world - has yet seen.

Football combines the two worst things about America: it is violence punctuated by committee meetings.

The Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire, the United Nations is a disunited collection of regimes, many of which do not represent the nations they govern.