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.

Most presidents come to Washington bright as freshly minted dimes and leave much diminished.

Liberals think their campaign against Wal-Mart is a way of introducing the subject of class into America's political argument, and they are more correct than they understand. Their campaign is liberalism as condescension. It is a philosophic repugnance toward markets, because consumer sovereignty results in the masses making messes. Liberals, aghast, see the choices Americans make with their dollars and their ballots and announce - yes, announce - that Americans are sorely in need of more supervision by... liberals.

Big government inevitably drives an upward distribution of wealth to those whose wealth, confidence and sophistication enable them to manipulate government.

Republicans define freedom as an absence of restraints imposed by government. Democrats define freedom as an absence of necessity, which government exists to reduce. America has not moved as far as it thinks it has beyond the argument about the New Deal, when FDR insisted, "Necessitous men are not free men."

In a nation committed to better living through chemistry - where Viagra-enabled men pursue silicone-contoured women - the national pastime has a problem of illicit chemical enhancement. Steroids threaten the health of the 5 percent to 7 percent of players proved, by a mild regime of scheduled tests, to be using them. Steroids also endanger emulative young people. Further, steroids subvert what baseball is selling - fair competition. And they strike at the pleasure of engagement with America's team sport with the longest history.

[Cultural relativism] licenses the envy of the untalented, giving rise to what has been called the revenge of failure: Those who cannot paint destroy the canons of painting; those who cannot write reject canonical literature.