With a chip on his shoulder larger than his margin of victory, Barack Obama is approaching his second term by replicating the mistake of his first. Then his overreaching involved health care - expanding the entitlement state at the expense of economic growth. Now he seeks another surge of statism, enlarging the portion of gross domestic product grasped by government and dispensed by politics. The occasion is the misnamed "fiscal cliff," the proper name for which is: the Democratic Party's agenda.

Like a snail crossing a sidewalk, the Clinton Administration leaves a lengthening trail of slime, this time on America's national honor.

There is an aura of changelessness to sport. There is the flux of competition, but it occurs within the ordering confinement of clear rules.

Only in football is long-term injury the result not of accidents but of the game played properly.

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.

(Pete) Rose's coming clean is the most soiled conversion of convenience since ... well, Aug. 17, 1998, when DNA evidence caused Bill Clinton to undergo a memory clarification. On the diamond, no one ever wrung more success from less natural talent than Rose did. But his second autobiography - which refutes the first - makes worse the mess he has made.

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