Perhaps the soundest advice for parents is: Lighten up. People have been raising children for approximately as long as there have been people.

As Aristotle said, happiness is not a condition that is produced or stands on its own; rather, it is a frame of mind that accompanies an activity. But another frame of mind comes first. It is a steely determination to do well.

Ronald Reagan has held the two most demeaning jobs in the country; President of the United States and radio broadcaster for the Chicago Cubs.

So the Clinton-Gore era culminates with an election as stained as the blue dress, a Democratic chorus complaining that the Constitution should not be the controlling legal authority, and Clinton's understudy dispatching lawyers to litigate this: It depends on what the meaning of 'vote' is.

I've lived in Washington now for 44 years, and that's a lot of folly to witness up close. Whatever confidence and optimism I felt towards the central government when I got here on January 1, 1970 has pretty much dissipated at the hands of the government.

It is important that Miers not be confirmed unless, in her 61st year, she suddenly and unexpectedly is found to have hitherto undisclosed interests and talents pertinent to the court's role. Otherwise the sound principle of substantial deference to a president's choice of judicial nominees will dissolve into a rationalization for senatorial abdication of the duty to hold presidents to some standards of seriousness that will prevent them from reducing the Supreme Court to a private plaything useful for fulfilling whims on behalf of friends.

The future is usually just like the past- right up to the moment when it isn't.