Pessimism is as American as apple pie - frozen apple pie with a slice of processed cheese.

Capital punishment, like the rest of the criminal justice system, is a government program, so skepticism is in order.

It is extraordinary how extraordinary the ordinary person is.

If your job is to leaven ordinary lives with elevating spectacle, be elevating or be gone.

Barack Obama, who might be mercifully closing the Clinton parenthesis in presidential history, is refreshingly cerebral amid this recrudescence of the paranoid style in American politics. He is the un-Edwards and un-Huckabee - an adult aiming to reform the real world rather than an adolescent fantasizing mock-heroic 'fights' against fictitious villains in a left-wing cartoon version of this country.

The phrase 'domestic cat' is an oxymoron.

The primary goal of collectivism - of socialism in Europe and contemporary liberalism in America - is to enlarge governmental supervision of individuals' lives. This is done in the name of equality. People are to be conscripted into one large cohort, everyone equal (although not equal in status or power to the governing class) in their status as wards of a self-aggrandizing government.