Americans are overreaching; overreaching is the most admirable and most American of the many American excesses.

The Soviet Union tried for 70 years to plant Marxism with bayonets in Eastern Europe. Today there are more Marxists on the Harvard faculty than there are in Eastern Europe.

Not since the multiplication of the loaves and fishes near the Sea of Galilee has there been creativity as miraculous as that of the Keystone XL pipeline. It has not yet been built but already is perhaps the most constructive infrastructure project since the Interstate Highway System. It has accomplished an astonishing trifecta

The First Amendment is not a blanket freedom-of-information act. The constitutional newsgathering freedom means the media can go where the public can, but enjoys no superior right of access.

(Barry) Bonds' records must remain part of baseball's history. His hits happened. Erase them and there will be discrepancies in baseball's bookkeeping about the records of the pitchers who gave them up. George Orwell said that in totalitarian societies, yesterday's weather could be changed by decree. Baseball, indeed America, is not like that. Besides, the people who care about the record book - serious fans - will know how to read it. That may be Bonds' biggest worry.

Major League Baseball's labor negotiations involve two paradoxes. The players' union's primary objective is to protect the revenues of a very few very rich owners - principally, the Yankees'. The owners' primary objective is a more egalitarian distribution of wealth. The union believes that unconstrained spending by the richest three teams pulls up all payrolls. Most owners believe that baseball's problems--competitive imbalance, the parlous financial conditions of many clubs--result from large and growing disparities of what are mistakenly treated as 'local' revenues.

It (baseball) has no clock, no ties and no Liberal intrusions into the organized progression.