The further you get from power, the closer you come to the truth.

The President doesn't just appoint the Secretary of State, he appoints the Secretary of State, and then the Congress votes. And if the Congress approves that person, that person becomes Secretary of State.

This has been one of the more comedic aspects of this 72 hours - watching a cavalcade of extremely wealthy pundits, editorialists and political operatives from New York and Washington tell me how rural Americans won't stand for this.

The further you get from power, the closer you come to the truth.

With Jack Abramoff under indictment, a number of readers have suggested that now he might flip and try to offer the feds some figures higher up the food-chain.

There's this old line the wise folks in Washington have that "it's not the crime, but the cover-up." But only fools believe that. It's always about the crime. The whole point of the cover-up is that a full revelation of the underlying crime is not survivable.

We are Republicans. How I see our mission is we always want to be transparent with readers about what we think, about our opinions. But, fundamentally, we are out there to collect and report facts. And that's always our guiding mission.