Because prison sentences in America tend to be long, de-incarceration lags falling crime rates by a fair amount, but eventually it does catch up.

If you want to make a difference in America, you need to be prepared for a very long, very frustrating slog.

Betsy DeVos, for example, has shown that she’s flatly ignorant of an astounding amount of basic education policy. It might be possible to persuade two or three Republicans to oppose her on these grounds - but only if the entire confirmation process isn’t a pure partisan battle.

Black crime rates fell more steeply than white crime rates, and now black incarceration is falling more steeply than white incarceration.

The folks who want to be left alone are the ones who actually get most of the work done, but they’re still mocked as drones or beavers or trolls. That’s bad enough, but now technology is helping the extroverts in their long twilight campaign against actually concentrating on anything.

Actually, I think we all understand just fine why Donald Trump is president: because he ran a racist, boorish, epically mendacious campaign and Republicans all decided to go along with it. And even that wouldn’t have been enough if Trump hadn’t gotten some additional help from his pals James Comey and Vladimir Putin.

During the [Barack] Obama presidency, the Dow doubled in real terms. What's more, its growth has been remarkably steady.