Why aren't Democrats voting against President [Donald] Trump's cabinet nominees en masse? Is it because they're just a bunch soft-headed Beltway lifers who don't understand that the base is pissed and wants them to fight fight fight?

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.

In America, the economy is simply nowhere near bad enough to serve as the base of any kind of serious political revolution.

So many theories. But all of them have one thing in common: They demonstrate that although Trump isn’t much of a businessman, he is rich enough to hire good tax attorneys who will hand over huge stacks of forms for him to sign blindly. That’s a helluva qualification for president, isn’t it?

In other words, in the same way that mass incarceration surged because of a real thing, it's finally starting to ebb because of a real thing: the actual, concrete decline in violent crime that started in the early 90s and which appears to be permanent. America is simply a safer place than it used to be, and looks set to stay that way.

I've long believed that having multiple official languages makes it very hard to sustain a united polity.

Ben Carson says his flat tax will be around 15 percent. And by God, if he ever shows you the details, you'll see how awesome and deficit-killing it is.