The failure to work out sensible budgets makes it impossible for government agencies to make long-term plans, and instead leaves them scrambling to spend money in the short term.

The race for the White House is normally an event suffused with drama, sucking eyeballs to the page all over the globe.

The basic scam in the Internet age is pretty easy even for the financially illiterate to grasp. It was as if banks like Goldman were wrapping ribbons around watermelons, tossing them out fiftieth-story windows, and opening the phones for bids. In this game you were a winner only if you took your money out before the melon hit the pavement.

Once you give an NFL player permission to have thoughts, you invite all kinds of mischief.

You know, I used to live in Russia where you had officers in the military opening up the warehouses at night and taking weapons out and putting them into a truck and selling them to foreign powers. That type of stuff doesn't happen in the United States. We still have a very functioning and relatively civil society.

You can have somebody living next door to you and you can live in a completely different world from that person, which is definitely something we've never experienced before. So I think just because of the media landscape and the way we get our information now, we're more atomized and isolated from each other than ever before.

Within the cult of Wall Street that forged Mitt Romney, making money justifies any behavior, no matter how venal.