At root, the Tea Party is nothing more than a them-versus-us thing.

Everybody I knew, practically, was a journalist when I was a kid - my father, all of his friends. I never wanted to be like those people.

Capitalism is a system for determining objective value.

What we have now is a situation where politicians get a whole bunch of money from mainly business interests. Then once they hold that office, they spend all their time in office paying back over and over again those campaign contributions through various favors and contracts and that sort of thing.

Obviously the commercial news media tries to get you worked up and terrified so you'll buy products that they're advertising.

It's come around to that point of view at the end of a long evolutionary process, in which the rule of law has slowly been replaced by giant idiosyncratic bureaucracies that are designed to criminalize failure, poverty, and weakness on the one hand, and to immunize strength, wealth, and success on the other.

Like wars, forest fires and bad marriages, really stupid laws are much easier to begin than they are to end.