What our country deserves from everyone who enjoys its fruits and freedoms is a little more gratitude - and a lot less greed.

Barack Obama and Jimmy Hoffa are like Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Lady Gaga and hype, the 'Jersey Shore' cast and hairspray: inseparable. The president can no more disown the Teamsters Union's leader than he can disown his own id.

I stand with the Santa Barbara News-Press. How about you?

We live in a different era now. And thank God for that.

It's time for ordinary Americans to come out of the shadows and remind Washington every day in words and actions that we are a sovereign nation, not a sanctuary nation.

The current health care takeover proposals feature a crucial payoff to Big Labor - a golden exemption from any tax on union members' generous health care benefits. The friends and patrons of Obama may be making out like bandits. But for everyone else, the Democrats' ideological bankruptcy comes at a nauseatingly steep price.

Washington is gripped by crab-in-the-bucket syndrome. And there's no cure in sight. Put a single crab in an uncovered bucket, and it will find a way to climb up and out on its own. Put a dozen crabs in a bucket, and 11 will fight with all their might to pull down the striver who attempts escape.