Texas is a fine place for men and dogs, but hell on women and horses.

California is now close to spending more on prisons than it does on higher education - surely the death warrant of a civilization.

So keep fighting for freedom and justice, beloveds.

Bad policies, stupid policies, gutless policies have real consequences.

It's hard to argue against cynics - they always sound smarter than optimists because they have so much evidence on their side.

Most of us think of government as them. Yet government isn't Them: It's us.

Economist Frederick Thayer has studied the history of our balanced-budget crusades and has come up with some depressing statistics. We have had six major depressions in our history (1819, 1837, 1857, 1873, 1893 and 1929); all six of them followed sustained periods of reducing the national debt. We have had almost chronic deficits since the 1930s, and there has been no depression since then - the longest crash-free period in our history.