My view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks.

By encouraging its citizens to violate our border, Mexico is pushing a tremendous welfare burden off of its shoulders and onto ours, while also benefiting from the significant sums of U.S. currency that these workers will eventually send back home to their families.

The rapid growth in many of our suburbs has spawned a booming construction industry eager to hire low wage immigrants who gladly fill these jobs, many of them happy to be paid in cash, free of federal and state taxes.

Illegal immigrants are beginning to comprise a black market class of workers in our society, jeopardizing the financial health of companies which play by the rules, while themselves vulnerable to the exploitation by those willing to take advantage of their illegal status.

In fact, a University of Connecticut study showed that as many as three in four pre-teens and teens who are exposed to Internet gambling become addicted.

Today, the technology is there to give early and normally ample warning when a powerful tornado approaches. When a tornado strikes, all of us are at risk.

The Veteran's History Project, a nationwide volunteer effort to collect oral histories from America's war veterans, provides an avenue to do just that. Now in its fifth year, the Project has collected more than 40,000 individual stories.