President-elect [Donald] Trump has made a provocative choice for secretary of education. Betsy DeVos comes from a wealthy Michigan family. She is an advocate for school choice. That phrase means, in essence, directing public education money to charter schools, private schools or parochial schools.

Toward the end of the campaign, we interviewed some voters in Raleigh, N.C., which is a generally Democratic city, and I'm thinking of a young couple. They had two kids. They described themselves as Christian. They oppose gay marriage. And they were saying that even though they didn't like Donald Trump, they were thinking of voting for him. And one of the reasons was they felt that they were - their very views were making them socially unacceptable. They were feeling a little alienated from the world.

We've learned something about President-elect [Donald] Trump's choice for secretary of defense. Lawmakers in Congress intend to proper debate over whether retired General James Mattis meets a requirement for civilian control of the military.

Those are the liberals who don't want to win. Those are the liberals who are in love with noble defeats, and I'm sick and tired of noble defeats.

Putin himself is a bit of a risk taker, so the invading Ukraine, in the east in particular - Crimea was risky.

Researchers have been asking a basic question of young people. Should men be allowed to beat their wives? How you answer that question may depend on where you live. U.N. researchers put that question to adolescent girls in India and Pakistan and 53 percent - a majority of girls - said yes, wife beating is justifiable even if it's for refusing sex.

Is that really the issue [of bathrooms and gender] we want to be pushing leading up to a momentous election like this one? It's that shortsightedness that comes from identity politics.