Most authoritarians do not surrender power voluntarily.

If I talk to rural people where I live - mostly Hispanic but also poor white - they're not sympathetic to the Black Lives Matter movement.

Stalin and Mao killed over 80 million and did not make omelets despite the broken eggs.

It is a hard thing for intellectuals to acknowledge benefits from their rich moral inferiors who never so intended it.

Behind every liberal philanthropist fortune is a huge capitalist score. Bill Gates and Warren Buffett can afford now to be liberal - an expensive indulgence - because in their early incarnations they were no-holds-barred capitalists who made lots of enemies conducting business without mercy and in search of pure profit.

Politicians in their hubris who believe they can ignore debt or wish it away are sorely disappointed - as we see now with the plummeting approval ratings of both the administration and Congress.

I wish I could attribute the absence of any conventional Arab offensive in the last 20 years to a change of political climate or a willingness to abide by past accords. But unfortunately it is more likely that the Egyptians or Syrians concluded that the next time their tanks headed to Tel Aviv, there was nothing stopping the counterassaults from ending up in downtown Cairo or Damascus.