Cheap anti-Americanism will eventually have consequences.

Westernization, coupled with globalization, has created an affluent and leisured elite that now gravitates to universities, the media, bureaucracies, and world organizations, all places where wealth is not created, but analyzed, critiqued, and lavishly spent.

States are like people. They do not question the awful status quo until some dramatic event overturns the conventional and lax way of thinking.

Almost every key indicator of the current economy - unemployment, deficits, housing, energy - argues that Obama's reactionary all-powerful statist approach has only made things far worse.

Offering 'comprehensive' reform usually means years of arguing and horse-trading among pressure groups to get anything done. By the time all the special interests are appeased or bought off, the resulting elephantine legislation typically looks nothing like what was intended. In short, big-government medicine usually doesn't work on big-government sickness. If President Obama wants 'comprehensive' change, it would be better simply not to spend any more money we don't have.

I think people are beating each other up in the halls of Congress, as they did in the late 1850s.

California is now a valuable touchstone to the country, a warning of what not to do. Rarely has a single generation inherited so much natural wealth and bounty from the investment and hard work of those more noble now resting in our cemeteries-and squandered that gift within a generation.