For too long, government officials have tinkered with Mexico's economic structure through piecemeal reforms that seek to ensure political stability but that do not address the key obstacles to greater innovation and competitiveness.

There are too many unions, monopolists, and bureaucrats that behave like hungry sharks, accustomed to feeding off oil revenues and appropriating the extraordinary wealth that Mexico produces but does not share in an equitable and democratic way.

The PRI can afford to push democratization; it can afford to be generous because it has a very good chance of winning in clean elections.

Mario Ruiz Massieu's resignation places the ball very firmly in Zedillo's court. A key decision he will have to make is whether he is going to govern with, without, or against his own party.

I know politics is emotionally brutal; I've already had experience with the reality of smear campaigns, so I understand there will not be a path of roses laid before me.

In the United States, the government has no business entering the marketplace of ideas to establish an arbiter of what is false, misleading, or a political smear.

I mean, people need to remember without the grassroots, Ronald Reagan probably doesn't become president of the United States of America and he worked the grassroots on a regular basis during his political career and especially between the years of 1976 and 1980 after the loss in Kansas City.

There's so much spirit of integration and democracy in jazz.