In Beijing, we talk about air purifiers the way that teenage boys talk about cars.

The U.S. must differentiate between controversial assertions of power, like those in the South China Sea, and fair reflections of China's growing contribution to the world, such as the new banks.

When you live in Beijing for a while, you gain a finely tuned understanding of air.

If you're going to have a book published in China, that means that you're going to be subject to in-house censorship at the publisher, and then also, of course, the government has an apparatus that is in charge of making sure that ideas that are considered disruptive or overly critical, that those don't get onto bookstore shelves.

Democracy is not simply a question of structures. It is a state of mind. It is an activity. And part of that activity is honesty.

I mean, republics have fallen because of Praetorian Guard mentality where government officials get very arrogant, they identify the national interest with their own political preferences and they feel that anyone who has a different opinion, you know, is somehow an enemy of the state.

MoveOn loves government. It remains enamored of government spending as fuel for its liberal agenda; and anything that threatens to close that spigot in any degree is perceived as a dire threat - worthy of Chicken-Little warnings that the sky is going to fall.

It was an idea we had when Al was in the Senate - to organize and moderate an annual conference that would look at government policy through the lens of the family to help identify ways that the family can be supported and strengthened.