I went downtown to the courthouse pretty late at night, and arraignment court was on. You have these prosecutors and public defenders and judges and all of these people who are there on a Friday night at half past 12, and how can you expect people to bring their judgment and their best selves to their work at that kind of time?

Try to understand that behind every headline, there are individuals, families, and communities.

You look around, and you think, 'Given the chance, if we can get away with it, people are going to be nasty to each other. They're going to pull up the draw bridge; they're going to draw up the ladder and try to live in this little bubble without giving anything to anyone else - without even receiving anything from anyone else.'

I think people have always had ambiguous relationships toward the police because of the position in society they occupy. But that anxiety and that animosity isn't as strong in other places as it is in the U.S., partially because the police are armed here.

The painful truth may be that Zimbabwe, the youngest of Africa's former colonies, has simply followed where the continent has led, treading the well-worn path beaten out of the lie that taking power from the colonialists and delivering democracy to the people are one and the same.

The Spartans were a paradoxical people. They were the biggest slave owners in Greece. But at the same time, Spartan women had an unusual level of rights. It's a paradox that they were a bunch of people who in many ways were fascist, but they were the bulwark against the fall of democracy.

States that scrap their state-run Obamacare exchanges are admitting they've wasted millions of dollars in federal grants. It's only fair that states have to pay American taxpayers and the federal government back for their total incompetence.

Our government is printing money, and it's degrading the living standard of every person in America. It's the cause of frustration, anger, and confusion.