The only question, today, is how long we’ll stay in the Brezhnev Trap, and what we will lose before we have the courage to get out of it.

Optimism works in politics, and it works in economics. Optimism in politics brings people together. In economics it leads to growth.

This period of excess is bringing the limits of our nationalism into the open. The next Thesis must accept that, and bury that, and move on to rejoin the world, and help save it. Because we have met the enemy and he is us.

If Bill really gets good at this, and finds the limit of his power to influence change, and looks at how badly our government is run, could he, maybe, try and take another job?

Conservative Democrats will grab hold of Webb as a way to lean against the Nixon-Reagan-Bush Thesis, just as Republicans a generation ago sought to lean Romney against the Roosevelt-Truman-Johnson Thesis.

For our economy to grow we need not only to free our people as individuals, but as groups, and as companies. We need more engineers, more writers, more developers in every area, fewer lawyers and accountants.

We are now further removed in time from the movie debut of Gone with the Wind, 67 years, than that event was from the end of the Civil War, 64 years.

News Corp. is losing so much money at MySpace that it can't earn it back in any traditional, Web-centric way. So it's going to sell out its users, isolate itself from at least two of the largest search engines, push Fox News down kids' throats, and tell the media how clever it is.

Congress needs to know when there is genuine concern about an issue. It has a right to distinguish between Astroturf and real grassroots. Congress also needs to understand that we have as much a right to choose how we filter our e-mail as they do

Open source is an approach to governance that is based, like the original New Deal, on an attitude. It's not a set of policies, but a method for finding policies and bringing them forward.