WASHINGTON -- Ideas are not responsible for the people who believe them, but when evaluating Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's ideas for making the Senate more like the House of Representatives, consider the source.

WASHINGTON -- Rick Snyder, who is hardly a human cactus, warned Michigan's labor leaders.

WASHINGTON -- With a chip on his shoulder larger than his margin of victory, Barack Obama is approaching his second term by replicating the mistake of his first.

"All Gods were immortal."

-- Stanislaw Lec

WASHINGTON -- And also brands, the gods of the marketplace. Earthquakes may strike, dynasties may fall and locusts may devour the crops, but Oldsmobile and Pan Am are forever. Never mind.

WASHINGTON -- There can be unseemly exposure of the mind as well as of the body, as the progressive mind is exposed in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a creature of the labyrinthine Dodd-Frank legislation.

WASHINGTON -- America's 57th presidential election revealed that a second important national institution is on an unsustainable trajectory.

PRESIDENT: The leading figure in a small group of men of whom -- and of whom only -- it is positively known that immense numbers of their countrymen did not want any of them for president.
-- Ambrose Bierce
The Devil's Dictionary (1906)

WASHINGTON -- Elections supposedly prevent convulsions, serving as safety valves that vent social pressures and enable course corrections.

DALLAS -- In the 1920s, in the wee small hours of the mornings, employees at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas sang while they worked.

DALLAS -- If in four weeks a president-elect Mitt Romney is seeking a Treasury secretary, he should look here, to Richard Fisher, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.