PHOENIX -- Sal DiCiccio says hes sorry. It is, he says, no excuse that the complex labor contracts that he, as a member of the city council, voted to ratify for city employees were presented to the council less than a week before the vote.

WASHINGTON -- Two policies of the Obama administration illustrate an axiom: As government expands, its lawfulness contracts.

"The beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord. The next and most urgent counsel is to take stock of reality."

-- William F. Buckley

Super-PAC donors acting as kingmakers in presidential contest

-- The Washington Post

Feb. 22, 2012

NEW YORK -- James and Jeanne Harmon reside in and supposedly own a five-story brownstone on Manhattan's Upper West Side, a building that has been in their family since 1949.

LOS ANGELES -- The worst day of Sugar Bear's 55 years was one of the days -- there have been many of them -- when he got out of prison.

WASHINGTON -- War, said James Madison, is "the true nurse of executive aggrandizement." Randolph Bourne, the radical essayist killed by the influenza unleashed by World War I, warned, "War is the health of the state." Hence Barack Obama's State of the Union hymn: Onward civilian soldiers, marching as to war.

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court can pack large portents in small details. When in late March it considers the constitutionality of Obamacare, there will be five and a half hours of oral argument -- the most in almost half a century.

LOS ANGELES -- Shawn Nee, 35, works in television but hopes to publish a book of photographs. Shane Quentin, 31, repairs bicycles but enjoys photographing industrial scenes at night. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department probably wishes both would find other hobbies.

CHARLESTON, S.C. -- Thanks to globalization, and to containerized shipping that began in 1956 and makes globalization work, commodities swiftly move vast distances around the planet. Wal-Mart alone imports 400,000 containers a year.