WASHINGTON -- "If two people always agree," says Ben Bernanke, "one of them is redundant."

PHOENIX -- Cindy Vong is a tiny woman with a problem as big as the government that is causing it.

WASHINGTON -- Liberal certitudes continue to dissolve, the most recent solvent being a robust new defense of a 1905 Supreme Court decision that liberals have long reviled -- and misrepresented.

MADISON, Wis. -- The residues of liberalism's Wisconsin Woodstock -- 1960s radicalism redux: operatic lamentations, theatrical demonstrations and electoral futilities -- are words of plaintive defiance painted on sidewalks around the state Capitol.

LONDON -- During the Second World War, a future prime minister, Harold Macmillan, said America is "the new Roman empire and we Britons, like the Greeks of old, must teach them how to make it go."

WASHINGTON -- Fifty years ago, a metaphor became concrete. Beginning on Aug. 13, 1961, along West Berlin's 27-mile border, the Iron Curtain became tangible in a wall of precast slabs of concrete.

WASHINGTON -- August is upon us, beaches beckon, and Michele Bachmann has set the self-improvement bar high.

"The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons."
-- Emerson

SAN ANTONIO -- In the 1850s, on the steps of the Waco courthouse, Wallace Jefferson's great-great-great-grandfather was sold.

DALLAS -- For a conservative Texan seeking national office, it could hardly get better than this: