Since the end of the Cold War, America has been grasping left and right for an identity.

The average Tea Partier is sincerely against government spending - with the exception of the money spent on them.

The individual incentive not to commit crime on Wall Street now is almost zero.

The NFL, sadly, has a fatal environmental problem: It kills its workers.

The one thing that I do is take really complicated systems and subjects and make them accessible to regular people.

The problem with the Tea Party is that it's been used in a way that scares people into supporting an agenda that's counter to their own interests.

The race for the White House is normally an event suffused with drama, sucking eyeballs to the page all over the globe.

There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power.

This is America: Corporate stealing is practically the national pastime, and Goldman Sachs is far from the only company to get away with doing it.

We may be many things, we Americans, but we always get the job done.

Within the cult of Wall Street that forged Mitt Romney, making money justifies any behavior, no matter how venal.

Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game.

2008 was to the American economy what 9/11 was to national security. Yet while 9/11 prompted the U.S. government to tear up half the Constitution in the name of public safety, after 2008, authorities went in the other direction.

Amendments occupy a great deal of most legislators' time, particularly those lawmakers in the minority. Members of Congress do author major bills, but more commonly they make minor adjustments to the bigger bill.

At least Bank of America got its name right. The ultimate Too Big to Fail bank really is America, a hypergluttonous ward of the state whose limitless fraud and criminal conspiracies we'll all be paying for until the end of time.

By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future.

By incentivizing Wall Street players to sniff out inefficient or corrupt companies and bet against them, short-selling acts as a sort of policing system; legal short-sellers have been instrumental in helping expose firms like Enron and WorldCom.

Candidates don't want to be associated with poor people, people who have jobs or are ugly; they want to be associated with a certain middle class demographic, so as a result they leave those others out completely.

Comparing your family budget to the sovereign debt of the United States is a little like comparing two kindergartners tossing a paper airplane to the Apollo 11 mission.

Creating legislation is a tough process. But watering down legislation? Strangling it with lawsuits and comment letters and blue-ribbon committees? Not so tough, it turns out.