The Capitol Building in Madison, Wisconsin has always been for me an inspiration. It's a stunning work of art fashioned from cold granite, and it makes of this unyielding material a very strong, yet welcoming edifice capable of embracing and even shaping the passions and aspirations of the people of Wisconsin. 

Since the advent of Reaganomics, both Repubs and Dems have fully embraced supply-side, trickle-down economic policy as the course that would provide growth and prosperity for all Americans. Indeed, there was no greater advocate of this than Bill Clinton, who established NAFTA as the standard for our Free Trade policies.

 Santa Claus was only one of the characters in the regular group of customers at my father’s tavern. This was a secret, however, that was kept from me. I knew him as Lemoyne Doucette, a house painter and a Frenchman of large girth and a robust laugh. His father had worked winters as a lumberjack in the northwoods and in one of the many sawmills in town during the summers. The lumbering boom had long since gone bust, and so Lemoyne had inherited little more from his father than a boyish sense of humor as well as a taste for good brandy.