Summarizing Sen. Mitch McConnell's speech: " ... in the 1980s, when the world said America was over, America said not quite, and when they said freedom was yesterday, America said I don't think so. Reagan 'stood taller than any statue.'"

But here is the portion that grabbed me:

The colors were presented. The U.S. Army chorus sang the national anthem so beautifully, with such harmonic precision and depth, that some dry eyes turned moist, including those of the crusty journalist to my right. Congressmen hear choirs sing patriotic songs all the time and grow used to it. The rest of us do not and are stirred. Tourists walk through the Rotunda and think to themselves that they'd die for the signs and symbols of this place. Lawmakers experience the Rotunda as a connecting point between House and Senate that's too often clogged by overweight tourists in shorts from Bayonne. We need term limits. When the music no longer moves you, you should leave. When you cannot leave, you should be pushed.

Amen.

Napolitano wouldn't elaborate on details during an appearance here Thursday in which she announced grants of about $59 million for local law enforcement efforts to combat crime along the southwestern border.

I'm all for fighting crime along the southwestern border. But Secretary Napolitano has a long history of spending money that doesn't exist, failing to provide any details, and then leaving other people -- usually Republicans -- to clean up the mess.

So now, in a day of multi-trillion dollar federal deficits, she is all smiles as she hands out federal money that is borrowed against our future. Meanwhile, six years of Napolitano overspending in Arizona created a huge problem she has left for Republicans to try to clean up, and even now there are no easy solutions.

History repeats itself. At some point, a responsible Republican administration will have to clean up the mess created by Obama administration overspending.

But it sure is fun to hand out money.

President Obama, with no Latinos in his Cabinet, was under intense pressure to choose a Hispanic woman, and federal appeals court judge Sonia Sotamayor was a perfect fit. Already, Democratic strategists are crowing about "locking up the Hispanic vote" for years to come as a result of this pick.

Republicans may be wary about opposing the first Hispanic high court nominee, despite her obvious liberal judicial philosophy and a You Tube clip showing her joking about federal appeals courts being the place where policy is made.

But if Democrats try to make too much of this historic first appointment, Republicans will be quick to remind them of their disgraceful treatment of federal appeals court judge nominee Miguel Estrada -- who after two appointments, 28 months and seven Senate filibusters -- withdrew his name from consideration. Estrada was opposed by Democrats precisely because they feared he could later become a Republican appointee to the Supreme Court. President Bush also appointed the first Latino Attorney General of the United States.

From my perspective, with the goal of a color-blind society in sight, I would like to see the focus for all candidates for high office be on their ability and judicial philosophy rather than their heritage or skin color.

The new results, obtained from Gallup's annual Values and Beliefs survey, represent a significant shift from a year ago, when 50% were pro-choice and 44% pro-life. Prior to now, the highest percentage identifying as pro-life was 46%, in both August 2001 and May 2002.

The May 2009 survey documents comparable changes in public views about the legality of abortion. In answer to a question providing three options for the extent to which abortion should be legal, about as many Americans now say the procedure should be illegal in all circumstances (23%) as say it should be legal under any circumstances (22%). This contrasts with the last four years, when Gallup found a strong tilt of public attitudes in favor of unrestricted abortion.

Of course, prior to Roe v. Wade and in the early days of our nation -- before any polls were taken -- the vast majority of our citizens knew the obvious: abortion was the taking of an innocent human life. The predecessor to the American Medical Association pushed for statutes on abortion during the mid-19th century -- an effort to codify the common law understanding that abortion was murder.

About a decade ago I wrote for the East Valley Tribune that abortion would end in America for the same reason slavery had to end -- it violates our nation's founding principles. We know as a people that we are endowed with certain unalienable rights, including the right to life. Our compassion as a people for the innocent, the vulnerable, the weak -- all of these values demand that we work to protect children in the womb.

While the continued movement toward life is a testament to the tireless efforts of pro-life leaders to increase public understanding of the issue, we have much work yet to do.

One fact these Gallup results make clear -- we have now elected a President and put in place Democratic political leadership in Congress who are dramatically out of touch with America on this vital issue.

And to top it all off -- I'm paying for his emails and his website!

Ironically, at almost exactly the same time, I got an email from the Goldwater Institute exposing the level of abuse of taxpayer funds by Arizona politicians to promote themselves.

The title is: "Shameless self-promotion: How politicians use your money to get re-elected."

I have some familiarity with the concept, having run for Governor against then-incumbent Janet Napolitano, who happily spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of our money to promote herself. And actually, there is much more than the report reveals -- as author Shawnna L.M. Bolick notes, the totals represent only "the tip of the iceberg."

Most disappointing to me is the presence on this list -- in a big way -- of politicians, including some friends, who are conservatives. The temptation to use your office to build name ID must be extraordinary, but I hope this report will encourage conservatives to abandon this practice as a violation of our commitment to fiscal integrity with taxpayer funds. There are plenty of ethical ways for an incumbent to stay in front of voters while performing legitimate functions of the office.

Take the time to read the report, and let your legislators know how you feel about your tax dollars being used for self-promotion rather than legitimate governmental purposes.

Winston Churchill's description of a political opponent applies to Souter: a modest man with much to be modest about.

Souter was nominated by the first President Bush during an era when liberal Democrats controlled the Senate Judiciary Committee, and on the heels of President Reagan's failure to get conservative Robert Bork onto the Court. Souter was touted as a "stealth" conservative who could get approved by the Senate because he hadn't really done anything they could complain about.

For about three years, Souter seemed to confirm that judgment. But beginning with his decision to reaffirm the essential holding of Roe v. Wade and his decision to block a simple prayer from being offered at a high school graduation, Souter has for many years formed a liberal, activist voting bloc with two Clinton appointees and Justice John Paul Stevens, appointed by President Ford.

The lesson for those who oppose liberal judicial activism? Make the case for originalism -- as Chief Justice Roberts did very effectively -- and let the political chips fall where they may. We can't win if we aren't willing to make an argument for the correct approach to the judiciary.

Once again we have a justice appointed by a conservative Republican who has wanted to leave the Court for years, but instead waited around for purely political reasons so that a liberal Democrat could pick his replacement.

For Souter -- having done his part to prevent the Rehnquist and Robert courts from fixing past judicial activism, and having deprived new generations of preborn children of the opportunity to have their lives protected by law -- now he can return to the anonymity and solitude he so strongly desired and richly deserves.

And a sense that the team in charge really doesn't have any idea what it is doing.

It seems like America is in trouble.

But we've been in tough spots before. On Thursday, 146 years will have passed since Abraham Lincoln called the nation to prayer and repentance in the midst of a civil war that claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of young Americans. Famously, Lincoln wrote in his April 30, 1863 Proclamation for "A Day of National Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer":

We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven. We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us!

It behooves us then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.

I'm not really concerned about whether it is politically correct to call people to pray, but I think Lincoln was on to something. Next week is the National Day of Prayer, and I'm delighted to be speaking at a citywide prayer breakfast in Flagstaff.

But a number of national and state leaders have asked us to start a week early, by remembering Lincoln's Proclamation and spending Thursday, April 30, 2009 as a day of humiliation, fasting and prayer. I will be reading Lincoln's entire Proclamation at a Christian prayer event Thursday at the State Capitol at 11 a.m. I hope to see you there, but if not, you can follow along at home -- please consider taking Thursday, April 30, as a special day to fast and pray for our nation.

Unshackled by bureaucratic, centralized control, people make rational choices. Success is rewarded, failure is penalized. In particular, people are motivated by knowing they live in a system where they will be rewarded financially through excellence in their chosen profession.

If you are one of the best singers, actors, baseball players, inventors or businessmen in America, it will pay off for you. In fact, success is rewarded in just about every arena -- except the profession of teaching. Might that have something to do with our abysmal record on public education?

Since 1960, after being adjusted for inflation, government spending on education has quadrupled. Does anyone believe our students are four times better educated now than in 1960? The issue is not how much we've spent, but how effectively we've spent it.

When I ran for Governor in 2006 I argued that if we want to attract and keep the best and the brightest in the teaching profession, we needed to institute a form of merit pay that rewards the most effective and successful teachers. I even suggested that under this system, we should be prepared to pay six-figure salaries to the very best public school teachers.

Now the Goldwater Institute has issued a report: "New Millennium Schools: Delivering six-figure teacher salaries in return for outstanding student learning gains." Read it. Pass it around.

And if we're serious about improving public education, let's start putting incentives into the teaching profession like they exist in the rest of the American economy.

The impression he leaves is that the American economy has always been a disaster, always on the verge of disaster -- until he came along to rebuild it. The reality is that our economy has long been the envy of the world, and even during the Bush years - despite an unprovoked and unprecedented terrorist attack, despite a Category 5 hurricane direct hit on New Orleans, etc. - the economy was so strong that Democratic governors were riding it to easy re-elections as late as 2006 (that's a sore point, sorry).

President Obama needs to talk down the economy and our American history in order to maintain the support he needs to do all the radical left-wing things that liberal ideologues have always wanted to do, including socialized health care, and widespread government control and regulation of the economy. He needs us to be scared; he needs a crisis. But those who understand history know that increasing governmental control of the economy and increasing government spending by taking money out of our pockets and out of the private sector will be an economic disaster.

What can those of us who believe in economic freedom and liberty do? Well we can start by showing up to stand in opposition. And your first opportunity to do so is tomorrow, on April 15, by participating in one of many Tea Parties throughout the United States. I will be attending the Tea Party at the Arizona Capitol Wednesday evening.

Hopefully our mere attendance at the Tea Parties won't put us on the federal government's "right-wing extremist" watch list.

While President Obama continues his international apology tour - asking forgiveness of the world for every American sin, real or perceived -- it was great to see President Bush celebrating America's unique pastime and getting a standing ovation from the crowd at a Texas Rangers' Opening Day baseball game.

It reminded me of the time President Bush took to the mound in Yankee Stadium -- shortly after 9/11 and under heightened security concerns -- and blew a fastball past radical Islam.

I'll give Obama credit for some basketball skill, but no President throws the opening pitch better than President Bush. And I love baseball.

Released in 2007, this terrorist is one of 60 former detainees at Guantanamo Bay who are now actively fighting American forces on behalf of radical Islam. His role - counter the U.S. troop surge in Afghanistan.

The notion that we are planning to either release prisoners of war during wartime or bring them to America and pay for their defense lawyers would be laughable if it weren't so pathetic.

Winston Churchill said it best: "The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries."

President Obama has us well on the way to spreading the misery equally.

Similar in many ways to the past four years. Tonight my son Will Munsil wrote a eulogy to the D'Antoni-Nash-era of the past four seasons on Facebook. I thought it was pretty good, so I decided to post it below. In fact, if newspapers weren't going defunct right and left, I would suggest some sports section give this kid a job:

A Shakespearean Decline and Fall, or, the 2004-2008 Phoenix Suns

Today at 8:30pm

So it's finally the end of the Suns era, at least this Suns era. Four years ago, when Nash was the MVP and Marion was still underrated and Amare was the next great power forward, and D'Antoni was a genius and Joe Johnson was the future...who knew it would end so soon, and so uncomfortably.

Suns fans are bitter, disillusioned, shell-shocked, delusional--it's not pretty how a titan tumbles.

As the league descends on Phoenix, here's the hard truth: this Suns team, no matter who we trade, hire, fire or boo, denounce or cheer, will not win a title this year, or likely soon.

So consider this my eulogy to the most heartbreaking and literary rise and fall sports will soon see, from the harsh territory of 28-23, ninth and sinking.

People say: "They were never going to win a championship, regular season success is meaningless, nothing matters except winning a ring." These people don't remember.

First and obviously, the regular season isn't meaningless. You can't tell me that four straight 58+win seasons, numerous All-Star selections, a Coach of the Year, two MVP Awards and three thrilling playoff runs (even with the attendant disappointments) mean nothing. Ask any team but the Spurs or Celtics or Heat if they would trade their last four years for ours.

Their answer would prove it. Those seasons were meaningful. Teams wanted to be the Suns. The fact that we didn't go all the way doesn't erase the truth that the Suns were, by any historical metric but the cruel tyranny of the trophy, an incredibly successful team.

What's more, the past four years of run-and-gun basketball not only revolutionized the league, but they provided more thrills and memorable moments than any other style of basketball could have produced, and I'll firmly believe this.

I still remember the moment I realized the Suns were going to be great that first year with Nash. I still remember when Q won the 3-point contest and the Suns were the talk of the league that first All-Star break. I still remember those games when Eddie House absolutely went insane hitting threes. I remember where I was when Tim Thomas hit that three against the Lakers to save our season without Amare, and when Raja Bell hit that miracle shot against the Clippers, and I remember how that season felt like us against the world--some upstart team with no center and a six-man rotation was within a few shots of winning a conference title.

I still remember the thrills and even the heartbreak of those Spurs series. Losing to them over and over, but always feeling like we were one break, one call, one bounce away.

"We beat on, boats against the current..."

I remember knowing we were better than them, just knowing it. It just wasn't in the cards maybe, but there's no way all of that was meaningless just because there was no title attached.

See, only one team can win a title every year.

It was never us. That doesn't mean the style couldn't win, or Nash couldn't lead us that far, or that D'Antoni's system was fatally flawed. It just meant that, for whatever reason, it didn't quite happen. It was tantalizingly close, but it never happened.

I've played in a few championship games in sports, and there are a few things that stick out to me. First, you have to get so many breaks to win a championship, no matter how good you are. People have to be healthy, your lineup has to be clicking, you have to get the bounces, you have to get lucky, sometimes. The Suns never had things break right like the Cardinals this year. They never had the easy draw, or the healthier team. They never got a little bit lucky.

Another thing about championships: there's nothing mystical about the games. One team wins, one team loses. Nothing about any particular style preordains it. The Spurs are not "built for the playoffs," they were built to be a good basketball team. The Suns weren't "built for the regular season," they were built to be a good basketball team.

The game is the same game, whenever you play it. With a few breaks, the conventional wisdom would be that in the new NBA, only high-scoring, great-shooting teams win in the playoffs, when games are further apart and teams have more time to rest. And you know what? The conventional wisdom would still be wrong. The Suns had their flaws. So did the Spurs. Their flaws were just ever-so-painfully, ever-so-slightly smaller. And they got the breaks.

So don't throw the past four years of Suns basketball away. I have a sneaking suspicion that twenty years from now we'll still remember these years as a sort of Golden Age. Sometimes greatness sneaks up on you, and it looks different than you expect, and it disappoints you, a little or a lot, in some unmeasurable way. Were the D'Antoni/Nash Suns any less great because they didn't win a title?

I say no. Their greatness just, for whatever reason, never won them a crown. So what? I'd take the last four years over this year, and, sadly, probably the next four, in a heartbeat.

In this Shakespearean tragedy the Suns of the early millennium have become, this was our tragic flaw:

We never quite recognized what was just out of our dim and murky vision. "We" means the fans, the owner, the GMs, the coaches, the players who wanted out, everyone. We never quite understood how great those Suns were until we lost them. C'est la vie, I guess. You can blame everyone, anyone, no one.

But what wouldn't you give to watch one more fast break dunk after a make, from out of bounds, to a streaking Nash, to a gliding Marion for the slam. One more Nash 3 in transition. One more perfect Dish to a thundering Amare, while the other center hangs his head and the basket screams for mercy. One more fusillade of glorious long-arching shots that forces a flustered timeout, while the arena rocks, and we wouldn't trade this team for anything, and it could never end.

But it ended. We may never see anything like it again

The Suns will probably win a championship someday. Who knows how long it will be, or what the team will look like. The uniforms may be different. The league may look different. The coaches and the players will be different. It will be indescribable. It'll feel like no team in the history of sports was as beautiful or as memorable or as meaningful to its fans.

Sic transit gloria mundi. Even that will fade, someday.

See, fans don't get rings. We don't "win" anything. Being a fan isn't about that. It's about the moments. Following a team is about the moments that, in some small way, shape a time in your life and give a city, a community, some ineffable thing to hold in common.

And those Suns gave us more moments that made us proud and thrilled to be a fan than any other team I've followed, even teams that have won World Series, or made Super Bowls.

It's a shame we never won. It would be a bigger shame if we let a few tough losses in epic playoff series wash those moments away.

Trial continues Monday in the federal lawsuit, which seeks $32 million in actual and punitive damages for civil rights violations, the infliction of emotional distress and other crimes....

The lawsuit is based on a March 7, 2004, incident in a dry wash on the 22,000-acre ranch, when he approached a group of illegal immigrants while carrying a gun and accompanied by a large dog.

Attorneys for the immigrants - five women and 11 men who were trying to cross illegally into the United States - have accused Mr. Barnett of holding the group captive at gunpoint, threatening to turn his dog loose on them and saying he would shoot anyone who tried to escape.

*****

Mr. Barnett told The Washington Times in a 2002 interview that he began rounding up illegal immigrants after they started to vandalize his property, northeast of Douglas along Arizona Highway 80. He said the immigrants tore up water pumps, killed calves, destroyed fences and gates, stole trucks and broke into his home.

Some of his cattle died from ingesting the plastic bottles left behind by the immigrants, he said, adding that he installed a faucet on an 8,000-gallon water tank so the immigrants would stop damaging the tank to get water.

Mr. Barnett said some of the ranch´s established immigrant trails were littered with trash 10 inches deep, including human waste, used toilet paper, soiled diapers, cigarette packs, clothes, backpacks, empty 1-gallon water bottles, chewing-gum wrappers and aluminum foil - which supposedly is used to pack the drugs the immigrant smugglers give their "clients" to keep them running.

Judge Roll should dismiss this ridiculous lawsuit at his earliest opportunity. The state of Arizona should award Mr. Barnett a medal. And the federal government should create a program to reimburse property owners for the cost and inconvenience of their failure to secure the border.

So he's had a pretty good run. But now he's running into serious opposition to his pork-laden spending bill, and he's not happy about it. In fact, the legendary "campaign cool" has gone missing, and instead we are seeing arrogance and anger.

Just a few weeks ago he claimed that his election signified that we have "chosen hope over fear ...". But last week he shifted into a mode of trying to scare us into immediately supporting a massive spending bill. Why? Because we have to do something, and we have to do it right away. But even his own people don't know whether it will help. And most economists think it is a pork-laden disaster.

Columnist Charles Krauthammer explains it well:

It's the essential fraud of rushing through a bill in which the normal rules (committee hearings, finding revenue to pay for the programs) are suspended on the grounds that a national emergency requires an immediate job-creating stimulus -- and then throwing into it hundreds of billions that have nothing to do with stimulus, that Congress' own budget office says won't be spent until 2011 and beyond, and that are little more than the back-scratching, special-interest, lobby-driven parochialism that Obama came to Washington to abolish. He said.

Not just to abolish but to create something new -- a new politics where the moneyed pork-barreling and corrupt logrolling of the past would give way to a bottom-up, grass-roots participatory democracy. That is what made Obama so dazzling and new. Turns out the "fierce urgency of now" includes $150 million for livestock insurance.

The Age of Obama begins with perhaps the greatest frenzy of old-politics influence peddling ever seen in Washington....

After Obama's miraculous 2008 presidential campaign, it was clear that at some point the magical mystery tour would have to end. The nation would rub its eyes and begin to emerge from its reverie. The hallucinatory Obama would give way to the mere mortal. The great ethical transformations promised would be seen as a fairy tale that all presidents tell -- and that this president told better than anyone.

I thought the awakening would take six months. It took two and a half weeks.