Quote of the day

"We have always known that eternal vigilance is the price of freedom. It's worse now, because capture of government is so much more important than it once was. There was a time when there was enough freedom that it hardly mattered which brand of crooks ran government. That has not been true for a long time -- not during most of your lifetimes, and for much of mine -- and it will probably never be true again."

- Jerry Pournelle, author

Reminds me of a column George Will wrote after the so-called Republican Revolution of 1994.  His closing thought could be paraphrased this way: the measure of success of the Republicans who had just captured Washington would be whether, in the future, Washington is so important to capture.  A quarter-century later, I think we see how that worked out.

Centralized power is the bane of freedom, regardless which faction wields it.