A drone is a high-tech version of an old army and a musket. It ought to be used in Somalia to hunt bad guys, but not in America. I don't want to see it hovering over anybody's home.

When the Cleveland Cavaliers lost the 2015 NBA Finals to Golden State, LeBron James sat motionless in the locker room, staring straight ahead, still wearing his game jersey, for 45 minutes after the final buzzer. Here was a guy immensely wealthy, widely admired, at the peak of his powers - yet stricken, inconsolable.

This is a formidable enemy. To dismiss it as a bunch of 'cowards' perpetuating 'senseless acts of violence' is complacent nonsense. People willing to kill thousands of innocents while they kill themselves are not cowards. They are deadly vicious warriors and need to be treated as such.

Trump's relentless public humiliation of Attorney General Jeff Sessions was clearly intended to get him to resign.

The Internet is a cauldron of anger every day, every year, election year or not, with unemployment at 10 percent or at two percent. It isn't exactly a good index of what's happening.

Baseball is a slow, boring, complex, cerebral game that doesn't lend itself to histrionics. You 'take in' a baseball game, something odd to say about a football or basketball game, with the clock running and the bodies flying.

There used to be a cruel joke that said Brazil is the country of the future, and always will be; Obama is the Brazil of today's politicians. He has obviously achieved nothing.

Ideas matter. Legislative proposals matter. Slick campaigns and dazzling speeches can work for a while, but the magic always wears off.

I was a Great Society liberal on domestic issues. People ask me, 'How do you go from Walter Mondale to Fox News?' The answer is, 'I was young once.' End of answer.

Sometimes it's easy to go where the wind blows, but those that stand firmly planted are forces to be reckoned with.

For every moment of triumph, there is an unequal and opposite feeling of despair. Take that iconic photograph of Muhammad Ali standing triumphantly over the prostrate, semiconscious wreckage of Sonny Liston. Great photo. Now think of Liston. Do the pleasure/pain calculus.

Every two years the American politics industry fills the airwaves with the most virulent, scurrilous, wall-to-wall character assassination of nearly every political practitioner in the country - and then declares itself puzzled that America has lost trust in its politicians.

I leave this life with no regrets. It was a wonderful life - full and complete with the great loves and great endeavors that make it worth living.

The normalization of Trump is one indicator that there may be less to the populist insurrection than imagined.

I believe that the pursuit of truth and right ideas through honest debate and rigorous argument is a noble undertaking.

You're betraying your whole life if you don't say what you think - and you don't say it honestly and bluntly.

Whenever you're faced with an explanation of what's going on in Washington, the choice between incompetence and conspiracy, always choose incompetence.

The Great Bailout is mostly over for the banks. But for those troubled behemoths of the nation's housing bust, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the lifeline from Washington just keeps getting longer.

State and federal studies indicate that thousands of water and sewer systems may be too old to function properly.

There is no central government database that allows officials to monitor water tests by local systems.

Government and other scientists have identified hundreds of chemicals that are linked to diseases in small concentrations and that are unregulated in drinking water or policed at limits that still pose serious risks.

Union leaders argue that pension shortfalls account for a proportionally tiny portion of governments' financial problems, and by all accounts, there are plenty of parties to blame for the growth in payrolls and obligations.

America has always had an apocalyptic strain. Yet it also seems to believe that if, or when, The End comes, it will still come out on top.

Charles Wyly was born Oct 13, 1933, in Lake Providence, La., and for a period lived with his family in a shack without electricity or plumbing.