I had someone call me this morning telling me they had somebody who would only work a certain number of hours a week because if they worked too many hours a week then they couldn't get their government assistance. And that person has multiple cell phones and gets them new every month with new minutes.

People in Oklahoma don't wake up every morning wondering what the government is going to do for them.

I was scheduled to give my first official press conference that morning anyway 'cause I was chairman of the Governors Energy Council and I was making a press conference with regard to energy policy.

The attorney general would call at 5 o'clock in the evening and say: 'Tomorrow morning we are going to try to integrate the University of Mississippi. Get us a memo on what we're likely to do and what we can do if the governor sends the National Guard there.'

I was a government employee in the morning and a writer in the evening.

'Not again!' I thought to myself this morning as news trickled out that John McCain was set to pick Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. Not again because too often women are promoted for the wrong reasons and then blamed when things don't go right.

There is a basic lesson on financial crises that governments tend to wait too long underestimate the risks want to do too little. And it ultimately gets away from them and they end up spending more money causing much more damage to the economy.

You know that I am living proof that the American Dream is real. Growing up our congressman cut through government bureaucratic red tape to help my mom buy our first house. That's the kind of congressman I'll be.

Men are governed by lines of intellect - women: by curves of emotion.

Of all the men that have run for president in the twentieth century only George McGovern truly understood what a monument America could be to the human race.