Forbes.com

In the 33 months since the launch of Amazon's Kindle platform, sales of Kindle e-books have surpassed sales of hardcover books. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos predicts that e-book sales will surpass paperback sales within the next 12 months, and combined hardcover and paperback sales soon after that. This despite the fact that the 600,000 titles in the Kindle bookstore represents only a fraction of Amazon's inventory.

As a very strange and very surprising primary season draws to a close, we're starting to get a sense of what the next Congress might look like. A number of unconventional conservatives, like Rand Paul of Kentucky and Sharron Angle of Nevada, are more than holding their own in early Senate polling. This is despite active efforts to characterize both candidates as dangerous extremists. As senators, Paul and Angle can be expected to vigorously oppose any expansion of the federal government.

If the U.S. were a stock, it would be trading at historic lows. The budget deficit is out of control, the economy is anemic and the political system is controlled by academic ideologues and Chicago hacks. Opposing them is a force largely comprised of know-nothings--to call them Neanderthals would be too complimentary.

Not surprisingly, many Americans have become pessimistic. Two in three adults now fear their children will be worse off than they are. Nearly 40% think China will become the world's dominant power in the next 20 years, as indicated by a recent survey.

Last week Bruce Bartlett devoted his Forbes column to criticizing plans for a budget commission to make recommendations on how to deal with the country's fiscal imbalances. This is the approach the White House and Congress seem poised to pursue to come up with the specific policies to put the nation's budget back on a sustainable path.

In the science fiction novel The Unincorporated Man, Dani Kollin and Eytan Kollin describe a future world in which all individuals are "incorporated" at birth. Of each infant's 100,000 shares, 20,000 are given to the parents and another 5,000 are assigned to the government. And as that child reaches maturity, more shares are sold off in exchange for food, clothing and education. Only a lucky few adults manage to ever acquire a controlling interest in themselves.

Michigan is staring into the fiscal abyss. Rather than carefully pare back a bloated state government, Michigan's leaders, Republicans and Democrats, spent the last decade touting expensive and futile industrial policies designed to save them from making hard choices.

The fight over the Democratic health reform proposals keeps bringing me back to the fight over invading Iraq, when I was convinced that we had no choice but to abide by the Bush administration's timetable. As U.S. military forces gathered in the Gulf, the question of whether to use military force quickly became one of when and not if.

Last week, the debate over the Democratic health reform effort took a brief and unexpected philosophical turn. Bart Stupak, a pro-labor Catholic Democrat representing Michigan's 1st congressional district, managed to pass the Stupak amendment as part of the House health bill. Sensing that an insurrection among anti-abortion Democrats threatened to derail the legislation, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who ardently opposes restrictions on abortion, allowed Stupak to offer the amendment, and it passed by a wide margin thanks to Republican votes.

Is racism universal? Since the end of the colonial era, the rising powers of the developing world have been quick to condemn Western racism. Ethnocentrism and color prejudice can be found in virtually all human societies, going back centuries if not thousands of years.