Shamu the killer whale is Sea World's Mickey Mouse; whales named Shamu are the star attractions of three parks and the focus of their marketing efforts.
Sea World's killer whale collection needs constant replenishing. The average life span of the animals in captivity is less than half the average for killer whales in the ocean.
Ralph Reed is deeply ambitious and always was so. There was a time when he... in one of my interviews, he said he pondered running the Ross Perot campaign, and he wasn't sure he wanted to do the Christian Right thing; he was worried that it boxed him into a corner.
Anyone who has been around Washington politics long enough can't avoid this truism: Election-year money is like a rushing river that invariably finds cracks in any dam the reformers erect.
Trying to decipher where President Obama really stands on free trade can be like trying to trace the U.S.-Mexico border with a Google map. There are words, and there are actions - but there is mostly that long squiggly line in between.
Unless engineers can stop southern Louisiana from sinking into the Gulf - the Mississippi Delta is the fastest-disappearing land on the planet - even post-Katrina's modernized levees will be overwhelmed.
The centerpiece of Obamanomics - raising taxes on high earners and investors and lowering them on the middle class - is attacked by free-marketers for penalizing economic success and possibly further stalling economic growth.
'George' exploits John Kennedy Jr.'s cult of celebrity at a time when Americans are hungry for icons, not heroes.
We know this much about how Barack Obama plans to govern: He will deploy the fattest checkbook ever at the disposal of an incoming American president.
If you like Obama, if you like a Washington that offers free stuff and taxing the rich, that's what you get. I don't see him evolving as a president.
Fame legitimizes. Being conspicuous gets confused with being illustrious.
Economically, long-term joblessness means fewer dollars for consumption. For deficit control, it means fewer taxpayers contributing to government revenues and tens of billions more spent on unemployment insurance.
The fierce battles between New Democrat centrists and old-style liberals that defined the Democratic Party in the 1990s are long gone, with the party unified behind Barack Obama's economic agenda of universal health care, expensive federal programs and more regulation of the financial markets.
When I visited the Water Institute's Baton Rouge offices overlooking the Mississippi River, I couldn't find a drop of the charged politics that drives so many environmental conversations in Washington.
Jobless workers, especially those out of work for months and years, don't have the skills to multitask in a fast-paced economy where medical workers need to know electronic record-keeping, machinists need computer skills, and marketing managers can no longer delegate software duties.
A desire to rescue secular America from fallen grace has driven conservative evangelicals at least since the 1970s, when Jerry Falwell formed the Moral Majority as a vehicle for conservative Christians to muscle their way into national politics.
To avoid becoming chronically unemployed, people need more than platitudes offering sympathy. Career reinvention requires encouragement and guidance.
One of my most vivid memories from 1974 was the gas station at the foot of the hill below my Southern California high school - car lines snaking out into the street, heralding the failure of the government's price controls and lame ideas such as odd-even rationing.
The longer people are unemployed, the less employable they become. Skills become rusty; managers look more suspiciously at someone who has been out of work for years than a candidate already employed.
If you want to know how Hillary Clinton could try to distance herself from President Obama's much-criticized foreign policy, listen closely to the words of her former top strategist, Anne-Marie Slaughter.
