Since arriving in Washington in January 2015, I have pushed for a strategic framework that clearly articulates how we'll tackle threats in cyberspace.

The nature and scope of security threats in the cyber era are four-dimensional compared to the early nuclear age.

There were giant scale barriers to becoming a nuclear power, whereas launching a cyberattack requires only some coding capability, a laptop and an Internet connection.

My grandma was a child of the Depression, and knew the tragedy of having her home outside Diller was destroyed by a tornado.

We must repeal Obamacare, but even more, we must replace the worldview that underlies and enabled it.

The first time I began to really think about politics was in fifth grade, during President Reagan's first term.

The American work ethic is, thankfully, still deeply engraved in rural Nebraska souls. This is who we are, and we here in Nebraska have far more to teach Washington, D.C. than Washington, D.C. has to teach us.

I think we should have a universal, a shared cultural or societal goal, of universal health insurance coverage. That's completely different from saying the government can solve all of those problems, or that it can micromanage every aspect of the health delivery system. I think we know that it can't do that.

We should be reforming our entitlement programs to empower people.

I think Medicaid harms people.

I think most Americans believe in a basic social safety net.

Our pandering politicians compete to add names to the dependency of entitlement rolls instead of evaluating the success of these programs by how many people leave the dole and are restored to an independence. And these bulging entitlements are saddling our offspring with unsustainable generational debt.

I'm often asked by search committees for public and private universities to help them think about how to find their next president.

As a former college president, I am well aware that every university is a complicated ecosystem, not a linear widget factory.

An institution of higher education is a partnership among students and alumni, faculty and administrators, donors and trustees, neighborhoods and more, to build a community - and a culture.

From the first-year students' fall orientation to the board's annual budget-approval meeting, everything a healthy college does requires a shared sense of mission.

It doesn't matter whether the challenge we face is large or small, whether it's a statewide disaster or a crisis just on our own block - Nebraskans face it with courage, goodwill, and the unwavering conviction that we are part of one community of neighbors and friends.

Every day, across our state, we see grit and resilience.

Before becoming a college president, I helped over a dozen organizations find strategies to get through some very ugly crises.

One important lesson I learned over and over is that, when you walk into any troubled organization, there is a delicate balance between expressing human empathy and yet not passively sweeping hard truths under the rug.

Reducing everything immediately to good and evil is bad history - not only because it isn't true, but because reductionism is unpersuasive; it is boring. Good history, on the other hand, demands that one talk socratically - that one can present alternate viewpoints, not strawman arguments.

Good history is good story-telling. And good story-telling demands empathy; it requires understanding different actors, differing motivations, competing goals.

In policy arena after policy arena, Democrats respond to every failure of clunky government by proposing the addition of still more layers to 1960s-era bureaucracies as they break down.

Republicans must sell a big-cause, problem-solving vision - low-ego and happy-warrior in tone.

We must energetically tackle the significant problems the voters rightly want Washington to be addressing.

The signers of the Declaration of Independence did not pledge their fortunes and sacred honor so the federal government could play 'helicopter parent' to a free people. They saw government as our shared project to secure liberty, doing a few big things and doing them well.

Obamacare has eliminated choices for millions of families, suffocated patient-centered medical innovation, and moved the United States closer to European-style centralized planning.

We must not extend nor expand Obamacare. We need a completely different solution to help those caught in the Obamacare snare.

We cannot let Obamacare expand geographically by setting up state exchanges, nor can we extend Obamacare's unlawful subsidies.

Obamacare cannot be fixed and Republicans must not extend this disastrous legislation.

Obamacare arrived also because Republicans failed to persuade the public that we could address the avalanche of problems government had already created by decades of interfering with the health-care market.

Democrats have long held an advantage over Republicans on health care, mostly due to a perceived empathy problem in my party.

Obamacare is not popular.

A family's desire to be able to keep its health insurance when changing jobs or geography (a problem that Obamacare doesn't make any better, by the way) is perfectly reasonable.

At our house we have come to conclude that building and strengthening character will require extreme measures and the intentional pursuit of gritty work experiences.

When I was a kid, we had airconditioning in the house... but we never used it.

We lack an educated, resilient citizenry capable of navigating the increasing complexities of daily life.

My wife, Melissa, and I, together with our neighbors, try to create experiences for our kids that build character. We want our kids to exercise their muscles and their minds.

The health of our republic depends on shared principles like the First Amendment, but it is also built on the Teddy Roosevelt-like vigor of its citizens and local self-reliance.

Becoming a reader grows our horizons, our appetite for the good, the true and the beautiful, and our empathy.

Few experiences help our kids discover the distinction between needs and wants like the great outdoors.

Deepfakes - seemingly authentic video or audio recordings that can spread like wildfire online - are likely to send American politics into a tailspin, and Washington isn't paying nearly enough attention to the very real danger that's right around the corner.

The word deepfake has become a generic noun for the use of machine-learning algorithms and facial-mapping technology to digitally manipulate people's voices, bodies and faces. And the technology is increasingly so realistic that the deepfakes are almost impossible to detect.

Rising political tribalism, shamelessly exaggerating our opponents' claims or behavior, is leaving us vulnerable: No one loves America's internal fighting - and our increasingly siloed news consumption - more than Vladimir Putin.

Some of the United States' enemies now assume, perhaps rightly, that we hate each other so much that we'd sooner collaborate with them than do the difficult work of listening to each other. It doesn't need to be this way - but national recovery won't come from Washington. It has to start with you.

The NBA has prided itself on free expression. Its players and owners have a well-earned reputation for speaking out on social justice in the United States. Sadly, it seems woke capitalism stops at the water's edge.

The Chinese Communist Party and the American people are locked in conflict.

With a population of 1.4 billion, China is a lucrative market. But getting into that market isn't cheap. At best, the price of doing business in China is silence; at worst, it's reading talking points straight from the Chinese Communist Party. Beijing is not subtle about it.

We ought to have the courage of our convictions and confidence in our own ingenuity. After all, that's what America is all about. Either that, or learn Mandarin.

Look at trade and automation: two competing but slightly overlapping forces in the shrinking of the duration of jobs right now. We have to be able to talk honestly about how disrupted this world is going to be, and it is crazy to mislead people and say we're going to bring back all of the big factory jobs by creating a protectionist regime.