Excessive partisanship is the problem. There has never been a democracy in the history of the world in a polity of any size where you didn't have political parties. Even sometimes over the objections of the people who started it.

If people knew of ethics violations, they should have sent them to the Ethics Committee. If you think there was serious ethics violation that ought to be looked at, you don't hold it back for retaliatory purposes.

When community action was put into federal law in the early sixties as part of the effort to combat poverty and social injustice, I supported it intellectually.

Trying to avert foreclosures, once you can't just force the banks to do it as a condition of getting aid, means that you have to put some public money into it or you have to do other things that are politically unpopular. From the macroeconomic standpoint there is overwhelming need to help people reduce what they owe so that we don't get the foreclosures and we don't get people kicked out of their homes. On the other hand, there is great resistance politically to helping people, not all of whom would be worth recipients of the help.

The rights of the people who have done terrible things are hard to defend. You have to keep pointing out, the question is the process to determine whether they've done the terrible things.

Well, many of us believe that excessive media concentration is a subject that ought to be addressed, and it is, of course, the intention of the majority party not to allow that to be discussed.

They appear to have become so attached to their outrage that they are even more outraged that they won't be able to be outraged anymore.