Every technology, including the printing press, comes at some price.

Maybe we're all a little too desperate these days for a simple formula to explain how our safe world came unhinged. That, as much as anything, may explain one of the more enduring conspiracy theories of the moment, the notion that we are about to send a quarter of a million American soldiers to war for the sake of Israel.

Most recently, the president's reluctance to offend Senator Rick Santorum - a Catholic theocrat who believes that states should have the power to arrest gay lovers in their bedrooms, or even to criminalize couples who use contraceptives - was an occasion to wonder what, exactly, Mr. Bush was born-again into.

I think there's been a decline in the public's access to what's being done with their tax dollars, what's being done in their name. I hope that that will be repaired.

I do care if religious doctrine becomes an excuse to exclude my fellow citizens from the rights and protections our country promises.

A vote for Mitt Romney is a vote for Satan.

I'm convinced that the most important division in human affairs is probably not the one between left and right, liberal and conservative. It's the one between zealotry and understanding, between absolute conviction and compromise, between preachers and politicians.