Democracy doesn't begin at the top; it begins at the bottom, when flesh-and-blood human beings fight to rekindle what Arlo Guthrie calls 'The Patriot's Dream.

Big money and big business, corporations and commerce, are again the undisputed overlords of politics and government. The White House, the Congress and, increasingly, the judiciary, reflect their interests. We appear to have a government run by remote control from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Petroleum Institute. To hell with everyone else.

Barack Obama strikes me as a man of strong principles and weak convictions - the kind of guy who would rather teach constitutional law than practice it, or who'd rather watch the match alone on TV than arm-wrestle his opponents.

I was not a public - I was not a thinker. I was a doer.

Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous.

Plutocracy too long tolerated leaves democracy on the auction block, subject to the highest bidder.

There's hardly a more bitter pill to take than when a President disappoints the people who most believed in him.