From my experience, politicians are much more uncomfortable being made fun of than they are being preached at and screeched at - you know, and the soapbox routine. They're much more uneasy knowing they're a target of ridicule.

There's so much hate that we direct externally that we forget we have our own psychos. But that's the role of the satirist - you have to examine your own country and say, look!

You can do the best research and be making the strongest intellectual argument, but if readers don't get past the third paragraph you've wasted your energy and valuable ink.

The TV commercials, which are endless and fairly crass, gave birth to Brock, the bad-lawyer character in Razor Girl. In real life you can find even sleazier examples than him.

I'm sort of fascinated by America's fascination with rednecks, the whole Duck Dynasty thing. Being a white guy from the South, I find it amazing that so many TV viewers are enchanted by beards, bad dentistry and moonshine accents.

When you're given a newspaper column, you're not being paid to sit on a fence and scratch your chin and say 'On the one hand this' and 'On the other hand that.' You're getting paid for your opinion.

As a lobbyist he had long ago concluded there was no difference in how Democrats and Republicans conducted the business of government. The game stayed the same: It was always about favors and friends, and who controlled the dough. Party labels were merely a way to keep track of the teams; issues were mostly smoke and vaudeville. Nobody believed in anything except hanging on to power, whatever it took.