Campaigns are no longer high-minded exchanges of ideas, even though God knows we need more good ones - ideas, that is.

It's better to be black than gay because when you're black you don't have to tell your mother.

As a writer, I have to admit, there is something darkly compelling about Alzheimer's because it attacks the two things most central to a writer's craft - language and memory, which together make up an individual's identity. Alzheimer's makes a new character out of a familiar person.

Ronald Reagan was a dim hack who did horrible damage to almost everything he touched.

There is a lot in American politics (and in American life) that is angry, greedy, reckless and violent.

For all the huffing and blowing we get about rugged individualism, the American spirit and the American experiment always have had at their heart the notion that the government is all of us and that, therefore, the government may keep things in trust for all of us.

The Republicans find their faith imperiled by Barney Frank's marriage. There is always a shadow on the wall, a monster in the closet, a mysterious rustling in the teeming underbrush of the conservative Id.