The political disfunction that has brought about the shutdown and now threatens default, isn't so much gridlock. It is exposing the fatal flaw in our Constitution and highly distinct system of government. In other words, it's the Constitution's fault. Something truly catastrophic was bound to happen sooner or later.

Why Hollywood has killed so many movie stars with cigarette smoking, with the romanticization of it from John Wayne to Humphrey Bogart, all those people had cancer, died of it, and sold cigarettes their whole career.

There's no real organised body, ... so through the internet people have spread their videos, spread photos, and spread word of a new urban movement.

It's not uncommon for revolutions to stem from a radicalized group just outside the circle of power. That's what the French Revolution was all about; that's what the American Revolution was. The question is: Will all those groups, because of the nature of partisan polarization and ideological polarization, just fight each other? Or is there capacity to organize?

The desire to punish is a desire that emanates from a place of equality and justice. The lesson I feel that we have to confront is that that impulse is so easily transmuted into something corrosive and corrupt in how it's actually put into practice. That's the danger. It's not that the impulse is wrong or unjust or not totally righteous. It's that the ways in which the system that operates, the system that we've constructed tends to not deliver the promise of equity we might want, when we look to the system to provide it.

We are looking at live pictures at this moment of a protest that is happening in Atlanta, Georgia, I believe, that has been assembled by the NAACP in protest, of course, of the shooting of Keith Lamont Scott.

I think that`s a plausible strategy. But I also think there is a case to be made that [Hillary] Clinton actually in some ways is best served by almost ignoring him and the sort of marginal voters that there are to get for Hillary Clinton are voters who already think poorly of Donald Trump and are not sold on her.