A wise soul once declared that the ultimate power of the writer is that he has the choice of whom he wants to be co-opted by.

[Betsy DeVos] does care about charter schools, which are public schools. She does care about choice, which is a perfectly legitimate thing to care about. It's because it's the one issue where the Democratic donor base was really energized, which was the teacher unions.

People ask, quite legitimately, why [Betsy] DeVos and why not a lot of the others? But it's because it has to do with the special interest groups that run a lot of Washington.

If you just rely on one model, you tend to amputate reality to make it fit your model.

Bill Clinton pandered by telling you what you wanted to hear. John Kerry panders by never telling you what you don't want to hear. This is negative pandering; he talks a lot without really ruling anything out so you can draw your own conclusions.....Kerry has been talking for years, and yet such is the thicket of his verbiage that he has achieved almost complete strategic ambiguity.

I was really fortunate that I went to a high school where we actually had a film theory program.

Memo to young journalists: Democratic victories are always ascribed to hope; Republican ones to rage.