The Iraq fight itself is probably going to go very, very fast. The shooting should be over within just a very few days from when it starts.

You've worked hard all your life. You've paid Medicare taxes for almost 30 years. But under the Republican plan, Medicare won't be there for you. Instead of Medicare as it exists now, under the Republican plan you'll get a voucher that will pay as little as half your Medicare costs when you turn 65—and as little as a quarter in your 80s. And all so that millionaires and billionaires can have a huge tax cut.

You can have these fake engagements, these virtual engagements that substitute for actual engagements. You don't have to participate, you can hit a button, send you 200 dollars to the Barack Obama for President campaign and think it's like you knocked on a door. But you didn't knock on a door.

So if I have two pieces of cake, do I have twice as good an experience as the first piece of cake? One of the things I've found in life is that the first piece of cake is the best.

Crown Prince Rupprecht, the heir to the throne of Bavaria who commanded the army group facing the British at the Somme, was the senior direct lineal heir of James Stuart, the Old Pretender of 1715. Had there been any Jacobites left in Britain in 1916, they would have had to regard this south German prince as their rightful king.

We're not free because other people are nice, maybe other people aren't nice that day. We're free because we expect the institutions of government to work impersonally. That we expect people in government to understand they don't work for the president or the prime minister, they work for the government. And the government is always there.

If we say something often enough, we come to believe it. We don't usually delude others until after we have first deluded ourselves.