America is an incredibly polarized country politically. I think ANY Republican would start out with 42 percent of the vote.

I always love it when a small paper wins. When I was growing up in the Bronx, the editor of the Riverdale Press - a neighborhood rag - kept submitting his columns for a Pulitzer. We laughed and laughed at his ego. He finally won.

My neighborhood is fairly white, yet the local middle school is all black. It is bad. It is very bad.

I feel like no matter what happens in my career endeavors after today, going to grad school is one of the best decisions I've ever made.

Allowing a non-lawyer to be on the Supreme Court strikes me as a very American thing, in a good way. Another is that the speaker of the house doesn't have to be a member of congress. He or she can be anyone. I'm not sure if James Madison really intended that, or if the wording was accidentally imprecise, but the Constitution, as a recall, simply says that the House shall chuse a speaker.

International politics is not my strong suit. The older I get the less certain I am that I even HAVE a strong suit.

Ever since roughly 1890, when snot poets first decided that rhyme was confining and unnecessary, every idiot with a pen fancied hisself a poet. The mere act of rhyming was suddenly regarded as a quaint, mannered, and uncool atavism, consigning doggerelists like me to the trash bin of literary history.