The key question: will the NSA continue to monitor hundreds of millions of people without any suspicion? Under Obama's proposals: Yes.

The ultimate test of a society's freedom is not how it treats its good, obedient, compliant citizens; it's how it treats its dissidents.

One should be weary of drawing too many inferences from a single poll. You can find wildly disparate results with two different polls. There is no question that American Muslims remain one of the most marginalized and demonized groups in United States. There has been a sustained propaganda campaign against Muslims for over a decade and it doesn't disappear over night. Those attitudes are hardened. But one of the things that polling often doesn't measure is the intensity of opinions.

If you remove the fear of criminal punishment for the nation's political and financial elites - as we have done - what possible constraint on their behavior does anyone think will remain?

As the American Muslim community gets a little bit freer in terms of not being under the thumb of that kind of oppressive mentality, there is going to be some internal dissent. When you are consciously oppressed, you tend to sort of band together and unite because there's a necessity to do so. And that as that proceeds, some of those difference get more into the fore and I think that's the reason you are seeing some internal dissension as a byproduct of the fact that there is not this kind of immediate urgency to unify against this kind of onslaught because that onslaught is refuted.

Terrorism': the word that means nothing, yet justifies everything.

Significant and seemingly impossible social and political change happens more often than we think, and it happens more rapidly than we realize. Even the most momentous change is always possible if one finds the right way to make it happen.