Our military doesn't defend our American people. Our military is the strong-arm muscle of corporations.

That's why you need the war on drugs to put all these pot smokers in prison so that the prisons remain full and the corporations remain profitable. It's a slippery slope.

Industrial hemp is a very useful plant. I challenged the attorney general to get rid of the criminal stigma associated with hemp so we can look at it in terms of how it might be useful.

I went out to testify in front of the Ways and Means Committee out in Congress on open free trade to China. Now, this would affect literally every Minnesotan in some way or another, if not all Americans in some way or another....The local media sent no one out to cover my testimony....Well, then a couple weeks later, I go out to do The Young and the Restless, the TV soap opera, and everybody sends crews. We had to move them into a room in three different sections or three shifts of them because there was so much media covering that.

Government works less efficiently when it begins to grow out of control and takes on more and more of the responsibilities that belong to the citizens.

I'm a warrior at heart; I'm an ex-Navy Seal. I'm too old to wage war anymore, and so now I wage it mentally. And so I find politics very stimulating; it's war without guns.

I don't think I would want the responsibility for enforcing the death penalties. There's always the inevitable question of whether someone you gave the order to execute might truly have been innocent.