Most people have a sense that things have gone terribly wrong. It's not just some giveaways to the rich and the rigging of regulatory rules. It's something fundamental. The very idea of America is being stolen, and people are sensing that with a tremor within their hearts. They are taking away this core notion of the common good, this idea that we are all in it together. They are diverting America from our historic striving towards egalitarianism, which is why America exists. It's the thing that makes us unique in history. That's what people are sensing. We are going down the wrong path.

You can't do progressive government from the inside. You have to rally those outsiders and make them a force.

But, as my mother used to tell me, two wrongs don't make a right. But I soon figured out that three left turns do.

What created democracy was Thomas Paine and Shays Rebellion, the suffragists and the abolitionists and on down through the populists and the labor movement, including the Wobblies. Tough, in your face people... Mother Jones, Woody Guthrie... Martin Luther King and Caesar Chavez. And now it’s down to us.

Reagan promised everyone a seven-course dinner. Ours turned out to be a possum and a six-pack.

When I entered politics, I took the only downward turn you could take from journalism.

The real bias of the media is not to the left or to the right, but to the thin strata of economic elites at the top of our society.