The power of the silent filibuster to distort Senate politics is now accepted on Capitol Hill and by the press as normal and not worth mentioning. Let me be the skunk at this political garden party and say this stinks. Representative government was not designed to work this way by the Founding Fathers.

Cable would not translate into the public radio universe.

There's a difference between using the word to insult somebody and using it to start a journalistic conversation.

I'm not a predictable black liberal.

For me, the key is I always have to be the same person.If someone was to hear me say something on Fox and hear me say something different on NPR, they would say, 'The guy is a hypocrite.'

It's almost a shock to me to go into places, and there's smoking these days. Boy, my life has changed, because everybody used to smoke.

I think the president's [Barack Obama] position has been very clear on Syria. He wants more aggressive, he's put the Special Ops on the ground, in fact one of the Republican criticisms is he's got thousands of Americans there. We just don't call them troops on the ground, we don't admit to it. But they are there.