When I'm on TV, I'm often talking to a conservative host. I may have another conservative arguing with me. You've got very limited time, and you're using 'sound-bite' type language.

In black America there's such a thing as passing, the black people who are light skinned and they will pass for white.

Gun-related violence and murders are concentrated among blacks and Latinos in big cities.

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

Democrats cannot win elections without capturing the votes of independent-minded swing voters. And that is where writing off the Tea Party as a bunch of racist kooks becomes self-destructive. The Tea Party outrage over health-care reform, deficit spending and entitlements run amok is no fringe concern.

In the 2000 presidential election, Al Gore got more votes than George W. Bush, but still lost the election. The Supreme Court's ruling in Florida gave Bush that pivotal state, and doomed Gore to lose the Electoral College. That odd scenario - where the candidate with the most votes loses - has happened three times in U.S. history.

In other words, United States, our values, the way that we occupy ourselves in terms of saying here's the way we stand in this country when we go to war, it's not that we go in and we kill off anybody, including families. We don't take the riches. We don't claim the women. My God, that's not America.