The soft bigotry of low expectations

The NSA is not looking through people's address books and Visa bills and violating the rights of average citizens. That's not what the NSA does.

Atheists can be good people; they just have no objective way to judge the conduct of those who are not.

The problem with these presidential debates like this is that you can't really prepare for them, because the questions are so individual and personal or even idiosyncratic. Secretary Hillary Clinton has a lot richer and deeper experience in doing these, obviously, than Donald Trump.

When your goal is to bring together the country in a substantive way to say that we're united by values and more - that are - you know, stronger than the things that divide us. That could be a moment.

The Republican Party has become more conservative. The Democratic Party has become marginally more liberal. There's almost no overlap in the middle, ideological overlap, in either house of Congress. That leaves moderates homeless. We have had a hollowing out of the middle in the U.S. Congress. There's less opportunity for compromise.

When you analyze it, Mike Pence could only defend Donald Trump in some circumstances by projecting an image of himself, as though he were - that Trump held his views on Russia or his views on Syria. And that's really not true. So, it was a weird way to defend the person at the top of your ticket.