How can you have the mess we have in New Orleans, and not have had deep investigations of the federal government, the state government, the city government, and the failure of citizenship in the Ninth Ward, where 22,000 people were so uneducated and so unprepared, they literally couldn't get out of the way of a hurricane.

Can we drop a little bit of the pious baloney? The fact is, you ran in '94 and lost. That's why you weren't serving in the Senate with Rick Santorum. The fact is, you had a very bad re-election rating, you dropped out of office, you had been out of state for something like 200 days preparing to run for president. You didn't have this interlude of citizenship while you thought about what you do. You were running for president while you were governor.

We have a choice between those who are failing to deliver and those who are unthinkable ... Neither party currently is where the country is.

The idea that a congressman would be tainted by accepting money from private industry or private sources is essentially a socialist argument.

When you have a 12-minute debate over whether lipstick on a pig refers to a demeaning comment about the vice presidential candidate, you know we're not talking about health reform, we're not talking about energy policy, we're not talking about balancing the budget. And you know, it's fairly stupid.

Would you pick me? I am so much my own agent, it would be - its inconceivable.

It may just be because I get homesick, but I have concluded Washington's cherry blossoms are just plain overrated.