The most powerful country in world history, which is sure to set its stamp on what follows, placed the entire government (executive, legislative, judicial branches) in the hands of an organization - the Republican Party - dedicated to escalating the race to disaster.

If the authors and custodians of history turn out to have an attractive image, it is only reasonable to look beyond and ask whether the image they construct is accurate.

The death penalty can be tolerated only by extreme statist reactionaries who demand a state that is so powerful that it has the right to kill.

I didn't pay my taxes for years.

In the primary debates for the 2016 election, every single Republican candidate was a climate change denier, with one exception, John Kasich - the "rational moderate" - who said it may be happening but we shouldn't do anything about it. For a long time, the media have downplayed the issue.

The Ottoman Empire . . . The rulers in Turkey were fortunately so corrupt that they left people alone pretty much - were mostly interested in robbing them - and they left them alone to run their own affairs . . . with a lot of local self determination.

On intervention under the UN framework, I think that sometimes that's legitimate, in fact even helpful.