Particularly when we are a country where leaders turn over every few years and - I mean, in Russia, Vladimir Putin has been in charge for 17 years and counting, right? That`s a disadvantage for us in terms of knowing the players, having a long-term plan, right?

But there's a reason that we have different laws for juveniles than we do for adults. And it's because kids are not liable for the things they do in the way that adults are, because we think that kids are different.

The artificial primacy of defense among our national priorities is a constant unearned windfall for some, but it's privation for the rest of America; it steals from what we could be and can do. In Econ 101, they teach that the big-picture fight over national priorities is guns versus butter. Now it's butter versus margarine—guns get a pass. Overall, we're weaker for it, and at enormous cost.

When Ronald Reagan spoke a thing aloud, he believed it forever and for always. By the time he started running for president, in 1976, he had already developed an unwavering and steadfast faith in the correctness of whatever came out of his mouth.

It makes sense in that environment that you would hold on in the U.S. government to the people who know their way around this particular block.

[Dan fried] is the department`s foremost Russia expert and he, too, is now leaving at a time when arguably the State Department needs it most, the State Department will not have the benefit of his insight going forward.

I'm gonna vote against Donald Trump .