If you're working on better conditions for prisoners, if you make that a popular issue and you invite mainstream media to weigh in on that subject, you're going to end up with a much more regressive public-policy environment than if you approach it in a quieter way. It's not because the public is stupid, it's just that people with only a cursory interest in something are going to have a knee-jerk reaction to it. That's impossible to explain in a cable-news media... it doesn't make sense.

It is hard to know what Sarah Palin means in Republican politics anymore.

If you're someone people count on, particularly in difficult moments, that's a sign of a life lived honorably.

There's nothing about the way my life unfolded that should be seen as at all prescriptive for what anybody else wants to do.

The Constitutional Convention debated whether America should even have a standing army. ... They worried that a powerful military could rival civilian government for power in our new country, and of course they worried that having a standing army around would create too much of a temptation to use it.

Here’s the thing about rights. They’re not actually supposed to be voted on. That’s why they’re called rights.

Internet's been down most of the day [at work]. Doing research by just asking everyone what we remember to be true. What could possibly go wrong?