The [Donald] Trump campaign turned on a dime instantly as soon as those WikiLeaks dumps started.

The primary agency responsible for rallying U.S.-led interests around the world appears to be having the air sucked out of it. If you are Russia and you are looking at that right now, do you love what you are seeing?

That`s how you end up with a guy like Dan Fried, overseeing the U.S. sanctions against Russia for Russia did in Ukraine and Crimea.Russia hates those sanctions more than they love life. They hate those sanctions. So, of course, you need your toughest and most experienced guy running those sanctions.

Gay people exist. There's nothing we can do in public policy that makes more of us exist, or less of us exist. And you guys have been arguing for a generation that public policy ought to essentially demean gay people as a way of expressing disapproval of the fact that we exist, but you don't make any less of us exist. You just are arguing in favor of more discrimination, and more discrimination doesn't make straight people's lives any better.

I'd rather have none at all than a grain too much.

I'm in favor of outing when people have demonized or scapegoated gay people for their own public gain. I don't think just being a Republican is reason enough.

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.