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.

John McCain from the very beginning has been unflinchingly loyal to Sarah Palin. He has never thrown her under the bus. He has never conceded it was a bad decision to pick her. He has never ever said a bad word against her.

if you want to achieve immortality, see what you can do about getting yourself turned into a Pentagon program.

When it starts to seem like you have popped into bed with a specific party, it makes it difficult for people to believe you are not doing someone else's bidding for them.

Senator [Tom] Cotton has campaigned on wanting to kill Obamacare. He voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act back in January, but he now says, despite these marathon all-night sessions going on in the House, Republicans need to do better, they need to start over, they need to come up with something that the Senate says will actually reduce prices for insurance and keep it affordable.

The new [Donald Trump] administration may not want the benefit of [Dan Fried] expertise in terms of figuring out what Russia is up to with us right now but I do. I mean, we can all benefit from it as a country as we figure out what`s going on right now with this presidency and with Russia in particular.

In the little town where I live in Hampshire County, Massachusetts, we now have a 'Public Safety Complex' around the corner from what used to be our hokey Andy Griffith-esque fire station.