A Russian citizen who worked for the [Donald] Trump campaign manager in Ukraine, worked for Paul Manafort when Manafort was working in Ukraine, that Russian citizen visited the United States around the time of the Republican convention.

I feel like I have more in common with conservative people who have activist causes in their hearts and who are interested in electoral politics than I do with somebody who doesn't care, doesn't have any political interests, doesn't know what policy is, and doesn't think any of it matters to them. If you care, we're actually going to have a basis of conversation. We might supplementally get along very well, and that might be complicated and fun in a way that is more constructive than you'd expect.

It's not just the small-potatoes post-9/11 Homeland spending that feels a little off mission. It's the big-ticket stuff too.

I don't feel there's anything about my experience of being gay that gives me more insight into "don't ask, don't tell," for example, than anybody else.

In this country, the most popular form of car racing is the huge multibillion dollar industry that`s called stock car racing. That`s what NASCAR is. That`s what the SC stands for in the middle of NASCAR, Stock cars.

As proud and capable as it is, I think the idea that the military can build new countries is a tall order, and it's the sort of thing that we would only expect from a military that we have superresourced and thought of as supercapable.

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.