Six months after 9/11, Jean-Marie Le Pen was almost elected president of France. There were a number of leaders and a number of parties running in the French national elections that year in the spring of 2002. But it ended up being not just a shock across France, and not just a shock across Europe. But it ended up being almost a worldwide shock when in the spring of 2002, Jean-Marie Le Pen came in second in those national elections. That put him in a two-man runoff for the presidency of France, spring of 2002.

Ridding Iraq of weapons of mass destruction. That was the whole idea, right? That‘s why we went. I am reluctant to let that fact disappear down the memory hole, because if — as the war ends, or at least starts to end — if, at this time, the history of the war is written as us going there to topple the regime of a bad man when that frankly isn‘t why were told that we were going there — Aren‘t we still at risk of making this horrific mistake again? And, aren‘t we letting the people who foisted the WMD idea on us, not many years ago, aren‘t we sort of letting them get away with it?

After [Donald] Trump and his campaign manager both initially denied having anything to do with the platform change, a Trump campaign official now admits that the campaign pushed to soften the Russian language in the platform. It says it was done specifically at Trump`s request.

There`s a reason people pause their lives to engage in political activism and pressure their local political leaders. Because as a whole, even if you can`t identify any one instance, as a whole pressure works and sometimes it starts with something as simple as pushing the button on the intercom.

What's insulting to the American people, the Senate, to this whole process is that the Republicans, with all other nominees, have said Democrats are being obstructionist for wanting to see documents, for wanting to see a paper trail, for wanting to get questions answered in the judiciary committee hearings, and now all of a sudden, the Republicans want those things for this.

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.

The day after the Republican convention ended, there was another political bomb that was dropped on the U.S. presidential election [2016] from Russia. The day after the Republican convention ended, right before the Democratic Convention began we got what U.S. intelligence agencies believed to be the next big Russian incursion into our election. We got the first WikiLeaks dump.