I'm hopeless by e-mail, by phone, by text.

It is hard to stay patient about policy matters where everybody agrees about what needs to be done and then it just doesn't happen, like reforming the immigration system and getting rid of family immigration jails and closing Guantanamo and criminal-justice reform. All these issues, there is basically consensus. There's no rational objections whatsoever, but it can't happen because of other stupid steps we have to take in politics.

My life is better with every year of living it.

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.

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.

Anything I really want I can find online.

after a generation or two of shedding the deliberate political encumbrances to war ... of dropping Congress from the equation altogether, of super-empowering the presidency with total war-making power and with secret new war-making resources that answer to no one but him, of insulating the public from not only the cost of war but sometimes even the knowledge that it's happened - war making has become almost an autonomous function of the American state. It never stops.