I teach at USC, and it's obvious to anyone who teaches college students that they don't cover much modern history and certainly not the modern presidency.

The paper nominated me 12 or 13 times for the Pulitzer Prize.

The death of American liberalism as a significant moral force can be traced to the point in when President Bill Clinton signed legislation that effectively ended the main federal anti-poverty program and turned the fate of welfare recipients, 70 percent of whom were children, over to the tender mercies of the states. With a stroke of the pen, Clinton eliminated what remained of New Deal-era compassion for the poor and codified into law the "tough love" callousness that his Republican allies in the Congress, led by Newt Gingrich, had long embraced.

I happen to love America. I love this freedom and democracy. The fact is we are the ones who killed innocent people, men, women and children, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear weapons, weapons that should have never been used, should have never been developed in the first place, you know?

There's a problem of terrorism in the world. There's always been terrorism. There will be terrorism. You have to deal with it surgically. You have to deal with it in a serious way.

I was a finalist for the Pulitzer as a reporter.

And new people come in, and it doesn't go along with their politics, and they fire me, end the column, silence a voice in Los Angeles. They can't silence it nationally, but they are able to do it there.