The Democrats were in the majority in the U.S. Senate when we voted for the Iraq war and passed the U.S. Patriot Act. It's not enough to be in the majority, you have to stand for something.

It is not patriotic to decide to destroy a new president who was duly elected by an overwhelming margin. It is un-patriotic to resolve to destroy that presidency.

Make no mistake, our military readiness is already suffering. According to a recent RAND study, the Army has been stretched so thin that active-duty soldiers are now spending one of every two years abroad, leaving little of the Army left in any appropriate condition to respond to crises that may emerge elsewhere in the world.

It's just really tragic after all the horrors of the last 1,000 years we can't leave behind something as primitive as government-sponsored execution.

Occupy Wall Street is a real movement.

When the President picks someone who is his ideological soul mate, that's his right, in my reading of "advise and consent." I do think, though, the more you get up the ladder, when someone is no longer accountable to the President, and more importantly, will stay in office after the President, the standard gets tougher and tougher.

In my opinion, we need to again consider the possibility of public funding of congressional elections, following the very successful experience with clean money systems in Maine and Arizona.