Social climbing and power climbing -- the two are often synonymous -- are what make Washington run. ... If there are more than two people together, if there are three, one of them is climbing.

This morning in the Washington Post there was a statistic about how 85% of Americans are Christians.

Even Colin Powell who was everywhere before he became secretary of state, just stopped going out. I think part of it was he didn't want to be viewed suspiciously by the other people in the White House who rarely go anywhere.

I never know what I'm going to do for the Post next. Two weeks ago I had a piece on Homeland Security. This is one of my pig ongoing projects. How unprepared we are for a terrorist attack.

My feeling is that a newspaper should serve its readers and it just seems to me that given what is going in the world, people are hungry for something.

I do think that many religious people have enormous doubts.

The Europeans have fallen away from religion and the church while the rest of the world is seemingly more religious. I don't know how to explain it.