Rhode Island works hard to reduce air pollution in our communities. We passed laws to prohibit cars and buses from idling their engines and to retrofit school buses with diesel pollution controls. But there is only so much a single state can do, particularly against out-of-state pollution.

Once people know that you can spend the money and that you're willing to spend the money and that you're set up to spend the money in politics, then your threat to spend the money is as convincing as actually spending it.

The Ryan budget gets rid of Medicare in 10 years and turns it into a voucher program.

When counting on learning from innovation, there are great successes but also failures. The Wright Brothers invented the aircraft and started an amazing process of innovation, where we now have planes that carry 500 passengers. Along the way there were some silly looking vehicles that crashed early on.

I am the exception to the rule that all senators see themselves in the Oval Office.

How arrogant - how very far from humility - would be the self-satisfied, smug assurance that God, a tidy-up-after-us God will come and clean up our mess? Hope for a nanny God, who will with a miracle grant us amnesty from our folly - thats not aligned with either history or the text of the Bible.

Trapped in the bureaucracy nightmare, real families suffer when the big banks and their servicers force foreclosures. The emotional toll on children packing up their rooms and on parents struggling to find a temporary roof is a deep one.