So many awful things have happened in Karachi, it's true. It has its own crazy rhythm. Even as crazy as other news is in Pakistan, the city manages to beat that in the frequency of catastrophes.

The Republican presidential candidate [Donald Trump] provoked condemnation from leaders in both parties and around the world. He did that by proposing to bar all Muslims from entering the United States.

The fact that - I mean, these are things to be talked about. You can't do anything without educating the public, right? And that's a slow work.

Here is a needle President Obama needs to thread if he chooses a ninth. The nominee would need to be so strongly qualified that he or she would be hard to reject. The person must also be willing to be nominated even though leading Senate Republicans have said they will not consider anyone the president names.

Is that really the issue [of bathrooms and gender] we want to be pushing leading up to a momentous election like this one? It's that shortsightedness that comes from identity politics.

We have to remember in that Bloomberg poll, strong Republican support for [Donald ]Trump's proposal, but the country at large - strong opposition to that support.

Toward the end of the campaign, we interviewed some voters in Raleigh, N.C., which is a generally Democratic city, and I'm thinking of a young couple. They had two kids. They described themselves as Christian. They oppose gay marriage. And they were saying that even though they didn't like Donald Trump, they were thinking of voting for him. And one of the reasons was they felt that they were - their very views were making them socially unacceptable. They were feeling a little alienated from the world.