I have a hard time understanding how cutting the program in our country that provides healthcare to working families by $800 billion can be classified as mercy.

There is no mercy in a system that makes health care a luxury. There is no mercy in a country that turns their back on those most in need of protection: the elderly, the poor, the sick, and the suffering.

If you believe that the greatest challenge you've got is credibility, then the way you get that is you earn it, right? That's not something that any set of policy makers can bestow.

Compromise' isn't supposed to be a dirty word. It is, in fact, how representative democracy works.

Since the end of the 1970s, something has gone profoundly wrong in America. Inequality has soared. Educational progress slowed. Incarceration rates quintupled. Family breakdown accelerated. Median household income stagnated.

My parents were both born in 1930. They grew up during the Depression. They wanted their children to have secure lives, to have a good salary and a pension plan. If I could've guaranteed that I'd be a best-selling writer, that would've been one thing, but nobody could say that. So I knew better than to say that was ambition.

Not surprisingly, my parents' generation did everything they could to make life easier for their own children. Was that good for us? I wonder. It certainly didn't do us any good from a cultural point of view. I'm struck by how few boomers have embraced adult culture in middle age.

I wanted to become a champ - I was surrounded by champs in my family and in my neighborhood - and because of this stupid accident, I lost my opportunity.