The minimum wage is the black teenage unemployment act. It is the guaranteed way of holding the poor, the minorities and the disenfranchised out of the mainstream is if you price their original services too high.

Over the past 100 years, there have been three major periods of tax-rate cuts in the U.S.: the Harding-Coolidge cuts of the mid-1920s; the Kennedy cuts of the mid-1960s; and the Reagan cuts of the early 1980s. Each of these periods of tax cuts was remarkably successful as measured by virtually any public policy metric.

What I'm not saying is that all government spending is bad. It's not - far, far from it, but there is no free lunch, as a former colleague of mine used to say. There is no public tooth fairy. Father Christmas does not work on the Treasury staff this year. You can never bail someone out of trouble without putting someone else into trouble.

And just remember, every dollar we spend on outsourcing is spent on U.S. goods or invested back in the U.S. market. That's accounting.

The American people hit the streets and did something that the government wouldn't do: the Civil Rights Act. It didn't go down well with the corporate world.

I take a grave view of the press. It is the weak slat under the bed of democracy.

Life is politics.

I've been thinking, in an age of Trump where you don't know the direction of the country, the person you need most is a steady conservative hand like Mark Kirk in the Senate to be advising the president, especially on national security topics ... which is my particular expertise after 23 years in the Navy.