My reading is that there was concern in the financial community that with the absence of Greenspan, we crazy politicians will no longer respect the independence of the Fed. Bush’s going there today, quite sensibly,...

Before this learning experience, I had assumed that with regard to programs that sought to help people out of poverty, the political world was essentially divided into two camps: conservatives who opposed these for a...

They not only didn’t do anything to protect him, they’re not doing anything now to protect people in the future. It’s really a disgrace.

If people knew of ethics violations, they should have sent them to the Ethics Committee. If you think there was serious ethics violation that ought to be looked at, you don’t hold it back for...

This is a timetable for making sure nothing gets resolved before the elections. I don’t understand what’s going to take many, many more months other than the need for the Republicans to resolve their political...

The regulation of medicine has been a State function.

It is, of course, further indication that a fundamentalist right has really taken over much of the Republican Party, People might cite George Bush as proof that you can be totally impervious to the effects...

But here too it should be noted that the President’s approach was to first ask the repressive and brutal Taliban to surrender Osama bin Laden to us, and only after that government refused to do...

He was good at what he did,

In this view, the role of the great majority of Americans is simply to buy the products produced, work happily for their wages, and leave all of the significant economic decisions to the capitalists.

It was just about the most heartless thing I have ever seen a government do that did not involve absolute loss of life.

Today, many people take for granted the notion that people whose lives are going to be very heavily affected by public policies should have a say in how they are formulated and carried out.

You showed your credentials by being able to talk about all this detail, but a lot of people – including Democrats – got sucked into it. They learned the lingo, but they forgot it had...

But it is also clear that left entirely untouched by public policy, the capitalist system will produce more inequality than is socially healthy or than is necessary for maximum efficiency.

not diluting the marriage between a man and a woman.

Increasing inequality in income distribution in this country has broader policy implications, and there is also the growing problem of perverse incentives that result from executives receiving grossly disproportionate compensation based on decisions they themselves...

People have been scared straight, and between now and Election Day will be one of the purest periods in American life.

Well, many of us believe that excessive media concentration is a subject that ought to be addressed, and it is, of course, the intention of the majority party not to allow that to be discussed.

This bill is the legislative equivalent of crack. It yields a short-term high but does long-term damage to the system and it’s expensive to boot.

But on those occasions when I do strongly disagree with the Democrats and I don’t say anything, I think I forfeit my right to have people pay attention to me when I say the things...

an extraordinarily stupid rule.

It is because the fight against the harshest aspects of unrestricted capitalism is therefore a political problem and not an intellectual one that community action remains so essential.

We will be seeking to knock out that part that says groups that engage in voter-registration and get-out-the-vote activities are not eligible.

What’s troubling is that the Republicans to defend Mr. DeLay are weakening the ethics process.

He couldn’t stop taking blame. He was a basket case and couldn’t keep it together.

But when others suggested that the poor should not simply be the objects of these programs but also the subjects – that they should be actively involved in shaping the programs, making decisions about how...

This is very revealing of the hypocrisy of the NRA, … They would have the second amendment of the Constitution amended so it would also read ‘a well regulated militia being necessary to the security...

It is true that the results of the American intervention in Afghanistan will certainly be a far more democratic Afghanistan, and I welcome that.

There’s a lot to be said for not displacing people.

When community action was put into federal law in the early sixties as part of the effort to combat poverty and social injustice, I supported it intellectually.

It is a very bad idea for the United States government to spend tens of billions of dollars to send people to Mars and to the moon,

Capitalism works better from every perspective when the economic decision makers are forced to share power with those who will be affected by those decisions.

It’s hard to see how anything could be completed before the election.

It seems to me that politicians ought to use the same words as other people.

I hope the regulators understand by now there is, I think, unanimity on this committee that they should experiment, they should be flexible, they should do everything reasonable to get money into people’s hands because...

While I was pleasantly surprised by the relatively high number of jobs created in April, the fact is that job creation during this recovery period has significantly lagged both historical experience in recovery, and the...

[The hurricane] reinforces the reason to have such a fund, … Some people said, ‘Well, it’s going to be abused.’ Well, let’s see how it works in Louisiana.

Community action is as valuable a principle on the international level as it has been domestically.

I’m used to being in the minority. I’m a left-handed gay Jew. I’ve never felt, automatically, a member of any majority.

Let us not say that we will decide on a political basis at the national level that no State is competent to regulate the practice of medicine in that State if they decide to allow...

The losers, if we do not re-enact terrorism risk insurance, are people who want to build in those cities seen as potential targets of terrorism. They would not be able to get loans.

The fact that they’re a congressionally chartered group should no more incline people to give to that group than the fact that it’s National Pickle Month should make them eat more pickles.

The time has come to undo some of those tax breaks,

For many of those who had historically supported welfare programs in the broadest sense, it was perfectly reasonable to enact legislation in which poor people were the objects of efforts to assist them.

Under the Republican provision, you can’t do get-out-the-vote efforts if you work in affordable housing, … There is an extremism here that is not comprehensible except if you know the history.

Martin Luther King said, and it is sadly still true, that one of the most segregated times in America is the hour of worship.

Are we not trying to promote the notion of people living together? … What religious group taking federal money says, ‘You know what, I want to help these poor people, but not with a Jew,’...

When I spoke to him, the first thing I did was tease him, saying I thought this was a ploy because he wants to run for Congress. It’s not anything that’s fun to do, sharing...

It is a terrible allocation of scarce resources, … The time has come to de-emphasize the manned space program.

I hope we will not so characterize religious people as being so narrow and so biased towards people not of their own religion that they cannot even work with them in this common cause to...