I suggest that those groups whose culture and values stress delayed gratification - education, hard work, success, and ambition - are those groups that succeed in America, regardless of discrimination.
I don't have any contempt for the men who have to have jobs and have to commute and have to pay the mortgage and have to get their kids an education. To me, that's the backbone of America, to coin a phrase.
I reflect back 35 years ago, and look how far we have come in America with our environmental policy to improve the conditions of our air and water, and we have had some real successes.
As a nation, we owe a great deal to the National Audubon Society, one of our most distinguished and important environmental organizations, and all those who work to protect America's open land and waterways.
2013 was a year of myths falling apart. The myth of President Obama - a myth in which Obama was a messianic figure descending to bequeath health care, equality, and brotherhood on mankind - imploded. The myth of an America embracing the leftist socia...
If increasing income equality is the goal, it might be wiser to put money into infrastructure than to subsidize manufacturing. Construction also pays good wages, but with lower educational requirements. And America's infrastructure needs are enormous...
As slavery died for the greater good of America, and the movement for equality sputtered to life, the white woman was on the cover of every American magazine. She was the dazzling jewel on every movie screen, the glory of every commercial and televis...
America is not perfect. It took a bloody civil war to free over 4 million African Americans who lived enslaved. It took another hundred years after that before they achieved full equality under the law.
Disney had such a hold on the mind of America-they were Adolf Hitler. The whole country thought Disney was some sort of god and that animation was some sort of pure thing for children.
This week you will nominate the most experienced executive to seek the presidency in 60 years in Mitt Romney. He has no illusions about what makes America great, and he doesn't confuse the presidency with celebrity, or loftiness with leadership.
There is no right to a job or a wage rate, but there is a right to move from one country to another in search of a better life. This is the point of view of Thomas Jefferson, John Locke and other great supporters of the natural rights tradition in Am...
But this is the great danger America faces. That we will cease to be one nation and become instead a collection of interest groups: city against suburb, region against region, individual against individual. Each seeking to satisfy private wants.
I would say, from an all-around point of view, Bruce Springsteen is one of the two great poet lords of America, Bob Dylan, coming out of the music world, the two of them.
The essence of America - that which really unites us - is not ethnicity, or nationality or religion - it is an idea - and what an idea it is: That you can come from humble circumstances and do great things.
It's one thing I like about America - they respect the sportsman. They put them up on a pedestal. They don't try to knock them down. And that's a great thing, to be respected by the whole country. It's so patriotic!
America is a great country. We are so wealthy. But our one remaining challenge is to fulfill the potential of all our people. And the only way we can do that is to try to bring everybody together to a higher place.
Are we simply waving farewell to the days when some of the most interesting thinking in Europe and America came to us from our fiction film-makers? BBC2, which once introduced and showed great films, now shows none.
Spiritually, we have marginalized the Bible. We've trivialized marriage, and we've neutralized the church. America today is in great turmoil. It feels like the soul of our nation has been taken from us.
For the pageants, it was my mother who got me involved in Miss America. It really gave me the opportunity to sing all around New Hampshire. And it was great when I was young, but looking back, it was also unbelievably stressful.
I think the moral majority and religious right have been shrinking and having not quite as loud a voice in America, and all of a sudden people are coming to their own realizations going, 'Joe down the street is gay and he's a great guy.'
I'd love to visit South America, especially Argentina, as I'm a winemaker myself. They do a fantastic malbec, so it would be a dream to sample their grapes. New Zealand would be great, too. I'm a golfer, so it would combine both my loves.
