I have always thought it rather interesting to follow the involuntary movements of fear in clever people. Fools coarsely display their cowardice in all its nakedness, but the others are able to cover it with a veil so delicate, so daintily woven with...
All those predictions about how much economic growth will be created by this, all of those new jobs, would be created by the things we wanted - the extension of unemployment insurance and middle class tax cuts. An estate tax for millionaires adds exa...
Egypt's problem is that you've got an economy that works for about 40 million people, only you have 90 million people. The answer to the Egyptian problem is not guns, but jobs. We've got to find a private-sector, nongovernmental, aggressive way of cr...
Having personally watched the Voting Rights Act being signed into law that August day, I can't begin to imagine how we could have all been so wrong in believing that more Americans would vote once they were all truly free to do so.
When people ask where I studied to be an ambassador, I say my neighborhood and my school. I've tried to tell my kids that you don't wait until you're in high school or college to start dealing with problems of people being different. The younger you ...
Going public is 18-month process, while an acquisition is a 6-month process. Going public means going under so much scrutiny, regulatory approval, auditing, magnified 10 times. Having the stomach to do that isn't necessarily in my DNA. My DNA is buil...
WhatsApp provides phone-number-based messaging, and people asked, 'Isn't that what SMS is?' Yes, but SMS is expensive, antiquated, and what WhatsApp did was modernize and level that playing field. For example, in Europe, if France wants to talk to Be...
In 1988, when democracy was restored, the military establishment was still very powerful. The extremist groups were still there. And when the aid and assistance to Pakistan was cut, we had to adopt harsh economic policies. So in a way, it showed that...
In fact, I really didn't get enthused about his Secretary of State race until I attended a couple of his rallies and found out there were a bunch of young folks that there were a bunch of young folks that he had been able to recruit on his own.
The move to tax Internet sales, clothed as a 'fairness' issue, is the typical 'wolf-in-sheep's-clothing' ploy so often used by governments unwilling to cut expenditures to match revenues. It matters not whether its proponents have a 'D' or an 'R' aft...
Obama and the Democrats' preposterous argument is that we are just one more big tax increase away from solving our economic problems. The inescapable conclusion, however, is that the primary driver of the short-term deficit is not tax cuts but the la...
For those of us who originally disagreed with ObamaCare and now disagree with the majority opinion of the SCOTUS, the challenge remains the same as it would have been had the Court ruled otherwise. We need to elect Mitt Romney and House and Senate ma...
I firmly believe a rising tide lifts all boats. I think having Airbus only grows and brings more attention to Alabama's entire aerospace and aviation industry. Listen, my goal is to bring good-paying jobs to our state and our region, regardless of wh...
People are remarkably bad at remembering long lists of goals. I learned this at a professional level when trying to get my high-performance coaching clients to stay on track; the longer their lists of to-dos and goals, the more overwhelmed and off-tr...
I've seen that phenomenally successful people believe they can learn something from everybody. I call them 'mavericks with mentors.' Richard Branson, for instance, is a total maverick but he surrounds himself with incredibly successful, smart people ...
No one wants one language. There are applications when it's appropriate to write something in C rather than in Java. If you want to write something where performance is much more important than extensibility, then you might want to choose C rather th...
I'm not of the opinion that all software will be open source software. There is certain software that fits a niche that is only useful to a particular company or person: for example, the software immediately behind a web site's user interface. But th...
Sometimes I, as a public official, turn to Scripture or hymns - especially hymns, because sometimes we Catholics don't have the Scriptures memorized like we should - to help me explain a public policy position or an idea or to be able to articulate i...
There is probably a perverse pride in my administration... that we were going to do the right thing, even if short-term it was unpopular. And I think anybody who's occupied this office has to remember that success is determined by an intersection in ...
The problem with modern politics is everybody is doing sound bite stuff. In my stump speech, I give 20 minutes on why I think we're off track. And I think people do really want to engage in a serious high-level discussion on how to get the country ba...
If the economy is still going forward, even at 40 miles an hour, 50 miles an hour, I think most people will stick with President Obama. I think people look at politics like they hire a plumber. I hire you to fix the bad pipe. If you fix it, I'll rehi...
