Stand-up is still my favorite, but the podcast is a close second. It's so fun, and it's given me the opportunity to have three-hour conversations with people I wouldn't have otherwise been able to talk to. When I talked to Maynard Keenan from Tool, I...
The Prime Minister in the UK thinks spending and borrowing more is the right thing to do in the circumstances, and is busily trying to bail out chunks of the private sector which would otherwise have to adjust more quickly to the painful reality that...
A chief justice's authority is really quite limited, and the dynamic among all the justices is going to affect whether he can accomplish much or not. There is this convention of referring to the Taney Court, the Marshall Court, the Fuller Court, but ...
I think judicial temperament is a willingness to step back from your own committed views of the correct jurisprudential approach and evaluate those views in terms of your role as a judge. It's the difference between being a judge and being a law prof...
When I worked in the Department of Justice, in the office of the solicitor general, it was my job to argue cases for the United States before the Supreme court. I always found it very moving to stand before the justices and say, 'I speak for my count...
President Ronald Reagan used to speak of the Soviet constitution, and he noted that it purported to grant wonderful rights of all sorts to people. But those rights were empty promises, because that system did not have an independent judiciary to upho...
Bill Gates recently picked up the ukulele. And Warren Buffett is a huge ukulele fan. I even got to strum a few chords with Francis Ford Coppola. It blows my mind that these people, who have everything in the world they could want, have picked up the ...
I was asked by an editor to consider writing something about an American inventor. I asked him if he knew who invented the computer. He said he didn't. In that case, I told him, I should write a book about John Vincent Atanasoff.
We can have tax cuts, but when we have tax cuts and do not have a surplus, the amount of the tax cut goes straight to the bottom line, adds to the deficit, and the deficit adds to the national debt, and sooner or later, the debt has to be paid.
The wisest rule in investment is: when others are selling, buy. When others are buying, sell. Usually, of course, we do the opposite. When everyone else is buying, we assume they know something we don't, so we buy. Then people start selling, panic se...
We should challenge the relativism that tells us there is no right or wrong, when every instinct of our mind knows it is not so, and is a mere excuse to allow us to indulge in what we believe we can get away with. A world without values quickly becom...
It's like doctors can't save all their patients, but, on balance, Bain under Gov. Romney created well over 100,000 jobs, which is certainly more than has been created in the Obama administration because we're down over 500,000 over the last three-and...
My dream was to go to Nashville. I had my sights set on my dream. I used to have an '89 Toyota Ford truck. On the front of the truck, I had this license plate with cowboy boots and a guitar that I had airbrushed at Wal-Mart. It said 'Chasin' A Dream....
I don't want to demonise 'Johnny.' I was really proud of what he achieved. Especially within stand-up. He was quite a unique voice. I will always possibly be trading off 'Johnny's name, but there's a lot more things that I'm able to do now - the stre...
I was successful and I enjoyed modeling, but it got to a point where I felt like I had 'been there, done that.' I wanted something that would inspire me and challenge me. I needed something that required more creativity. I started writing and I start...
It just didn't seem to fit the story and lineage, I guess. So I just sort of surrounded 'Blood Bank' with three other songs that were very different from one other, and they all kind of came together as a palette cleanser for the last record. And I'm...
I do a lot of American plays. I've done a lot of Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and Neil Simon. I was in 'Sisters Rosensweig,' 'Six Degrees of Separation,' all of that stuff. So we're very familiar with America. I did 400 performances of 'Born Yes...
Without a doubt, if I had it to do all over again, I would do whatever it takes to be a one-person studio. You need to learn how to write so you can control the material. If you own the material, you can do it all.
Affirmative action is a little like the professional football draft. The NFL awards its No. 1 draft choices to the lowest-ranked team in the league. It doesn't do this out of compassion or guilt. It's done for mutual survival. They understand that a ...
Well, Mark, I led the charge for five or six years to get reforms for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. I was chairman of an organization called 'FM Policy Focus.' What we were saying was, if there was blip in the housing market, Fannie and Freddie would d...
The Democratic Party has taken the black community for granted and said, 'This is the most loyal constituency we have. They're not going anywhere.' But the Republican Party has said, 'That's the most loyal constituency Democrats have. They're not goi...