While the wider global environment is worrying we are seeing some positive results in our economic affairs.

The job numbers are positive. We've had more jobs created now than were lost during the recession. We're seeing that the creation we're seeing those numbers not only grow but shift toward the private sector and shift toward full-time employment and these are all signs that the recovery is taking some hold but we're not out of woods.

Those minutes that I'm on stage are the best! Being there and looking at the crowd and seeing their faces hearing them sing the positive words from the songs.

We're seeing quite a lot of people who really would like a return to class-based politics.

On the other side I do believe that the rhetoric we are seeing from the Democrats today is unprecedented is a new low in presidential politics and goes beyond political discourse and amounts to political hate speech.

In fact a lot of them I think are absolute baloney. Those Charles Olsens and people like that. At first I was interested in seeing what they were up to what they were doing why they were doing it. They never moved me in the way that one is moved by true poetry.

To this day I don't ever remember seeing a pet inside Moscow I never saw anyone carrying a dog or leading a dog. Err I finally saw a a pet some years later in Kiev so I thought that life must have been different.

I don't have to run the Peace Corps. I could live without seeing my picture in the newspapers and without being interviewed.

When I look back on my childhood I think of that short time in Beirut. I know that seeing the city collapse around me forced me to grasp something many people miss: the fragility of peace.

Few things are more satisfying than seeing your children have teenagers of their own.