This is an exhausted administration. It's going to be very hard for [them] to come out with a big new initiative.

Individual accounts offset some of the benefit reduction you'd otherwise see.

This is the first time in the country's history where simply by virtue of living somewhere you are mandated to purchase a product.

It is in this sense that Nietzsche is driven, against many explicit resolutions to the contrary, to be a No-sayer. For what the décadents who surround him are doing is to say No where they should be saying Yes, where they should be Dionysian; and what is leading them to this life-denying perversity, mostly of course unconsciously, is that they subscribe to a set of values that puts the central features of *this* world at a discount. Where they find suffering, they immediately look for someone to blame, and end up hating themselves, or generalize that into a hatred of "human nature". They look for "peace of mind", using it as a blanket term and failing to see the diversity of states, some of them desirable and some of them the reverse, which that term covers. They confuse cause and effect, thinking that the connection between virtue and happiness is that the former leads to the latter, whereas in fact the reverse is the case. They have, in Nietzsche's cruelly accurate phrase, "the vulgar ambition to possess generous feelings" ("Expeditions of an Untimely Man, number 6). They confuse breeding fine men with taming them. Throughout the major part of Twilight this devastating list of our vulgarities continues.

I don't think either one of them is really telling the whole story. What Bush is saying is that if you eat your spinach, you'll be able to have some ice cream for dessert. Al Gore, on the other hand, just wants to pretend that the spinach doesn't exist.

[Some analysts think next year's Congressional elections already pushed reform to the 2003 agenda.] I don't actually think Sept. 11 will have any long-term impact on the Social Security debate, ... 2002 is an election year, so I always thought Congress would take up the issue in 2003.