[On presidential candidates not condemning the controversial MoveOn.org ad in The New York Times.] If you're not tough enough to repudiate a scurrilo… - John McCain

After a while, we must have thought the distance between our desks too great for either of us to hear each other clearly or that the presence of the clerk transcribing our exchange had become too distracting. And as if we had both heard some secret signal, we set down our microphones simultaneously and walked briskly to the well of the floor, where we could continue in closer quarters, and in language perhaps too…familiar…to be recorded for posterity, which, regrettably was still audible enough to be overheard by a few reporters, who were now leaning over the railing of the press gallery trying to ascertain just what the hell was going on between McCain and Kennedy. After we both were satisfied we had sufficiently impressed upon each other the particulars of proper senatorial comportment, we ended our discussion, and returned to the business that had brought us to the chamber in the first place. And, I'm happy to report, we succeeded in discouraging our colleagues from continuing their intemperate argument. They both had deserted the chamber with, I was later told, for I did not notice their escape, rather puzzled if not frightened looks on their faces.

We must take our own side in this fight. We must be vigilant. We must persevere. And through it all, we must never, never cease to believe in the moral superiority of our own values — that we stand for truth against falsehood, freedom against tyranny, right against injustice, hope against despair . . . and that even though we will inevitably take losses and suffer setbacks, through it all, so long as people of goodwill and courage refuse to lose faith in the West, it will endure.

Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.