I draw pleasure in governance, in doing new things and bringing people together. That pleasure is all I need from life.
Since taking office, President Obama has signed into law spending increases of nearly 25 percent for domestic government agencies - an 84 percent increase when you include the failed stimulus. All of this new government spending was sold as 'investment.'
As Congress debates overhauling the nation's health care system, it should not authorize a reform plan that would further our financial woes. We must avoid creating an unsustainable government program. There is no question that reform is needed, but health care can be made more affordable without massive and expensive new bureaucracies.
Now, in New Jersey, we have more government workers per square mile than any state in America. But since I've been governor we now have fewer people on the state payroll at any time since Christie Whitman left office in January 2001. That's the right direction, Mr. President, not the wrong direction.
In New Mexico... I may have vetoed more legislation as governor of New Mexico than all the other governors in the country combined.
I was broke when I lived in New York City during college, so I'd spend weekends walking around town, grabbing something to eat, and interacting with strangers. That ritual has stuck with me.
My father was born in Newark, New Jersey, and my mother was born in Philadelphia. They both went to Stanford for grad school and met there.
I moved to New York in '92 and got my graduate degree in acting from NYU - they have a great acting program. I graduated in '95.
My dad was going to graduate school at Columbia, in New York, so we moved there. After he graduated, we ended up settling in New York, so I grew up there.
As a brand new graduate student starting in October 1956, my supervisor Michail Fischberg, a lecturer in the Department of Zoology at Oxford, suggested that I should try to make somatic cell nuclear transplantation work in the South African frog Xenopus laevis.
I was a graduate student in 1984 when President Ronald Reagan called for the construction of a new space station. I knew then that I wanted to apply for the astronaut program, and this was an exciting development.
After graduating from Brown, I went to law school and became a corporate lawyer in New York City.
My first Grammy nomination? I was 24 - I was nominated for best new artist of the year.
My first Grammy wasn't even in a jazz category, but of course I was really excited. 'Rockit' was the beginning of kind of a new era for the whole hip-hop movement.
New nemeses keep racing fresh, but I also find challenge in going longer, with only the distance as foe. I run my first 50-mile race, journey across the Grand Canyon and back, circumnavigate Mount St. Helens.
I have to fit holidays around tournaments, particularly the grand slams, in Melbourne, Paris, London and New York.
We're in this transition period of figuring out how to deal with all the new technology that is out there, but television still proves to be the granddaddy of them all.
The grandest thing has been the lifting up of the gates and the opening of the doors to the women of America, giving liberty to twenty-seven million women, thus opening to them a new and larger life and a higher ideal.
Often the art in New York is related to the buildings, to grandiose things.
Being a grandparent is whole new phase in your life.
