I do want to thank the Washington press corps, however, because for a year, nobody had any idea who I was, and I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you. But I also want to thank you for making sure that everybody does know who I am - they all think I’m an intense maniac with an anger management disorder now. [his expression was great during this line -- he's letting them know that he knows what they did and while he'll keep a sense of humor about it, he knows they know he's a serious guy, and he's calling them out for their bullsh*t; politely]

[...] People always ask me, “Well, don’t you think the people in Iraq are better off now that Saddam is gone? Don’t you think America is safer now that Saddam is gone?” I said no, I didn’t think we were safer. That was an opportunity for some of my opponents in the race and other folks to criticize me, but the truth is, we’ve lost over 100 soldiers and many wounded since then, had orange alerts, had F-16 jet fighters escorting foreign commercial airliners into American airspace for the first time in a long time.

So clearly we’re not safer. [talking like a scientist again, Howard; you know that scares them...]

[...] We have a chairman of the Federal Reserve who has done something, to me, which is just absolutely stunning. Alan Greenspan, who has served this country with honor and very well for a long time, in the 1990s, was part of an attempt to fix the Social Security problem and help craft a solution - perhaps it was the late 80s - help craft a solution where we would raise payroll taxes some, and Social Security would be extended. Recently he suggested we would have to cut Social Security benefits, and recommended that perhaps we ought to extend the president’s tax cuts.

The combination of those recommendations is as follows. Raise the most regressive tax in America, which is the payroll tax, on the vast majority of Americans - because you pay that tax until you make $86,000 a year - then, a few years later, cut Social Security benefits for those same people who paid in in the Eighties in order to save the system - and do it all because the deficits are so large, and then recommend extending the deficits by making permanent the president’s tax cuts - the largest deficit in the history of the United States of America.

So we have in Washington an administration, apparently backed by the chairman of the Federal Reserve, who is willing boldly to say that we ought to preside over one of the greatest shifts of wealth and redistributions of wealth in this country, in history. From middle-class people, to people like Ken Lay who ran Enron.

[...] We have an enormous problem in this country. And I’m not here to beard the Washington establishment, but I’m going to tell you -- people in this town do not get it. They don’t understand it -- and people in many places on the East Coast and the West Coast don’t get it.

[...] This city, and the people in it, both Republicans and Democrats, have got to understand the extraordinary pain that’s going on in America. And you’ve got to stop paying lip service to it. Because they’re beyond that. And the things that you saw in our campaign show, more than anything else, that people want to hope again.