It was in fact the detainees who were interrogated without enhanced interrogation techniques who helped find the path to bin Laden. You can't have it both ways; members of the Bush administration have decided to revive the torture debate, and I find it quite distasteful and against the facts, yet it seems to be getting some traction.

— Karen Greenberg, executive director of the Center on Law and Security at NYU, on The Brian Lehrer Show.

The U.S. has known for a long time that Pakistan is playing a double game, but the U.S. doesn't have many options. We play the cards we're dealt. The ISI has very different priorities from the U.S., and the tricky game the CIA had to play is to try and get little pieces of genuine information in middle of a lot of fake information.

— Bobby Ghosh, deputy international editor for Time Magazine, on The Brian Lehrer Show.

The energy right now in the Republican party is over fiscal issues...this fear about America becoming more like Europe in terms of a social welfare state. That said, there are still a lot of conservatives who vote in primaries and participate in caucuses that are driven by a set of cultural issues. In a place like Iowa especially, we're talking about an electorate that is perhaps half or over half self-identified born again evangelical.

— Jonathan Martin, senior political writer at Politico, on The Brian Lehrer Show.

The irony is that we have congestion pricing in New York City, in that we pay, according to a study by the Partnership for New York, $13 billion a year in terms of time wasted in traffic, in terms of delayed delivery of goods, the fuel we just spend idling...But the joke is on us, because that $13 billion is not being used to improve the transit system, or for better infrastructure; it's going up in smoke.

— David Bragdon, director of New York City's Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability, on The Brian Lehrer Show.

The real job here is for [Mayor Corey] Booker to be a Geronimo and convince people that he's not just going to apply what Zuckerberg wants him to do; that he's out there, he's listening to parents, that he wants to get their feedback and doesn't want to plow through reforms already thought out in his head or Christie's head.

— Barbara Martinez, The Wall Street Journal, reporter covering public education, on The Brian Lehrer Show

Back in 1987 he was flirting with the idea of running for president and saying, 'Of course, if I ran, I'd win.' And this is in the 1988 election, almost a quarter-century ago. Just as he's been bankrupt many times, Trump has flirted with running for president many times...If he dropped out, what would his excuse be? The boy can cry wolf only so many times.

— Kurt Andersen, host of WNYC's Studio 360 and founder and former editor-in-chief of Spy magazine, on The Brian Lehrer Show.

Right now we don't have an incentive that is based appropriately in the consumer world. There are no incentives to bring those costs under control, and yet we are faced with a situation in which those restraints will be forced upon the public through mechanisms like [the Affordable Care Act].

— Congresswoman Nan Hayworth (R-NY 19), on The Brian Lehrer Show.

[S&P doesn't] have a lot of credibility left after totally blowing all major calls of the past decade...The chance that the United States would not pay its debts after more than 200 years of being the best creditor in the world, that chance exists. It is quite remote in my assessment. But there's no question that S&P is trying to swing the other way and trying to get some attention from the left and right, and it's obviously working.

— Simon Johnson, former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund and professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, on The Brian Lehrer Show.

Cuomo was really one of earliest to start looking at mortgage securities. He subpoenaed all of the banks and rating agencies back in the summer of 2007, before people really realized we were having crisis. There was all this information about how they were packing loans into mortgage bonds, but that's something he never brought a case in. He had all that information showing just how much banks knew about how crummy those loans were.

— Louise Story, New York Times Wall Street and Financial reporter, on The Brian Lehrer Show.

To those people paying the bill, those people under 55, we say, 'You don't get Medicare. You get something less generous, but we don't have any choice.' I think it's deeply unfair to make that big divide and say, 'I've got this great plan, it's really great, it won't harm you, it will save vast amounts of money—but don't worry: so long as you're 55, you won't have to be any part of it.'

— David Leonhardt, writer of the "Economic Scene" column for the New York Times, discussing Paul Ryan's budget on The Brian Lehrer Show.