Francis Fukuyama:

The depressing bottom line is that given how self-reinforcing the country's political malaise is, and how unlikely the prospects for constructive incremental reform are, the decay of American politics will probably continue until some external shock comes along to catalyze a true reform coalition and galvanize it into action.

Washington Post editorial board:

In an era of fierce partisanship and close division, there will always be a temptation to postpone legislating until after the next election and to spend the intervening two years jockeying for political advantage. But a knockout blow will remain out of reach for both sides, and the price of postponement will be national decline.

Matt McKenna:

We live in a country in which Congress has an approval rating of barely 15% and yet 95% of incumbents are reelected. How can it be that voters continually elect the same people and parties they say are doing a terrible job?

Andrew Sullivan:

The leadership in both parties cannot help themselves when they have a big shiny military and see something they don't like happening in the world. When will Washington actually admit its catastrophic errors and crimes of the last decade -- and try to reform its own compulsive-interventionist habits to reflect reality rather than myth? Not yet, it appears, not yet. Washington cannot bear very much reality.

John Markoff:

Weapons that make their own decisions move so quickly that human overseers soon may not be able to keep up. Yet many of them are explicitly designed to permit human operators to step away from the controls.

Mike Loukides:

Intentions mean nothing when they're hidden behind a model that makes decisions for you.

Travis Nicholson, a graduate student at the JILA, a joint institute between NIST and CU-Boulder:

That's research grade tinfoil.