Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Because TED is for, and by, unbelievably rich people, they tiptoe around questions of the justness of a society that rewards TED attendees so much for what usually amounts to a series of lucky breaks.
I think Matt Yglesias is wrong to declare that the world of 'This Town' is dying, unless he thinks publicly financed elections, strict lobbying bans and Scandinavian-style wealth distribution are imminent.
Medicare is expensive because we spend a lot on healthcare. We spend a lot on healthcare basically just because we want to, and doing so has been very good to a lot of people who work in healthcare fields.
There are a lot of people whose livelihoods depend on keeping lots of conservatives terrified and ill-informed. The groups that exist to raise funds raise more funds when they endorse the crazier candidate.
John Boehner was and is an unprincipled ward-heeler who simply couldn't weather the transition of the Republican Party from a corporatist party with a sizable conservative base to a purely conservative party.
'Simplifying' the tax code is a priority mainly for people who make enough money to want to avoid paying taxes, and who make their money by means unorthodox enough to make avoiding taxes possible and desirable.
In some future America, there could be a plausible Michael Bloomberg path to the Democratic nomination. I would love to read a column by a smart person actually attempting to persuade me of this, using evidence.
We're getting the sort of 'compromise' American politics specializes in: the one where things are intentionally made worse for most people in the hopes that if things are made bad enough, the other side will cave.
The Right likes to think that intellectuals and academics like Allan Bloom and Dinesh D'Souza spurred the explosive growth of movement conservatism in the 1980s and 1990s, when it was actually mostly Rush Limbaugh.
CNN's problem goes to its very core and to the identity it's sought ever since the rise of Fox News, on its right: CNN is the channel for people who don't want to watch the other channels! That's a stupid strategy.
It's easy for the thought-leader and executive classes to embrace a 'do what you love and love what you do' philosophy when they are wealthy enough to work hard only voluntarily, and when their jobs grant them status.
For the most part, congressional Republicans represent people who are whiter, older and richer than most Americans, and our creaky old political system gives those Americans disproportionate influence over public policy.
Vaccines don't cause autism. Vaccines, instead, prevent disease. Vaccines have wiped out a score of formerly deadly childhood diseases. Vaccine skepticism has helped to bring some of those diseases back from near extinction.
The thing with 'The West Wing' is that the fantasy was legitimately better than the reality - these were smarter, better people than their real-life counterparts, working together at a better White House than the one we had.
In many ways, Tucker Carlson's a better symbol of the pathetic state of what passes for conservative journalism than even Glenn Beck or the late Andrew Breitbart, to name two of his contemporaries with a much larger following.
Programs aimed strictly at the poorest Americans are always and forever under assault from a Republican Party that still has not dared to cut spending on programs - like Medicare and crop insurance - that also benefit the rich.
Sen. Rand Paul is a Different Kind of Republican. He will drag the party, kicking and screaming, toward a new kind of conservatism that appeals more to today's youth, who embrace liberty and are skeptical of foreign intervention.
Every year, the White House Correspondents' Dinner inspires two competing varieties of coverage: celebrity-obsessed fawning and angry tirades about how it represents everything twisted about our broken democracy. It doesn't, really.
Many people - especially those people who earn livings by convincing editors and bookers that rich and influential strangers consider their thoughts and opinions interesting - have ideas about who should or should not run for president.
There are two important things to remember about 'entitlements': They are hugely popular programs for a very good reason, and actual sensible 'reform' would mean improving them, not sacrificing them at the altar of 'fiscal responsibility.'
CNN will always be the channel people turn on when wars and horrible disasters happen. The 'trick' is getting people to also want to watch it when there aren't hundreds or thousands of people somewhere in the world currently in mortal peril.
For the cable news guest, nothing happens for a while until suddenly everything happens very quickly. After you receive your television face, you stand around for a while, ignored, until you're sat down at a desk and asked to argue with strangers.
If some modern-day David Brock wanted to defect from the conservative movement and write a tell-all focused solely on the financial chicanery of the entire right-wing nonprofit/think tank/publishing sphere, I would read the absolute heck out of it.
Donald Trump, an oft-bankrupt make-believe mogul clown with a television show where he pretends to fire America's saddest former celebrities, is one of the Republican Party's most prominent national figures because he is on TV and people have heard of him.
Obviously no one wants to give members of Congress a lot of money, because they barely do anything, and many of them are terrible, but a Congress that is made up of rich-but-not-super-rich people is going to be more corruptible than a Congress of really rich people.
FreedomWorks, which is funded primarily by very rich people, solicits donations from non-rich conservative people. More than 80,000 people donated money to FreedomWorks in 2012, and it seems likely that only a small minority of those people were hedge fund millionaires.
For most of the millions of people who watch TED videos at the office, it's a middlebrow diversion and a source of factoids to use on your friends. Except TED thinks it's changing the world, like if 'This American Life' suddenly mistook itself for Doctors Without Borders.
It's been possible for years to use a PC to watch and record over-the-air television broadcasts, and unencrypted cable television tuners have been available almost as long. But for a long time, you could only watch copyright-protected channels with a cable company-leased box.
An American parliamentary system with proportional representation wouldn't immediately or inexorably lead to a flourishing social democracy, but it would at least correct the overrepresentation of an ideological minority and cut down on intentional tactical economic sabotage.
Most of us don't think forwarding a racist joke or speaking in an insulting 'comedic' accent is appropriate at the workplace. Unfortunately, for those raised in the toxic culture of conservatism, the sort of mentality that leads government employees to do those things is widespread.
Christopher Hitchens, the late essayist and sot, was a man who purposefully cultivated a lot of friends of a certain type - rich, self-important, generally dim-witted and hence easy for a well-spoken Oxbridge debater to impress - and he electrified Washington D.C. society mainly by not being a completely charmless bore.