Those of us who actually were working in the region at the time will point out how strongly committed we were to supporting the democratic process and encouraging elections, in spite of the fact that a war was going on in several of these countries.

Sonic Youth has a very democratic process for the most part. It almost doesn't matter who brings in an initial idea; everything gets worked over by the band and kind of co-written by everyone in the end because everyone's ideas get contributed to it.

We can't wait until elections to fight for what we care about. We can't hope for a benevolent leader who may choose to listen to us. We need a network that lets the best ideas and leaders rise to the top through an open, inclusive democratic process.

It is important for us to be able to meet and greet the people that we serve. And if we start having police presence everywhere we go, it's going to create a chilling effect on discourse, and it creates an incredible assault on the democratic process.

Marrying video, sound, and words can create incredibly compelling storytelling, and when you add the political piece, you get a special combination: stories directly impacting the democratic process. It's a unique responsibility and one I'm passionate about.

I think the success of democracy is not really police security; it's the presence of a broad middle class. The stronger the middle class of a people is, the less you have to worry about one group coming in and exploiting the democratic process for its own ends.

If you go in to vote, and you are no longer confident that the vote that you put in is the way it's going to get recorded because you don't know if the Russians or someone else have gotten into the voting system, that undercuts your trust in the democratic process.

I've actually thought very little about solo work up until just very recently. Most of it is because in my band, Incubus, it is very much a collaborative effort. I do what I do in the band, and everyone plays their respective parts, but in the end, we are sort of a democratic process.

One of the things that happens that's challenging within the democratic process is that people say, 'Look at this failure, so we should totally change this whole thing.' And then you add in tons of bureaucratic process and checks and balances, and all of a sudden, it doesn't work that well.

Virtually everywhere in the world, people still wake up and want their country to be more like the United States than any other nation. We are the envy of the world because of what we stand for and how our democratic process, flawed as it may often seem to be, operates. We should take pride in that.

As transparency campaigner for more than 10 years, I have long had a sense that something was not quite right about the E.U. referendum. I warned back in November 2017 that the leave campaign seemed to be awash with dark money that may have circumvented rules designed to uphold the integrity of our democratic process.

If you look at the democratic process as a game of chess, there have to be many, many moves before you get to checkmate. And simply because you do not make any checkmate in three moves does not mean it's stalemate. There's a vast difference between no checkmate and stalemate. This is what the democratic process is like.

Nationwide injunctions undermine the democratic process, depart from history and tradition, violate constitutional principles, and impede sound judicial administration, all at the cost of public confidence in our institutions and particularly in our courts as apolitical decision-makers dispassionately applying objective law.

I think anything we do outside of Gym Class Heroes still falls under the Gym Class Heroes umbrella. There's really no method to the madness. With Gym Class, it's more of a democratic process, and when I'm working on solo stuff, it's just me, either working with producers or sitting in a room by myself. They balance and complement each other.

Radical groups can become legitimate political players in the democratic process if they accept core democratic principles and abandon the use of force as a political tool. Or they can maintain armed terrorist militias in order to threaten their neighbors and intimidate their people. The international community should not allow them to do both.

That's really what's kept me at 'TYT' even though I've gotten offers where I'd make a lot more money working at other media outlets: There's a value in making sure we inform our audience so they're responsible members of the democratic process. To me, that's more valuable than ratings or money or anything else you can get at these other networks.

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