Ideology knows the answer before the question has been asked. Principles are something different: a set of values that have to be adapted to circumstances but not compromised away.
Inequality hardens society into a class system. Inequality divides us from one another... Inequality undermines democracy.
We will have a more just society as soon as we want one.
I do think Donald Trump would be a catastrophic turn in American history.
At the heart of the matter is a battle between wish and fear. Fear generally proves stronger than a wish, but it leaves a taste of disappointment on the tongue.
We have all the information in the universe at our fingertips, while our most basic problems go unsolved year after year...All around, we see dazzling technological change, but no progress.
It seems preposterous now, but Amazon began as a bookstore.
It's kind of funny to read the work of ex-Marines and soldiers because what they said to me as a reporter was only a fraction of what they were thinking and feeling and saying to one another.
Before the nineteen-seventies, most Republicans in Washington accepted the institutions of the welfare state, and most Democrats agreed with the logic of the Cold War. Despite the passions over various issues, government functioned pretty well. Legislators routinely crossed party lines when they voted, and when they drank; filibusters in the Senate were reserved for the biggest bills; think tanks produced independent research, not partisan talking points. The "D." or "R." after a politician's name did not tell you what he thought about everything, or everything you thought about him.
The invisibility of work and workers in the digital age is as consequential as the rise of the assembly line and, later, the service economy.
Surrendering to jargon is a sign of journalism's dismal lack of self-confidence in the optimized age of content-management systems.
In a sense, whites who were always sort of the unthinking majority who didn't think of themselves necessarily as one among many interest groups but is simply the dominant group, now as whites become - are close to becoming a minority of Americans, are becoming a political interest group. And that's what Donald Trump is playing to. And it's a really dangerous, volatile game.
Today, we have our own concentrations of economic power. Instead of Standard Oil, U.S. Steel, the Union Pacific Railroad, and J. P. Morgan and Company, we have Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft.
I would caution anyone who thinks the solution is to get out to realize that Iraq will be our problem, whether we're there or not, for years to come. It will not be Vietnam; it will not let us go home and lick our wounds.
It's a cliche that the Senate is broken, and like most cliches, it's true.
The way Donald Trump talks about the problems of black Americans as a kind of separate group who are not part of his audience but he's kind of reaching over his audience or behind his audience to black Americans, saying what have you got to lose? As in you might as well join me because the Democrats haven't done anything for you. But joining me means joining this group that already supports me.
Much of the international unease with the Sochi Games has focused on the threat of terrorism, Putin's domestic repressiveness, and the Russian campaign of anti-gay propaganda.
The Petraeus-Crocker testimony is the kind of short-lived event on which the Administration has relied to shore up support for the war: the 'Mission Accomplished' declaration, the deaths of Uday and Qusay Hussein, Saddam's capture, the transfer of sovereignty, the three rounds of voting, the Plan for Victory, the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Every new milestone, however illusory, allows the Administration to avoid thinking ahead, to the years when the mistakes of Iraq will continue to haunt the U.S.
Like an odorless gas, [inequality] pervades every corner of the United States and saps the strength of the country's democracy. But it seems impossible to find the source and shut it off.
This is why mustard gas is such a danger or any weapon of mass destruction is such a dangerous thing because it - it's victims become everyone in the end.
Inequality provokes a generalized anger that finds targets where it can--immigrants, foreign countries, American elites, government in all forms--and it rewards demagogues while discrediting reformers.
Inequality saps the will to conceive of ambitious solutions to large collective problems, because those problems no longer seem very collective.
Gingrich was a far more volatile and aggressive individual than Boehner, but the institutional norms of self-restraint, and perhaps even self-interest, have broken down under the pressure of an increasingly abnormal Republican Party.
Character is destiny, and politicians usually get the scandals they deserve, with a sense of inevitability about them.
Twitter is crack for media addicts.
