The 2012 presidential campaign's turn away from the classic, straight-up, American election - where the candidate who gets the most votes nationwide wins - is another sad reminder of the extreme political polarization distorting today's politics. No one talks about a 50-state strategy for winning the presidency these days.
As President Obama is inaugurated for a second time, the biggest political surprise is that gun control is now key to his political legacy.
I think that you have a situation where one political party, in specific, if you watched the Republican debate, it's all about terrorism.
Americans have a lower opinion of Congress than they do of the NFL replacement refs, head lice, traffic jams, cockroaches and even the group to which yours truly belongs - Washington political pundits.
For the first time since 2007 there is political momentum behind fixing the immigration system. President Obama in his State of the Union speech reached out to the right-wing by saying illegal immigrants seeking citizenship will have to pay taxes, learn English and get in line behind people who are trying to enter the United States. legally.
Mr. Bush, I don't recognize the world you paint. I find your speech a form of sheer propaganda, having almost no relationship to reality. ...You can't 'stay the course' because you don't have a course.
It would be difficult for a writer of realism to avoid suggesting a political/moral perspective in his or her fiction. "Politics" per se is absent from my writing but there is usually a moral (if ironic) compass.
I think it`s going to be an important policy, the opening of Cuba and I think political policy for the hemisphere.
I think that behind the scenes the Pope [Francis] is seen as more of a religious figure, but obviously he is sort of a global political figure.
I think that Rahm Emanuel`s political career is going to be very difficult to revive after the mismanagement.
It's been encouraging to hear the pope talking about climate change and take it away from being a political issue to being one of survival.
I had imagined I would come back at some point. But yeah, that was for a very specific reason. I will be very excited when I can tweet things that are just stupid puns and not be political for a while.
Filmmaking became a possible way for me to combine my interest in photography and in gathering stories, as well as my interest in journalism and political science and international relations.
As an element in human progress, the right of private property, in importance, has taken first and almost only place in the current systems of law and of political economy. While admitting its great importance, we cannot conceal the fact that the writers on those subjects have wholly failed to distinguish between its use and its abuse, or to recognize its rational and equitable limits.
I'm not politically correct; I never said I was.
Even as I've become more reticent about the political possibilities of the academic space, I want to note that students have played significant roles in insurrectionary activity across the globe for decades and centuries, and I don't think that we've crossed some threshold where that's never going to happen again. We still need to take the university space quite seriously.
Over the last few decades, I've grown more skeptical about a few things in which I used to have more faith. I believe as much in the necessity of, and the possibility of, revolution as I ever did. At the same time, I've grown more skeptical about poetry's role in it or art's contribution to it, and I've grown more skeptical about the university. Universities are big companies, and they're disciplinary in the way that any big institution is. I've found that the political militancy that the professoriate has mostly been fairly repressive of what I take to be necessary politics.
The most important quote about poetry and politics that I know is from a different situationist, Guy Debord. He was locked in a debate with the French Surrealists, many of whom by the 40s and 50s were part of the French communist party apparatus. Many Surrealists eventually argued for instrumentalizing art for political ends. Debord countered, "I don't want to put poetry in the service of revolution. I want to put revolution in the service of poetry".
There's a difference, though, between being a political appointee and putting a political operative in charge of a U.S. attorney's office.
My feeling is, Twitter's free. If people want to have a political discourse with me on Twitter, and they disagree with me, I've got all the time in the world for that. It's when it gets nasty that I have problems.
Put yourself in the shoes of one of these oligarchs who has been given a gift of $10 billion. Russia is in a deep depression. Nobody's investing. There is a widespread political consensus that the way you got your wealth is illegitimate.
For the United States, our political system is clearly distorted. We have gerrymandering so that there is a situation where a million more voters who vote for Democrats, yet the House is controlled by the Republicans. So clearly, the way our Congress operates is important. The other big issue is the influence of money in politics. It's not only campaign contributions. People like Trump - either you become very dependent on your benefactors or you are very rich.
They [political leaders ] thought the only problem was the banking system, and if they fixed the banking system, all would be fine. But the banking system and the mortgage problem were symptomatic of some deeper problems, and evidently they still haven't recognized those deeper problems.
Venice was always one step removed from what was going on. If you were in Turin or in Milan or one of the industrial centers, you would have had a much more active political constituency. Venice essentially lived for itself.
When people ask me what they should do, I reply, "Get informed, get outraged, and then get political."
