Political battles are won when the rich favor them.

Most politicians are vain. Many of them are stupid.

Everyone knows how hard it can be to market to millennials.

The conservative media movement exists primarily as a moneymaking venture.

Modern political speechwriting is not a high-minded pursuit for brilliant talents.

The Pentagon budget, like all government spending, is an expression of priorities.

I grew up in a politically aware household: very civically-minded, good Minnesota liberals.

'Political junkies' and liberals will watch MSNBC, and angry, old right-wingers will watch Fox.

Modern political speechwriting is certainly a skill, and one that requires experience and practice to master.

Apocalyptic hysteria is much more effective at getting people to open their wallets than reasonable commentary.

Only a small rich fringe hates Social Security for disincentivizing 80-year-olds from seeking full-time employment.

Furloughing a bunch of air traffic controllers has a pretty easy-to-predict effect on air travel: It causes delays.

Please don't begin to believe that the American political establishment is anything but a corrupt puppet of oligarchy.

Aaron Sorkin is why people hate liberals. He's a smug, condescending know-it-all who isn't as smart as he thinks he is.

There's no good reason that reliably liberal states should be electing senators as friendly to Wall Street as Cory Booker.

I guess if you want me to stop writing horrible, mean takedowns of everyone, give me a really, really cushy columnist gig.

Co-opting the conservative line on anti-poverty programs did nothing to halt conservative attacks on anti-poverty programs.

The State of the Union is less written than it is designed, structured and organized around applause prompts and camera cues.

Conservatives don't want to read good, smart books. They mostly want to read Fox and talk radio hosts writing about presidents.

In case you're unfamiliar with TED, it is a series of short lectures on a variety of subjects that stream on the Internet for free.

I think humor can be an effective way of getting the point across, but there are definitely times where I just write very earnestly.

I love insults, devastating takedowns, things that could be described by Twitter hacks as 'shots fired,' and funny ad hominem attacks.

I don't want to be totally repetitive and doing the same thing over and over again for the rest of my life. I don't want to do that at all.

Political journalists, socially inept or no, are not nerds. Most of them can't do math, a fact that campaigns and politicians regularly exploit.

In our system of government, an opposition party doesn't have the ability to pass legislation, but it has the ability to massively screw things up.

Do you know who takes weekday shuttle flights between Washington and New York? People who think they are too important for the train, let alone the bus.

What really destroyed Tucker Carlson, respected magazine journalist, was TV. TV exposed him as glib, smug, and not nearly as clever as he thought he was.

Niall Ferguson is an intellectual fraud whose job, for years, has been to impress dumb, rich Americans with his accent and flatter them with his writings.

Tax expenditures for middle- and working-class Americans - like the earned income tax credit - aren't thought of as loopholes; they're just thought of as benefits.

American politicians are responsive almost solely to the interests and desires of their rich constituents and interest groups that primarily represent big business.

The late Christopher Hitchens had the professional contrarian's fixation on attacking sacred cows, and rather soon after his cancer diagnosis, he became one himself.

For CNBC, and for Wall Street, billion-dollar fines for violations of the law are just part of the price of doing business, along with litigation costs and 'compliance.'

Some BuzzFeed articles are written by smart people who use complete sentences. Some of the disposable lists are witty and appear to have taken some effort to put together.

Ideally, in the future, you'll just pay your cable company for the stream, which you'll be able to watch and manipulate through whatever means on whatever devices you like.

'The Newsroom' is phenomenally bad good TV. Sam Waterston and Jeff Daniels and Emily Mortimer are all terrific! So is the production, and the direction, and even the editing!

Freedom from menial work should be a rallying cry, not a cudgel to be used against the Left. How much liberty is there in having to do something you hate in order to survive?

Vaccine conspiracies, like so much modern cult conspiracy culture, perpetuates itself and lives on indefinitely thanks to the community-building and archiving of the Internet.

The goal isn't, and shouldn't be, to block Hillary Clinton. The goal is to make sure a potential President Clinton is beholden to a better Congress and a better Democratic Party.

Is there something psychologically wrong with David Gregory? No, besides the usual superhuman vanity of a television professional. He is just not a great host of a news talk show!

From the late David Broder on down, the most powerful and influential of the great Washington columnists and journalists tend to cultivate the driest, least lively voices possible.

Rush Holt would be a fine senator. He's an actual physicist, which is neat. He cares very strongly about global warming, which is probably the single most pressing issue of our era.

Conservatives frequently complain of being frozen out of the culture industry, though, like all industries, the culture industry will produce or sell anything it expects to profit from.

The song 'Take This Job and Shove It' spent 18 weeks on the country charts in 1977. 1970s country music fans had a clearer understanding of the ennui of wage-slavery than modern elites.

Cory Booker became a millionaire because this is how the economy works for people of his class: Rich people give other rich people money to do nothing, simply because they 'deserve' it.

As long as Rupert Murdoch has owned it, the 'New York Post' has been defined by its shamelessness and total lack of interest in taking responsibility for its worst errors and poor judgment.

Anderson Cooper is fine. He is a smart, conscientious guy, and he seems to want his show to produce and highlight good journalism. But he also seems to want to replace Regis, or maybe even Oprah.

Many on the professional Right owe their livelihoods to a large and growing network of nonprofit donor-funded groups and for-profit consulting and direct marketing companies hired by those groups.

We are actually a very rich country with a lot of resources and the ability to do almost whatever we want. We could eliminate poverty in America by spending a fraction of what we spend on defense.

Cable boxes are, almost without exception, awful. They're under-powered computers running very badly designed software. Their channel guides are slow, poorly laid out, and usually riddled with ads.

'Flash mobs' are reported on extensively because they're novel and can be used to stoke fears of young people and the Internet. The media, of course, have absolutely no clue what they're reporting on.

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