Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
We moved a lot. I went to nine schools in four states before I was 14. It gave me tough skin, exposed me to lots of different kinds of people and made me somewhat adaptable.
Few believe Democrats will control both houses of Congress in 2021, and even if they manage to, Republicans will still be around to play spoiler on plenty of big agenda items.
I'd be perfectly happy living anonymously on a ranch in Kentucky, where the only time someone mentioned me was to discuss the crazy lady up the road with all the taxidermy and jerky.
At 80 million, millennials, born between 1980 and 2000, are the largest generation in history. Yet they are a demographic Congress has historically either taken for granted or ignored altogether.
While our goals in Syria were never clearly enumerated by then-President Obama or President Trump, throughout the war one of our most committed and effective allies in the fight has been the Kurds.
It's funny, when I'm in airports and I'm walking around, maybe feeling a little tired in my sweatpants and not wanting to talk to folks, I just put on my sunglasses. And usually it works every time.
Walking away from fame, whether by choice or necessity, isn't a bad thing. In fact for many, it's likely saved their lives, careers, families and basic dignity. More celebrities should probably try it.
But until Democrats and Republicans, blacks and whites, liberal activists and conservative activists decide division is no longer the most valuable unit of currency, there will be no solutions of any kind.
I enjoyed working at Fox. I met wonderful people who respected and mentored me. I learned a lot and made life-long friends. The network is an important part of our media landscape, and I want it to thrive.
When we talk about people or a party being on the wrong side of history, it usually requires some hindsight, a position of informed advantage to see clearly missteps that were less clear at the time of events.
But for Republicans and conservatives, it's both willfully ignorant and negligent not to acknowledge that there is in fact a scientific consensus that the Earth is warming and man is responsible for much of it.
I know many men at Fox, and most are good, decent people. Many are also good family men who have wives, mothers, sisters and daughters. Many are men of faith and moral conviction. These men have huge platforms.
The United States, under President Trump, is abdicating an important moral obligation to all democracies by seeming to shrug off the most egregious of human rights violations from both our allies and our enemies.
Larry Hogan Sr. was the first Republican to break with President Richard Nixon during his impeachment hearings, weakening not only the GOP firewall of support for the embattled president, but also Nixon's own defiance.
The idea that Americans are more divided than ever, entrenched in ideological camps and unwilling to meet in the middle, is so pervasive that one hardly goes a single hour without hearing about it on a cable news show.
Sacrifice is putting country before party and principles before politics. It is not defending the indefensible, protecting the powerful, or staying silent in the face of injustice just because you'd like to keep your job.
I put my conservatism up against anyone. I'm a pretty staunch conservative, with pretty rabid ideas about conservative values... Questioning my conservatism doesn't seem like a particularly interesting project or exercise.
Sacrifice is a leader who puts the needs of millions of others before his own, who can forgo ego and pride in order to do what he promised he would. It's rising above pettiness and partisanship for the good of the country.
One of the things we must do to begin to solve our hate problem is to put down our metaphorical weapons, our defenses, our special interests - and be honest about the role that guns play in this culture of hate in America.
There are plenty of good, rational, compassionate and talented conservatives who deserve a microphone and a platform. It's time to pass the baton to a new generation of leaders who don't speak - or think - like Archie Bunker.
In fact, if you think hard about it, animal conservation should actually be anathema to the Darwin-loving liberal agenda, which holds up evolution - and not altruistic compassion - as the final word on the survival of a species.
I don't like mimicking people. I don't like repeating talking points. I don't like arguing with people just to argue. I like actually coming up with an interesting thing to say that I don't think has been said before in that way.
Millennials are exceptionally independent and innovative. Striking out on your own and failing a few times is de rigueur, while going to work for a company on the expectation that you'll build a 30-year career there is unheard of.
If you've spent any time on social media, you may have had the misfortune of coming up against a cowardly troll who hides behind a Twitter handle or Facebook page to criticize or attack you for any number of grievances, real or perceived.
When I decided to see what Nascar was all about in 2005, it was an intellectual project, the same reason I went to the shooting range on West 20th Street and tried shooting a rifle at paper targets. I was addicted to both things instantly.
For one, as I've written before, the death penalty is plainly unjust. When the number of wrongful convictions and death penalty cases that are eventually exonerated number in the hundreds, if not thousands, we can not call it a moral system.
When it comes to crime, college campuses act as if they are sovereign nations, inside which secret bodies can adjudicate criminal wrongdoing to protect the reputation of the institution and the illusion that it is a safe place to send your kids.
When America pays lip service but little more to horrors like the disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi, instead proclaiming convenient but arbitrary loopholes in our moral obligations, we just give the world's worst bullies more ammunition and power.
I am so sick and tired of participating in this predictable cycle of politics, where a mass shooting happens, the left calls for new gun laws - some meaningful, some unproductive - the right yells 'slippery slope' and hides behind the Constitution.
We tend to think of the House as a less historically significant legislative body than the Senate. There are more representatives than there are senators, they're up for re-election every two years, and many come and go without having much of an impact.
But on a regular basis, Van Jones is my jam. I would show up anywhere to talk about anything with Van. And I'm lucky enough, not only to do that on television for CNN, but traveling to do left-right debates at colleges or for groups or work associations.
Women are not unwinnable for Republicans. Ronald Reagan won a majority of them in both of his elections, and by 10 points in 1984. The largest spread in recent history was in 1972, when Richard Nixon, even with that mug, won women by a whopping 24 points.
Early on in Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, Republicans were confronted almost daily with a clear choice: accept Trump's overt appeals to the bigotry and racism festering in the bowels of the nation, or reject it wholly. Far too many chose the former.
Donald Trump has been president for nearly three years. He's been on Twitter for more than 10. Yet the only thing more surprising than Trump's increasingly awful, hideously unpresidential, deeply divisive tweets is that we still manage to be surprised by them.
I believe in a strong two-party system, and when one party is losing so spectacularly, it emboldens the other party to overreach and become a cartoon of itself, invoking awful things like - I'm just spit-balling here - child separation policies and trade wars.
But the rising chorus urging ESPN to change its stripes is missing something: The intersection of sports and politics is natural. And the left-wing lean of ESPN is inevitable. Conservatives bothered by the slant should stop hand-wringing and start their own network.
Remember common sense? Bring it back. Abolishing ICE, our main federal immigration enforcement agency, is a colossally stupid idea. Floating the possibility of impeaching Brett Kavanaugh, whose confirmation just jolted the GOP back out of its coma, is painfully dumb.
Speaking of honesty, if you're like me you turn on the news to get information - a set of facts. If you want opinion, you come to shows like mine, where our prejudices and biases and opinions are made known; there's no false pretenses that you're getting pure objectivity.
Republicans can continue to protest reality and stick their heads in the sand, but the sooner they acknowledge the very basic facts of climate change, the sooner they can get to crafting a conservative strategy to combat it, instead of ceding the territory solely to Democrats.
As a college-educated twentysomething woman with cool glasses and an affinity for modern art and Ryan Adams, I had the constant experience of strangers assuming I was a liberal. I grew accustomed to the shock and horror that passed over their faces when I revealed that, yes, I am a Republican.
For years, I've gone on television and made the case for the Second Amendment - the right to bear arms. I've pointed out that criminals don't follow gun laws, and I've defended the NRA and its members - law-abiding gun owners like me who have nothing to do with mass shootings or violent gun crimes.
Tribalism, after all, is part of our evolutionary DNA. The need to identify with a group, to belong and commune with like-minded people is not only biological, it's what has helped motivate our desire for and devotion to all kinds of important cultural institutions, from organized religion to sports fandom.
Time's Up is finally, it would seem, activism with some teeth. It isn't perfect, however. One of the first acts of protest - urging celebrities to wear black to awards shows - reveals a worrisome willingness to keep lunging toward those lazy, meaningless and empty gestures that cheapen the seriousness of an issue.
Maybe you want to look at the most recent polling or you want to pull up a data set on early voting in Ohio, but when you cover politics day-to-day and you've been doing it for many election cycles, you're prepared. You either know this stuff because you've been doing it so long or you don't and that shows real quick.
There is no sense in meddling with the extinction of polar bears, not when so many more pressing human problems await. Until there's ironclad proof of how and why extinction works, and how much evil we've done to hasten it along, I'm going to save my emotional anguish for dying and suffering members of my own species.
After helping the Republican National Committee address some of the troubling deficiencies the party faced after 2012, as outlined in its so-called autopsy report, and witnessing some real progress in our outreach to women in the ensuing years, I did not expect an egomaniacal arsonist to come along and set all that ablaze.
If it's possible, 2018 was a year in which it felt like everything was changing, and also like nothing was. While we set our global expectations for the next one, teeming with significant political, social and economic volatility, we're also considering more local possibilities - changes within our own communities, homes and bodies.