Kevin Drum Quotes

Carli Fiorina says companies are consolidating because it's the only way to compete with big, corrupt government. "This is how socialism starts." Is that also why she bought Compaq when she was CEO of Hewlett-Packard?

[Donald] Trump had the opportunity to go after [Hillary] Clinton's emails at length if he wanted to, but he didn't.

We had Hillary Clinton try and do a reset. We had Hillary Clinton give Russia 20 percent of the uranium in our country. You know what uranium is, right? This thing called nuclear weapons, like lots of things, are done with uranium, including some bad things.

Republican voters already hated Democrats so much that [Bill] Clinton and [Barack] Obama didn't really have much impact.

On the Medicare side, they limited their cuts to far in the future, and to providers.

Rising inequality is a cultural and economic cancer on a lot of different levels.

In other words, in the same way that mass incarceration surged because of a real thing, it's finally starting to ebb because of a real thing: the actual, concrete decline in violent crime that started in the early 90s and which appears to be permanent. America is simply a safer place than it used to be, and looks set to stay that way.

Open office plans, cell phones, constant notifications: these are all things that fight against sustained attention on a task. For some people and some tasks, that doesn’t matter. But for a lot of important work, it matters a lot.

Note to conservatives: sometimes you just have to give up. Do you really care that much about killing lots of bad guys as opposed to letting them rot in prison for the rest of their lives? It might be time to let go and save your energy for other battles. This one is getting absurd.

You have to buy off interest groups, compromise your ideals, and settle for half loaves...

I’m just some white guy in California, and nobody in Flint is going to pay any attention to what I’m saying. I don’t blame them. Nor do doctors want to publicly agree with me, because nobody wants to downplay the effects of lead poisoning. I get that too. I can already imagine the number of tweets and emails I’m going to get demanding to know why I think Flint is no big deal.

Promising a revolution that’s simply not feasible really does have the potential to create cynicism when a couple of years go by and it hasn’t happened.

I watch CNN, it's so much anger and hatred and just the hatred.

I can't fault [Donald] Trump for firing [Craig] Deare. Then again, I also can't fault Deare for going berserk. Sometimes a marriage just doesn't work.

Marco Rubio turns a question about missing Senate votes into an attack on the mainstream media.

There's no liberal equivalent of Donald Trump.

Smart hiring managers in the modern world should be asking, “How long can you concentrate on a task before you have to take a break?” I wonder how many of them do?

Of course the system can be changed. Why would I bother spending 14 years of my life blogging if I didn't believe that?

Actually, I think we all understand just fine why Donald Trump is president: because he ran a racist, boorish, epically mendacious campaign and Republicans all decided to go along with it. And even that wouldn’t have been enough if Trump hadn’t gotten some additional help from his pals James Comey and Vladimir Putin.

Because prison sentences in America tend to be long, de-incarceration lags falling crime rates by a fair amount, but eventually it does catch up.

Apple is happy to allow users more control over their devices as long as it also happens to benefit Apple. If it doesn't, then tough.

The media here is the opposition party. They don't understand this country. They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States.

We need to cut regulations. Apparently this will make everyone a little more socially responsible?

I read quite a few complaints last night about Lester Holt’s choice of debate topics. Liberals wanted to know why climate change didn’t come up. Conservatives thought there should have been a question about abortion.