Kevin Drum Quotes

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

[Ronald]Reagan and[George W.] Bush were far more radical than other presidents.

There's no liberal equivalent of Donald Trump.

Donald Trump lied about criticizing Mark Zuckerberg.Ben Carson lied about Mannatech.Carli Fiorina lied about the size of the tax code.Marco Rubio flatly refused to answer a question ("discredited attacks from Democrats") that I guess he didn't think he could just lie about. This is quite a debate.

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.

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?

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

Black crime rates fell more steeply than white crime rates, and now black incarceration is falling more steeply than white incarceration.

They [Republicans] assume that military action always shows strength, while avoiding military action always shows weakness. That's just crazy.

You're more likely to vote Democratic if you hate Republicans than if you love Democrats, and vice versa.

If Trump really opposed the war in Iraq, all he has to do is show us the evidence. It would take five minutes. He hasn’t done it. He’s lying.

The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while.

I hate the idea that we might lose even a few talented future leaders because they fell for Bernie Sanders's spiel and then got discouraged when it didn't pan out.

If you want to make a difference in America, you need to be prepared for a very long, very frustrating slog.

Our system is a mess, but 90 percent of America has insurance coverage.

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.

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.

In any case, to the extent that the media is dedicated to exposing lies and reporting the truth, it is indeed the opposition party to people like Bannon.

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

The reporting is fake. Look, look...You know what it is? Here's the thing. The public isn't - you know, they read newspapers, they see television, they watch. They don't know if it's true or false because they're not involved.But I'm involved. So I know when you're telling the truth or when you're not. I just see many, many untruthful things.

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.

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.

During the [Barack] Obama presidency, the Dow doubled in real terms. What's more, its growth has been remarkably steady.

Betsy DeVos, for example, has shown that she’s flatly ignorant of an astounding amount of basic education policy. It might be possible to persuade two or three Republicans to oppose her on these grounds - but only if the entire confirmation process isn’t a pure partisan battle.

If Democrats vote against everyone sight unseen, then Republicans will vote for everyone sight unseen. However, if Democrats demonstrate that they’re considering each candidate on the merits, they have at least a fighting chance of defeating one or two of Trump’s nominees.

Why aren't Democrats voting against President [Donald] Trump's cabinet nominees en masse? Is it because they're just a bunch soft-headed Beltway lifers who don't understand that the base is pissed and wants them to fight fight fight?

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.

[David] Muir tried four or five times to get a straight answer about [Donald] Trump's idiotic claim that 3-5 million noncitizens voted, and Trump just flatly wouldn't engage.

Despite more than a year of spittle-flecked fury at Hillary Clinton for using a private email server, most Trump voters probably don’t even know what a private server is. Nor do they care. It was just a buzzword that somehow meant Hillary was a crook.

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.

I think liberals should accept that if we want big programs that significantly reduce inequality - and we should - it's going to require higher taxes on everyone. The rich can certainly do more, especially given their stupendous income increases since the Reagan era, but they can't do it all.

So many theories. But all of them have one thing in common: They demonstrate that although Trump isn’t much of a businessman, he is rich enough to hire good tax attorneys who will hand over huge stacks of forms for him to sign blindly. That’s a helluva qualification for president, isn’t it?

When Donald Trump disingenuously demands to know why [Hillary] Clinton never tried to close the loopholes he used, the answer is: She did. And if there had been any way to make it retroactive, she probably would have voted for that too.

The FBI released its report on [Hillary] Clinton's emails. It exonerated her almost completely, but a few days later Matt Lauer obliviously spent a full third of his interview with Clinton on the emails anyway. Lauer was widely pilloried for this.

The fallout from the Supreme Court halfway killing Obamacare would likely be more serious than conservatives believe...Even their own base, which has been told relentlessly that Obamacare represents the end of the America they love, might start to demand a fix once it becomes clear just what they’re missing - and what all those blue states with their own exchanges are getting.

The ability to focus on a single task for an extended period is a talent that’s underappreciated - especially by extroverts, who continue to exercise an unhealthy hegemony over most workplaces.

If you don’t want your followers to give up in disgust, your inspiration needs to be in the service of goals that are at least attainable.

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.

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?

The folks who want to be left alone are the ones who actually get most of the work done, but they’re still mocked as drones or beavers or trolls. That’s bad enough, but now technology is helping the extroverts in their long twilight campaign against actually concentrating on anything.

I don't support everything Bernie Sanders supports, but I support most of it: universal health care, reining in Wall Street, fighting climate change, reversing the growth of income inequality, and so forth. If we could accomplish all this in a couple of years, I'd be delighted. But we can't.

Donald Trump says he's going to change the no-guns policy at his resorts. I can't wait to see that.

Carli Fiorina is really annoying. Hell, they're all annoying. But Fiorina doesn't even pretend to offer up policy answers. She just gives mini stump speeches about how bad everything is.

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.

I've long believed that having multiple official languages makes it very hard to sustain a united polity.

Apple has never allowed ad-blocking software on the iPhone or iPad. This is one among many reasons that I ditched both. Not because I hate ads all that passionately, but because it's an example of the obsessive corporate control Apple maintains over its environment.

The WHO took care to explicitly say that processed meat didn’t rank alongside smoking when it comes to cancer risk.

Like it or not, war is not always the answer. The better part of wisdom is to stay out.

If Robert Heinlein is more to your taste than George Lucas: “If you are part of a society that votes, then do so. There may be no candidates and no measures you want to vote for, but there are certain to be ones you want to vote against.” That’s certainly true of me. Over my lifetime, the Republican Party has done far more to repulse me than the Democratic Party has done to appeal to me. But the result in the voting booth would be about the same either way.

We didn't create ISIS. ISIS created ISIS.