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Because TED is for, and by, unbelievably rich people, they tiptoe around questions of the justness of a society that rewards TED attendees so much for what usually amounts to a series of lucky breaks.
Alex Pareene -
Furloughing a bunch of air traffic controllers has a pretty easy-to-predict effect on air travel: It causes delays.
Alex Pareene
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Christopher Hitchens, the late essayist and sot, was a man who purposefully cultivated a lot of friends of a certain type - rich, self-important, generally dim-witted and hence easy for a well-spoken Oxbridge debater to impress - and he electrified Washington D.C. society mainly by not being a completely charmless bore.
Alex Pareene -
Co-opting the conservative line on anti-poverty programs did nothing to halt conservative attacks on anti-poverty programs.
Alex Pareene -
The thing with 'The West Wing' is that the fantasy was legitimately better than the reality - these were smarter, better people than their real-life counterparts, working together at a better White House than the one we had.
Alex Pareene -
Please don't begin to believe that the American political establishment is anything but a corrupt puppet of oligarchy.
Alex Pareene -
Modern political speechwriting is not a high-minded pursuit for brilliant talents.
Alex Pareene -
The conservative media movement exists primarily as a moneymaking venture.
Alex Pareene
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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.
Alex Pareene -
Many people - especially those people who earn livings by convincing editors and bookers that rich and influential strangers consider their thoughts and opinions interesting - have ideas about who should or should not run for president.
Alex Pareene -
FreedomWorks, which is funded primarily by very rich people, solicits donations from non-rich conservative people. More than 80,000 people donated money to FreedomWorks in 2012, and it seems likely that only a small minority of those people were hedge fund millionaires.
Alex Pareene -
Donald Trump, an oft-bankrupt make-believe mogul clown with a television show where he pretends to fire America's saddest former celebrities, is one of the Republican Party's most prominent national figures because he is on TV and people have heard of him.
Alex Pareene -
CNN's problem goes to its very core and to the identity it's sought ever since the rise of Fox News, on its right: CNN is the channel for people who don't want to watch the other channels! That's a stupid strategy.
Alex Pareene -
CNN will always be the channel people turn on when wars and horrible disasters happen. The 'trick' is getting people to also want to watch it when there aren't hundreds or thousands of people somewhere in the world currently in mortal peril.
Alex Pareene
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'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!
Alex Pareene -
I grew up in a politically aware household: very civically-minded, good Minnesota liberals.
Alex Pareene -
The Pentagon budget, like all government spending, is an expression of priorities.
Alex Pareene -
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.
Alex Pareene -
Medicare is expensive because we spend a lot on healthcare. We spend a lot on healthcare basically just because we want to, and doing so has been very good to a lot of people who work in healthcare fields.
Alex Pareene -
Apocalyptic hysteria is much more effective at getting people to open their wallets than reasonable commentary.
Alex Pareene
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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.
Alex Pareene -
It's been possible for years to use a PC to watch and record over-the-air television broadcasts, and unencrypted cable television tuners have been available almost as long. But for a long time, you could only watch copyright-protected channels with a cable company-leased box.
Alex Pareene -
The Right likes to think that intellectuals and academics like Allan Bloom and Dinesh D'Souza spurred the explosive growth of movement conservatism in the 1980s and 1990s, when it was actually mostly Rush Limbaugh.
Alex Pareene -
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.'
Alex Pareene