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I grew up in a politically aware household: very civically-minded, good Minnesota liberals.
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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.
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For the cable news guest, nothing happens for a while until suddenly everything happens very quickly. After you receive your television face, you stand around for a while, ignored, until you're sat down at a desk and asked to argue with strangers.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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'Political junkies' and liberals will watch MSNBC, and angry, old right-wingers will watch Fox.
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In many ways, Tucker Carlson's a better symbol of the pathetic state of what passes for conservative journalism than even Glenn Beck or the late Andrew Breitbart, to name two of his contemporaries with a much larger following.
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The Pentagon budget, like all government spending, is an expression of priorities.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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'Simplifying' the tax code is a priority mainly for people who make enough money to want to avoid paying taxes, and who make their money by means unorthodox enough to make avoiding taxes possible and desirable.
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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.
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We're getting the sort of 'compromise' American politics specializes in: the one where things are intentionally made worse for most people in the hopes that if things are made bad enough, the other side will cave.
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Modern political speechwriting is certainly a skill, and one that requires experience and practice to master.
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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?
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There's no good reason that reliably liberal states should be electing senators as friendly to Wall Street as Cory Booker.
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Every year, the White House Correspondents' Dinner inspires two competing varieties of coverage: celebrity-obsessed fawning and angry tirades about how it represents everything twisted about our broken democracy. It doesn't, really.
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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.
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Programs aimed strictly at the poorest Americans are always and forever under assault from a Republican Party that still has not dared to cut spending on programs - like Medicare and crop insurance - that also benefit the rich.
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If some modern-day David Brock wanted to defect from the conservative movement and write a tell-all focused solely on the financial chicanery of the entire right-wing nonprofit/think tank/publishing sphere, I would read the absolute heck out of it.