David Sirota Quotes

Cheney initiatives that may seem superficially reasonable when calmly uttered by a Cheney usually have an insane ulterior motive. In this case, that truism applies: The Crow-Cheney legislation may sound like it includes reasonable requests, but they are designed to make the Afghanistan deployment permanent. In practice, nobody can predict with 100 percent certainty what will ensue once a nineteen-year ends. What we can know is that it’s a bad idea to continue a policy that isn’t working — and there’s plenty of evidence that it isn’t.

So far in the #DemocraticDebate, there is @BernieSanders who says the wealthiest country in human history can afford to make sure its people don't die for lack of health insurance and can get a debt-free education, and then there are others who insist that's not possible.

The first rule for every incoming freshman Democrat in Congress should be that you never work with a Cheney on war policy. The second rule for every freshman Democrat should be: re-read the first rule and make damn sure to follow it.

a lot of affluent liberals... hate Bernie & Warren hate them because Bernie/Warren basically reject the idea that we can just go back to the pre-Trump corporate status quo — a status quo that was great for affluent folks, and a crushing dystopia for millions of other people.'''

According to data compiled by the UK Guardian, Chavez's first decade in office saw Venezuelan GDP more than double and both infant mortality and unemployment almost halved. Then there is a remarkable graph from the World Bank that shows that under Chavez's brand of socialism, poverty in Venezuela plummeted (the Guardian reports that its "extreme poverty" rate fell from 23.4 percent in 1999 to 8.5 percent just a decade later). In all, that left the country with the third lowest poverty rate in Latin America.

Politicians often talk about “workers” but many of them do not actually say the word “union.” Bernie has been saying that word for decades and Warren in her opening video also said it. We will see if any other 2020 candidates are EXPLICIT in their support for the labor movement.

It would help if television shows elucidate the public policy records of the politicians running, so that voters can make policy-based — rather than personality-based — decisions on who to be passionate about. This seems particularly critical in the era of climate change.

For weeks, Beto [O'Rourke] fans have attacked our reporting in an effort to intimidate journalists into not looking into his record. But now the Houston Chronicle is citing our reporting for having prompted a much needed debate about climate policy & his record.

No doubt, there are few absolutely clear answers to those uncomfortable questions, if those questions are assessed honestly. Most likely, in fact, the answers are murky. But such questions need to be asked.

When a country goes socialist and it craters, it is laughed off as a harmless and forgettable cautionary tale about the perils of command economics. When, by contrast, a country goes socialist and its economy does what Venezuela's did, it is not perceived to be a laughing matter - and it is not so easy to write off or to ignore. It suddenly looks like a threat to the corporate capitalism, especially when said country has valuable oil resources that global powerhouses like the United States rely on. For a flamboyant ideologue like Chavez, that meant him being seen by the transnational elite as much more than an insignificant rogue leader of a relatively small country. He came to be seen as a serious threat to the global system of corporate capitalism. That, of course, is considered a high crime by the American political illuminati - a high crime prompting a special punishment.

Rep. Liz Cheney, daughter of Dick, is trying to prolong her father's in Afghanistan. You would think that every Democrat would be united in opposing such a policy, right? Well, you would be wrong. It’s not every day that you wake up in your blue state and learn that one of your newly elected Democratic congresspeople is joining with a Cheney to try to prolong the longest war in American history. But that's what happened this week, when Colorado's freshman Democratic Rep. Jason Crow teamed up with Republican Rep. Liz Cheney to advance legislation that would make it more difficult for any president to draw down troop deployments in Afghanistan. I live in the same media market as Crow's district. I can tell you that his 2018 campaign was focused on gun control. It was not a campaign promising voters that he would go to Washington to make common cause with Liz Cheney, and help her efforts to glorify and fortify her daddy's policy of endless war. But that’s exactly what his bill does.

It would be nice if our political discourse could be rational enough to actually accept the science that says Obama’s historic oil production increases are bad for the planet, instead of looking at that science and just screaming “but Obama is popular among voters!”

Here’s Joe Biden. Note: this is not a speech from a long time ago. This is a speech from mid-2018. This seems very important... Biden explicitly says "Paul Ryan was correct when he did the tax code...the first thing we have to go after, [w:Social Security|SS]] and Medicare... It's the only way to find room to pay for it"

Personal opinion: I think it would be good for there to be a presidential debate in which the questions don’t come only from millionaires paid by billionaires.

At the moment Chavez's name is invoked, the conversation is inevitably terminated, ending any possibility of discourse. That is by design - it is what the longtime caricaturing and marginalizing of Chavez was always supposed to do. But maybe now that the iconoclast is dead, the cartoon will end. Maybe now Chavez's easily ridiculed bombast can no longer be used to distract from Venezuela's record - and, thus, a more constructive, honest and critical economic conversation can finally begin.