Kevin Drum quotes:

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.

Ben Carson says his flat tax will be around 15 percent. And by God, if he ever shows you the details, you'll see how awesome and deficit-killing it is.

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

Apparently the Republican base got radicalized first, and Democrats picked up the ball later. Or something.

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.

If I could snap my fingers and import France's health care system today, I'd do it.

Democrats are awfully sensitive to losing power for a few years. I report, you decide.

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

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

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.

[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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

I'd like to see college debt levels drop by a lot, but I'm not quite sure what the best way to do that is.

We stiffened the penalties for fraud, we extended nationwide efforts to make sure that payments are accurate and they closed a loophole in which people were gaming the system. We didn't change eligibility requirements or reduce the level of benefits.

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.

[Donald trump] was steamed about [Hillary] Clinton's suggestion that he might not be as rich as he says. So he ditched the email stuff and instead spend a couple of minutes defending the greatness of his income, his company, his debts, his bankers, his buildings - and then sort of forgot what he was talking about and wandered off into a riff about how terrible our infrastructure is.

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.

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

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.

Despite more than a year of spittle-flecked fury at Hillary Clinton for using a private email server, most [Donald] 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.

I think [Hillary] Clinton owes the press some thanks for going so far overboard on the emails and the Clinton Foundation over the past year.

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.

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 [Donald] Trump's nominees.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

In America, the economy is simply nowhere near bad enough to serve as the base of any kind of serious political revolution.

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 [Steven] Bannon.

It's certainly true that it's easier to be patient about change when you're not personally suffering.

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

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

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

My fear is that having been promised a revolution, Bernie Sanders supporters will become disgusted and cynical when Hillary Clinton and the establishment win yet again and the revolution doesn't happen.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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?

So many theories. But all of them have one thing in common: They demonstrate that although [Donald] 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?

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.

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-& what all those blue states with their own exchanges are getting.

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 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.

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.

The plain fact is that recent college grads aren't in massive pain. They suffered during the Great Recession like everyone else, but all told, they probably suffered a little less than most other groups.

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

The younger you are, the more likely you are to have grown up in a (mostly) lead-free environment, and that means you're less likely to have committed a felony or gotten sent to prison.

There's no liberal equivalent of Donald Trump.

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

We didn't create ISIS. ISIS created ISIS.

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

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.

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?

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

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

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