Peter Baker:

It is possible to win the inside game and lose the outside game. In their darkest moments, White House aides wonder aloud whether it is even possible for a modern president to succeed, no matter how many bills he signs. It may be that every modern president is going to be, at best, average.

Stringer Bell:

There are games beyond the game.

Rahm Emanuel:

We have to play the game.

John Carney:

Get ready to hear the phrase "pig through the python" a lot.

Jonathan Blaustein:

Is this food? Just because we can put something in our mouths, does that make it food? At what point do we decide that something isn't food?

Ben McGrath:

The first time Sheila McClear had lunch with Nick Denton, she returned to the office afterward and threw up. She attributed this to food poisoning, but it happened again the second time they had lunch.

Barbara Boxer (and everyone else):

It's just a thing -- I worked so hard ...

Seth Godin:

A lot of entrepreneurs get an MBA because they are afraid to go out into world without one.

Lara Stone:

I kept saying 'Excuse me, excuse me, excuse me,' because I had to get to the catwalk, but she just kept posing. So I pushed her. It was only a few stairs.

Tim Henderson:

After watching their parents -- typically both of them -- work ever longer hours in an increasingly around-the-clock and competitive world, 20-somethings wonder whether their 20s will be the best time of their lives or will be spent doggedly climbing the career ladder.

Jerry Weinberger:

Our pursuit of happiness first makes us unhappy, and then makes us poor because it makes us corrupt, which then makes us even more unhappy.

For a smart and lucky person in civilized society, the wise thing to do is to work hard and then retire as early as possible.

Decius:

Life is too short to spend 2300 hours a year working on someone else's idea of what the right problems are.

Michael Kinsley:

There are a dozen ways to look at the national debt and the annual government deficit, and they all lead to varying degrees of panic. What's especially scary about our fiscal situation is that everybody knows the facts and concedes the implication, but nobody is doing anything about it.

Decius:

I said I'd do something about this, and I am.

Wendy Kaminer:

I wish the issues were vetted ... but I think they're not, because voters don't have the time, or the energy, or the information.

Tribal Leader:

We Taliban have time.

Christopher Hitchens:

I could introduce you to dozens of enthusiastic and intelligent people, highly aware of "the issues" and very well-informed on all questions from human rights to world trade to counterinsurgency, to none of whom it would occur to subject themselves to what passes for the political "arena." They are willing to give up potentially more lucrative careers in order to work on important questions and expand the limits of what is currently thinkable politically, but the great honor and distinction of serving their country in the legislature is only offered to them at a price that is now way too steep.

The Economist:

In all his speeches, John McCain urges Americans to make sacrifices for a country that is both "an idea and a cause".

He is not asking them to suffer anything he would not suffer himself.

But many voters would rather not suffer at all.

Josh Kraushaar:

Democrats have portrayed the influx of GOP outside money into the political process as sinister, raising the unsubstantiated specter of foreign influence into the political process. But money chases momentum -- not the other way around.

Lawrence Lessig:

Under our current system of campaign finance, there is no overlap between the interests of voters and of contributors. There is instead a fundamental gap. The sort of thing you need to do to make contributors happy is not the sort of thing you need to do to make voters happy.

Jay Rosen:

Who's going to win? What's the strategy? Is it working? Focusing on those things helps advertise the political innocence of the press because "who's winning?" is not an ideological question. By repeatedly asking it journalists underline that theirs is not an ideological profession. But how does this pattern help voters make a decision? Should they vote for the candidate with the best strategy?

My own view is that journalists should describe the world in a way that helps us participate in political life. That is what they are "for".

Michael Tomasky:

One old rule of politics is that when the other side is shooting itself in the foot, do nothing - just stand back and watch.

But we are in a new media and political environment.

So I propose a new rule: when the other side is shooting itself in the foot, stand close by and keep handing out bullets.

The Economist:

American exceptionalism comes in many forms, but one of the odder ones is the way it sets its electoral boundaries.

Politically controlled redistricting helps drive the hyper-partisanship of politics. In turbulent political times, when large swings in the vote are possible, party bosses feel driven to construct safer seats than they once used to need. With fewer seats changing hands on election day, this tends to shift the focus of politics away from the general election itself, and on to the primaries in which the parties select their candidates. The turnout in primaries is tiny, typically only between 10% and 20% of voters, and tends to be disproportionately composed of activists. So those selected tend to be politically slanted to the left or the right extremes.

On November 2nd, a big blow could be struck against the ancient practice of gerrymandering, when California's voters will decide whether or not to turn the task over to an independent Citizen Redistricting Commission, laboriously constructed so as to be balanced and independent by a process of screening and random selection.

Most other states don't have the power to change voting rules by popular ballot, meaning that legislatures will, in effect, have to vote to disempower themselves.

Until every district matters, perhaps we could use a tool that vectors prospective authors of Wikipedia articles toward the "battleground" districts where their efforts at educational outreach might have an impact.

Aaron Swartz:

As described in Jeffrey Toobin's excellent New Yorker article, The Great Election Grab, new computer software allows whatever party controls the state legislature to redraw districts so finely and accurately that of the 435 House seats, only about 30 are actually contested.

Jeffrey Toobin:

Before 1990, most state legislators did their redistricting by taking off their shoes and tiptoeing with Magic Markers around large maps on the floor, marking the boundaries on overlaid acetate sheets. Use of computers in redistricting began in the nineties, and it has now become a science.

The software is called Caliper's Maptitude for Redistricting and costs about four thousand dollars per copy. The software permits mapmakers to analyze an enormous amount of data -- party registration, voting patterns, ethnic makeup from census data, property-tax records, roads, railways, old district lines.

Nathaniel Persily:

There used to be a theory that gerrymandering was self-regulating. But it's not self-regulating anymore. We have become very good at predicting how people are going to vote. The software is too good, and the partisanship is too strong.

Electoral boundaries in America: Time to bury Governor Gerry

Neil Shea:

In Afghanistan every soldier or Marine, every civilian, possesses some small piece of the truth. Journalists pull these pieces together into stories, but it is impossible to collect them all. We generally believe, or hope, that others at higher levels and with grander titles have gathered more and see a larger collage of reality.

Arab Proverb:

It is good to know the truth, but it is better to speak of palm trees.

Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef:

The biggest mistake of American policy makers so far might be their profound lack of understanding of their enemy.

P.J. O'Rourke:

We're outsiders in Afghanistan, and this is Occam's razor for explaining the Taliban.

Traditionalism being one of the things that makes Afghanistan so hard for Americans to understand. We Americans have so many traditions. For instance our political traditions date back to the 12th-century English Parliament if not to the Roman Senate. Afghans, on the other hand, have had the representative democracy kind of politics for only six years. Afghanistan's political traditions are just beginning to develop. A Pashtun tribal leader told me that a "problem among Afghan politicians is that they do not tell the truth." It's a political system so new that that needed to be said out loud.

If Americans claim not to understand Afghan corruption, we're lying. Bribery has been a dominant part of our foreign policy in Afghanistan, the way it's been a dominant part of everyone's foreign policy in Afghanistan including al Qaeda's. What we Americans don't understand about Afghan corruption is why it's so transparent, just a matter of openly taking money.

Anatol Lieven:

Afghanistan is often called a "medieval" country as if this were an insult. It would in fact be a compliment -- if only it were true. In many respects, Afghanistan is in fact closer to the European Dark Ages than to the European -- or Muslim -- Middle Ages.

Robin Nagle:

You can understand the entire cosmos of a culture by looking at its definitions of dirty and clean, and acceptable versus unacceptable, the profane and the sacred.

Lawrence Lessig:

Washington is the kind of city where one never writes if one can call, never calls if one can speak, never speaks if one can nod, and never nods if one can wink.

There may be a quid. There may be a quo. But because the two are independent, there is no pro.

Marcia Angell:

They consistently refer to "potential" conflicts of interest, as though that were different from the real thing, and about disclosing and "managing" them, not about prohibiting them.

In short, there seems to be a desire to eliminate the smell of corruption, while keeping the money.

Decius:

I've come to the conclusion that you actually want shifty, dishonest politicians elected by an apathetic populace. This means that things are working.

Wendy Kaminer:

These issues, you say they're going to get vetted in the campaign. They're going to get talked about in the campaign, but that's not getting vetted -- because, it's going to be, a conversation, it's going to be an is-too, is-not conversation ... It's not as if the voters are going to go out there, and read the underlying legislation, do the underlying research on the issue. They're just going to decide whose word they take. You know, that's how voters decide these issues. They decide whose word they're going to take, because they're not going to do the underlying research, and that's why I say, it comes down, not to specific issues ... but to what people glean are the attitudes of the candidates, personalities, and what the general environment feels like.

I wish the issues were vetted ... but I think they're not, because voters don't have the time, or the energy, or the information.

Tom Cross:

Most people in the State of Georgia have never heard of a Voter Information Guide and the idea has never occurred to them. If you think this is a good idea, tell someone else about it.

Gunnar Hellekson:

You get transparency first, and that compels reform. That's the whole point.

Dan Gillmor:

Maybe we, the audience, have to take some responsibility on ourselves, being more literate about media techniques, especially the kind used to persuade or manipulate audiences.

An exchange:

Moe: You gotta ... think hard, and come up with a slogan that appeals to all the lazy slobs out there.
Homer: [moans] Can't someone else do it?
Moe: "Can't someone else do it?", that's perfect!

There Is No Pro

Milt Bearden, in March 2009:

The only certainty about Afghanistan is that it will be Obama's War.

Garry Wills:

Most presidents start wondering -- or, more often, worrying -- about their "legacy" well into their first term. Or, if they have a second term, they worry even more feverishly about what posterity will think of them. Obama need not wonder about his legacy, even this early. It is already fixed, and in one word: Afghanistan.

The President might have been saved from the folly that will be his lasting legacy. But now we are ten years into a war that could drag on for another ten, and could catch in its trammels the next president, the way Vietnam tied up president after president.

David Petraeus:

Hard is not hopeless.

Nir Rosen:

"You Westerners have your watches," the leader observed. "But we Taliban have time."

Obama's Legacy: Afghanistan

Evgeny Morozov:

We want to cultivate voters who are less susceptible to propaganda than Shirky's beloved South Korean teenagers. Very little suggests that we are enjoying greater success in this quest than we did in the golden era of network television. The environment of media scarcity produced voters who, on average, were far less partisan and far better informed about politics than are today's voters.

David Isenberg:

The shift from scarcity to plenty is often the harbinger of new value propositions.

Decius:

I said I'd do something about this, and I am.

Paul Graham:

Officially the purpose of schools is to teach kids. In fact their primary purpose is to keep kids locked up in one place for a big chunk of the day so adults can get things done.

Richard Haass:

Let's not kid ourselves. We're not going to find some wonderful thing that's going to deliver large positive results at modest costs. It's not going to happen.

Atul Gawande:

This is a deeper, more fundamental problem than we acknowledge. The truth is that the volume and complexity of the knowledge that we need to master has grown exponentially beyond our capacity as individuals. Worse, the fear is that the knowledge has grown beyond our capacity as a society. [...] We're not talking about a problem rooted in economics. We're talking about a problem rooted in scientific complexity.

The most interesting, under-discussed, and potentially revolutionary aspect of the law is that it doesn't pretend to have the answers.

NYT:

Surely the case of Maher Arar was a chance to show that those who countenanced torture must pay a price.

Malcolm Gladwell:

Free is just another price.

David Cole:

The courts have washed their hands of the Maher Arar affair, but that does not mean that it is resolved.

To the Obama administration, defending government officials from suit, regardless of the gravity of the allegations, is evidently more important than holding individuals responsible for complicity in torture.

Scott Shane:

The case of Yahya Wehelie illustrates the daunting challenge, both for people like Mr. Wehelie and for their FBI questioners, of proving that they pose no security threat.

The no-fly list gives the American authorities greater leverage in assessing travelers who are under suspicion, because to reverse the flying ban many are willing to undergo hours of questioning.

But sometimes the questioning concludes neither with criminal charges nor with permission to fly.

Dan Elliott and Chris Brummit:

Gary Faulkner, an American construction worker, has been detained in the mountains of Pakistan after authorities there found him carrying a sword, pistol and night-vision goggles on a solo mission to hunt down and kill Osama bin Laden.

Scott Faulkner insisted his brother was on a rational mission.

Scott Faulkner:

He's as normal as you and I. He's just very passionate.

Johan de Kleer:

One passionate person is worth a thousand people who are just plodding along ...

Benjamin Wallace-Wells:

The best way to fight terrorists is to go at it not like G-men, with two-year assignments and query letters to the staff attorneys, but the way the terrorists do, with fury and the conviction that history will turn on the decisions you make -- as an obsession and as a life style.

As Normal As You And I

NYT:

Surely the case of Maher Arar was a chance to show that those who countenanced torture must pay a price.

Malcolm Gladwell:

Free is just another price.

Bill Gurley:

Customers seem to really like free as a price point.

Martin Kaplan:

What we really need are leaders with more character, followers with more discrimination, deciders who hear as well as listen and media that know the difference between the public interest and what the public is interested in.

Merlin Mann:

I love when [...] people unfollow me. It delights me, because that is the sound of my audience getting better.

William Deresiewicz:

Excellence isn't usually what gets you up the greasy pole. What gets you up is a talent for maneuvering.

James Lileks:

The Apple tablet is the Barack Obama of technology. It's whatever you want it to be, until you actually get it.

Viktor Chernomyrdin:

We wanted the best, but it turned out as always.

The Economist on Obama, from November 2008:

He has to start deciding whom to disappoint.

NYT:

There is no excuse for the Obama administration's conduct.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, in 2005:

If you [...] tell them the truth even when it threatens their beliefs, you run the risk of losing them. But if you peddle cleverly manipulated talking points to people who trust you not to lie, you won't merely lose them, you'll break their hearts.

Kathleen Parker:

Giving up being liked is the ultimate public sacrifice.

No Price to Pay