Quotes from Stuart Stevens

Broadcast operated under the FCC's fairness doctrine, whose core requirements were that broadcasters cover matters of public importance and that they do so fairly, mostly in the sense that they air competing positions.

Those with the lowest standards willing to grovel and beg are often the recipients of the greatest rewards.

Money and the necessity of its craven pursuit have polluted and twisted our elections in destructive ways that all reduce the power of the individual, distorting the essence of democracy in ways unimaginable even fifty years ago.

a gaffe is when a politician tells the truth

I was never burdened by the notion that I was working for a political party that was fundamentally hypocritical on the deficit and economy and one that would proceed to impeach Bill Clinton for lying about sex under the leadership of Speaker Newt Gingrich, who was having an affair with a former House intern himself.

When Reagan took office, the national debt was $934 billion; when he left, it was $2.7 trillion.

The 1987 FCC decision to stop enforcing the fairness doctrine supercharged conservative media into a billion-dollar industry.

Special interest groups are like terrorists: they test for weakness and exploit fear.

The evidence points to a major partisan asymmetry in polarization. Despite the widespread belief that both parties have moved to the extremes, the movement of the Republican Party to the right accounts for most of the divergence between the two parties. Since the 1970s, each new cohort of Republican legislators has taken more conservative positions on legislation than the cohorts before them. That is not true of Democratic legislators.11

The biggest mistake so far," said Rudolph G. Penner, who was the chief economist in the Ford Administration's budget office, "was to urge this tremendous cut in taxes without reducing spending sufficiently. That is a major mistake that will have profound long run costs.

The fortunate among us realize early that loss is the key in which much of life is played.

Now there was no need to be concerned with offering equal time or performing a news function.

What happened to the Republican Party is that slowly over half a century the kooks and weirdos and social misfits of a conservative ideology started discovering that they could force reasonable people to support unreasonable positions through fear.

colossal stupidity of Newt Gingrich as Speaker of the House.

The transition of the National Rifle Association is a perfect parable: over a couple of decades, it evolved from a gun-safety education organization to a thuggish gang that rewards those at the top with millions of dollars based on proven ability to muscle elected officials into doing what they mostly know is wrong.

You have to care about what you're doing. If you have a society where all we care about is that the other side is bad, and therefore we don't have to do the right thing, that society will break down, and you will have no liberty. I refuse to be a part of that.30

The Republican Party is held aloft by a large, powerful, and ever-growing industry of deceit. The purpose of much of conservative media is to lie to their audience. It is fitting that at the heart of the Trump presidency itself is a lie: Almost every Republican elected official in Washington knows Donald Trump is unfit to be president.

know-nothing racist for president

Trump is a disaster and a disgrace.

In reality, the Republican Party isn't serious about deficit reduction, because politicians know their voters don't feel affected by the mind-boggling numbers and subsequently don't really care.

Any pretense that the Republican Party, if only given complete control of all three chambers of power, would focus on the deficit was just one of the myths shattered in the first two years of the Trump presidency.

Conservatives have managed to turn the phrase "mainstream media," or "lame stream media," as that noted arbiter of intellectual rigor, Sarah Palin, called it, into a pejorative. But what is mainstream media? It's the journalism that believes in standards, strives to report facts, and has a professional standard to correct errors. It's the news the majority of Americans consume.

those idiots at Breitbart.

The simple reality is that the Republican Party was in business with Russian intelligence efforts, what used to be known as the KGB, and precious few leading the Republican Party seem to give a damn.