Sacrifice is putting country before party and principles before politics. It is not defending the indefensible, protecting the powerful, or staying silent in the face of injustice just because you'd like to keep your job.
S.E. Cupp
For one, as I've written before, the death penalty is plainly unjust. When the number of wrongful convictions and death penalty cases that are eventually exonerated number in the hundreds, if not thousands, we can not call it a moral system.
There is no sense in meddling with the extinction of polar bears, not when so many more pressing human problems await. Until there's ironclad proof of how and why extinction works, and how much evil we've done to hasten it along, I'm going to save my emotional anguish for dying and suffering members of my own species.
To be clear, impeachment is above all else a political act.
When we talk about people or a party being on the wrong side of history, it usually requires some hindsight, a position of informed advantage to see clearly missteps that were less clear at the time of events.
States without the death penalty have had consistently lower murder rates. And national murder rates have declined steadily since 1992, despite fewer executions.
Our tax code is arcane, burdensome and unwieldy. In the years since Ronald Reagan's 1986 Tax Reform Act, the code has gone from fewer than 30,000 pages to more than 70,000.
Maybe you want to look at the most recent polling or you want to pull up a data set on early voting in Ohio, but when you cover politics day-to-day and you've been doing it for many election cycles, you're prepared. You either know this stuff because you've been doing it so long or you don't and that shows real quick.
Larry Hogan Sr. was the first Republican to break with President Richard Nixon during his impeachment hearings, weakening not only the GOP firewall of support for the embattled president, but also Nixon's own defiance.
In a very dysfunctional business, CNN happens to be the most functional network I've worked at.
Too many prefer to cling to the thing that divides us, and precious few are willing to come together over the thing that unites us.
Sunday is the only day where I can kind of do my own thing and not have it dictated by the news cycle.
While our goals in Syria were never clearly enumerated by then-President Obama or President Trump, throughout the war one of our most committed and effective allies in the fight has been the Kurds.
For years, I've gone on television and made the case for the Second Amendment - the right to bear arms. I've pointed out that criminals don't follow gun laws, and I've defended the NRA and its members - law-abiding gun owners like me who have nothing to do with mass shootings or violent gun crimes.
Few believe Democrats will control both houses of Congress in 2021, and even if they manage to, Republicans will still be around to play spoiler on plenty of big agenda items.
Speaking of honesty, if you're like me you turn on the news to get information - a set of facts. If you want opinion, you come to shows like mine, where our prejudices and biases and opinions are made known; there's no false pretenses that you're getting pure objectivity.
Donald Trump has been president for nearly three years. He's been on Twitter for more than 10. Yet the only thing more surprising than Trump's increasingly awful, hideously unpresidential, deeply divisive tweets is that we still manage to be surprised by them.
One of the things we must do to begin to solve our hate problem is to put down our metaphorical weapons, our defenses, our special interests - and be honest about the role that guns play in this culture of hate in America.
I am so sick and tired of participating in this predictable cycle of politics, where a mass shooting happens, the left calls for new gun laws - some meaningful, some unproductive - the right yells 'slippery slope' and hides behind the Constitution.
I love the Constitution. But it's still a document, meant to protect human beings and ensure their life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
I enjoyed working at Fox. I met wonderful people who respected and mentored me. I learned a lot and made life-long friends. The network is an important part of our media landscape, and I want it to thrive.
If it's possible, 2018 was a year in which it felt like everything was changing, and also like nothing was. While we set our global expectations for the next one, teeming with significant political, social and economic volatility, we're also considering more local possibilities - changes within our own communities, homes and bodies.
It's pretty tough to intimidate me. And that's probably at my own peril sometimes.
Remember common sense? Bring it back. Abolishing ICE, our main federal immigration enforcement agency, is a colossally stupid idea. Floating the possibility of impeaching Brett Kavanaugh, whose confirmation just jolted the GOP back out of its coma, is painfully dumb.
The idea that Democrats have a lock on the female vote is contradicted by history.
Of course sports and politics intersect, and those conversations belong, more than anywhere else, on a network devoted to sports.
As a college-educated twentysomething woman with cool glasses and an affinity for modern art and Ryan Adams, I had the constant experience of strangers assuming I was a liberal. I grew accustomed to the shock and horror that passed over their faces when I revealed that, yes, I am a Republican.
There are plenty of good, rational, compassionate and talented conservatives who deserve a microphone and a platform. It's time to pass the baton to a new generation of leaders who don't speak - or think - like Archie Bunker.
I never have any idea how my opinions will be received, and more often than not I'm surprised when anything I say is controversial.
Republicans can continue to protest reality and stick their heads in the sand, but the sooner they acknowledge the very basic facts of climate change, the sooner they can get to crafting a conservative strategy to combat it, instead of ceding the territory solely to Democrats.
Though we are more prosperous a nation and more connected a global community than ever before, many of us still feel lonely, disoriented and uncertain of the future.
When I decided to see what Nascar was all about in 2005, it was an intellectual project, the same reason I went to the shooting range on West 20th Street and tried shooting a rifle at paper targets. I was addicted to both things instantly.
We moved a lot. I went to nine schools in four states before I was 14. It gave me tough skin, exposed me to lots of different kinds of people and made me somewhat adaptable.
The United States, under President Trump, is abdicating an important moral obligation to all democracies by seeming to shrug off the most egregious of human rights violations from both our allies and our enemies.
When Colin Kaepernick refuses to stand for the anthem, that's both a sports story and a politics story.
Sacrifice is a leader who puts the needs of millions of others before his own, who can forgo ego and pride in order to do what he promised he would. It's rising above pettiness and partisanship for the good of the country.
But until Democrats and Republicans, blacks and whites, liberal activists and conservative activists decide division is no longer the most valuable unit of currency, there will be no solutions of any kind.
We tend to think of the House as a less historically significant legislative body than the Senate. There are more representatives than there are senators, they're up for re-election every two years, and many come and go without having much of an impact.
Sacrifice is the 1.3 million active duty men and women in the U.S. military and 800,000 reserve forces who volunteer to keep us safe and defend our way of life.
I love, love, love the reality shows on Bravo. It's great mindless television.
I knew at a very young age that I didn't really buy the whole God gamut.
We are more and more defined not by our friends but our political enemies - collecting them like badges of honor.
The phone's never far away. The TV's always on. We are constantly on the news cycle; either watching the news, making the news, talking about the news.
Most conservative atheists I know, including myself, have a really healthy respect for the role of religion in society and this country, in particularly.
Conservatives should defend free speech - but we must not amplify it when it's blatantly grotesque.
While social media can play an important role in spreading messages and democratizing access to ideas, hashtags without organization end up fizzling out.
I believe in a strong two-party system, and when one party is losing so spectacularly, it emboldens the other party to overreach and become a cartoon of itself, invoking awful things like - I'm just spit-balling here - child separation policies and trade wars.
When America pays lip service but little more to horrors like the disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi, instead proclaiming convenient but arbitrary loopholes in our moral obligations, we just give the world's worst bullies more ammunition and power.
In the era of President Trump, we've gone from believing things that are 'true enough' to believing things that aren't true at all, and can be demonstrably proven so.
And I think when you're an elected official, rightly so, you should watch what you say.
