“He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met." --Abe Lincoln
“When they call the roll in the Senate, the senators do not know whether to answer ‘present’ or ‘not guilty.'" --Teddy Roosevelt
''In my many years I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a congress.'' --John Adams
''If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read: 'President Can't Swim.''' --Lyndon Johnson
''My esteem in this country has gone up substantially. It is very nice now when people wave at me, they use all their fingers.'' --Jimmy Carter
The rich person speaks and all are silent; they extol to the clouds what he says. The poor person speaks and they say, "Who is this fellow? "And should he stumble, they even push him down. -- Sirach: 13:23
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| (from the NPR website) |
"Make no mistake. This is your father's Republican Party. This is the exact same trans-vaginal ultrasound, all-white-guy committee chair, aspirin-between-your-knees Republican Party we've have fighting for 30 years. Shame on them. They're trying to fool women. And shame on us if we let them get away with it. They don't support women. They don't respect women. So don't tell me that there's no "war on women". And don't bother asking for a truce. We didn't start this fight, but mark my words - we are going to win it. But if we don't show up for this battle in 2016, we will pay the price for a generation to come. Just imagine what a Republican President and a Republican Congress would do."
--Stephanie Schriock, EMILY's List
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| http://professionalleft.blogspot.com |
If she is elected, she unequivocally will accept the science of anthropogenic climate change and treat it as a crisis. This cannot be said of any of the Republican candidates, real or potential.
If she is elected, she unequivocally will support marriage equality, and oppose discrimination against our fellow citizens based on sexual orientation or gender identity. This cannot be said of any of the Republican candidates, real or potential.
If she is elected, she will not destroy the Affordable Care Act, an article of faith among all the Republican candidates, real or potential.
If she is elected, and despite her closeness to certain Wall Street interests, she will not destroy the Dodd-Frank reforms, another article of faith among all the Republican candidates, real or potential.
If she is elected, the DREAMers will get to stay in the country.
If she is elected, she will not sign a bill to eliminate the estate tax. (More on this one later)
If she is elected, Janice Rogers Brown will stay right where she is in the judicial food chain.
To get elected, she does not have to wink at state's rights, up to and including incidents of armed resistance.
To get elected, she does not have to equivocate on the science behind the theory of evolution as does any Republican candidate who seeks the votes of Republicans in Iowa.
To get elected, she does not have to peddle the snake oil of supply-side economics, nor does she have to peddle scare stories about the oncoming caliphate, nor does she have to create bogeymen about jackboots coming to steal your guns.
More, I suspect, to follow.
Jesus, this is going to be a long 19 months.Amen to that, Brother Charles.
A rich donor to Tulsa police mistakenly pulled out his gun instead of his Taser and blasted a fleeing suspect.
The volunteer cop in Tulsa, Oklahoma, who killed an unarmed black man was forking over thousands in donations and equipment after becoming an unpaid sheriff’s deputy.
Robert Bates, a 73-year-old insurance executive-turned-deputy, accidentally fired his gun instead of a Taser—costing Eric Harris, 44, his life and adding to the tally of deadly police shootings against minorities nationwide.Recent update via Daily Beast:
The Tulsa deputy charged with manslaughter for fatally shooting an unarmed black man was the sheriff’s sugar daddy—treating him to exotic cruises and fishing trips—former officers with the sheriff’s department told The Daily Beast.--and--
“Bob Bates came on board because he had all this money,” one former reserve deputy said, adding that the sheriff and other higher-ups would “go on these cruises in the Bahamas and in Mexico all the time.”
"[Bates] foots the bill,” the deputy added. “The sheriff just gave him free rein because he was treating him right. He bought his way into this position.”
Another former full-time deputy said Bates was “getting glad-handed” around the office because of his wealth.
“This is your typical Southern good ol’ boys system,” he said, adding that before the shooting Bates planned to take Glanz on a fishing trip to Florida.In case anybody may still harbor the soul-crushingly stoopid notion that "Pay-To-Play-Citizen-Goon" is a good idea, here's Charlie Pierce:
Something has gone permanently squirrelly with law-enforcement in this country. There is the change in attitude by which police increasingly feel and behave like an occupying army in American cities. There is the preposterous increase in available armament. On a wider scale, there is the triumph at all levels of government of an attitude that we will not tax ourselves, ever, for anything, even our own safety. So we wind up with traffic cops who look on, ahem, certain citizens as resources to be pillaged, or we wind up with septuagenarian insurance salesmen empowered to shoot people in the street under color of law, because they were willing to buy guns and ammo privately for a public purpose. This is Kafka rewritten by Grover Norquist and Bozo The Clown. You get what you pay for, and we're not willing to pay for anything any more.
