Congress Best Quotes

You listen to me,” she says. Her jaw is set, ironclad. It’s the game face he’s seen her use to stare down Congress, to cow autocrats. Her grip on his hand is steady and strong. He wonders, half-hysterically, if this is how it felt to charge into war under Washington. “I am your mother. I was your mother before I was ever the president, and I’ll be your mother long after, to the day they put me in the ground and beyond this earth. You are my child. So, if you’re serious about this, I’ll back your play.” Alex is silent. But the debates, he thinks. But the general. Her gaze is hard. He knows better than to say either of those things. She’ll handle it. “So,” she says. “Do you feel forever about him?” And there’s no room left to agonize over it, nothing left to do but say the thing he’s known all along. “Yeah,” he says, “I do.” Ellen Claremont exhales slowly, and she grins a small, secret grin, the crooked, unflattering one she never uses in public, the one he knows best from when he was a kid

But I believe that good questions are more important than answers, and the best children’s books ask questions, and make the reader ask questions. And every new question is going to disturb someone’s universe.

That there would be a political advantage in having the declaration written by a Virginian was clear, for the same reason there had been political advantage in having the Virginian Washington in command of the army. But be that as it may, Jefferson, with his "peculiar felicity of expression," as Adams said, was the best choice for the task, just as Washington had been the best choice to command the Continental Army, and again Adams had played a key part. Had his contributions as a member of Congress been only that of casting the two Virginians in their respective, fateful roles, his service to the American cause would have been very great.

As best as the Count could determine, the Bolsheviks assembled whenever possible in whichever form for whatever reason. In a single week, there might be committees, caucuses, colloquiums, congresses, and conventions variously coming together to establish codes, set courses of action, levy complaints, and generally clamor about the world’s oldest problems in its newest nomenclature. If

A new poll found that 84% of American people were disgusted by Congress, and my only thought is, Are 16% of Americans insane? If they’re not disgusted, they should eat a bowl of vomit soup. It’s fresh, as I just made it after reading the latest political news.

The late maverick economist Kenneth Boulding perhaps best summed it up when testifying before the U.S. Congress, declaring that “anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.

Mark Twain said it best—“Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress: but I repeat myself.

The numbers were, at best, guesstimates, and all three men knew it. The relevant figure would ultimately be the one that represented the most they could possibly ask from Congress without raising too many questions. Whatever that sum turned out to be, they knew they could count on (Interim Assistant Secretary of the Treasury) Kashkari to perform some sort of mathematical voodoo to justify it:

Men are biological. Women are biological. We pretend our minds are in control, but that’s a very tenuous control at best, and a civilized society can’t be built on uncontrolled biology. I see it in my work: intelligence betrayed by lust, by jealousy, by macho ownership; otherwise trustworthy men who can’t be trusted at all around women, or vice versa. Hell, look at Congress. Well-intentioned, progressive, admired law-makers who end up losing it all because they can’t control how they react to women! And I certainly don’t trust most women around men

THE product itself should be its own best salesman. Not the product alone, but the product plus a mental impression, an atmosphere, which you place around it.

Where would the money come from? The best place to start, in my view, is with the cheaters. The IRS now estimates that the United States loses more than $1 trillion a year in unpaid taxes, most of it owing to tax avoidance by multinational corporations and wealthy families. Congress hasn’t given the agency the resources it needs to hunt down tax criminals, leaving the IRS outgunned and outmatched.

Here is one way to conceptualize NASA's heroic era: in 1961, Kennedy gave his "moon speech" to Congress, charging them to put an American on the moon "before the decade is out." In the eight years that unspooled between Kennedy's speech and Neil Armstrong's first historic bootprint, NASA, a newborn government agency, established sites and campuses in Texas, Florida, Alabama, California, Ohio, Maryland, Mississippi, Virginia, and the District of Columbia; awarded multi-million-dollar contracts and hired four hundred thousand workers; built a fully functioning moon port in a formerly uninhabited swamp; designed and constructed a moonfaring rocket, spacecraft, lunar lander, and space suits; sent astronauts repeatedly into orbit, where they ventured out of their spacecraft on umbilical tethers and practiced rendezvous techniques; sent astronauts to orbit the moon, where they mapped out the best landing sites; all culminating in the final, triumphant moment when they sent Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to step out of their lunar module and bounce about on the moon, perfectly safe within their space suits. All of this, start to finish, was accomplished in those eight years.

It’s not all peeling grapes, being a handmaiden,” said Ptraci. “The first lesson we learn is, when the master has had a long hard day it is not the best time to suggest the Congress of the Fox and the Persimmon. Who says you have to do anything?

Just a decade before, in the wake of the Vietnam War and with his agency’s budget slashed, Stephen Lukasik had appealed to Congress to allow DARPA to pursue “high-risk projects of revolutionary impact.” Lukasik told Congress that in the modern world, the country with the most powerful weapons would not necessarily have the leading edge. He argued that as the twenty-first century approached, the leading edge would belong to the country with the best information—with which it could quickly plan, coordinate, and attack.

Vice President Cheney has been the most dangerous vice president we've had probably in American history. The idea he doesn't realize that Article I of the Constitution defines the role of the vice president of the United States, that's the Executive Branch. He works in the Executive Branch. He should understand that. Everyone should understand that. And the primary role of the vice president of the United States of America is to support the president of the United States of America, give that president his or her best judgment when sought, and as vice president, to preside over the Senate, only in a time when in fact there's a tie vote. The Constitution is explicit. The only authority the vice president has from the legislative standpoint is the vote, only when there is a tie vote. He has no authority relative to the Congress.

It is not that the historian can avoid emphasis of some facts and not of others. This is as natural to him as to the mapmaker, who, in order to produce a usable drawing for practical purposes, must first flatten and distort the shape of the earth, then choose out of the bewildering mass of geographic information those things needed for the purpose of this or that particular map. My argument cannot be against selection, simplification, emphasis, which are inevitable for both cartographers and historians. But the map-maker's distortion is a technical necessity for a common purpose shared by all people who need maps. The historian's distortion is more than technical, it is ideological; it is released into a world of contending interests, where any chosen emphasis supports (whether the historian means to or not) some kind of interest, whether economic or political or racial or national or sexual. Furthermore, this ideological interest is not openly expressed in the way a mapmaker's technical interest is obvious ("This is a Mercator projection for long-range navigation-for short-range, you'd better use a different projection"). No, it is presented as if all readers of history had a common interest which historians serve to the best of their ability. This is not intentional deception; the historian has been trained in a society in which education and knowledge are put forward as technical problems of excellence and not as tools for contending social classes, races, nations. To emphasize the heroism of Columbus and his successors as navigators and discoverers, and to de-emphasize their genocide, is not a technical necessity but an ideological choice. It serves- unwittingly-to justify what was done. My point is not that we must, in telling history, accuse, judge, condemn Columbus in absentia. It is too late for that; it would be a useless scholarly exercise in morality. But the easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress (Hiroshima and Vietnam, to save Western civilization; Kronstadt and Hungary, to save socialism; nuclear proliferation, to save us all)-that is still with us. One reason these atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth. We have learned to give them exactly the same proportion of attention that teachers and writers often give them in the most respectable of classrooms and textbooks. This learned sense of moral proportion, coming from the apparent objectivity of the scholar, is accepted more easily than when it comes from politicians at press conferences. It is therefore more deadly. The treatment of heroes (Columbus) and their victims (the Arawaks)-the quiet acceptance of conquest and murder in the name of progress-is only one aspect of a certain approach to history, in which the past is told from the point of view of governments, conquerors, diplomats, leaders. It is as if they, like Columbus, deserve universal acceptance, as if they-the Founding Fathers, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, Kennedy, the leading members of Congress, the famous Justices of the Supreme Court-represent the nation as a whole. The pretense is that there really is such a thing as "the United States," subject to occasional conflicts and quarrels, but fundamentally a community of people with common interests. It is as if there really is a "national interest" represented in the Constitution, in territorial expansion, in the laws passed by Congress, the decisions of the courts, the development of capitalism, the culture of education and the mass media.

His larger argument was that a president should not simply defer to the will and wishes of the Congress or the judiciary. Instead, Jackson was saying, the president ought to take his own stand on important issues, giving voice as best he could to the interests of the people at large.

Taking wildly different positions on the value of assets and using his emotional state to justify those valuations helps explain something else Trump has done repeatedly. Congress requires all presidential candidates to file a financial disclosure statement listing their assets, liabilities, and income. Trump’s ninety-two-page disclosure report valued one of his best-known properties at more than $50 million. But he told tax authorities the same property was worth only about $1 million. He valued another signature Trump property at zero—and demanded the return of the property taxes he had already paid.

To drive the point home, here’s one more story. And, as a matter of fact, this person’s story is legendary. He wanted a job, and that job was to become president of the United States. His business failed in 1831. He was defeated in his run for the Illinois State Legislature in 1832. His second business failed in 1833. He suffered a nervous breakdown in 1836. He was defeated in his run for Illinois House Speaker in 1838, and for his run for Congress in 1843. He was elected to Congress in 1846, but lost renomination in 1848. He lost his bid to the U.S. Senate in 1854, for vice president in 1856, and again for the U.S. Senate in 1858. Finally, in 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected president of the United States.

The Founding Fathers believed that the best way to avoid oppressive and unjust rule was by making it difficult for government to act at all. They also believed that the real threat of tyranny lies with the president, not the Congress. Thus, they provided for a strong Congress with many enumerated powers, and a relatively weak president with few specific powers. Over

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country. Fellow-citizens, we can not escape history. We of this Congress and this Administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance or insignificance can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We, even we here, hold the power and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave we assure freedom to the free--honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just--a way which if followed the world will forever applaud and God must forever bless.

The result, as the journalist Elizabeth Drew noted in the Atlantic Monthly, was “an unabashed act to protect private industry from government regulation.” Politicians were far more protective of the narrow interests of tobacco than of the broad interest of public health. Tobacco makers need not have bothered inventing protective filters, Drew wrote drily: Congress had turned out to be “the best filter yet.

Mr. President I confess that there are several parts of this constitution which I do not at present approve, but I am not sure I shall never approve them: For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information, or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise. It is therefore that the older I grow, the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment, and to pay more respect to the judgment of others. Most men indeed as well as most sects in Religion, think themselves in possession of all truth, and that wherever others differ from them it is so far error. Steele a Protestant in a Dedication tells the Pope, that the only difference between our Churches in their opinions of the certainty of their doctrines is, the Church of Rome is infallible and the Church of England is never in the wrong. But though many private persons think almost as highly of their own infallibility as of that of their sect. In these sentiments, Sir, I agree to this Constitution with all its faults, if they are such; because I think a general Government necessary for us, and there is no form of Government but what may be a blessing to the people if well administered, and believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in Despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic Government, being incapable of any other. I doubt too whether any other Convention we can obtain, may be able to make a better Constitution. For when you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men, all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views. From such an assembly can a perfect production be expected? It therefore astonishes me, Sir, to find this system approaching so near to perfection as it does; and I think it will astonish our enemies, who are waiting with confidence to hear that our councils are confounded like those of the Builders of Babel; and that our States are on the point of separation, only to meet hereafter for the purpose of cutting one another's throats. Thus I consent, Sir, to this Constitution because I expect no better, and because I am not sure, that it is not the best. The opinions I have had of its errors, I sacrifice to the public good. I have never whispered a syllable of them abroad. Within these walls they were born, and here they shall die. If every one of us in returning to our Constituents were to report the objections he has had to it, and endeavor to gain partizans in support of them, we might prevent its being generally received, and thereby lose all the salutary effects & great advantages resulting naturally in our favor among foreign Nations as well as among ourselves, from our real or apparent unanimity. Much of the strength & efficiency of any Government in procuring and securing happiness to the people, depends, on opinion, on the general opinion of the goodness of the Government, as well as of the wisdom and integrity of its Governors. I hope therefore that for our own sakes as a part of the people, and for the sake of posterity, we shall act heartily and unanimously in recommending this Constitution (if approved by Congress & confirmed by the Conventions) wherever our influence may extend, and turn our future thoughts & endeavors to the means of having it well administred. On the whole, Sir, I can not help expressing a wish that every member of the Convention who may still have objections to it, would with me, on this occasion doubt a little of his own infallibility, and to make manifest our unanimity, put his name to this instrument.

The United States had been created through an act of disloyalty. No matter how eloquently the Declaration of Independence had attempted to justify the American rebellion, a residual guilt hovered over the circumstances of the country's founding. Arnold changed all that. By threatening to destroy the newly created republic through, ironically, his own betrayal, Arnold gave this nation of traitors the greatest of gifts; a myth of creation. The American people had come to revere George Washington, but a hero alone was not sufficient to bring them together. Now they had the despised villain Benedict Arnold. They knew both what they were fighting for - and against. The story of American's genesis could finally move beyond the break with the mother country and start to focus on the process by which thirteen former colonies could become a nation. As Arnold had demonstrated, the real enemy was not Great Britain, but those Americans who sought to undercut their fellow citizens commitment to one another. Whether it was Joseph Reed's willingness to promote his state's interests at the expenses of what was best for the country as a whole or Arnold's decision to sell his loyalty to the highest bidder, the greatest danger to America's future cam from self-serving opportunism masquerading as patriotism. At this fragile state in the country's development, a way had to be found to strengthen rather than destroy the existing framework of government. The Continental Congress was far from perfect, but it offered a start to what could one day be a great nation. By turning traitor, Arnold had alerted the American people to how close they had all come to betraying the Revolution by putting their own interests ahead of their newborn country's. Already the name Benedict Arnold was becoming a byword for that most hateful of crimes: treason against the people of the United States.

But fear best thrives in the present tense. That is why experts rely on it; in a world that is increasingly impatient with long-term processes, fear is a potent short-term play. Imagine that you are a government official charged with procuring the funds to fight one of two proven killers: terrorist attacks and heart disease. Which cause do you think the members of Congress will open up the coffers for? The likelihood of any given person being killed in a terrorist attack is far smaller than the likelihood that the same person will clog up his arteries with fatty food and die of heart disease. But a terrorist attack happens now; death by heart disease is some distant, quiet catastrophe. Terrorist acts lie beyond our control; french fries do not. Just as important as the control factor is what Peter Sandman calls the dread factor. Death by terrorist attack (or mad-cow disease) is considered wholly dreadful; death by heart disease is, for some reason, not.

After Rep. Martin Sweeney of Ohio delivered a scathing attack on the Roosevelt administration for allegedly using conscription as a way to get the United States into the war, Rep. Beverly Vincent of Kentucky, who was next to Sweeney, loudly muttered that he refused “to sit by a traitor.” Sweeney swung at Vincent, who responded with a sharp right to the jaw that sent Sweeney staggering. It was, said the House doorkeeper, the best punch thrown by a member of Congress in fifty years.

They barely have time to fend off calls from angry creditors, let alone write letters to Congress. And most are profoundly, desperately ashamed of their situation. For many, the decision to file for bankruptcy proves to be the darkest secret of their entire lives. Politically speaking, they are almost invisible. And yet these families were up against what was already one of the best-organized, best-funded lobbies in America. (It would get even better organized and better funded in the years to come.)

While women suffer from our relative lack of power in the world and often resent it, certain dimensions of this powerlessness may seem abstract and remote. We know, for example, that we rarely get to make the laws or direct the major financial institutions. But Wall Street and the U.S. Congress seem very far away. The power a woman feels in herself to heal and sustain, on the other hand--"the power of love"--is, once again, concrete and very near: It is like a field of force emanating from within herself, a great river flowing outward from her very person. Thus, a complex and contradictory female subjectivity is constructed within the relations of caregiving. Here, as elsewhere, women are affirmed in some way and diminished in others, this within the unity of a single act. The woman who provides a man with largely unreciprocated emotional sustenance accords him status and pays him homage; she agrees to the unspoken proposition that his doings are important enough to deserve substantially more attention than her own. But even as the man's supremacy in the relationship is tacitly assumed by both parties to the transaction, the man reveals himself to his caregiver as vulnerable and insecure. And while she may well be ethically and epistemically disempowered by the care she gives, this caregiving affords her a feeling that a mighty power resides within her being. The situation of those men in the hierarchy of gender who avail themselves of female tenderness is not thereby altered: Their superordinate position is neither abandoned, nor their male privilege relinquished. The vulnerability these men exhibit is not a prelude in any way to their loss of male privilege or to an elevation in the status of women. Similarly, the feeling that one's love is a mighty force for the good in the life of the beloved doesn't make it so, as Milena Jesenka found, to her sorrow. The feeling of out-flowing personal power so characteristic of the caregiving woman is quite different from the having of any actual power in the world. There is no doubt that this sense of personal efficacy provides some compensation for the extra-domestic power women are typically denied: If one cannot be a king oneself, being a confidante of kings may be the next best thing. But just as we make a bad bargain in accepting an occasional Valentine in lieu of the sustained attention we deserve, we are ill advised to settle for a mere feeling of power, however heady and intoxicating it may be, in place of the effective power we have every right to exercise in the world.

Sonia Gandhi and her son play an important part in all of this. Their job is to run the Department of Compassion and Charisma and to win elections. They are allowed to make (and also to take credit for) decisions which appear progressive but are actually tactical and symbolic, meant to take the edge off popular anger and allow the big ship to keep on rolling. (The best example of this is the rally that was organised for Rahul Gandhi to claim victory for the cancellation of Vedanta’s permission to mine Niyamgiri for bauxite—a battle that the Dongria Kondh tribe and a coalition of activists, local as well as international, have been fighting for years. At the rally, Rahul Gandhi announced that he was “a soldier for the tribal people”. He didn’t mention that the economic policies of his party are predicated on the mass displacement of tribal people. Or that every other bauxite “giri”—hill—in the neighbourhood was having the hell mined out of it, while this “soldier for the tribal people” looked away. Rahul Gandhi may be a decent man. But for him to go around talking about the two Indias—the “Rich India” and the “Poor India”—as though the party he represents has nothing to do with it, is an insult to everybody’s intelligence, including his own.) The division of labour between politicians who have a mass base and win elections, and those who actually run the country but either do not need to (judges and bureaucrats) or have been freed of the constraint of winning elections (like the prime minister) is a brilliant subversion of democratic practice. To imagine that Sonia and Rahul Gandhi are in charge of the government would be a mistake. The real power has passed into the hands of a coven of oligarchs—judges, bureaucrats and politicians. They in turn are run like prize race-horses by the few corporations who more or less own everything in the country. They may belong to different political parties and put up a great show of being political rivals, but that’s just subterfuge for public consumption. The only real rivalry is the business rivalry between corporations.

Hunting Down the Secular Humanists" "...What makes them so dangerous is that Secular Humanists look just like you and me. Some of them could be your best friends without you knowing that they are Humanists. They could come into your house, play with your children, eat your food and even watch football with you on television, and you'd never know they have read Catcher in the Rye, Brave New World, and Huckleberry Finn.... No one is safe until Congress sets up an Anti-Secular Humanism Committee to get at the rot. Witnesses have to be called, and they have to name names.

Dear patient (first name, last name)! You are presently located in our experimental state hospital. The measures taken to save your life were drastic, extremely drastic (circle one). Our finest surgeons, availing themselves of the very latest achievements of modern medicine, performed one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten operations (circle one) on you. They were forced, acting wholly in your interest to replace certain parts of your organism with parts obtained from other persons, in strict accordance with Federal Law (Rev. Stat. Comm. 1-989/0-001/89/1). The notice you are now reading was thoughtfully prepared in order to help you make the best possible adjustment to these new if somewhat unexpected circumstances in your life, which, we hasten to remind you, we have saved. Although it was found necessary to remove your arms, legs, spine, skill, lungs, stomach, kidneys, liver, other (circle one or more), rest assured that these mortal remains were disposed of in a manner fully in keeping with the dictates of your religion; they were, with the proper ritual, interred, embalmed, mummified, buried at sea, cremated with the ashes scattered in the wind—preserved in an urn—thrown in the garbage (circle one). The new form in which you will henceforth lead a happy and healthy existence may possibly occasion you some surprise, but we promise that in time you will become, as indeed all our dear patients do, quite accustomed to it We have supplemented your organism with the very best, the best, perfectly functional, adequate, the only available (circle one) organs at our disposal, and they are fully guaranteed to last a year, six months, three months, three weeks, six days (circle one).

OUR ANCESTORS UNDERSTOOD origins by extrapolating from their own experience. How else could they have done it? So the Universe was hatched from a cosmic egg, or conceived in the sexual congress of a mother god and a father god, or was a kind of product of the Creator’s workshop—perhaps the latest of many flawed attempts. And the Universe was not much bigger than we see, and not much older than our written or oral records, and nowhere very different from places that we know. We’ve tended in our cosmologies to make things familiar. Despite all our best efforts, we’ve not been very inventive.

Our forefathers bequeathed to us far more than a republic. They willed to us an enduring Constitution that incorporates more thought and brainpower than any document ever written by man. After fifty-five convention delegates worked on it ceaselessly for four months, three million people argued about it for two years, and only then was it ratified by conventions of the people so it could become the supreme law of the land. And immediately after it was put in force, Congress acceded to popular demand by proposing ten amendments that restricted the government from abridging the rights of the governed. Was

I became interested in librarians while researching my first book, about obituaries. With the exception of a few showy eccentrics, like the former soldier in Hitler's army who had a sex change and took up professional whistling, the most engaging obit subjects were librarians. An obituary of a librarian could be about anything under the sun, a woman with a phenomenal memory, who recalled the books her aging patrons read as children—and was also, incidentally, the best sailor on her stretch of the Maine coast—or a man obsessed with maps, who helped automate the Library of Congress's map catalog and paved the way for wonders like Google Maps.

Mary Montrose: This relocation isn’t my wish. How about you relocate some of our neighbors who aren’t Indians? They are sitting on our best land. Mr. Cooper (abrupt laugh): That is out of the question. We are here on your behalf, but we cannot do such a thing. Mr. Hail: We know the Indian Department did not initiate this move that included the Turtle Mountain Chippewa Indians and the reservation. It was an act of Congress. Some members of Congress heard or seem to believe that the Turtle Mountain Chippewa are so far advanced that they should be relinquished by the government. Moses Montrose: We are advanced in some ways. That is true. We have a lot of smart Indians in this room. But most of us are plain-out broke. We are working, but even if we did become rich, that would have no bearing on our agreement with the government. Nothing in the treaty says that if we better ourselves we lose our land. Thomas Wazhashk: I am not sure what study the information about our advancement, financially speaking, was based on. But I will tell you it was faulty. Most of our people live on dirt floors, no electricity, no plumbing. I haul my own water like most Indians in this room. I consider myself advanced only because I read and write. Should I not be an Indian person because I read and write?

That afternoon, King telegraphed Kennedy that “the Negro’s endurance may be at the breaking point.” Kennedy, who had been deliberating for months, went to Congress to meet with House members. He decided the time had come to speak to the public. On television that night, he addressed the nation: “If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public; if he cannot send his children to the best public school available; if he cannot vote for the public officials who represent him; if, in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place?

. . . to voice private sympathies in the context of an official proceeding would require Washington to become, in his own words, 'lost to my own character.' Here, in this reference to character, Washington hit upon the essential difference between himself and Arnold. Washington's sense of right and wrong existed outside the impulsive demands of his own self-interest. Rules mattered to Washington. Even though Congress had made his life miserable for the last four years, he had found ways to do what he considered best for his army and his country without challenging the supremacy of civil authority. To do otherwise, to declare himself, like the seventeenth-century English revolutionary Oliver Cromwell, master of his army and his country, would require him to become 'lost to my own character.' For Arnold, on the other hand, rules were made to be broken. He had done it as a pre-Revolutionary merchant and he had done it as military governor of Philadelphia. This did not make Arnold unusual. Many prominent Americans before and since have lived in the gray area between selfishness and altruism. What made Arnold unique was the god-like inviolability he attached to his actions. He had immense respect for a man like Washington, but Arnold was, in the end, the leading person-age in the drama that was his life. Not lost to his own character, but lost in it, Arnold did whatever Arnold wanted.

Here was a temporary solution. Parole would get Mofokeng and Mokoena out of jail as quickly as possible. Other details could be sorted out later. I accompanied Nyambi to Kroonstad jail at the end of October and remember that as he told Mofokeng and Mokoena the news—that they would be home for Christmas—smiles slowly but surely transformed the sombre, cautious expressions on their faces. Big problem: it was discovered in December, a full two months after the judgment was made, that the court order does not mention the NCCS at all. Consequently, the NCCS interpreted the court's order as having removed the NCCS's jurisdiction to deal with any "lifers" sentenced pre-1994. The members of the NCCS packed their briefcases and went home. No one knows why the judgment didn't mention the NCCS; maybe the judge who wrote it, Justice Bess Nkabinde, simply didn't know how the parole system operates; but eight of her fellow judges, the best in the land, found with her. The Mofokeng and Mokoena families, who are from 'the poorest of the poor', as the ANC likes to say, are distraught. But the rest—the law men, the politicians and the government ministers—well, quite frankly, they don't seem to give a fig. Zuma has gone on holiday, to host his famous annual Christmas party for children. Mapisa-Nqakula has also gone on holiday. Mofokeng and Mokoena remain where they were put 17 years ago, despite not having committed any crime.

An obituary of a librarian could be about anything under the sun, a woman with a phenomenal memory, who recalled the books her again patrons read as children - and was also, incidentally, the best sailor on her stretch of the Maine coast - or a man obsessed with maps, who helped automate the Library of Congress’s map catalog and paved the way for wonders like Google Maps… Whether the subject was a community librarian or a prophet, almost every librarian obituary contained some version of this sentence: “Under [their] watch, the library changed from a collection of books into an automated research center.” I began to get the idea that libraries were where it was happening - wide open territory for innovators, activists, and pioneers.

When Carter first talked to Andrew Young in late 1976 about leaving Congress to become his ambassador to the United Nations, Young resisted. He told the president-elect he would better serve Carter’s interests by staying in the House of Representatives, where Carter knew almost no one. Young suggested that Congresswoman Barbara Jordan should be his UN ambassador. “But she didn’t march with King, and you did,” Carter told him. The president-elect felt that the credibility of his human rights campaign abroad depended on its connection to the American civil rights movement. On the day Young was sworn in, Carter handed him a note that said: “Ask African leaders what we can do together.” Young believed the first word, Ask, spoke volumes about the transformation under way.

More notable perhaps were the names of those who were not from the Congress. These included two representatives of the world of commerce and one representative of the Sikhs. Three others were lifelong adversaries of the Congress. These were R. K. Shanmukham Chetty, a Madras businessman who possessed one of the best financial minds in India; B. R. Ambedkar, a brilliant legal scholar and an ‘Untouchable’ by caste; and Shyama Prasad Mookerjee, a leading Bengal politician who belonged (at this time) to the Hindu Mahasabha. All three had collaborated with the rulers while the Congress men served time in British jails. But now Nehru and his colleagues wisely put aside these differences. Gandhi had reminded them that ‘freedom comes to India, not to the Congress’, urging the formation of a Cabinet that included the ablest men regardless of party affiliation.6

In my first interview with Mr. Lincoln alone he stated to me that he had never professed to be a military man or to know how campaigns should be conducted, and never wanted to interfere in them: but that procrastination on the part of commanders, and the pressure from the people at the North and Congress, WHICH WAS ALWAYS WITH HIM, forced him into issuing his series of “Military Orders"—one, two, three, etc. He did not know but they were all wrong, and did know that some of them were. All he wanted or had ever wanted was some one who would take the responsibility and act, and call on him for all the assistance needed, pledging himself to use all the power of the government in rendering such assistance. Assuring him that I would do the best I could with the means at hand, and avoid as far as possible annoying him or the War Department, our first interview ended.

Lyndon Johnson had lost it all, and so had the rest of them; they had, for all their brilliance and hubris and sense of themselves, been unwilling to look to and learn from the past and they had been swept forward by their belief in the importance of anti-Communism (and the dangers of not paying sufficient homage to it) and by the sense of power and glory, omnipotence and omniscience of America in this century. They were America, and they had been ready for what the world offered, and the challenges posed....Nor had they, leaders of a democracy, bothered to involve the people of their country in the course they had chosen: they knew the right path and they know how much could be revealed, step by step along the way. They had manipulated the public, the Congress and the press from the start, told half truths, about why we were going in, how much were were spending, and how long we were in for.

In fact, only six days later, with Chief Justice Marshall not participating, the Court avoided a possible constitutional confrontation. Voting 5–0 in Stuart v. Laird (1803), the justices upheld Congress’s repeal of the Judiciary Act of 1801, a move some historians see as reflecting the Court’s unwillingness to test the full dimensions of the power it had just claimed for itself. More than half a century would pass before the Supreme Court again declared an act of Congress unconstitutional. That was the Dred Scott decision of 1857 (Scott v. Sandford), invalidating the Missouri Compromise and holding that Congress lacked authority to abolish slavery in the territories. That notorious decision, a step on the road to the Civil War, was perhaps not the best advertisement for judicial review. But since then, the Court has lost its early reticence. It has declared acts of Congress unconstitutional more than 150 times.

I tried to remember the first time I had heard of Congress’s plans for Japanese American internment. I recalled that my first impression had been one of approval, that certainly we couldn’t chance domestic disloyalty in the face of this terrible world war. But now, as I sat beside Rose and Lorelei and gazed out at this barn—this farm camp, as they called it—I wavered. Certainly these two girls posed no threat to our country. In fact, all the farmworkers seemed to be the most peaceful of people. They had volunteered to help with the harvest, tough physical labor at best, to leave the camp and stay here in conditions little better than those provided for our livestock, all to earn a measly nineteen dollars a month. This was temporary, I kept telling myself. At war’s end, they could return to the homes, businesses, and places in society where they had lived before. I found myself wishing I’d never seen this camp. Perhaps someday, we could all make it back to the places where we started. I didn’t believe it, but I tried to.

I know he’s had his problems in the past… “He can’t keep his hands off a liquor bottle at the best of times, and he still hasn’t accepted the loss of his wife!” “I sent him to a therapist over in Baltimore,” she continued. “He’s narrowed his habit down to a six-pack of beer on Saturdays.” “What does he get for a reward?” he asked insolently. She sighed irritably. “Nobody suits you! You don’t even like poor old lonely Senator Holden.” “Like him? Holden?” he asked, aghast. “Good God, he’s the one man in Congress I’d like to burn at the stake! I’d furnish the wood and the matches!” “You and Leta,” she said, shaking her head. “Now, listen carefully. The Lakota didn’t burn people at the stake,” she said firmly. She went on to explain who did, and how, and why. He searched her enthusiastic eyes. “You really do love Native American history, don’t you?” She nodded. “The way your ancestors lived for thousands of years was so logical. They honored the man in the tribe who was the poorest, because he gave away more than the others did. They shared everything. They gave gifts, even to the point of bankrupting themselves. They never hit a little child to discipline it. They accepted even the most blatant differences in people without condemning them.” She glanced at Tate and found him watching her. She smiled self-consciously. “I like your way better.” “Most whites never come close to understanding us, no matter how hard they try.” “I had you and Leta to teach me,” she said simply. “They were wonderful lessons that I learned, here on the reservation. I feel…at peace here. At home. I belong, even though I shouldn’t.” He nodded. “You belong,” he said, and there was a note in his deep voice that she hadn’t heard before. Unexpectedly he caught her small chin and turned her face up to his. He searched her eyes until she felt as if her heart might explode from the excitement of the way he was looking at her. His thumb whispered up to the soft bow of her mouth with its light covering of pale pink lipstick. He caressed the lower lip away from her teeth and scowled as if the feel of it made some sort of confusion in him. He looked straight into her eyes. The moment was almost intimate, and she couldn’t break it. Her lips parted and his thumb pressed against them, hard. “Now, isn’t that interesting?” he said to himself in a low, deep whisper. “Wh…what?” she stammered. His eyes were on her bare throat, where her pulse was hammering wildly. His hand moved down, and he pressed his thumb to the visible throb of the artery there. He could feel himself going taut at the unexpected reaction. It was Oklahoma all over again, when he’d promised himself he wouldn’t ever touch her again. Impulses, he told himself firmly, were stupid and sometimes dangerous. And Cecily was off limits. Period. He pulled his hand back and stood up, grateful that the loose fit of his buckskins hid his physical reaction to her. “Mother’s won a prize,” he said. His voice sounded oddly strained. He forced a nonchalant smile and turned to Cecily. She was visibly shaken. He shouldn’t have looked at her. Her reactions kindled new fires in him.

On paper, at least, none of this would necessarily stop us from getting a stimulus bill passed. After all, Democrats enjoyed a seventy-seven-seat majority in the House and a seventeen-seat majority in the Senate. But even in the best of circumstances, trying to get the largest emergency spending bill in history through Congress in record time would be a little like getting a python to swallow a cow. I also had to contend with a bit of institutionalized procedural mischief—the Senate filibuster—which in the end would prove to be the most chronic political headache of my presidency. The filibuster isn’t mentioned anywhere in the Constitution. Instead, it came into being by happenstance: In 1805, Vice President Aaron Burr urged the Senate to eliminate the “motion to proceed”—a standard parliamentary provision that allows a simple majority of any legislature to end debate on a piece of business and call for a vote. (Burr, who seems never to have developed the habit of thinking things through, reportedly considered the rule a waste of time.) It didn’t take long for senators to figure out that without a formal way to end debate, any one of them could bring Senate business to a halt—and thereby extract all sorts of concessions from frustrated colleagues—simply by talking endlessly and refusing to surrender the floor. In 1917, the Senate curbed the practice by adopting “cloture,” allowing a vote of two-thirds of senators present to end a filibuster. For the next fifty years the filibuster was used only sparingly—most notably by southern Democrats attempting to block anti-lynching and fair-employment bills or other legislation that threatened to shake up Jim Crow. Gradually, though, the filibuster became more routinized and easier to maintain, making it a more potent weapon, a means for the minority party to get its way. The mere threat of a filibuster was often enough to derail a piece of legislation. By the 1990s, as battle lines between Republicans and Democrats hardened, whichever party was in the minority could—and would—block any bill not to their liking, so long as they remained unified and had at least the 41 votes needed to keep a filibuster from being overridden.

New Rule: Democrats must get in touch with their inner asshole. I refer to the case of Van Jones, the man the Obama administration hired to find jobs for Americans in the new green industries. Seems like a smart thing to do in a recession, but Van Jones got fired because he got caught on tape saying Republicans are assholes. And they call it news! Now, I know I'm supposed to be all reinjected with yes-we-can-fever after the big health-care speech, and it was a great speech--when Black Elvis gets jiggy with his teleprompter, there is none better. But here's the thing: Muhammad Ali also had a way with words, but it helped enormously that he could also punch guys in the face. It bothers me that Obama didn't say a word in defense of Jones and basically fired him when Glenn Beck told him to. Just like dropped "end-of-life counseling" from health-care reform because Sarah Palin said it meant "death panels" on her Facebook page. Crazy morons make up things for Obama to do, and he does it. Same thing with the speech to schools this week, where the president attempted merely to tell children to work hard and wash their hands, and Cracker Nation reacted as if he was trying to hire the Black Panthers to hand out grenades in homeroom. Of course, the White House immediately capitulated. "No students will be forced to view the speech" a White House spokesperson assured a panicked nation. Isn't that like admitting that the president might be doing something unseemly? What a bunch of cowards. If the White House had any balls, they'd say, "He's giving a speech on the importance of staying in school, and if you jackasses don't show it to every damn kid, we're cutting off your federal education funding tomorrow." The Democrats just never learn: Americans don't really care which side of an issue you're on as long as you don't act like pussies When Van Jones called the Republicans assholes, he was paying them a compliment. He was talking about how they can get things done even when they're in the minority, as opposed to the Democrats , who can't seem to get anything done even when they control both houses of Congress, the presidency, and Bruce Springsteen. I love Obama's civility, his desire to work with his enemies; it's positively Christlike. In college, he was probably the guy at the dorm parties who made sure the stoners shared their pot with the jocks. But we don't need that guy now. We need an asshole. Mr. President, there are some people who are never going to like you. That's why they voted for the old guy and Carrie's mom. You're not going to win them over. Stand up for the seventy percent of Americans who aren't crazy. And speaking of that seventy percent, when are we going to actually show up in all this? Tomorrow Glenn Beck's army of zombie retirees descending on Washington. It's the Million Moron March, although they won't get a million, of course, because many will be confused and drive to Washington state--but they will make news. Because people who take to the streets always do. They're at the town hall screaming at the congressman; we're on the couch screaming at the TV. Especially in this age of Twitters and blogs and Snuggies, it's a statement to just leave the house. But leave the house we must, because this is our last best shot for a long time to get the sort of serious health-care reform that would make the United States the envy of several African nations.

I suggest you stand slowly and walk out with my men,” Zrakovi said, tapping a napkin against his lying, two-faced mouth and putting a twenty on the table to cover the drinks. “If you make a scene, innocent humans will be injured. I have a Blue Congress cleanup team in place, however, so if you want to fight in public and damage a few humans, knock yourself out. It will only add to your list of crimes.” I stood slowly, gritting my teeth when Squirrel Chin patted me down while feeling me up and making it look like a romantic moment. He’d been so busy feeling the naughty bits that he missed both Charlie, sitting in my bag next to my foot, and the dagger attached to my inner forearm. Idiot. Alex would never have been so sloppy. If Alex had patted me down, he’d have found not only the weapons but also the portable magic kit. From the corner of my eye, I saw a tourist taking mobile phone shots of us. He’d no doubt email them to all his friends back home with stories of those crazy New Orleanians and their public displays of affection. I considered pretending to faint, but I was too badly outnumbered for it to work. Like my friend Jean Lafitte, whose help I could use about now, I didn’t want to try something unless it had a reasonable chance at succeeding. I also didn’t want to pull Charlie out and risk humans getting hurt. “Walk out the door onto Chartres and turn straight toward the cathedral.” Zrakovi pulled his jacket aside enough for me to see a shoulder holster. I hadn’t even known the man could hold a gun, although for all I knew about guns it could be a water pistol. The walk to the cathedral transport was three very long city blocks. My best escape opportunity would be near Jackson Square. When the muscular goons tried to turn me left toward the cathedral, I’d try to break and run right toward the river, where I could get lost among the wharves and docks long enough to draw and power a transport. Of course in order to run, I’d have to get away from the clinch of Dreadlocks and Squirrel Chin. Charlie could take care of that. I slipped the messenger bag over my head slowly, and not even Zrakovi noticed the stick of wood protruding from the top by a couple of inches. Not to be redundant, but . . . idiots. None of us spoke as we proceeded down Chartres Street, where, to our south, the clouds continued to build. The wind had grown stronger and drier. The hurricane was sucking all the humidity out of the air, all the better to gain intensity. I hoped Zrakovi, a Bostonian, would enjoy his first storm. I hoped a live oak landed on his head.

Congress displayed contempt for the city's residents, yet it retained a fondness for buildings and parks. In 1900, the centennial of the federal government's move to Washington, many congressmen expressed frustration that the proud nation did not have a capital to rival London, Paris, and Berlin. The following year, Senator James McMillan of Michigan, chairman of the Senate District Committee, recruited architects Daniel Burnham and Charles McKim, landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., and sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens to propose a park system. The team, thereafter known as the McMillan Commission, emerged with a bold proposal in the City Beautiful tradition, based on the White City of Chicago's 1893 Columbian Exposition. Their plan reaffirmed L'Enfant's avenues as the best guide for the city's growth and emphasized the majesty of government by calling for symmetrical compositions of horizontal, neoclassical buildings of marble and white granite sitting amid wide lawns and reflecting pools. Eventually, the plan resulted in the remaking of the Mall as an open lawn, the construction of the Lincoln Memorial and Memorial Bridge across the Potomac, and the building of Burnham's Union Station. Commissioned in 1903, when the state of the art in automobiles and airplanes was represented by the curved-dash Olds and the Wright Flyer, the station served as a vast and gorgeous granite monument to rail transportation.

He began, “There is absolutely no doubt in the mind of a very overwhelming number of Americans, that the best immediate defense of the United States is the success of Britain in defending itself. “Now, what I am trying to do is eliminate the dollar sign. That is something brand new in the thoughts of everybody in this room, I think—get rid of the silly, foolish, old dollar sign. “Well, let me give you an illustration,” he said, and then deployed an analogy that distilled his idea into something both familiar and easy to grasp, something that would resonate with the quotidian experience of countless Americans. “Suppose my neighbor’s home catches fire, and I have got a length of garden hose four or five hundred feet away: but, my Heaven, if he can take my garden hose and connect it up with his hydrant, I may help him put out the fire. Now, what do I do? I don’t say to him before that operation, ‘Neighbor, my garden hose cost me $15; you have got to pay me $15 for it.’ What is the transaction that goes on? I don’t want $15—I want my garden hose back after the fire is over. All right. If it goes through the fire all right, intact, without any damage to it, he gives it back to me and thanks me very much for the use of it. But suppose it gets smashed up—holes in it—during the fire; we don’t have to have too much formality about it, but I say to him, ‘I was glad to lend you that hose; I see I can’t use it any more, it’s all smashed up.’ “He says ‘How many feet of it were there?’ “I tell him, ‘There were 150 feet of it.’ “He says, ‘All right, I will replace it.’ ” That became the kernel of an act introduced in Congress soon afterward, numbered H.R. 1776 and titled “A Bill Further to Promote the Defense of the United States, and for Other Purposes,” soon to receive its lasting byname, the Lend-Lease Act. Central to the proposal was the idea that it was in the best interests of the United States to provide Britain, or any ally, with all the aid it needed, whether it could pay or not.

In 1786, Jefferson, then the American ambassador to France, and Adams, then the American ambassador to Britain, met in London with Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja, the ambassador to Britain. The Americans wanted to negotiate a peace treaty based on Congress’ vote to appease. During the meeting Jefferson and Adams asked the ambassador why Muslims held so much hostility towards America, a nation with which they had no previous contacts. In a later meeting with the American Congress, the two future presidents reported that Ambassador Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja had answered that Islam “was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Qur’an that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman (Muslim) who should be slain in Battle was sure to go to Paradise.” For the following 15 years, the American government paid the Muslims millions of dollars for the safe passage of American ships or the return of American hostages. Most Americans do not know that the payments in ransom and Jizyah tribute amounted to 20 percent of United States government annual revenues in 1800. Not long after Jefferson’s inauguration as president in 1801, he dispatched a group of frigates to defend American interests in the Mediterranean, and informed Congress. Declaring that America was going to spend “millions for defense but not one cent for tribute,” Jefferson pressed the issue by deploying American Marines and many of America’s best warships to the Muslim Barbary Coast. The USS Constitution, USS Constellation, USS Philadelphia, USS Chesapeake, USS Argus, USS Syren and USS Intrepid all fought. In 1805, American Marines marched across the dessert from Egypt into Tripolitania, forcing the surrender of Tripoli and the freeing of all American slaves. During the Jefferson administration, the Muslim Barbary States, crumbled as a result of intense American naval bombardment and on shore raids by Marines. They finally agreed officially to abandon slavery and piracy. Jefferson’s victory over the Muslims lives on today in the Marine Hymn with the line “From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli, we will fight our country’s battles on the land as on the sea.” It wasn’t until 1815 that the problem was fully settled by the total defeat of all the Muslim slave trading pirates.

Though it’s best not to be born a chicken at all, it is especially bad luck to be born a cockerel. From the perspective of the poultry farmer, male chickens are useless. They can’t lay eggs, their meat is stringy, and they’re ornery to the hens that do all the hard work of putting food on our tables. Commercial hatcheries tend to treat male chicks like fabric cutoffs or scrap metal: the wasteful but necessary by-product of an industrial process. The sooner they can be disposed of—often they’re ground into animal feed—the better. But a costly problem has vexed egg farmers for millennia: It’s virtually impossible to tell the difference between male and female chickens until they’re four to six weeks old, when they begin to grow distinctive feathers and secondary sex characteristics like the rooster’s comb. Until then, they’re all just indistinguishable fluff balls that have to be housed and fed—at considerable expense. Somehow it took until the 1920s before anyone figured out a solution to this costly dilemma. The momentous discovery was made by a group of Japanese veterinary scientists, who realized that just inside the chick’s rear end there is a constellation of folds, marks, spots, and bumps that to the untrained eye appear arbitrary, but when properly read, can divulge the sex of a day-old bird. When this discovery was unveiled at the 1927 World Poultry Congress in Ottawa, it revolutionized the global hatchery industry and eventually lowered the price of eggs worldwide. The professional chicken sexer, equipped with a skill that took years to master, became one of the most valuable workers in agriculture. The best of the best were graduates of the two-year Zen-Nippon Chick Sexing School, whose standards were so rigorous that only 5 to 10 percent of students received accreditation. But those who did graduate earned as much as five hundred dollars a day and were shuttled around the world from hatchery to hatchery like top-flight business consultants. A diaspora of Japanese chicken sexers spilled across the globe. Chicken sexing is a delicate art, requiring Zen-like concentration and a brain surgeon’s dexterity. The bird is cradled in the left hand and given a gentle squeeze that causes it to evacuate its intestines (too tight and the intestines will turn inside out, killing the bird and rendering its gender irrelevant). With his thumb and forefinger, the sexer flips the bird over and parts a small flap on its hindquarters to expose the cloaca, a tiny vent where both the genitals and anus are situated, and peers deep inside. To do this properly, his fingernails have to be precisely trimmed. In the simple cases—the ones that the sexer can actually explain—he’s looking for a barely perceptible protuberance called the “bead,” about the size of a pinhead. If the bead is convex, the bird is a boy, and gets thrown to the left; concave or flat and it’s a girl, sent down a chute to the right.

Yet risk feels particularly complicated in the context of the stories of white firearm. Lessons seem hard to cull when the support groups are comprised only of grieving loved ones because the primary victims do not live long enough to tell you what was going through their minds. Knowledge about best practices is fleeting because Congress effectively blocks federally funded research on gun-related risk, leading to a knowledge vacuum unlike anything ever seen for every other leading cause of injury and death. Ultimately, risk is embodied not in the imagined intruder but in the person who already lives in the house. Risk then becomes at once prevalent and invisible. Risk is an ellipsis, an evanescent void.

1906, in his Sixth Annual Message to Congress, TR wrote approvingly of the bourgeois, observing, “The best Americanism is that which aims for stability and permanency of prosperous citizenship, rather than immediate returns on large masses of capital.

We have had a wretched winter for the farmer,” Jefferson had written Madison in March 1811.143 It had not been much better for statesmen. “The rancor of party was revived with all its bitterness during the last session of Congress,” his son-in-law John Wayles Eppes wrote Jefferson the same month.144 “United by no fixed principles or objects and destitute of everything like American feeling, so detestable a minority never existed in any country—Their whole political creed is contained in a single word ‘opposition’—They pursue it without regard to principle, to personal reputation or the best interests of their country.

I was convinced that the logic of healthcare reform was so obvious that even in the face of well-organized opposition I could rally the American people’s support. Other big initiatives—like immigration reform and climate change legislation—would probably be even harder to get through Congress; I figured that scoring a victory on the item that most affected people’s day-to-day lives was our best shot at building momentum for the rest of my legislative agenda.

The best approach toward anthrax is antimicrobial therapy,” Dr. Fauci admitted to Congress in 2007.

Sometimes she felt much like a natural philosopher watching exotic animals in their native habitat. What she had always suspected was confirmed by life aboard the Fancy--men were simple creatures with uncomplicated brains. They wanted food, and drink, and fighting, and sexual congress. They were impressed with their own body's ability to make noise and odor. Their idea of humor was at best crude, at worst painful, yet even after some of the bizarre practical jokes that brought men to her sick bay they were still laughing and bragging about whatever insane thing they'd done that got them in that condition.

the Baptists vigorously united with their fellow-citizens in resisting the arbitrary claims of Great Britain; but it seemed to them unreasonable that they should be called upon to contend for civil liberty, if, after it was gained, they should still be exposed to oppression in religious concerns. When, therefore, the first Continental Congress met in Philadelphia, the Warren Association, viewing it as the highest civil resort, agreed to send Mr. Backus as their agent to that convention, “there to follow the best advice he could obtain, to procure some influence from thence in their favor.

is enough to say that I always held, and repeatedly avowed, the principle that a Senator in Congress occupied the position of an ambassador from the State which he represented to the Government of the United States, as well as in some sense a member of the Government; and that, in either capacity, it would be dishonorable to use his powers and privileges for the destruction or for the detriment of the Government to which he was accredited. Acting on this principle, as long as I held a seat in the Senate, my best efforts were directed to the maintenance of the Constitution, the Union resulting from it, and to make the General Government an effective agent of the States for its prescribed purpose.

Though total agreement between the Executive and Congress is impossible, total respect is important. I am proud to be among my colleagues of the Congress whose legacy to their trust is their loyalty to their nation. I am not unaware of inner emotions of the new Members of this body tonight. Twenty-eight years ago I felt as you do now. You will soon learn that you are among men whose first love is their country, men who try each day to do, as best they can, what they believe is right. “What an

LINCOLN WROTE for the ear. Most politicians and academics write for the eye. Lincoln often spoke or whispered out loud before putting his Faber pencil to paper. He was fascinated by the sound of words. I contend that even his written communications, such as the conclusions of his annual messages to Congress, even when he knew they were to be read by clerks, contained the marks of his best oratory. Lincoln’s pattern was to speak or read his addresses slowly. The average person speaks at about 150 or 160 words per minute. Lincoln spoke 105 to 110 words per minute.4 His slower speed was an aid to hearers, especially in an outdoor environment without the aid of the technology of loudspeakers. Before starting this journey, may I suggest taking the time to hear the selection of Lincoln’s words from each speech at the beginning of each chapter. Speak them aloud. Do so slowly, as Lincoln would have done. This simple exercise will be helpful preparation to enter more fully into a portrait of Lincoln’s eloquence.

Barak Obama has been elected, Congress is overrun with Democrats like cooties on a spelling bee winner, and the Supreme Court will be next to go. Poor Chief Justice John Roberts did the best he could to save us by muffing the oath of office.

Go visit any of the presidential libraries or the National Archives. Watch or better yet sit in on a committee hearing of Congress or your state legislature. Go to the local school board meeting. Attend oral arguments at the Supreme Court. Walk a Civil War battlefield. Do not skip out on serving on a jury. You will come away with a new appreciation of how we got to where we are and why what is best about this country is worth preserving.

The American navy captured fifty merchantmen, but the real damage to British commerce in 1812 was done by what one Republican called “our cheapest & best Navy”—American privateers.181 Congress laid down the rules for privateering a week after the declaration of war, and several days later the administration began issuing commissions.182 The first privateers were small pilot boats armed with one large center-pivot gun, called a “Long Tom,” and carrying fifty or sixty men armed with assorted small arms: muskets, sabers, boarding pikes, and the like. According to one privateer captain, this “was quite enough to capture almost any British merchantman, at this stage of the war.

He suspended habeas corpus, arrested newspaper editors, jailed Northerners without hearings or trials, bypassed Congress, ignored the Supreme Court, and even arrested a member of Congress. He justified these violations as part of the Executive’s War Powers and claimed that he violated the Constitution for the sole purpose of protecting it.

During NASA’s first fifty years the agency’s accomplishments were admired globally. Democratic and Republican leaders were generally bipartisan on the future of American spaceflight. The blueprint for the twenty-first century called for sustaining the International Space Station and its fifteen-nation partnership until at least 2020, and for building the space shuttle’s heavy-lift rocket and deep spacecraft successor to enable astronauts to fly beyond the friendly confines of low earth orbit for the first time since Apollo. That deep space ship would fly them again around the moon, then farther out to our solar system’s LaGrange points, and then deeper into space for rendezvous with asteroids and comets, learning how to deal with radiation and other deep space hazards before reaching for Mars or landings on Saturn’s moons. It was the clearest, most reasonable and best cost-achievable goal that NASA had been given since President John F. Kennedy’s historic decision to land astronauts on the lunar surface. Then Barack Obama was elected president. The promising new chief executive gave NASA short shrift, turning the agency’s future over to middle-level bureaucrats with no dreams or vision, bent on slashing existing human spaceflight plans that had their genesis in the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush White Houses. From the starting gate, Mr. Obama’s uncaring space team rolled the dice. First they set up a presidential commission designed to find without question we couldn’t afford the already-established spaceflight plans. Thirty to sixty thousand highly skilled jobs went on the chopping block with space towns coast to coast facing 12 percent unemployment. $9.4 billion already spent on heavy-lift rockets and deep space ships was unashamedly flushed down America’s toilet. The fifty-year dream of new frontiers was replaced with the shortsighted obligations of party politics. As 2011 dawned, NASA, one of America’s great science agencies, was effectively defunct. While Congress has so far prohibited the total cancellation of the space agency’s plans to once again fly astronauts beyond low earth orbit, Obama space operatives have systematically used bureaucratic tricks to slow roll them to a crawl. Congress holds the purse strings and spent most of 2010 saying, “Wait just a minute.” Thousands of highly skilled jobs across the economic spectrum have been lost while hundreds of billions in “stimulus” have been spent. As of this writing only Congress can stop the NASA killing. Florida’s senior U.S. Senator Bill Nelson, a Democrat, a former spaceflyer himself, is leading the fight to keep Obama space advisors from walking away from fifty years of national investment, from throwing the final spade of dirt on the memory of some of America’s most admired heroes. Congressional committees have heard from expert after expert that Mr. Obama’s proposal would be devastating. Placing America’s future in space in the hands of the Russians and inexperienced commercial operatives is foolhardy. Space legend John Glenn, a retired Democratic Senator from Ohio, told president Obama that “Retiring the space shuttles before the country has another space ship is folly. It could leave Americans stranded on the International Space Station with only a Russian spacecraft, if working, to get them off.” And Neil Armstrong testified before the Senate’s Commerce, Science & Transportation Committee that “With regard to President Obama’s 2010 plan, I have yet to find a person in NASA, the Defense Department, the Air Force, the National Academies, industry, or academia that had any knowledge of the plan prior to its announcement. Rumors abound that neither the NASA Administrator nor the President’s Science and Technology Advisor were knowledgeable about the plan. Lack of review normally guarantees that there will be overlooked requirements and unwelcome consequences. How could such a chain of events happen?

All ten of the top ten presidents in C-SPAN’s survey were hackers. Only one, JFK, climbed a semblance of a traditional ladder; he served in both houses of Congress, but was a war hero and author of a Pulitzer Prize–winning book—clearly not the average ladder climber. Each of the men on this list worked hard in his career, learned and proved leadership through diverse experiences, and switched ladders multiple times. They continuously parlayed their current success for something more, and they didn’t give up when they lost elections (which most of them did). The ladder switching made them better at getting elected and better at the job. To be a good president, Wead says, “You’ve got to be able to think on your feet.” Stubbornness and tradition make for poor performance—as we see with Andrew Johnson and other presidents at the bottom of history’s rankings. The fact that our best presidents—and history’s other greatest overachievers—circumvented the system to get to the top speaks to what’s wrong with our conventional wisdom of paying dues and climbing the ladder. Hard work and luck are certainly ingredients of success, but they’re not the entire recipe. Senators and representatives, by contrast, generally play the dues-and-ladder game of hierarchy and formality. And they get stuck in the congressional spiderweb. “The people that go into Congress go step by step by step,” Wead explains. But presidents don’t. It begs the question: should we?

In the face of this vision, Powell put forth another. What was needed above all else, Powell believed, was to know the land, to understand the land, and to react accordingly. This had practical consequences: while a cow might properly graze on a half-acre in the lush East, it would require fifty times that amount of land in most of the West. It followed that the standard acreage of settlement should be different, and it followed that settlement should take into account sources of water. Powell’s goal with his survey was to clearly map out the western lands, to determine what land could be realistically used for agriculture, which meant also determining where irrigation dams should be placed for best effect. In other words, his goal, to use Wendell Berry’s phrase, was to think about “land use” and to do so on a massive scale. Specifically, Powell wanted to think out the uses of land that would be the most beneficial and fruitful for the human beings living there, and for the entire ecosystem (though that word did not yet exist). From the Mormons, Powell learned how “salutary co-operation could be as a way of life, how much less wasteful than competition.” In the late 1880s, Powell wrote a General Plan for land use in the West that “reached to embrace the related problems of land, water, erosion, floods, soil conservation, even the new one of hydroelectric power” that was based on “the settled belief in the worth of the small farmer and the necessity of protecting him both from speculators and from natural conditions he did not understand and could not combat.” It was a methodical, sensible, scientific approach, essentially a declaration of interdependence between the people and their land, and the miracle is that it came very close to passing into law. But of course it met with fierce opposition from those who stood to profit from exploitation, from the boosters and boomers and politicians who thought it “unpatriotic” to describe the West as dry. After all, how dare he call their garden a desert? What right did he have to come in and determine what only free individuals should? Powell was attacked in the papers, slandered in Congress. According to Stegner, Congressman Thomas M. Patterson of Colorado referred to Powell as “this revolutionist,” and the overall attack on Powell “distinguished itself for bombast and ignorance and bad faith.

This was an extraordinary exercise of judicial power, to say the least. Apart from the meager settlement of the civil claim, criminal proceedings arising out of the disaster, wherever they may be pending, would stand quashed. What was surprising was that five Supreme Court judges, the learned attorney general of India, others taking daily interest in the litigation, and the press, which gets terribly hot under the collar about lesser matters, did not object to this unusual settlement reeking of corruption. This settlement, agreed upon without consulting either the victims, the NGOs working for their welfare, or their well wishers has been characterized by Prof. Upen Baxi, India’s best scholar jurist, as an ‘unconscionable settlement’ by an unscrupulous Congress government.

OVER THE NEXT century and a half, Barrington’s cause was taken up by a long procession of rogues, explorers, scientists, pseudoscientists, and outright kooks. In the 1820s, a colorful crank from Ohio named John Cleves Symmes Jr. toured the United States, arguing that there were large holes at the North and South Poles that connected to networks of probably inhabited subterranean cavities. Scientists scoffed, but his “holes at the poles” concept, encapsulated in his best-selling book Symmes’ Theory of the Concentric Spheres, struck a chord with large audiences and eventually helped influence Congress , in 1836, to appropriate $ 300,000 for an ambitious voyage toward the South Pole. Two years

Harry, the security guard, was way too old and overweight for his job, but he was well liked by everyone, and best of all, he let us use his telephone to make local calls. I sometimes brought him a sandwich and some fruit from the galley, for which he was always grateful. His job didn’t pay much and from the looks of his attire, I don’t believe there was a woman looking after him. He didn’t talk much about things, other than to tell stories about his seafaring life so long ago. His shaggy dog lay sleeping next to a big, glowing potbelly stove. Occasionally some scruffy friends joined him to play cards under a bare light bulb hanging over a sad looking card table. It was a trip into the distant past, when I heard him tell some of his sea stories. After the perfunctory greeting and some remarks about the miserable weather, I asked if I could use his telephone. “Anytime,” Harry said, as I picked up the receiver from its cradle. I started to dial the prefix, when I noticed a movement on the wooden shelf behind the phone. At first I thought it was my imagination but there, I saw it again, and this time I could tell what it was… It was a rodent! It wasn’t just a small rodent; it was a huge Norwegian Rat! Gasping, I jumped back, letting the receiver drop. Whoa, I could feel the hair on the back of my neck tingling! “What the hell is this?” I exclaimed. The damn thing did not scurry away as I would have expected but just sat there with its nose twitching. It didn’t seem at all afraid…. I knew that it could have attacked me, but instead it just sat there looking at me, as a cat would, except with small, black, beady eyes. “Harry,” I shouted. “Get over here and look at this beast. It looks bigger than your dog!” “Keep your shirt on, sonny,” he said. “You're looking at Nibbles.” Sure enough, I now saw Nibble's milk and food dish. The damn rat was Harry's pet! I guess everyone needs somebody, but a pet rat and a shaggy dog? That was just too much! I left without making my call…. I don’t even recall putting the phone back into its cradle, although I’m certain I did. I figured that it wouldn’t take me all that long to walk the steep incline from the docks, past the warehouses, up to Congress Street and then down to State Street. I was on my way to my girlfriend’s apartment, snow or no snow, rat be damned!

amount to a fart in a cyclone. His parents and their parson had tried to sell him the same message, binding him to a hardscrabble farm and a church built on strict “thou shalt nots.” Ridgway had kicked over the traces, gone out on his own and proved them wrong. In spades. Once he was rich as Croesus—no, scratch that; richer than Croesus or the Lord Himself—small minds kept after him in other ways. They told him that he should concentrate on oil and gas, stick with the things he knew, where he had proven his ability. Don’t branch out into other fields and least of all space exploration. What did any Texas oil man with a sixth-grade education know about the friggin’ moon and stars beyond it? Next to nothing, granted. But he had money to burn, enough to buy the brains that did know all about the universe and rockets, astrophysics, interplanetary travel—name your poison. And he knew some other things, as well. Ridgway knew that his country had been losing ground for decades—hell, for generations. Ever since the last world war, when Roosevelt and Truman let Joe Stalin gobble up half of the world without a fight. The great U.S. of A. had been declining ever since, with racial integration and affirmative action, gay rights and abortion, losing wars all over Asia and the Middle East. He’d done his best to save America, bankrolling groups that stood against the long slide into socialism’s Sodom and Gomorrah, but he’d finally admitted to himself that they were beaten. His United States, the one he loved, was circling the drain. And it was time to start from scratch. He’d be goddamned if some inept redneck would spoil it now. You want a job done right, a small voice in his head reminded him, do it yourself. San Antonio CONGRESS HAD CREATED the National Nuclear Security Administration in 2000, following the scandal that had enveloped Dr. Wen Ho Lee and the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Lee had been accused of passing secrets about America’s nuclear arsenal to the People’s Republic of China, pleading guilty on one of fifty-nine charges, then turned around

Mercifully, unlike the Congress party, there is tolerance of dissent within my party. I do not claim to be infallible but even my most trenchant critics would not deny that I speak and act out of personal conviction. I write also to stir debate and have the humility to retract my views when bested in such debates. If that makes me a maverick, I confess I relish the epithet. In the meantime I proudly remain ‘Unchanged and Unrepentant’.

Take Brooksley Born, former chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), who waged an unsuccessful campaign to regulate the multitrillion-dollar derivatives market. Soon after the Clinton administration asked her to take the reins of the CFTC, a regulatory backwater, she became aware of the over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives market, a rapidly expanding and opaque market, which she attempted to regulate. According to a PBS Frontline special: "Her attempts to regulate derivatives ran into fierce resistance from then-Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, then-Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, and then-Deputy Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who prevailed upon Congress to stop Born and limit future regulation." Put more directly by New York Times reporter Timothy O'Brien, "they ... shut her up and shut her down." Mind you, Born was no dummy. She was the first female president of the Stanford Law Review, the first woman to finish at the top of the class, and an expert in commodities and futures. But because a trio of people who were literally en-titled decided they knew what was best for the market, they dismissed her call for regulation, a dismissal that triggered the financial collapse of 2008. To be fair to Greenspan et al., their resistance was not surprising. According to psychologists Hillel Einhorn and Robin Hogarth, "we [as human beings] are prone to search only for confirming evidence, and ignore disconfirming evidence." In the case of Born, it was the '90s, the markets were doing well, and the country was prospering; it's easy to see why the powerful troika rejected her disconfirming views. Throw in the fact that the disconcerting evidence was coming from a "disconfirming" person (i.e., a woman), and they were even more likely to disregard the data. In the aftermath, Arthur Levitt, former chairman of the SEC, said, "If she just would have gotten to know us... maybe it would have gone a different way."12 Born quotes Michael Greenberg, the director of the CFTC under her, as saying, "They say you weren't a team player, but I never saw them issue you a uniform." We like ideas and people that fit into our world-view, but there is tremendous value in finding room for those that don't. According to Paul Carlile and Clayton Christensen, "It is only when an anomaly is identified—an outcome for which a theory can't account that an opportunity to improve theory occurs."13 One of the ways you'll know you are coming up against an anomaly is if you find yourself annoyed, defensive, even dismissive, of a person, or his idea.

Fourth Amendment reasonableness balances the advancement of government interests against the intrusion of the government’s acts. An officer should only be permitted to invoke a legal standard based on a different government’s interests when that government has recognized that enforcement as genuine and legitimate. Permitting cross-enforcement without authorization would permit an officer to piggyback on government interests that his searches and seizures are unlikely to advance. Authorization provides the best signal that an officer’s conduct genuinely advances the government interests used that justify it. When a government is silent on who can enforce its laws, questions of constitutional history and structure justify different presumptions. State officers should be allowed to search or seize to enforce federal criminal laws unless Congress has forbidden it. On the other hand, federal officers should not be allowed to search or seize to enforce state law unless state statutory or caselaw affirmatively allows it.

Not only will the vast majority (96%) of actively managed mutual funds not beat the market, they are going to charge us an arm and leg, and extract up to two-thirds of our potential nest egg in fees. But here is the kicker: they are going to have the nerve to look you in the eye and tell you that they truly have your best interests at heart while simultaneously lobbying Congress to make sure that is never the case.

Using the powers of the office of President of the United States, Barack Hussein Obama, in violation of his constitutional oath faithfully to execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, has willfully usurped and undermined the constitutional authority and prerogatives of Congress.

This pattern became particularly apparent in the 2000s. In 2002 the presidential election was won by Álvaro Uribe. Uribe had something in common with the Castaño brothers: his father had been killed by the FARC. Uribe ran a campaign repudiating the attempts of the previous administration to try to make peace with the FARC. In 2002 his vote share was 3 percentage points higher in areas with paramilitaries than without them. In 2006, when he was reelected, his vote share was 11 percentage points higher in such areas. If Mancuso and his partners could deliver the vote for Congress and the Senate, they could do so in presidential elections as well, particularly for a president strongly aligned with their worldview and likely to be lenient on them. As Jairo Angarita, Salvatore Mancuso’s deputy and the former leader of the AUC’s Sinú and San Jorge blocs, declared in September 2005, he was proud to work for the “reelection of the best president we have ever had.” Once elected, the paramilitary senators and congressmen voted for what Uribe wanted, in particular changing the constitution so that he could be reelected in 2006, which had not been allowed at the time of his first election, in 2002. In exchange, President Uribe delivered a highly lenient law that allowed the paramilitaries to demobilize. Demobilization did not mean the end of paramilitarism, simply its institutionalization in large parts of Colombia and the Colombian state, which the paramilitaries had taken over and were allowed to keep.

In 1976, to rank George Washington above all other U.S. officers, Congress gave him the posthumous promotion of “General of the Armies of the United States,” a grade equivalent to a six-star general.

The guns on both sides were silent until they returned. Suddenly, a fierce cannonade from the British ships exploded onto the beach at Turtle Gut Inlet, but only one American was hit, “Shott through the arm and body.” It was Richard Wickes. A cannonball took his arm and half his chest away. Fresh from the Reprisal, Lambert Wickes arrived on the beach at the head of his reinforcements just as his younger brother died: “I arrived just at the Close of the Action Time enough to see him expire . . . Captn Barry . . . says a braver Man never existed.”123 Taking Richard Wickes's body, the American sailors left the spit of sand they fought over that morning. The powder was stowed in the Wasp's hold and sent up the Delaware. “At 2 weighed and made Sail,” Hudson briefly noted in his journal.124 The British returned to Cape Henlopen. As before, Barry had taken long odds, assessed the best plan that could succeed, and beaten the British. The Nancy was destroyed, but the Wasp would reach Philadelphia safely with the desperately needed gunpowder. Despite superior firepower, the “butcher's bill” was far heavier for the British. But the victory brought no cheers or satisfaction among the Americans, and Barry was particularly saddened by the death of the gallant young Wickes.125 The next morning—Sunday, June 30—the men of the Lexington and Reprisal gathered to mourn their shipmate at the log meetinghouse in the small village of Cold Spring, just north of Cape May. Under the same light breezes of the day before, the American sailors, with “bowed and uncovered heads,” filed inside and sat on the long, rough-cut wooden pews. After “The Clergyman preached a very deacent Sermon,” Lambert Wickes and the Reprisal's officers silently hoisted the coffin. Shuffling under its weight, they carried it outside to the little cemetery, and laid their comrade to rest.126 Lambert Wickes now faced the task of informing his family in Maryland of Richard's death. On July 2, in a sad but disjointed letter to his brother Samuel, he mentioned Richard's death among a list of the items—including the sugar and “one Bagg Coffee” that accompanied the letter. “You'll disclose this Secret with as much Caution as possible to our Sisters,” he pleaded. He quoted Barry's report that Richard “fought like a brave Man & was fore most in every transaction of that day,” dying for the cause of the “united Colonies.”127 By the time Lambert's package reached his family in Maryland, the “united Colonies” ceased to exist as well. The same day Wickes posted his letter, Congress approved the Declaration of Independence. Barry, Wickes, and the rest of the Continental Navy were now fighting for the survival of a new country: the United States of America.

I suggest you stand slowly and walk out with my men,” Zrakovi said, tapping a napkin against his lying, two-faced mouth and putting a twenty on the table to cover the drinks. “If you make a scene, innocent humans will be injured. I have a Blue Congress cleanup team in place, however, so if you want to fight in public and damage a few humans, knock yourself out. It will only add to your list of crimes.” I stood slowly, gritting my teeth when Squirrel Chin patted me down while feeling me up and making it look like a romantic moment. He’d been so busy feeling the naughty bits that he missed both Charlie, sitting in my bag next to my foot, and the dagger attached to my inner forearm. Idiot. Alex would never have been so sloppy. If Alex had patted me down, he’d have found not only the weapons but also the portable magic kit. From the corner of my eye, I saw a tourist taking mobile phone shots of us. He’d no doubt email them to all his friends back home with stories of those crazy New Orleanians and their public displays of affection. I considered pretending to faint, but I was too badly outnumbered for it to work. Like my friend Jean Lafitte, whose help I could use about now, I didn’t want to try something unless it had a reasonable chance at succeeding. I also didn’t want to pull Charlie out and risk humans getting hurt. “Walk out the door onto Chartres and turn straight toward the cathedral.” Zrakovi pulled his jacket aside enough for me to see a shoulder holster. I hadn’t even known the man could hold a gun, although for all I knew about guns it could be a water pistol. The walk to the cathedral transport was three very long city blocks. My best escape opportunity would be near Jackson Square. When the muscular goons tried to turn me left toward the cathedral, I’d try to break and run right toward the river, where I could get lost among the wharves and docks long enough to draw and power a transport. Of course in order to run, I’d have to get away from the clinch of Dreadlocks and Squirrel Chin. Charlie could take care of that. I slipped the messenger bag over my head slowly, and not even Zrakovi noticed the stick of wood protruding from the top by a couple of inches. Not to be redundant, but . . . idiots. None of us spoke as we proceeded down Chartres Street, where, to our south, the clouds continued to build. The wind had grown stronger and drier. The hurricane was sucking all the humidity out of the air, all the better to gain intensity. I hoped Zrakovi, a Bostonian, would enjoy his first storm. I hoped a live oak landed on his head.

Congress will also look into the possible link that certain medical problems, such as Down syndrome, Autism, and others have that causes such violence to occur from these kinds of people. The Health Administration will research the possible reasons for this violence, what can be done about it, and how it might be prevented in the future. If it starts in the womb, we will take care of such problems. If it occurs due to nurture, the parents and their mental health will be examined. It might be best if children were raised by the community, so that’s something we’ll examine. We will leave no stone unturned to get to the bottom of gun violence. We’ll take a couple of questions,” “Speaker Rooney, what’s being done to curb the speculation online that this whole thing was a set-up to take away guns from the American people?

Well, gentlemen, what do you think?” “I think that doing what we’re about to do could either backfire big time or be the best thing that has happened to the United States in a long time. We won’t know until it happens. When you send Delaney into the Oval Office, I’ll order the Marine guards to arrest the members of the White House staff who are completely loyal to Collins, and I’ll send the Secret Service to round up the Cabinet and Vice President. After we do, we’ll have to hold a press conference to ask Congress to come back. I assume Evans is going to have the election re-done?” asked Shields. “Yes, Admiral. He assured me that he‘d contact the heads of the parties and ask them to recruit a candidate to run for office. We might have a rough transition back to our roots, but we’ll get there.

ECB – unlike, say, the US Federal Reserve which is placed within a political structure where Congress, the President, and the Treasury supply all the necessary political counterweights – is free (indeed, is supposed) to operate in a political vacuum: the parliaments and governments of the members of the euro zone have lost control over monetary policy, while the EP has no authority in this area. Moreover, the ECB enjoys not only ‘instrument independence’ but also ‘goal independence’. When a central bank enjoys only instrument independence, it is up to the government to fix the target – say, the politically acceptable level of inflation – leaving then the central bank free to decide how best to achieve the target. In the case of goal independence, the discretionary power of the central banker is much larger. The idea that central bankers, or other economic experts, may know what rate of inflation is in the long-run interest of a country (and, a fortiori, of a group of countries at very different levels of socioeconomic developments such as the EU) is indeed extraordinary. Politicians and elected policymakers, rather than experts, can be expected to be sensitive to the public’s preferred balance of inflation and unemployment. If the public wants to trade some unemployment for a somewhat higher rate of inflation, it can make this preference known by electing candidates who stand for such a policy; but no such possibility is given to the citizens of the euro zone or to their political representatives.

The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America. He shall hold his Office during the Term of four Years, and, together with the Vice President chosen for the same Term, be elected, as follows: Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector. The Electors shall meet in their respective States, and vote by Ballot for two Persons, of whom one at least shall not be an Inhabitant of the same State with themselves. And they shall make a List of all the Persons voted for, and of the Number of Votes for each; which List they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the Seat of the Government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate. The President of the Senate shall, in the Presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the Certificates, and the Votes shall then be counted. The Person having the greatest Number of Votes shall be the President, if such Number be a Majority of the whole Number of Electors appointed; and if there be more than one who have such Majority, and have an equal Number of votes, then the House of Representatives shall immediately chuse by Ballot one of them for President; and if no Person have a Majority, then from the five highest on the List the said House shall in like Manner chuse the President. But in chusing the President, the Votes shall be taken by States, the Representation from each State having one Vote; a Quorum for this Purpose shall consist of a Member or Members from two thirds of the States, and a Majority of all the States shall be necessary to a Choice. In every Case, after the Choice of the President, the Person having the greatest Number of Votes of the Electors shall be the Vice President. But if there should remain two or more who have equal Votes, the Senate shall chuse from them by Ballot the Vice President. The Congress may determine the Time of chusing the Electors, and the Day on which they shall give their Votes; which Day shall be the same throughout the United States. No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States. In Case of the Removal of the President from Office, or of his Death, Resignation, or Inability to discharge the Powers and Duties of the said Office, the Same shall devolve on the Vice President, and the Congress may by Law provide for the Case of Removal, Death, Resignation or Inability, both of the President and Vice President, declaring what Officer shall then act as President, and such Officer shall act accordingly, until the Disability be removed, or a President shall be elected. The President shall, at stated Times, receive for his Services, a Compensation, which shall neither be encreased nor diminished during the Period for which he shall have been elected, and he shall not receive within that Period any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them. Before he enter on the Execution of his Office, he shall take the following Oath or Affirmation:—"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Senator Warren questions SEC chair on broker reforms 525 words By Sarah N. Lynch WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Senator Elizabeth Warren said Friday that the Labor Department should press ahead with brokerage industry reforms, and not be deterred by the Securities and Exchange Commission's plans to adopt its own separate rules.    President Barack Obama, with frequent Wall Street critic Warren at his side, last month called on the Labor Department to quickly move forward to tighten brokerage standards on retirement advice, lending new momentum to a long-running effort to implement reforms aimed at reducing conflicts of interest and "hidden fees." But that effort could be complicated by a parallel track of reforms by the SEC, whose Chair Mary Jo White on Tuesday said she supported moving ahead with a similar effort to hold retail brokers to a higher "fiduciary" standard. "I want to see the Department of Labor go forward now," Warren told Reuters in an interview Friday. "There is no reason to wait for the SEC. There is no question that the Department of Labor has the authority to act to ensure that retirement advisers are serving the best interest of their clients." Warren said that while she has no concerns with the SEC moving forward to write its own rules, she fears its involvement may give Wall Street a hook to try to delay or water down a separate ongoing Labor Department effort to craft tough new rules governing how brokers dole out retirement advice. She also raised questions about White's decision to unveil her position at a conference hosted by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA), a trade group representing the interests of securities brokerage firms. Not only is the SEC the lead regulator for brokers, but unlike the Labor Department, it is also bound by law to preserve brokers' commission-based compensation in any new fiduciary rule.     "I was surprised that (Chair) White announced the rule at a conference hosted by an industry trade group that spent several years and millions of dollars lobbying members of Congress to block real action to fix the problem," Warren said. Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat who frequently challenges market regulators as too cozy with industry, stopped short of directly criticizing White. The SEC and SIFMA both declined to comment on Warren's comments. SIFMA has strongly opposed the Labor Department's efforts, fearing its rule will contain draconian measures that would cut broker profits, and in turn, force brokers to pull back from offering accounts and advice to American retirees. It has long advocated for the SEC to take the lead on a rule that would create a new uniform standard of care for brokers and advisers. The SEC has said it has been coordinating with the Labor Department on the rule-writing effort, but on Tuesday White also acknowledged that the two can still act independently of one another because they operate under different laws. The industry and reform advocates have been waiting now for years to see whether the SEC would move to tighten standards.     Warren expressed some skepticism on Friday about whether the SEC will ever in fact actually adopt a rule, saying that for years the agency has talked about taking action, but has not delivered. (Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch; Editing by Christian Plumb)

So let’s recap. Not only will the vast majority (96%) of actively managed mutual funds not beat the market, they are going to charge us an arm and leg, and extract up to two-thirds of our potential nest egg in fees. But here is the kicker: they are going to have the nerve to look you in the eye and tell you that they truly have your best interests at heart while simultaneously lobbying Congress to make sure that is never the case.

Rarely in history have so many people quoted the United States Constitution and yet seemed deliberately obtuse to its meaning than have the members of the United States Congress. Why that still comes as a surprise probably says more about me than it does about them. Let’s face it. Liberals always have had a love-hate relationship with the Constitution—they love it when they can use it to abort babies or let gay people get married. They hate it when its language gets in the way of their big-government schemes, like censoring conservative media outlets or investigating troublesome, truth-telling journalists. They especially hate the fact that the Constitution explicitly—yes, explicitly—protects gun owners. To get around that inconvenient truth, the left does what it does best: It denies that things say what they actually say, or mean what they actually mean. Or

These best and brightest willingly sacrificed happiness for success because, like so many of us, they had been taught that if you work hard you will be successful—and only then, once you are successful, will you be happy. They had been taught that happiness is the reward you get only when you become partner of an investment firm, win the Nobel Prize, or get elected to Congress. But in fact, as you will learn throughout this book, new research in psychology and neuroscience shows that it works the other way around: We become more successful when we are happier and more positive.

he mentions that the buses taking the Vietnamese to MAGA events across America are all free. I ask who pays, but he doesn’t know ... interesting. Some rich benefactor is paying to send busloads of South Vietnamese to Trump events, presumably so they’ll talk about fighting communism. But who? Who’d think that was the best use of their limited resources?

he could do for her. But, Nehru showed no interest and said nothing. After some time, she left disappointed. She returned to Ahmedabad to stay with a cousin. Neither Nehru, nor the Congress Party bothered about her well-being. Such was the fate of the lady who gave her all to the nation and of the daughter of a person who made India what it is today! Contrast this with the Nehru Dynasty, who enjoyed all the fruits, while others had done all the sacrifices.

As former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan grudgingly acknowledged in his testimony to Congress, there had been a ‘flaw’ in the theory underpinning the Western world’s approach to financial regulation. The presumption that ‘the self-interest of organisations, specifically banks, is such that they were best capable of protecting shareholders and equity in the firms’ had proved incorrect.8 Contrary to the claims of the ‘efficient markets hypothesis’ which underpinned that assumption, financial markets had systematically mispriced assets and risks, with catastrophic results.

As best as the Count could determine, the Bolsheviks assembled whenever possible in whichever form for whatever reason. In a single week, there might be committees, caucuses, colloquiums, congresses, and conventions variously coming together to establish codes, set courses of action, levy complaints, and generally clamor about the world’s oldest problems in its newest nomenclature.

Sticking with the $2 trillion infrastructure proposal, MMT would have us begin by asking if it would be safe for Congress to authorize $2 trillion in new spending without offsets. A careful analysis of the economy’s existing (and anticipated) slack would guide lawmakers in making that determination. If the CBO and other independent analysts concluded it would risk pushing inflation above some desired inflation rate, then lawmakers could begin to assemble a menu of options to identify the most effective ways to mitigate that risk. Perhaps one-third, one-half, or three-fourths of the spending would need to be offset. It’s also possible that none would require offsets. Or perhaps the economy is so close to its full employment potential that PAYGO is the right policy. The point is, Congress should work backward to arrive at the answer rather than beginning with the presumption that every new dollar of spending needs to be fully offset. That helps to protect us from unwarranted tax increases and undesired inflation. It also ensures that there is always a check on any new spending. The best way to fight inflation is before it happens. In one sense, we have gotten lucky. Congress routinely makes large fiscal commitments without pausing to evaluate inflation risks. It can add hundreds of billions of dollars to the defense budget or pass tax cuts that add trillions to the fiscal deficit over time, and for the most part, we come out unscathed—at least in terms of inflation. That’s because there’s normally enough slack to absorb bigger deficits. Although excess capacity has served as a sort of insurance policy against a Congress that ignores inflation risk, maintaining idle resources comes at a price. It depresses our collective well-being by depriving us of the array of things we could have enjoyed if we had put our resources to good use. MMT aims to change that. MMT is about harnessing the power of the public purse to build an economy that lives up to its full potential while maintaining appropriate checks on that power. No one would think of Spider-Man as a superhero if he refused to use his powers to protect and serve. With great power comes great responsibility. The power of the purse belongs to all of us. It is wielded by democratically elected members of Congress, but we should think of it as a power that exists to serve us all. Overspending is an abuse of power, but so is refusing to act when more can be done to elevate the human condition without risking inflation.

General Sherman praised the shows as "wonderfully realistic and historically reminiscent." Reviews and the show's own publicity always stressed its "realism." There is no doubt it was more realistic, visually and in essence, than any of the competing Wild Wests. There were four other Wild West shows that year: Adam Forepaugh had one, Dr. A. W. Carver another; there was a third called Fargo's Wild West and one known as Hennessey's Wild West. Cody criticized all their claims and their use of the words "Wild West." He had copyrighted the term according to an act of Congress on December 22, 1883, and registered a typescript at the Library of Congress on June 1, 1885. The copyright title read: The Wild West or Life among the Red Man and the Road Agents of the Plains and Prairies-An Equine Dramatic Exposition on Grass or Under Canvas, of the Adventures of Frontiersmen and Cowboys. Additional copy was headed BUFFALO BILL'S "WILD WEST" PRAIRIE EXHIBITION AND ROCKY MOUNTAIN SHOW, A DRAMATIC-EQUESTRIAN EXPOSITION OF LIFE ON THE PLAINS, WITH ACCOMPANYING MONOLOGUE AND INCIDENTAL MUSIC THE WHOLE INVENTED AND ARRANGED BY W.F. CODY W.F. CODY AND N. SALSBURY, PROPRIETORS AND MANAGERS WHO HEREBY CLAIM AS THEIR SPECIAL PROPERTY THE VARIOUS EFFECTS INTRODUCED IN THE PUBLIC PERFORMANCES OF BUFFALO BILL'S "WILD WEST" Although the show's first year under enlarged and reorganized management had not been a financial success, at least one good thing had come from it. Also showing in New Orleans that winter had been the Sells Brothers Circus. One of its performers who had wandered over to visit the Wild West lot was Annie Oakley. The story of Annie Oakley's life was so much in the American grain that it might have come from the pen of Horatio Alger Jr., the minister turned best-selling author, who chronicled the fictional lives of poor boys who made good. Ragged Dick: or, Street Life in New York, Ragged Tom, and Luck Moses then married Dan Brumbaugh, who died in an accident shortly afterward, leaving another daughter. When she was seven, Annie frequently fed the family with quail she had caught in homemade traps, much as young Will Cody had trapped small game. In an interview she once said: "I was eight years old when I made my first shot, and I still consider it one of the best shots I ever

The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country. Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance of insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor of dishonor, to the latest generation. We SAY we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We-even we here- hold the power, and bear the responsibility. In GIVING freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free- honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope on earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just- a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless.

It’s still masturbation if your clone gives you a hand job. It’s also a lot like being a member of Congress.

(Ezra Pound had the peculiar distinction of winning an award from the Library of Congress for writing the best poem of the year, in 1948, while government psychiatrists insisted he "was" insane.)

The Greenbrier Bunker was one of America’s best-kept secrets for decades. Beneath the Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia, a bomb shelter was hidden from the general public. It was created for members of Congress in the event of an emergency, stocked with months’ worth of food and supplies. The bunker was kept a secret for over thirty years, and it was built alongside the Greenbrier Resort, in the town of White Sulphur Springs. Even the official historian of Greenbrier, Bob Conte, knew nothing about the bunker. Conte had all sorts of records and photos from the property, but nothing that revealed information about the bunker. It turns out that the bunker was built in case of an emergency during the Cold War. The space of the bunker has been compared to that of a Walmart store, with thick, concrete walls and an extensive air filtration system. Rows of metal bunkbeds line the walls, with enough beds for 1,100 people. The building of the bunker was called “Project Greek Island,” and hotel workers and locals were told the construction was for a new conference and exhibition center. It was even used for conferences by thousands of people who had no idea that it was actually designed to be a secret bunker. Down the hall from the sleeping quarters, there was a room designed to be the floor for the House of Representatives. A group of secret government employees disguised themselves as technicians, but they were really some of the only people in the world who knew about the bunker. It was their job to make sure there was a constant six-month supply of food, the most up-to-date pharmaceuticals, and everything that the members of Congress would need in the event of an emergency. The bunker was exposed to the public in 1992. Today, the Greenbrier property is home to not only the Greenbrier Resort, but also the Presidents’ Cottage Museum. As over twenty-five presidents have stayed there, the museum shows their experiences, the property’s history, and, now, part of the bunker. There is a new emergency shelter in place, but only a handful of people know its whereabouts.

The Javits legislation, reauthorized in 2001 as part of the No Child Left Behind Act (PL 107–110), was funded at $11.14 million in fiscal year 2004. Congress approved an appropriation of approximately $7.6 million for the Javits program in fiscal year 2008. The Javits funding was eliminated in 2010, curtailing research projects not yet completed. After a gap in funding, the Javits Act was funded again in 2013, and funding reached $12 million in 2016, the highest level in the history of the Javits Act. The National Center for Research on Gifted Education was also funded. Located at the University of Connecticut, the center has a partnership with the University of Virginia. In 2018, the Javits funding continued at $12 million. Academic standards have become increasingly important in the twenty-first century. The National Association for Gifted Children (2010) issued the Pre-K–Grade 12 Gifted Programming Standards. These standards focus on student outcomes and encourage collaboration among general education teachers, special educators, and teachers of the gifted in an effort to assist students in achieving projected outcomes. In 2010, the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices in conjunction with the Council of Chief State School Officers put forth the Common Core State Standards Initiative (2019), which provided standards in mathematics and English/language arts for Grades K–12. In 2013, the Next Generation Science Standards (2019) became available and were adopted by several states.

The best response to the expression of a view we disagree with is to reply to it. Violence and censorship are never legitimate responses.

Luther Martin of Maryland replied that "the states would never give up the power over the militia; and that, if they were to do so, the militia would be less attended to by the general than by the state governments."21 After Gerry warned that granting Congress powers inconsistent with the existence of the states would lead to civil war, Madison rejoined that "as the greatest danger to liberty is from large standing armies, it is best to prevent them by an effectual provision for a good militia.

...by the late 2000s, it seemed like a sucker's bet to try to make a living as an inventor in the classic sense, by creating useful and original things... the country's most famous inventors were inventing things of dubious merit, generating enormous wealth for a few by hawking gadgets to the many. In the San Francisco Bay Area, as America's coal-fired power plants continued to soak the atmosphere with gunk, as dysfunction snarled Congress and the roads and bridges chipped and cracked, as twelve million searched in vain for jobs and the economies of entire towns ran on food stamps, the best and brightest trilled about the awesomeness of their smartphone apps. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Angry Birds, Summly, Wavii: software to entertain, encapsulate, package, distract. Silicon Valley: a place that has made many useful things and created enormous wealth and transformed the way we live and where many are now working to build a virtual social layer atop the real corroding world.

Jefferson had written Madison in March 1811.143 It had not been much better for statesmen. “The rancor of party was revived with all its bitterness during the last session of Congress,” his son-in-law John Wayles Eppes wrote Jefferson the same month.144 “United by no fixed principles or objects and destitute of everything like American feeling, so detestable a minority never existed in any country—Their whole political creed is contained in a single word ‘opposition’—They pursue it without regard to principle, to personal reputation or the best interests of their country.

Yet, despite his best efforts and intentions, Barack Obama, unlike George W. Bush, will leave office without having found a way to persuade Congress to raise the minimum wage for all workers nationwide. Thus, as of this writing, the federal minimum wage remains $7.25—which, in terms of purchasing power, is lower than it was in 1968. Little wonder that so many working Americans are struggling.36

Congress at the time, he wrote in Profiles in Courage, discouraged the use of political courage: ‘“The way to get along”, I was told when I entered Congress, “is to go along.”’ He loathed this mentality, arguing instead that: ‘Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth … only the very courageous will be able to take the hard and unpopular decisions.

The Panama Canal Zone was the only Latin American territory not acquired as a result of the war with Spain; however it was governed as if it had been. As president, Theodore Roosevelt understood the importance of a canal connecting the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. It would allow the United States to move its fleet from one coast to the other in a relatively short time, which had been a major problem during the war with Spain. To facilitate this he received authorization from Congress to purchase the assets of the failed French attempt to build a canal. The primary obstacle was in acquiring the necessary land to build a canal across the Isthmus of the Americas, which prior to 1903 was part of Colombia. When the United States showed an interest in building the canal, the Colombian government immediately demanded a larger percentage of the tolls than had been previously agreed upon with the French. Negotiations dragged on through 1902 and into 1903. Early in 1903, the United States signed a treaty with the Colombian government, giving the United States a strip of land 6 miles wide, from the Caribbean to the Pacific Ocean. On August 12, 1903, the irate Colombian Senate unanimously voted down the agreement and refused to give the United States the land. Panamanian insurgents with the backing of the United States perpetrated a revolt against the Colombian government, causing Colombia to lose the coveted parcel of land north of its present border. The fledgling nation of Panama was protected from Colombia by a dense jungle and the might of the United States. On November 3, 1903, after 57 years of policing Bogotá's interests, the United States, looking out for its own best interests, sided with Panama against Colombia. A treaty was quickly drafted between the two new allies, giving Panama $10,000,000 of investment money, plus $250,000 per year in perpetuity. It also allowed the United States to purchase the remaining French assets that had been left behind. On November 18th, with the signing of the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty, the Panama Canal Zone was formed.

In a dynamic that’s familiar in our own time, hostility from the journalists of the East convinced a number of middle Americans that a cause under such assault must have something to recommend it. “It wasn’t until the newspapers began to attack the Klan that it really grew,” William Simmons recalled. When the House Rules Committee, prodded by the World series, held brief hearings into the Klan, it, too, inadvertently fed the flames, at least for a time. “Certain newspapers also aided us by inducing Congress to investigate us,” Simmons recalled. “The result was that Congress gave us the best advertising we ever got.

These best and brightest willingly sacrificed happiness for success because, like so many of us, they had been taught that if you work hard you will be successful—and only then, once you are successful, will you be happy. They had been taught that happiness is the reward you get only when you become partner of an investment firm, win the Nobel Prize, or get elected to Congress.

In my first interview with Mr. Lincoln alone he stated to me that he had never professed to be a military man or to know how campaigns should be conducted, and never wanted to interfere in them: but that procrastination on the part of commanders, and the pressure from the people at the North and Congress, WHICH WAS ALWAYS WITH HIM, forced him into issuing his series of "Military Orders"--one, two, three, etc. He did not know but they were all wrong, and did know that some of them were. All he wanted or had ever wanted was some one who would take the responsibility and act, and call on him for all the assistance needed, pledging himself to use all the power of the government in rendering such assistance. Assuring him that I would do the best I could with the means at hand, and avoid as far as possible annoying him or the War Department, our first interview ended.

When I slipped on that wedding ring, I got more than a partner for life; I gained a standing veto to all my best schemes. Marriage has a built-in system of checks and balances. The checks aren’t so much like Congress checking a president as they are like one hockey player checking another into a wall. It hurts, but it’s also a wakeup call—assuming you ever wake up.

What follows is my attempt to fill in the blanks that I did not understand in real time. I started by revisiting my notes, as well as my public reporting, seeking to retrace my steps over two years. I pored through hundreds of pages of documents, obtained by myself and others, including NGOs doggedly filing public records requests. Still more files have been made publicly available through investigations by inspectors general and Congress. To contextualize these documents, I spoke with dozens of sources, from those responsible for considering, implementing, then unwinding the policy, to others who were caught in its crosshairs. I heard from people who participated in and experienced the policy on the border, and some of those who directed it from Washington, including, at times, from inside the White House itself. What I have now unequivocally learned is that the Trump administration’s family separation policy was an avoidable catastrophe made worse by people who could have made it better at multiple inflection points, which I’ll share with you here in a series of pivotal moments presented as scenes. The dialogue you’ll read in these pages is reconstructed, when I was present, to the best of my memory or using recordings made as part of my reporting.

Why, of course, the people don't want war," Goering shrugged. "Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship." "There is one difference," I pointed out. "In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars." "Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country." Nuremberg Diary by Gustave Mark Gilbert