Congress Campaign Quotes

If I were the Devil . . . I mean, if I were the Prince of Darkness, I would of course, want to engulf the whole earth in darkness. I would have a third of its real estate and four-fifths of its population, but I would not be happy until I had seized the ripest apple on the tree, so I should set about however necessary to take over the United States. I would begin with a campaign of whispers. With the wisdom of a serpent, I would whisper to you as I whispered to Eve: “Do as you please.” “Do as you please.” To the young, I would whisper, “The Bible is a myth.” I would convince them that man created God instead of the other way around. I would confide that what is bad is good, and what is good is “square”. In the ears of the young marrieds, I would whisper that work is debasing, that cocktail parties are good for you. I would caution them not to be extreme in religion, in patriotism, in moral conduct. And the old, I would teach to pray. I would teach them to say after me: “Our Father, which art in Washington” . . . If I were the devil, I’d educate authors in how to make lurid literature exciting so that anything else would appear dull an uninteresting. I’d threaten T.V. with dirtier movies and vice versa. And then, if I were the devil, I’d get organized. I’d infiltrate unions and urge more loafing and less work, because idle hands usually work for me. I’d peddle narcotics to whom I could. I’d sell alcohol to ladies and gentlemen of distinction. And I’d tranquilize the rest with pills. If I were the devil, I would encourage schools to refine yound intellects but neglect to discipline emotions . . . let those run wild. I would designate an athiest to front for me before the highest courts in the land and I would get preachers to say “she’s right.” With flattery and promises of power, I could get the courts to rule what I construe as against God and in favor of pornography, and thus, I would evict God from the courthouse, and then from the school house, and then from the houses of Congress and then, in His own churches I would substitute psychology for religion, and I would deify science because that way men would become smart enough to create super weapons but not wise enough to control them. If I were Satan, I’d make the symbol of Easter an egg, and the symbol of Christmas, a bottle. If I were the devil, I would take from those who have and I would give to those who wanted, until I had killed the incentive of the ambitious. And then, my police state would force everybody back to work. Then, I could separate families, putting children in uniform, women in coal mines, and objectors in slave camps. In other words, if I were Satan, I’d just keep on doing what he’s doing. (Speech was broadcast by ABC Radio commentator Paul Harvey on April 3, 1965)

Even after the horror of Newtown, Congress appeared determined to block any measure that could help keep guns out of the wrong hands, with legislators more interested in collecting campaign donations from the National Rifle Association than they were in protecting kids.

When I talk about a political revolution, what I am referring to is the need to do more than just win the next election. It's about creating a situation where we are involving millions of people in the process who are not now involved, and changing the nature of media so they are talking about issues that reflect the needs and the pains that so many of our people are currently feeling. A campaign has got to be much more than just getting votes and getting elected. It has got to be helping to educate people, organize people. If we can do that, we can change the dynamic of politics for years and years to come. If 80 to 90 percent of the people in this country vote, if they know what the issues are (and make demands based on that knowledge), Washington and Congress will look very, very different from the Congress currently dominated by big money and dealing only with the issues that big money wants them to deal with.

Third, the investigation established that several individuals affiliated with the Trump Campaign lied to the Office, and to Congress, about their interactions with Russian-affiliated individuals and related matters.

I’ll be up-front with you. I might hurt you. You’re going in knowing that. I’m choosing the campaign. I’m choosing Congress, because it’s what I want and what I believe in. Nothing, no one is getting in the way of me and the House of Representatives.

Third, the investigation established that several individuals affiliated with the Trump Campaign lied to the Office, and to Congress, about their interactions with Russian-affiliated individuals and related matters. Those lies materially impaired the investigation of Russian election interference.

I saw, during the midterm campaign of 2006, how difficult it was for opponents of stem cell research to run against hope. And so it was in the 2008 presidential contest. This was hope in the collective, a definition that should always apply to the expression of a people's political will. Christopher Reeve had believed in a formula: optimism + information = hope. In this case, the informing agent was us. Granted, it may all look different in six months to a year, but it is hard not to be buoyed by the desire for positive change as articulated and advanced by Barack Obama. It is okay to hope. This time the aspiration of many will not be derided as desperation by a few, as it was during the stem cell debate of '06. By the time you read this book, President Obama and the 111th Congress will have established federal funding for stem cell research. The dam has broken. Just as I'd hoped.

Charles Lathrop Pack, president of the American Tree Association, told how Rogers gave him advice in handling an educational campaign in tree planting. 'Will Rogers told me,' said Pack, 'that I was on the wrong track in trying to educate people to the value of putting idle land to work growing trees. "Pack," he said, "you go down to Washington and get Congress to pass a law prohibiting tree planting and you'll have everybody doing it in a week.

Several years ago, researchers at the University of Minnesota identified 568 men and women over the age of seventy who were living independently but were at high risk of becoming disabled because of chronic health problems, recent illness, or cognitive changes. With their permission, the researchers randomly assigned half of them to see a team of geriatric nurses and doctors—a team dedicated to the art and science of managing old age. The others were asked to see their usual physician, who was notified of their high-risk status. Within eighteen months, 10 percent of the patients in both groups had died. But the patients who had seen a geriatrics team were a quarter less likely to become disabled and half as likely to develop depression. They were 40 percent less likely to require home health services. These were stunning results. If scientists came up with a device—call it an automatic defrailer—that wouldn’t extend your life but would slash the likelihood you’d end up in a nursing home or miserable with depression, we’d be clamoring for it. We wouldn’t care if doctors had to open up your chest and plug the thing into your heart. We’d have pink-ribbon campaigns to get one for every person over seventy-five. Congress would be holding hearings demanding to know why forty-year-olds couldn’t get them installed. Medical students would be jockeying to become defrailulation specialists, and Wall Street would be bidding up company stock prices. Instead, it was just geriatrics. The geriatric teams weren’t doing lung biopsies or back surgery or insertion of automatic defrailers. What they did was to simplify medications. They saw that arthritis was controlled. They made sure toenails were trimmed and meals were square. They looked for worrisome signs of isolation and had a social worker check that the patient’s home was safe. How do we reward this kind of work? Chad Boult, the geriatrician who was the lead investigator of the University of Minnesota study, can tell you. A few months after he published the results, demonstrating how much better people’s lives were with specialized geriatric care, the university closed the division of geriatrics.

Second, we need to protect our constitutional rights. Our founding charter has served us well for more than two centuries. It protects liberty by separating powers, limiting the authority of the federal government, and guaranteeing every American the freedom to speak your mind, pray to God, and protect yourself and your family by bearing arms in their defense. Every single one of those constitutional protections has come under assault from the Obama administration, which has usurped the power of Congress through executive amnesty, redefined the relationship between the federal government and the governed through Obamacare, and attempted to repeal and undermine the First and Second Amendments through abusive campaign finance regulations, coercions of religious consciences, and repeated attacks on the right to bear arms.

Presidents lie all the time. Really great presidents lie. Abraham Lincoln managed to end slavery in America partially by deception. (In an 1858 debate, he flatly insisted that he had no intention of abolishing slavery in states where it was already legal — he had to say this in order to slow the tide of secession.) Franklin Roosevelt lied about the U.S. position of neutrality until we entered World War II after the attack on Pearl Harbor. (Though the public and Congress believed his public pledge of impartiality, he was already working in secret with Winston Churchill and selling arms to France.) Ronald Reagan lied about Iran-Contra so much that it now seems like he was honestly confused. Politically, the practice of lying is essential. By the time the Lewinsky story broke, Clinton had already lied about many, many things. (He’d openly lied about his level of commitment to gay rights during the ’92 campaign.) The presidency is not a job for an honest man. It’s way too complex. If honesty drove the electoral process, Jimmy Carter would have served two terms and the 2008 presidential race would have been a dead heat between Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich.

I believe in the division of labor. You send us to Congress; we pass laws under which you make money...and out of your profits, you further contribute to our campaign funds to send us back again to pass more laws to enable you to make more money.

American boys have a lot in common with their counterparts in England and Australia. In all three countries, boys are on the wrong side of an education gender gap. But there is one major difference: it is inconceivable that reports on the US boy gap would emanate from the US Congress. A Success for Boys campaign would create havoc in the United States. The women’s lobby would rise in fury. The ACLU would find someone to sue. Legislators would face an avalanche of angry faxes, emails, petitions, and phone calls for taking part in a “backlash” against girls.

For Bernie, winning wasn’t the only thing. I’m a backbencher in Congress, he told Devine. I want to come out of this in a better position to push the issues I care about. He wanted a higher profile in the Senate if he ran and lost. “A presidential campaign, if done well, can accomplish that,” Devine replied.

When Lincoln was running for the House of Representatives from Illinois, he was charged with being “a scoffer at religion,” wrote the historian William J. Wolf, because he belonged to no church. During the campaign, Lincoln attended a sermon delivered by his opponent in the race, Reverend Peter Cartwright, a Methodist evangelist. At a dramatic moment in his performance, Cartwright said, “All who do not wish to go to hell will stand.” Only Lincoln kept his seat. “May I inquire of you, Mr. Lincoln, where you are going?” the minister asked, glowering. “I am going to Congress” was the dry reply. When he was president, Lincoln also liked the story of a purported exchange about him and Jefferson Davis between two Quaker women on a train: “I think Jefferson will succeed,” the first said. “Why does thee think so?” “Because Jefferson is a praying man.” “And so is Abraham a praying man.” “Yes, but the Lord will think Abraham is joking.

was a little girl when Joseph McCarthy launched his big campaign against Communism. He managed to scare people into thinking there were Communists everywhere: in the Congress, in their backyards, waiting in the bushes to overthrow the government.” “Were there?” “Oh, maybe a few. But most of them were too busy smoking marijuana to overthrow anything.

The use of force in Iraq had been authorized by both houses of Congress, including a majority of Democrats in the Senate. It was supported in eloquent speeches by John Kerry, John Edwards, Al Gore and other Democratic leaders. But just three months into the war, they turned against an action that they had authorized, and began a five-year campaign to delegitimize the war, casting America as its villain.

Everything is going according to plan in this strategically fathomed notion of "country" where the population wholeheartedly believes in that fabled myth known as democracy. The corporations that profit from our endless war campaigns, who have a multifarious number of politicians at the top of their covert letterheads and on payroll always get what they pay for - a route to even more of our tax dollars. The status quo doesn't change with the election of any given politician, whether it be in the Senate, the Congress, or even the White House. This nation (i.e. notion) is, in and of itself, nothing but an ingeniously designed corporation that uses you and I to further perpetuate the myth of country, the myth of united, the myth of democracy, and the myth of patriotism. We have long passed the point where we the people sat on the tongue of this monstrosity. We now reside in the belly of the beast.

After the 2008 campaign, two of her aides, Kris Balderston and Adrienne Elrod, had toiled to assign loyalty scores to members of Congress, ranging from one for the most loyal to seven for those who had committed the most egregious acts of treachery. Bill Clinton had campaigned against some of the sevens in subsequent primary elections, helping to knock them out of office. The fear of retribution was not lost on the remaining sevens, some of whom rushed to endorse Hillary early in the 2016 cycle.

but the plan had the opposite of the desired effect: a wave of horror washed across the country and the Congress unanimously awarded Salvador Allende the presidential sash. From that moment on, the right and the CIA plotted together to oust the government of the Unidad Popular, even at the cost of destroying the economy and Chile’s long democratic tradition. Then the CIA activated an alternate plan: a so-called destabilization, which consisted of cutting off international credit and initiating a campaign of sabotage to incite economic ruin and social violence.

The cosmic joke was that Trump convinced a vast swathe of working-class white folks in the Midwest that he cared about their well-being. The truth was that he couldn’t care less. I don’t mean that as speculation or an opinion. That was a stone-cold fact during the 2016 campaign and throughout Trump’s presidency to this very day. To Trump, his voters are his audience, his chumps, his patsies, his base. Guns, criminalizing abortion—Trump took up those conservative positions not because he believed in them but because they were his path to power. That was what I meant when I told Congress that Trump is a con man.

Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana gave public voice to what angers so many Americans today about Congress—it operates like a dysfunctional family. “The people’s business is not being done,” Bayh declared in February 2010. Congress suffers from multiple pathologies, he said, and he ticked them off: “strident partisanship, unyielding ideology, a corrosive system of campaign financing, gerrymandering of House districts, endless filibusters, holds on executive appointees in the Senate, dwindling social interaction between senators of opposing parties and a caucus system that promotes party unity at the expense of bipartisan consensus.

HST: Yeah, I’d do almost anything after that, even run for President—although I wouldn’t really want to be President. As a matter of fact, early on in the ’72 campaign, I remember telling John Lindsay that the time had come to abolish the whole concept of the presidency as it exists now, and get a sort of City Managertype President…. We’ve come to the point where every four years this national fever rises up—this hunger for the Saviour, the White Knight, the Man on Horseback—and whoever wins becomes so immensely powerful, like Nixon is now, that when you vote for President today you’re talking about giving a man dictatorial power for four years. I think it might be better to have the President sort of like the King of England—or the Queen—and have the real business of the presidency conducted by… a City Manager-type, a Prime Minister, somebody who’s directly answerable to Congress, rather than a person who moves all his friends into the White House and does whatever he wants for four years. The whole framework of the presidency is getting out of hand. It’s come to the point where you almost can’t run unless you can cause people to salivate and whip on each other with big sticks. You almost have to be a rock star to get the kind of fever you need to survive in American politics. Ed:

Established politicians are also bumping into a new cast of characters within corridors of legislative power. In 2010 parliamentary elections in Brazil, for example, the candidate who won the most votes anywhere in the country (and the second-most-voted congressman in the country's history) was a clown - an actual clown who went by the name of Tiririca and wore his clown costume while he campaigned. His platform was as anti-politician as it gets. "I don't know what a representative in congress does," he told voters in YouTube video that attracted millions of voters, "but if you send me there I will tell you". He also explained that his goal was "to help needy people in this country, but especially my family".

From 2000, Fannie and Freddie’s appetite for sub-prime loans increased markedly every year, encouraging a rich harvest of increasingly crazy loans by mortgage originators to supply this appetite. House-builders, lenders, mortgage brokers, Wall Street underwriters, legal firms, housing charities and pressure groups like ACORN all benefited. Taxpayers did not. By the early 2000s, Fannie and Freddie were well intertwined with politicians, donating rich campaign contributions especially to Congressional Democrats, and giving rewarding jobs to politicians – Clinton’s former Budget Director Franklin Raines would pocket $100 million from his brief spell in charge of Fannie. Between 1998 and 2008, Fannie and Freddie spent $175 million lobbying Congress.

week before the election, the New Republic’s Morton Kondracke wrote that “it seems more likely by the day that Ronald Reagan is not going to execute a massive electoral sweep. In fact, the movement of the presidential campaign suggests a Carter victory.”14 David Broder had written: “There is no evidence of a dramatic upsurge in Republican strength or a massive turnover in Congress.” Though polls in the days leading up to the election showed Reagan ahead of Carter, most were near or within the margin of error, and everyone was predicting a late-night nail-biter. The New York Times poll three days out had Reagan ahead by a single point; veteran California pollster Mervin Field said, “At the moment there is a slight movement toward Carter.” George Gallup said, “This election could very well be a cliffhanger just like 1948.”15

It isn't a coincidence that the massacre of Muslims in Gujarat happened after September 11. Gujarat is also one place where the toxic waste of the World Trade Center is being dumped right now. This waste is being dumped in Gujarat, and then taken of to Ludhiana and places like that to be recycled. I think it's quite a metaphor. The demonization of Muslims has also been given legitimacy by the world's superpower, by the emperor himself. We are at a stage where democracy - this corrupted, scandalous version of democracy - is the problem. So much of what politicians do is with an eye on elections. Wars are fought as election campaigns. In India, Muslims are killed as part of election campaigns. In 1984, after the massacre of Sikhs in Delhi, the Congress Party won, hands down. We must ask ourselves very serious questions about this particular brand of democracy.

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.

I can hardly believe that our nation’s policy is to seek peace by going to war. It seems that President Donald J. Trump has done everything in his power to divert our attention away from the fact that the FBI is investigating his association with Russia during his campaign for office. For several weeks now he has been sabre rattling and taking an extremely controversial stance, first with Syria and Afghanistan and now with North Korea. The rhetoric has been the same, accusing others for our failed policy and threatening to take autonomous military action to attain peace in our time. This gunboat diplomacy is wrong. There is no doubt that Secretaries Kelly, Mattis, and other retired military personnel in the Trump Administration are personally tough. However, most people who have served in the military are not eager to send our young men and women to fight, if it is not necessary. Despite what may have been said to the contrary, our military leaders, active or retired, are most often the ones most respectful of international law. Although the military is the tip of the spear for our country, and the forces of civilization, it should not be the first tool to be used. Bloodshed should only be considered as a last resort and definitely never used as the first option. As the leader of the free world, we should stand our ground but be prepared to seek peace through restraint. This is not the time to exercise false pride! Unfortunately the Trump administration informed four top State Department management officials that their services were no longer needed as part of an effort to "clean house." Patrick Kennedy, served for nine years as the “Undersecretary for Management,” “Assistant Secretaries for Administration and Consular Affairs” Joyce Anne Barr and Michele Bond, as well as “Ambassador” Gentry Smith, director of the Office for Foreign Missions. Most of the United States Ambassadors to foreign countries have also been dismissed, including the ones to South Korea and Japan. This leaves the United States without the means of exercising diplomacy rapidly, when needed. These positions are political appointments, and require the President’s nomination and the Senate’s confirmation. This has not happened! Moreover, diplomatically our country is severely handicapped at a time when tensions are as hot as any time since the Cold War. Without following expert advice or consent and the necessary input from the Unites States Congress, the decisions are all being made by a man who claims to know more than the generals do, yet he has only the military experience of a cadet at “New York Military Academy.” A private school he attended as a high school student, from 1959 to 1964. At that time, he received educational and medical deferments from the Vietnam War draft. Trump said that the school provided him with “more training than a lot of the guys that go into the military.” His counterpart the unhinged Kim Jong-un has played with what he considers his country’s military toys, since April 11th of 2012. To think that these are the two world leaders, protecting the planet from a nuclear holocaust….

The modern holiday of Mother's Day was first celebrated in 1908, when Anna Jarvis held a memorial for her mother at St Andrew's Methodist Church in Grafton, West Virginia.[9] St Andrew's Methodist Church now holds the International Mother's Day Shrine.[10] Her campaign to make Mother's Day a recognized holiday in the United States began in 1905, the year her mother, Ann Reeves Jarvis, died. Ann Jarvis had been a peace activist who cared for wounded soldiers on both sides of the American Civil War, and created Mother's Day Work Clubs to address public health issues. She and another peace activist and suffragette Julia Ward Howe had been urging for the creation of a Mother’s Day dedicated to peace. 40 years before it became an official holiday, Ward Howe had made her Mother’s Day Proclamation in 1870, which called upon mothers of all nationalities to band together to promote the “amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.”[11] Anna Jarvis wanted to honor this and to set aside a day to honor all mothers because she believed a mother is "the person who has done more for you than anyone in the world" Ghb구매,물뽕구입,Ghb 구입방법,물뽕가격,수면제판매,물뽕효능,물뽕구매방법,ghb가격,물뽕판매처,수면제팔아요 카톡【AKR331】라인【SPR331】위커【SPR705】텔레【GEM705】 첫거래하시는분들 실레지만 별로 반갑지않습니다 이유는 단하나 판매도 기본이지만 안전은 더중요하거든요 *물뽕이란 알고싶죠? 액체 상태로 주로 물이나 술 등에 타서 마시기 때문에 속칭 '물뽕'으로 불린다. 다량 복용시 필름이 끊기는 등의 증세가 나타나고 강한 흥분작용을 일으켜 미국에서는 젊은 청소년들속에서 주로 이용해 '데이트시 강간할 때 쓰는 약'이라는 뜻의 '데이트 레이프 드러그(date rape drug)'로 불리기도 한다. 미국 등 일부 국가에서는 GHB가 공식적으로 여성작업용으로 시중에서 밀거래 되고있다 미국에서는 2013년부터 미국FDA에서 발표한데의하면 법적으로 물뽕(GHB)약물을 사용금지하였다 이유는 이약물이 사람이 복용후 30분안에 약효가 발생하는데 6~7시간정도 지나면 바로 몸밖으로 오즘이나 혹은 땀으로 전부 빠져나간다는것이다 한번은 미국에서 어떤여성분이 강간을 당했다면서 미국 경찰청에 신고를 했다 2번의재판끝에 경찰당국과 여성분은 아무런 증거도 얻을수없었다 남성분이나 혹은 여성분이 복용할경우 30분이면 바로 기분이 좋아지면서 평소 남성의 터치나 남성의 시선까지 거부하던 여성분이그녀답지않은 스킨쉽으로 30분이 지나서 약발이 오르면 바로 작업을 걸어도 그대로 바로 빠져들게하는 마성의 약물이다 이러한 제품도 진품을살때만이 효과를 보는것이다. 더궁금한것이 있으시면 카톡【AKR331】라인【SPR331】위커【SPR705】텔레【GEM705】로 문의주세요. In 1908, the U.S. Congress rejected a proposal to make Mother's Day an official holiday, joking that they would also have to proclaim a "Mother-in-law's Day". However, owing to the efforts of Anna Jarvis, by 1911 all U.S. states observed the holiday, with some of them officially recognizing Mother's Day as a local holiday (the first being West Virginia, Jarvis' home state, in 1910). In 1914, Woodrow Wilson signed a proclamation designating Mother's Day, held on the second Sunday in May, as a national holiday to honor mothers.

In 1964 the fear & loathing of Barry Goldwater was startling. Martin Luther King, Jr., detected “dangerous signs of Hitlerism in the Goldwater campaign.” Joachim Prinz, president of the American Jewish Congress, warned that “a Jewish vote for Goldwater is a vote for Jewish suicide.” And George Meany, head of the AFL-CIO, saw power falling into “the hands of union-hating extremists, racial bigots, woolly-minded seekers after visions of times long past.” On Election Day Goldwater suffered a devastating defeat, winning only 41 electoral votes. It was the judgment of the establishment that Goldwater’s critique of American liberalism had been given its final exposure on the national political scene. Conservatives could now go back to their little lairs and sing to themselves their songs of nostalgia and fancy, and maybe gather together every few years to hold testimonial dinners in honor of Barry Goldwater, repatriated by Lyndon Johnson to the parched earth of Phoenix, where dwell only millionaires seeking dry air to breathe and the Indians Barry Goldwater could now resume photographing. But then of course 16 years later the world was made to stand on its head when Ronald Reagan was swept into office on a platform indistinguishable from what Barry had been preaching. During

One of the issues that animated the Tea Party in South Carolina and nationally during my campaign for governor was bailouts. The debate started with the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) passed by Congress in 2008 and signed by President Bush. The TARP bailout was a perfect example of government not understanding the value of a dollar. It was a quick fix to get everyone to calm down. But what did it actually do? The banks that received the money didn’t expand lending to businesses. They used the cash to help their own books, and the taxpayers were put on the hook as loan guarantors. No one—not the politicians who encouraged the recklessness, not the quasi-governmental entities like Fannie Mae that got rich off it, and certainly not the Wall Street firms that got bailed out—was ever held accountable. And the American people ended up worse off than they were before. As a small businessperson, I found the message government was sending incredibly offensive. In my version of capitalism, if a company succeeds, you don’t punish it by raising its taxes; and if a company fails, you don’t reward it by having the taxpayers bail it out. TARP opened the floodgates for a wave of unaccountable spending that flowed out of Washington. Soon afterward, President Obama bailed out the auto industry to rescue big labor. His allies in Congress passed the $787 billion stimulus bill, most of them without having read it. And he forced through a trillion-dollar health-care takeover. With each bailout, more and more of us felt we were getting further and further from what America was meant to be: a free and striving people with a limited and accountable government. Instead, Washington was revealing itself to be an inside game, with the rules fixed to benefit the establishment. The rules favor the well connected, while the rest of us in flyover country pay the bills.

Then there were those who were thrilling to Senator Sanders, who believed that Bernie would be the one to give them free college, to solve climate change, and even to bring peace to the Middle East, though that was not an issue most people associated with him. On a trip to Michigan, I met with a group of young Muslims, most of them college students, for whom this was the first election in which they planned to participate. I was excited that they had come to hear more about HRC's campaign. One young woman, speaking for her peers, said she really wanted to be excited about the first woman president, but she had to support Bernie because she believed he would be more effective at finally brokering a peace treaty in the Middle East. Everyone around her nodded. I asked the group why they doubted Hillary Clinton's ability to do the same. "Well, she has done nothing to help the Palestinians." Taking a deep breath, I asked them if they knew that she was the first U.S. official to ever call the territories "Palestine" in the nineties, that she advocated for Palestinian sovereignty back when no other official would. They did not. I then asked them if they were aware that she brought together the last round of direct talks between the Israelis and Palestinians? That she personally negotiated a cease-fire to stop the latest war in Gaza when she was secretary of state? They shook their heads. Had they known that she announced $600 million in assistance to the Palestinian Authority and $300 million in humanitarian aid to Gaza in her first year at State? They began to steal glances at one another. Did they know that she pushed Israel to invest in the West Bank and announced an education program to make college more affordable for Palestinian students? More head shaking. They simply had no idea. "So," I continued, "respectfully, what is it about Senator Sander's twenty-seven-year record in Congress that suggests to you that the Middle East is a priority for him?" The young woman's response encapsulated some what we were up against. "I don't know," she replied. "I just feel it.

Politicians are the only people in the world who create problems and then campaign against them. Have you ever wondered why, if both the Democrats and Republicans are against deficits, we have deficits? Have you ever wondered why if all politicians are against inflation and high taxes, we have inflation and high taxes? You and I don’t propose a federal budget. The president does. You and I don’t have Constitutional authority to vote on appropriations. The House of Representatives does. You and I don’t write the tax code. Congress does. You and I don’t set fiscal policy. Congress does. You and I don’t control monetary policy. The Federal Reserve Bank does. One hundred senators, 435 congressmen, one president and nine Supreme Court justices — 545 human beings out of 235 million — are directly, legally, morally and individually responsible for the domestic problems that plague this country. I excused the members of the Federal Reserve Board because that problem was created by the Congress. In 1913, Congress delegated its Constitutional duty to provide a sound currency to a federally chartered by private central bank. I exclude all of the special interests and lobbyists for a sound reason. They have no legal authority. They have no ability to coerce a senator, a congressman or a president to do one cotton-picking thing. I don’t care if they offer a politician $1 million in cash. The politician has the power to accept or reject it. No matter what the lobbyist promises, it is the legislators’ responsibility to determine how he votes. Don’t you see the con game that is played on the people by the politicians? Those 545 human beings spend much of their energy convincing you that what they did is not their fault. They cooperate in this common con regardless of party. What separates a politician from a normal human being is an excessive amount of gall. No normal human being would have the gall of Tip O’Neill, who stood up and criticized Ronald Reagan for creating deficits. The president can only propose a budget. He cannot force the Congress to accept it. The Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land, gives sole responsibility to the House of Representatives for originating appropriations and taxes. Those 545 people and they alone are responsible. They and they alone should be held accountable by the people who are their bosses — provided they have the gumption to manage their own employees.

Yet in 2012, he returned. Plenty of the speechwriters were livid. The club was the embodiment of everything we had promised to change. Was it really necessary to flatter these people, just because they were powerful and rich? In a word, yes. In fact, thanks to the Supreme Court, the rich were more powerful than ever. In 2010, the court’s five conservative justices gutted America’s campaign finance laws in the decision known as Citizens United. With no more limits to the number of attack ads they could purchase, campaigns had become another hobby for the ultrawealthy. Tired of breeding racehorses or bidding on rare wines at auction? Buy a candidate instead! I should make it clear that no one explicitly laid out a strategy regarding the dinner. I never asked point-blank if we hoped to charm billionaires into spending their billions on something other than Mitt Romney’s campaign. That said, I knew it couldn’t hurt. Hoping to mollify the one-percenters in the audience, I kept the script embarrassingly tame. I’ve got about forty-five more minutes on the State of the Union that I’d like to deliver tonight. I am eager to work with members of Congress to be entertaining tonight. But if Congress is unwilling to cooperate, I will be funny without them. Even for a politician, this was weak. But it apparently struck the right tone. POTUS barely edited the speech. A few days later, as a reward for a job well done, Favs invited me to tag along to a speechwriting-team meeting with the president. I had not set foot in the Oval Office since my performance of the Golden Girls theme song. On that occasion, President Obama remained behind his desk. For larger gatherings like this one, however, he crossed the room to a brown leather armchair, and the rest of us filled the two beige sofas on either side. Between the sofas was a coffee table. On the coffee table sat a bowl, which under George W. Bush had contained candy but under Obama was full of apples instead. Hence the ultimate Oval Office power move: grab an apple at the end of a meeting, polish it on your suit, and take a casual chomp on your way out the door. I would have sooner stuck my finger in an electrical socket. Desperate not to call attention to myself, I took the seat farthest away and kept my eyes glued to my laptop. I allowed myself just one indulgence: a quick peek at the Emancipation Proclamation. That’s right, buddy. Look who’s still here. It was only at the very end of the meeting, as we rose from the surprisingly comfy couches, that Favs brought up the Alfalfa dinner. The right-wing radio host Laura Ingraham had been in the audience, and she was struck by the president’s poise. “She was talking about it this morning,” Favs told POTUS. “She said, ‘I don’t know if Mitt Romney can beat him.

Months later, Time magazine would run its now infamous article bragging about how it had been done. Without irony or shame, the magazine reported that “[t]here was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes” creating “an extraordinary shadow effort” by a “well-funded cabal of powerful people” to oppose Trump.112 Corporate CEOs, organized labor, left-wing activists, and Democrats all worked together in secret to secure a Biden victory. For Trump, these groups represented a powerful Washington and Democratic establishment that saw an unremarkable career politician like Biden as merely a vessel for protecting their self-interests. Accordingly, when Trump was asked whom he blames for the rigging of the 2020 election, he quickly responded, “Least of all Biden.” Time would, of course, disingenuously frame this effort as an attempt to “oppose Trump’s assault on democracy,” even as Time reporter Molly Ball noted this shadow campaign “touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding.” The funding enabled the country’s sudden rush to mail-in balloting, which Ball described as “a revolution in how people vote.”113 The funding from Democratic donors to public election administrators was revolutionary. The Democrats’ network of nonprofit activist groups embedded into the nation’s electoral structure through generous grants from Democratic donors. They helped accomplish the Democrats’ vote-by-mail strategy from the inside of the election process. It was as if the Dallas Cowboys were paying the National Football League’s referee staff and conducting all of their support operations. No one would feel confident in games won by the Cowboys in such a scenario. Ball also reported that this shadowy cabal “successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears.” And yet, Time magazine made this characterization months after it was revealed that the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s corrupt deal-making with Chinese and other foreign officials—deals that alleged direct involvement from Joe Biden, resulting in the reporting’s being overtly censored by social media—was substantially true. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey would eventually tell Congress that censoring the New York Post and locking it out of its Twitter account over the story was “a mistake.” And the Hunter Biden story was hardly the only egregious mistake, to say nothing of the media’s willful dishonesty, in the 2020 election. Republicans read the Time article with horror and as an admission of guilt. It confirmed many voters’ suspicions that the election wasn’t entirely fair. Trump knew the article helped his case, calling it “the only good article I’ve read in Time magazine in a long time—that was actually just a piece of the truth because it was much deeper than that.

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 my campaign launch speech on Roosevelt Island, I took the opportunity to talk about my mother. When I thought about the sweep of history, I thought about her. Her birthday had just passed a few days earlier. She was born on June 4, 1919—the exact same day that Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, finally granting women the right to vote. “I really wish my mother could be here tonight,” I told the crowd in Brooklyn. I had practiced this part several times, and each time, I teared up. “I wish she could see what a wonderful mother Chelsea has become, and could meet our beautiful granddaughter, Charlotte.” I swallowed hard. “And, of course, I wish she could see her daughter become the Democratic Party’s nominee for President of the United States.

In the general US population, fewer than one in two hundred people hold a law degree. In the House of Representatives, it is over one in three. In the Senate, it is over one in two. Statistics on wealth are just as striking. The median net worth of an average American is just under $45,000.115 The median net worth of an average member of Congress, by contrast, is over ten times as high, and that of senators higher still. Marked by the growing role of courts, of bureaucratic agencies, of central banks, and of supranational institutions. At the same time, there has been a rapid growth in the influence of lobbyists, in the money spent on political campaigns, and in the gulf that separates political elites from the people they are supposed to represent. Taken together, this has effectively insulated the political system from the popular will.

Beneath the grandiose behavior of every narcissist lies the pit of fragile self-esteem. What if, deep down, the person whom Trump trusts least is himself? The humiliation of being widely exposed as a “loser,” unable to bully through the actions he promised during the campaign, could drive him to prove he is, after all, a “killer.” In only the first four months of his presidency, he teed up for starting a war in three places, Syria, Afghanistan, and North Korea. It is up to Congress, backed up by the public, to restrain him.

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.

although the evidence of contacts between Campaign officials and Russia-affiliated individuals may not have been sufficient to establish or sustain criminal charges, several U.S. persons connected to the Campaign made false statements about those contacts and took other steps to obstruct the Office’s investigation and those of Congress. This Office has therefore charged some of those individuals with making false statements and obstructing justice.

The election campaign of 1951–2 was conducted through large public meetings, door-to-door canvassing, and the use of visual media. ‘At the height of election fever’, wrote a British observer, ‘posters and emblems were profuse everywhere – on walls, at street corners, even decorating the statues in New Delhi and defying the dignity of a former generation of Viceroys’. A novel method of advertising was on display in Calcutta, where stray cows had ‘Vote Congress’ written on their backs in Bengali.

Liberals including James Tobin, Paul Samuelson, and John Kenneth Galbraith and conservatives like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek have all advocated income guarantees in one form or another, and in 1968 more than 1,200 economists signed a letter in support of the concept addressed to the U.S. Congress.4 The president elected that year, Republican Richard Nixon, tried throughout his first term in office to enact it into law. In a 1969 speech he proposed a Family Assistance Plan that had many features of a basic income program. The plan had support across the ideological spectrum, but it also faced a large and diverse group of opponents.5 Caseworkers and other administrators of existing welfare programs feared that their jobs would be eliminated under the new regime; some labor leaders thought that it would erode support for minimum wage legislation; and many working Americans didn’t like the idea of their tax dollars going to people who could work, but chose not to. By the time of his 1972 reelection campaign, Nixon had abandoned the Family Assistance Plan, and universal income guarantee programs have not been seriously discussed by federal elected officials and policymakers since then.* Avoiding

The political beauty of our online age is that it’s now actually feasible—and urgently necessary—to reengage the public in just this way. In Aristotle’s time, Athenian citizens assembled on the Pnyx hillside near the Acropolis to cast their ballots. For most of American history, elected representatives came together in the Congress to cast votes in the name of the people. Yet that kind of representation is now in name only, except if you happen to be a wealthy campaign contributor. In the coming age of e-governance, however, direct democracy will once again become feasible, and indeed inevitable.

He was a very private man, a true loner, who lacked the instinctive affability and gregariousness of most successful politicians. One thought of him more easily as a strategist than a candidate. He hated meeting ordinary people, shaking their hands, and making small talk with them. He was always awkward at the clubby male bonding of Congress. When he succeeded it was because he worked harder and thought something out more shrewdly than an opponent and, above all, because he was someone who always wanted it more. Nixon had to win. To lose a race meant losing everything—so much was at stake, and it was all so personal. Taft, if not exactly jolly and extroverted, won the admiration of his peers because he was intellectually sterling. Ike inspired other men because of his looks, his athletic ability, his natural charm. Nixon was always the outsider; his television adviser in his successful 1968 presidential campaign, Roger Ailes, once said of him that he had the least control of atmosphere of any politician that Ailes had ever met. By that Ailes meant charisma, the capacity to walk into a room and hold the attention of those assembled there. Even success did not really bring him confidence.

Even after the horror of Newtown, Congress appeared determined to block any measure that could help keep guns out of the wrong hands, with legislators more interested in collecting campaign donations from the National Rifle Association than they were in protecting kids. Politics was a mess, I said. On this front, I had nothing terribly uplifting or encouraging to say.

Trump has to do one thing right now, declare the Insurrection Act and fucking fix this. Now, the Congress, Nancy Pelosi was eating ice cream while we were fucking ... I was ... I was fucking depressed in New York. Before I went campaigning. Stuck in an apartment, she was fucking eating ice cream on fucking late night TV. NOTE: As we’ve discussed, at the time of The Event, poor people were feeling the cumulative effects of nearly a year of being locked down in their shitty apartments because of COVID. During this same time, Nancy Pelosi made the brilliant decision to conduct a tour of her lavish home on Late Night TV and spent special time going over her collection of exotic ice creams.

All members of Congress, it had often been said, had surgery to remove their backbones as soon as they took office. While working on Rick’s campaign, she would have sworn he was different. And so he was. In his case, it was a series of keyhole operations, one vertebra at a time, so skillfully done that he never felt a thing.

The modern holiday of Mother's Day was first celebrated in 1908, when Anna Jarvis held a memorial for her mother at St Andrew's Methodist Church in Grafton, West Virginia.[9] St Andrew's Methodist Church now holds the International Mother's Day Shrine.[10] Her campaign to make Mother's Day a recognized holiday in the United States began in 1905, the year her mother, Ann Reeves Jarvis, died. Ann Jarvis had been a peace activist who cared for wounded soldiers on both sides of the American Civil War, and created Mother's Day Work Clubs to address public health issues. She and another peace activist and suffragette Julia Ward Howe had been urging for the creation of a Mother’s Day dedicated to peace. 40 years before it became an official holiday, Ward Howe had made her Mother’s Day Proclamation in 1870, which called upon mothers of all nationalities to band together to promote the “amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.”[11] Anna Jarvis wanted to honor this and to set aside a day to honor all mothers because she believed a mother is "the person who has done more for you than anyone in the world" Ghb구매,물뽕구입,Ghb 구입방법,물뽕가격,수면제판매,물뽕효능,물뽕구매방법,ghb가격,물뽕판매처,수면제팔아요 까톡【pak6】텔레:【JRJR331】텔레:【TTZZZ6】라인【TTZZ6】 첫거래하시는분들 실레지만 별로 반갑지않습니다 이유는 단하나 판매도 기본이지만 안전은 더중요하거든요 *물뽕이란 알고싶죠? 액체 상태로 주로 물이나 술 등에 타서 마시기 때문에 속칭 '물뽕'으로 불린다. 다량 복용시 필름이 끊기는 등의 증세가 나타나고 강한 흥분작용을 일으켜 미국에서는 젊은 청소년들속에서 주로 이용해 '데이트시 강간할 때 쓰는 약'이라는 뜻의 '데이트 레이프 드러그(date rape drug)'로 불리기도 한다. 미국 등 일부 국가에서는 GHB가 공식적으로 여성작업용으로 시중에서 밀거래 되고있다 미국에서는 2013년부터 미국FDA에서 발표한데의하면 법적으로 물뽕(GHB)약물을 사용금지하였다 이유는 이약물이 사람이 복용후 30분안에 약효가 발생하는데 6~7시간정도 지나면 바로 몸밖으로 오즘이나 혹은 땀으로 전부 빠져나간다는것이다 한번은 미국에서 어떤여성분이 강간을 당했다면서 미국 경찰청에 신고를 했다 2번의재판끝에 경찰당국과 여성분은 아무런 증거도 얻을수없었다 남성분이나 혹은 여성분이 복용할경우 30분이면 바로 기분이 좋아지면서 평소 남성의 터치나 남성의 시선까지 거부하던 여성분이그녀답지않은 스킨쉽으로 30분이 지나서 약발이 오르면 바로 작업을 걸어도 그대로 바로 빠져들게하는 마성의 약물이다 이러한 제품도 진품을살때만이 효과를 보는것이다. 더궁금한것이 있으시면 까톡【pak6】텔레:【JRJR331】텔레:【TTZZZ6】라인【TTZZ6】로 문의주세요. In 1908, the U.S. Congress rejected a proposal to make Mother's Day an official holiday, joking that they would also have to proclaim a "Mother-in-law's Day". However, owing to the efforts of Anna Jarvis, by 1911 all U.S. states observed the holiday, with some of them officially recognizing Mother's Day as a local holiday (the first being West Virginia, Jarvis' home state, in 1910). In 1914, Woodrow Wilson signed a proclamation designating Mother's Day, held on the second Sunday in May, as a national holiday to honor mothers.

In my past, I had never aspired to be elected. I didn’t major in political science, serve in the military, lead in student government, or work my way up from local office. But I wanted to do the right things when I got to Washington, and it was this determination that launched my campaign. I was tired of people getting ripped off by corporations that cheated them, and a government that ignored them. And I was tired of not having any power to fix those things. I decided to run for Congress to get power. That is the naked truth about why everyone decides to run for Congress: They want power. The question we should be asking every candidate, every day, is what they will do with the power.

Justice Ginsburg asked the first question, and wasted no time in getting to the heart of the matter. Ginsburg asked, Mr. Olson, are you taking the position that there is no difference in the First Amendment rights of an individual? A corporation, after all, is not endowed by its creator with inalienable rights. So is there any distinction that Congress could draw between corporations and natural human beings for purposes of campaign finance? Mr. Olson’s reply—which made a claim on speech rights of all corporations— was a marked departure from the first argument, and set the stage for all that followed: “What the Court has said in the First Amendment context … over and over again, is that corporations are persons entitled to protection under the First Amendment.

The constitutional reforms that are essential to save American democracy are not difficult to identify. They must include popular election of the president, the allocation of Senate seats based on population, the abolition or at least reform of the filibuster, term limits for Supreme Court justices, the elimination of partisan gerrymandering, the clearer empowerment of Congress especially with regard to civil rights, limits on campaign spending, greater advancement of racial equality, and more protection of voting rights.

you’re worried about Congress being manipulated by money, the United States House of Representatives started filing their campaign contributions electronically a decade ago, yet the United States Senate refuses to do so. Year after year a bill is proposed, and one way or another it ends up suffocating and dying by the end of the session. This results in a half-million dollar expense to the taxpayer as the Federal Election Commission takes nearly three months to type in, from the various campaigns’ paper reports, every campaign contribution that every Senate campaign receives. And as a result, we cannot see how a member of the United States Senate is being influenced by money until long after the time when the relevance of that information has passed.

For himself, Sanjay wasn’t too certain what the election was all about. In a press conference on 25 January 1977 he seemed in characteristic verbal form: Q.: Mr Gandhi, earlier you were against having elections. Are you personally in favour of them now? A.: All in all, seeing things as they are now, it’s okay. If you’d asked me six months ago I would have said no. Q.: What has improved? A.: Nothing. Six months ago I would have thought to wait longer would have been better—which now I do not think. Q.: Would you expect the fact of the Emergency to be the principal issue in the campaign? A.: What do you mean by that? Q.: Well, recently the Janata party has been talking about the Emergency itself as a campaign issue. A.: I don’t think that would be much of a poll issue. Because most of it has happened. It would be a poll issue if it was going to happen. Q.: What about family planning? Do you think that will be a major issue? A.: I don’t think so. Q.: What would you expect would be the major issue? A.: I am not quite sure. BY THE TIME SANJAY arrived in Amethi, he seemed to have shed his earlier fuzziness. He had by then perceived the issues. In speeches he would stress the ‘package’ of progress made during the previous nineteen months, the transformation awaiting Amethi on his election (275 km of hard roads, 1200 km of kutcha roads, a multi-crore textile mill), the disparate nature of the opposition (which usually included an attack on Charan Singh). And then he would come to the programme closest to his heart: family planning via nasbandi. ‘As soon as Sanjay mentioned the words "parivar niyojan" and "nasbandi" the audience would get incensed. We could see the anger seething in their faces. Many of those listening had suffered personally and many more had heard the experiences of friends and neighbours. Congress workers would hang their heads down when Sanjay spoke about those things. They did not dare look the people in the face. By his speeches, Sanjay, instead of making people happy, was making them more and more angry,’ a Block Development Officer from Jagdishpur told me.

Equally unsettling was the discovery that the country’s major political parties were being financed by those same corporations. Congress and

SCANDALS AND MISMANAGEMENT If Secretary Clinton’s political career had ended with her defeat for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, her skills as a manager would have been judged by her disorganized and drama-filled campaign for the presidency and her disastrous Health Care Task Force as First Lady. President Obama, who defeated her calamitously run campaign, should have been wary of nominating Clinton to a post that was responsible for tens of thousands of federal employees throughout the world. While her tenure in Foggy Bottom didn’t have the highly publicized backstabbing element that tarnished her presidential campaign, Secretary Clinton’s deficiencies as a manager were no less evident. There was one department within State that Secretary Clinton oversaw with great care: the Global Partnerships Initiative (GPI), which was run by long-time Clinton family aide Kris Balderston. Balderston was known in political circles for creating a “hit list” that ranked members of Congress based on loyalty to the Clintons during the 2008 presidential primaries.[434] Balderston was brought to Foggy Bottom to “keep the Clinton political network humming at State.”[435] He focused his efforts on connecting CEOs and business interests—all potential Clinton 2016 donors—to State Department public/private partnerships. Balderston worked alongside Clinton’s long-time aide Huma Abedin, who was given a “special government employee” waiver, allowing her to work both as Secretary Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, and for other private sector clients. With the arrangement, Abedin would serve as a consultant to the top Clinton allied firm, Teneo, in a role in which, as the New York Times reported, “the lines were blurred between Ms. Abedin’s work in the high echelons of one of the government’s most sensitive executive departments and her role as a Clinton family insider.”[436] Secretary Clinton and her allies have placed great emphasis on the secretary of state’s historic role in promoting American business interests overseas, dubbing the effort “economic statecraft.”[437] The efforts of the GPI, Abedin, and Balderston ensured that Secretary Clinton’s “economic statecraft” agenda would be rife with the potential for conflicts of interest reminiscent of the favor-trading scandals that emanated from her husband’s White House. While the political office and donor maintenance program was managed with extreme meticulousness, Secretary Clinton ignored her role as manager of the rest of the sprawling government agency.[438] When it came to these more mundane tasks, Secretary Clinton was not on top of what was really going on in the department she ran. While Secretary Clinton was preoccupied with being filmed and photographed all around the world, the State Department was plagued by chronic management problems and scandals, from visa programs to security contractors. And when Secretary Clinton did weigh in on management issues, it was almost always after a raft of bad press forced her to, and not from any proactive steps she took. In fact, she and her department’s first reaction in certain instances was to silence critics or intimidate whistleblowers, rather than get to the bottom of what was actually going on. The events that unfolded in Benghazi were the worst example of Secretary Clinton neglecting her managerial responsibilities. This pattern of behavior, which led to the tragedy, was characteristic of her management style throughout her four years at Foggy Bottom. “Economic Statecraft” A big part of Secretary Clinton’s record-breaking travel—112 countries visited—was her work as a salesperson for select U.S. business interests.[439] Today, her supporters would have us believe her “economic statecraft” agenda was a major accomplishment.[440] Yet, as always seems to be the case with the Clintons, there was one family that benefited more than any other from all this economic statecraft—the Clinton family.

In the early 1970s, Buchanan orchestrated a campaign that overrode Congress, ignored polls showing strong public support, and so utterly obliterated a bill that would have created a high-quality universal child-care system in America that in forty years, the very idea has never surfaced for discussion again. Ever. The veto of the child-care bill set the stage for unpaid medical leave and all subsequent U.S. family policy. Schulte, Brigid (2014-03-11). Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time (pp. 97-98). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

In 2013 in the United States alone, the oil and gas industry spent just under $400,000 a day lobbying Congress and government officials, and the industry doled out a record $73 million in federal campaign and political donations during the 2012 election cycle, an 87 percent jump from the 2008 elections.

Why didn't the Democrats accomplish more right after the 2006 elections that gave them control of Congress? It wasn't just that they didn't have votes to override a presidential veto or block a filibuster. They didn't use their mandate to substantially change how the public--and the media-- thought about issues. They just tried to be rational, to devise programs to fit people's interests and the polls. Because there was little understanding of the brain, there was no campaign to change brains. Indeed, the very idea of "changing brains" sounds a little sinister to progressives-- a kind of Frankenstein image comes to mind. It sounds Machiavellian to liberals, like what the Republicans do. But "changing minds" in any deep way always requires changing brains. Once you understand a bit more about how brains work, you will understand that politics is very much about changing brains-- and that it can be highly moral and not the least bit sinister or underhanded.

People employ what economists call “rational ignorance.” That is, we all spend our time learning about things we can actually do something about, not political issues that we can’t really affect. That’s why most of us can’t name our representative in Congress. And why most of us have no clue about how much of the federal budget goes to Medicare, foreign aid, or any other program. As an Alabama businessman told a Washington Post pollster, “Politics doesn’t interest me. I don’t follow it. … Always had to make a living.” Ellen Goodman, a sensitive, good-government liberal columnist, complained about a friend who had spent months researching new cars, and of her own efforts study the sugar, fiber, fat, and price of various cereals. “Would my car-buying friend use the hours he spent comparing fuel-injection systems to compare national health plans?” Goodman asked. “Maybe not. Will the moments I spend studying cereals be devoted to studying the greenhouse effect on grain? Maybe not.” Certainly not —and why should they? Goodman and her friend will get the cars and the cereal they want, but what good would it do to study national health plans? After a great deal of research on medicine, economics, and bureaucracy, her friend may decide which health-care plan he prefers. He then turns to studying the presidential candidates, only to discover that they offer only vague indications of which health-care plan they would implement. But after diligent investigation, our well-informed voter chooses a candidate. Unfortunately, the voter doesn’t like that candidate’s stand on anything else — the package-deal problem — but he decides to vote on the issue of health care. He has a one-in-a-hundred-million chance of influencing the outcome of the presidential election, after which, if his candidate is successful, he faces a Congress with different ideas, and in any case, it turns out the candidate was dissembling in the first place. Instinctively realizing all this, most voters don’t spend much time studying public policy. Give that same man three health insurance plans that he can choose from, though, and chances are that he will spend time studying them. Finally, as noted above, the candidates are likely to be kidding themselves or the voters anyway. One could argue that in most of the presidential elections since 1968, the American people have tried to vote for smaller government, but in that time the federal budget has risen from $178 billion to $4 trillion. George Bush made one promise that every voter noticed in the 1988 campaign: “Read my lips, no new taxes.” Then he raised them. If we are the government, why do we get so many policies we don’t want?

In 1871 the campaign of lies, terror, and intimidation of black voters was a success. Black voters in Texas simply disappeared from the polls, and the Democrats swept the elections for Congress. Within two years the Democrats in Texas had an unbreakable lock on the legislature and all statewide offices, and most of the gains in the areas of civil rights, social justice, education, and tax reform had been turned back.

In the aftermath of 9/11, Republicans gained control of both chambers of Congress heading into the 2004 campaign season. Guest speakers and candidates lined up at the Republican National Convention, each referencing and emphasizing the events of 9/11, the need to fight terrorism, the menace of Saddam Hussein, and related threats. They discussed, repeatedly, the “hour of danger,” the “very dangerous world,” a “grave, new threat,” the terrorists’ “horrific acts of atrocities,” people “dedicated to killing us,” torture chambers, mass graves, radical ideologies, deadly technologies, and of course, “weapons of mass destruction.”22 Fear was, as journalist Glenn Greenwald once wrote, the “one very potent weapon” that the Bush administration had in its arsenal, which it repeatedly used.

Neither the First Amendment nor any other provision of this Constitution shall be construed to prohibit the Congress or any state from imposing reasonable limits on the amount of money that candidates for public office, or their supporters, may spend in election campaigns.

We have had campaign-finance reform, and reform of the seniority system in Congress, and endless rounds of anticorruption measures in the federal government. Calls for “transparency” and “accountability” have meant more administrative and judicial supervision. In turn, power flows to impersonal institutions (agency review boards, courts, and so on) and away from elected leaders who can get things done—and who can be punished at the ballot box for delay and disappointment.

The American Zionist Emergency Council (AZEC) embarked on a well-financed publicity campaign that helped by late 1947 to generate large majorities—some polls said over 80 percent—of the American people in favor of such a homeland. AZEC's efforts helped induce thirty-three state legislatures to pass resolutions favoring a Jewish state in Palestine. In addition, forty governors, fifty-four senators, and 250 members of congress signed petitions to Truman on the issue. 34

I’m not sure why I thought it would be a good idea to bring Kanish to Mel Odious Sound yesterday. Bringing a Billionheir to a large recording complex full of Producers is like opening a bag of chips at a seagull convention. It wouldn’t be long before every Producer within earshot swooped in to aggressively pitch his latest and greatest pet project, most of which would likely prove unprofitable. Rev is obviously going to pitch a project, and it very well may be something amazing. But as I’ve pointed out, in order for Kanish to make a profit, he would have to pick up half the Publishing—a non-starter for the Rev. He’s not a Songwriting Producer, so he likely doesn’t have a sufficient portion of the Publishing to share. And even if he did, no seasoned Producer is going to give half of their equity in a song in order to basically secure a small loan from an outside investor. There’s no upside. For starters, Kanish has no channels of Distribution beyond Streaming, which is already available to anyone and everyone who wants it, and which is currently only profitable for the Major Labels and the stockholders of the Streaming services themselves. Everyone else is getting screwed. And please don’t quote me the Douchebag Big Tech Billionaires running big Streaming Corporations. They are literally lining their pockets with the would-be earnings of Artists and Songwriters alike. What they claim as fair is anything but. Frankly, I don’t think we should be comfortable with Spotify taking a 30 percent margin off the top, and then disbursing the Tiger’s Share of the remaining 70 percent to the Major Labels who have already negotiated top dollar for access to their catalog. This has resulted in nothing but some remaining scraps trickling down to the tens of thousands of Independent Artists out there who just want to make a living. You can’t make a living off scraps, or even a trickle, for that matter. Mark my words, we are currently witnessing the greatest heist in the annals of the Music Business, and that’s saying something given its history. Can you say Napster? Stunningly, the only place that Songwriters can make sufficient Performance Royalties is radio—a medium that is coming up on its hundred-year anniversary. To make matters worse, the Major Distributors still have radio all locked up, and without airplay, there’s no hit. So even now, more than twenty years into the Internet revolution, the odds of breaking through the artistic cacophony without Major-Label Distribution are impossibly low. So much for the Internet leveling the playing field. At this point, only Congress can solve the problem. And despite the fact that Streaming has been around since the mid-aughts, Congress has done nothing to deal with the issue. Why? Because it’s far cheaper for Big Tech to line the pockets of lobbyists and fund the campaigns of politicians who gladly ignore the issue than it is to pay Artists and Songwriters a fair rate for their work, my friends. Same is it ever was. Just so I’m clear, there is a debate to be had as to how much Songwriters and Artists should be paid for Streaming. A radio Spin can reach millions. A Stream rarely reaches more than a few listeners. Clearly, a new method of calculation is required. But that doesn’t mean that we should just sit by as the Big Tech Douchebags rob an entire generation of royalties all so they can sell their Streaming Corporation for billions down the line. I mean, that is the end game, after all. At which point, profit for the new majority stockholder will be all but impossible. How will anyone get paid then?

Attempts to Close the Detention Center The United States Detention Center on the grounds of the Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba was established in January of 2002 by the U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld. It was designated as the site for a prison camp, euphemistically called a detention center, to detain prisoners taken in Afghanistan and to a lesser degree from the battlefields of Iraq, Somalia and Asia. The prison was built to hold extremely dangerous individuals and has the facilities to be able to interrogate these detainees in what was said to be “an optimal setting.” Since these prisoners were technically not part of a regular military organization representing a country, the Geneva Conventions did not bind the United States to its rules. The legality of their incarceration is questionable under International Law. This would lead one to the conclusion that this facility was definitely not a country club. Although, in most cases these prisoners were treated humanely, there were obvious exceptions, when the individuals were thought to have pertinent information. It was also the intent of the U.S. Government not to bring them into the United States, where they would be afforded prescribed legal advantages and a more humane setting. Consequently, to house these prisoners, this Spartan prison was constructed at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base instead of on American soil. Here they were out of sight and far removed from any possible legal entanglements that would undoubtedly regulate their treatment. Many of the detainees reported abuses and torture at the facility, which were categorically denied. In 2005 Amnesty International called the facility the “Gulag of our times.” In 2007 and 2008, during his campaign for the Presidency, Obama pledged to close the Detention Center at Guantánamo Bay. After winning the presidential election, he encouraged Congress to close the detention center, without success. Again, he attempted to close the facility on May 3, 2013. At that time, the Senate stopped him by voting to block the necessary funds for the closure. The Republican House remained adamant in their policy towards the President, showing no signs of relenting. It was not until thaw of November of 2014 that any glimmer of hope became apparent. Despite Obama’s desire to close the detention center, he also knew that the Congress, headed by his opposing party, would not revisit this issue any time soon, and if anything were to happen, it would have to be by an executive order. The number has constantly decreased and is now said to be fewer than 60 detainees. There are still problems regarding some of these more aggressive prisoners from countries that do not want them back. It is speculated that eventually some of them may come to the United States to face a federal court. Much is dependent on President-Elect Trump as to what the future holds regarding these incarcerated people.

Despite the refusal of the Obama Justice Department to prosecute anyone at the IRS, it is clear that what happened was an epic clampdown on any conservative voices speaking or advocating against the president’s disastrous policies and in favor of patriotism and adherence to the Constitution and the rule of law. Over the course of twenty-seven months leading up to the 2012 election, not a single Tea Party–type organization received tax-exempt status. Many were unable to operate; others disbanded because donors refused to fund them without the IRS seal of approval; some organizations and their donors were audited without justification; and many incurred legal fees and costs fighting the unlawful conduct by Lerner and other IRS employees. The IRS suppressed the entire Tea Party movement just in time to help Obama win reelection. And everyone in the administration involved in this outrageous conduct got away with it without being punished or prosecuted. Was it simply a case of retribution against the perceived “enemies” of the administration? No, this was much bigger than political payback. It was a systematic and concerted effort to squash the Tea Party movement—one of the most organic and powerful political movements in recent memory—during an election season. [See Appendix for select IRS documents uncovered by Judicial Watch.] This was about campaign politics. It was a scandal for the ages. President Obama obviously wanted this done even if he gave no direct orders for it. In 2015, he told Jon Stewart on The Daily Show that “you don’t want all this money pouring through non-profits.” But there is no law preventing money from “pouring through non-profits” that they use to achieve their legal purposes and the objectives of their members. Who didn’t want this money pouring through nonprofits? Barack Obama. In the subsequent FOIA litigation filed by Judicial Watch, the IRS obstructed and lied to a federal judge and Judicial Watch in an effort to hide the truth about what Lois Lerner and other senior officials had done. The IRS, including its top political appointees like IRS Commissioner John Koskinen and General Counsel William J. Wilkins, have much to answer for over their contempt of court and of Congress. And the Department of Justice lawyers and officials enabling this cover-up in court need to be held accountable as well. If the Tea Party and other conservative groups had been fully active in the critical months leading up to the 2012 election, would Mitt Romney have been elected president? We will, of course, never know for certain. But we do know that President Obama’s Internal Revenue Service targeted right-leaning organizations applying for tax-exempt status and prevented them from entering the fray during that period. That is how you steal an election in plain sight. Accountability is not something we will get from the Obama administration. But Judicial Watch will continue its independent investigation and certainly any new presidential administration should take a fresh look at this IRS scandal.

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.

Any democratically elected government that listens more to its campaign financiers than its citizens, takes the demands of financial lenders sine qua non and those of its impoverished citizenry non exitus, is a failed government, corrupt and incompetent. It's not a government for the people and by the people, it is a government by the Whores for power!

In July 1945, B.R. Ambedkar published a book called "What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables". This argued that Gandhi’s campaign to lift the Depressed Classes had failed, and for three reasons. First, ‘Gandhi’s sermons on Untouchability have completely failed to move the Hindus’, who ‘hear his after-prayer sermons for few minutes and then go to the comic opera’. Second, that while Gandhi claimed to be against untouchability, he had himself never launched a concerted political (as distinct from social) campaign for its abolition. Third, that (as Ambedkar saw it) ‘Gandhi does not want the Untouchables to organize and be strong. For he fears that they might thereby become independent of the Hindus and weaken the ranks of Hindus.’ Ambedkar argued that ‘it is to kill this spirit of independence among the Untouchables that Mr. Gandhi started the Harijan Sevak Sangh’. He claimed that ‘the whole object of the sangh is to create a slave mentality among the untouchables towards their Hindu masters. Examine the Sangh from any angle one may like and the creation of slave mentality will appear to be its dominant purpose.’ When asked why there were no Harijans in the governing body of the Harijan Sewak Sangh, Gandhi had answered that it was an institution that asked caste Hindus to make reparations for the sins of the past. The exploiters had to make amends themselves. Ambedkar saw this as a cunning ploy to keep the ‘untouchables’ forever subservient. He claimed that ‘if the Sangh was handed over to the Untouchables Mr. Gandhi and the Congress will have no means of control over the Untouchables. The Untouchables will cease to be dependent on the Hindus.... [T]he Untouchables having become independent will cease to be grateful to the Hindus'.

In late April, disappointed by the waning of the anti-untouchability campaign, and the reports he was receiving of lack of enthusiasm among Congress workers, Gandhi decided to go on a fresh fast. This would be of a specified duration, namely three weeks, and commence on 8 May. In a statement issued on 30 April, Gandhi remarked: ‘Let there be no misunderstanding about the impending fast. I have no desire to die. I want to live for the cause, though I am equally prepared to die for it. But I need for me and my fellow-workers greater purity, greater application and dedication'.

there are today three types of PACs: The first is “separate segregated funds” (SSFs) that are attached to corporations and unions, and which may solicit contributions only from employees, stockholders, owners, or members. Major corporations such as Ebay and Microsoft, as well as large unions like the AFL-CIO typically have SSFs. The second is “non-connected” PACs that are not affiliated with a corporate or labor interest, and that solicit contributions from the public at large in support of a common value. For example, EMILY’s List, whose name is an acronym for “Early Money Is Like Yeast,” helps women candidates “rise” by providing them with funding to jumpstart their campaigns. EMILY’s List may accept contributions from anyone willing to donate to the cause. Finally, “leadership PACs” are established by federal officeholders to help other candidates get elected. When members of Congress do not face a strong challenge in their own reelection campaigns, for instance, they can channel part of their war chest to other candidates via a Leadership PAC.

saying you're Abraham Lincoln is a very ineffective way of getting people to play chess with you due to the fact that Abraham Lincoln was actually a very controversial president. The Emancipation Proclamation was actually only effective in the Southern Slave States, so the slave states that were a part of the US were not legally required to release slaves, even though that was the point. Also, his Gettysburg Address is basically telling people that the thousands dying was good for the Union and that they should fight and most likely die too. Third, he chose to let General Grant continue his Overland Campaign, even though he had thrown away tens of thousands of lives, against Congress' wishes. While the emancipation proclamation freed only Southern slaves, the northern states had already freed theirs, meaning that only the 4 border state kept slave until the end of the war, when Congress freed everybody. Lincoln did free all the slaves, he just didn't want to "punish" the border states, who might have joined to South if he tried to free their slaves too early. Also, Gettysburg address is "these ppl didn't die for no reason, they did to protect the Union, and what they did made Gettysburg hallowed ground." Unless you believe that the North shouldn't have fought to reunite the union (thereby created the CSA, which had slavery and racism baked into its constitution), there is nothing wrong with this speech. Finally, Grant was the first and only general on the Eastern Front who could have won the war quickly. All other generals before him were too cautious, too slow, or too incompetant. Even Meade, who won Gettysburg, was unable to chase to Southern army and finish them, ending the war. Grant's attack, attack, attack stategy won the war in less than a year and a half, sadly at the cost of many men. Actually, Congress, Lincoln, and Johnson fought over this for TEN years via the reconstruction plans. Lincoln's was too ineffective for the Congressmen known as the Radical Republicans, and they tried to impeach Johnson for his even more ineffective plans. The plans to get all of the South into the Union again were due to Radical Reconstruction, which only happened in the South, making the northern slave states not required. :3

Radical and “stalwart” Republicans—those still committed to Reconstruction—in Congress tried to check the campaign of terror unfolding across the South.

BRAND VERSUS PRODUCT The Modi brand was built on the promise of delivery. The 2014 campaign was promoted under the theme ‘Achche din aane wale hain’ (good days are on the way). It assumed that Modi would bring change. It was not an empty promise: it came from his certitude and his reductive understanding of the problems that India and its government grapple with. The Modi view of the world is also the view of the middle classes, generally speaking. It can be understood thus: the system is bad, but it cannot be fixed because politicians are corrupt. India’s poverty and inefficiency was the product, therefore, of bad politicians. The view also is that India’s potential has been kept suppressed and the people, especially the middle class, have suffered for this. The nation had not become developed though it was full of people who were talented. The politicians had let the rest of us down. The system had failed because of the party which had created it and run it. The Congress stood for corruption and socialism and dynasty (this last bit is less damaging than is assumed, in a society where such things as a ‘good family’, meaning virtue spread through genes, are believed to be true). The Gandhis were nepotistic, and people like Rahul Gandhi are not equipped or qualified in any way to lead India to its deserved greatness. A good man, an honest man, a strong man who means well is the thing needed to fix this system because the system is the problem and needs to be fixed. Once that is done, this great society will be able to take its destined place in the world.

found a pocket of forlorn, former conquerors, huddling under un-heated heaters in the bus station. They bitterly informed me they’d tried being “peaceful” today, and that hadn’t worked, so now it was probably time to use bombs, guns, and nooses to exterminate people with different ideas than them, including elected officials and civilians such as myself. They weren’t terrorists of course, they were “patriots,” it’d be ridiculous to suggest people who “blowed up” houses and hung corpses from trees for political reasons were terrorists, right? In the spirit of fairness, I will concede that I’m just one man, and I can’t claim to have been everywhere at once on this day, so if defenders of MAGA want to claim “not everyone was like that” yeah, that could be true. Maybe I got a skewed sample. But being on the ground and witnessing the whole day, I did see a theme about a terrorist guerrilla campaign develop that was a real thing, however widespread.

Besides which ... both sides are controlled by corrupt bureaucrats who take bribes from billionaires. They report the money on their tax returns, it’s not even a secret! They just call them “speaking fees,” or “campaign contributions,” or “awarding government contracts to your brother’s company!” (gasps for air) ... and now you know how I feel about politics.

heard stories of political violence that sent chills down my spine. One guy nostalgically recalled how he crippled a man he considered a “Nazi,” first beating him into submission and then jumping on his spine, all based on unacceptable opinions the man had shared at a bar. A law student working his way up the Democratic Party told me that periodic beatings of opponents to spread fear in the population were key to any political victory. I tried to talk him out of it, tried to say the entire point of democracy was to have a nonviolent way to transfer power, but he just kept smiling and reminding me that he was already actively organizing campaigns and his candidates always won.

Drug markers spent more on lobbying in the first six months of 2017 than in any year since at least 1999. Campaign donations to members of Congress nearly doubled from the year before-directed heavily toward Republicans and Democrats on key committees that served as gatekeepers for any legislation that might affect the industry.

In politics, there is no saint.

That optimism aside, Louise Day Hicks had entered Congress, setting up a similarly urgent campaign to drive her from the seat in her 1972 reelection bid. But this time around, David Nelson was out of the running. After the 1970 race, Nelson began serving as assistant attorney general under Robert Quinn, and by 1972 was in line for an appointment to a federal judgeship. For his part, Moakley’s second run for the seat came as an independent. This ensured Moakley would appear on the final ballot, competing with Hicks for an electorate that had over one hundred thousand more voters. With Moakley and Nelson out of the Democratic primary, advocates who wanted to organize against Hicks needed a new candidate.

Trump’s election and the fiercely loyal support he received from the GOP—even when stoking a violent insurrection against the U.S. Congress in the final days of his term—exposed how one of the nation’s major political parties had been radicalized. Top leaders were willing to go to extraordinary lengths to preserve their party’s power. As Stuart Stevens, a major Republican campaign operative who had managed Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign in 2012, argued in his book It Was All a Lie, “In the end, the Republican Party rallied behind Donald Trump because if that was the deal needed to regain power, what was the problem? The rest? The principles? The values? It was all a lie.

campaign. But there was a nervous, unformed quality about him, as if he were a student who’d done the coursework and was eager to impress the teacher but deep down lacked either the aptitude or the passion to master the subject. As it was getting late, I noticed Singh fighting off sleep, lifting his glass every so often to wake himself up with a sip of water. I signaled to Michelle that it was time to say our goodbyes. The prime minister and his wife walked us to our car. In the dim light, he looked frail, older than his seventy-eight years, and as we drove off I wondered what would happen when he left office. Would the baton be successfully passed to Rahul, fulfilling the destiny laid out by his mother and preserving the Congress Party’s dominance over the divisive nationalism touted by the BJP?

In this environment, the primary job of Koch’s lobbyists was to gather and analyze information. Inside information was perhaps even more important in the market for influence than it was in the market for crude oil. Congress was an impossibly opaque system, a complex pipeline network of policy ideas that flowed between 535 offices in the House and Senate. Minute-by-minute updates on the inner workings of Congress were extraordinarily valuable, and out of reach for most companies. Koch’s lobbyists, like most other corporate lobbyists, spent their time gathering detailed intelligence. They determined which bills were originating from which offices, which bills had momentum and which didn’t, which politician needed help with a campaign and where that politician stood on issues that were important to Koch. This need for inside information explains why so many lobbyists are former congressional staffers. The former staffers have personal relationships with lawmakers and their staffers. They know which bills will be debated and moved forward through the system. A lobbyist’s value comes just as much from knowing about this process as it does from being able to influence it.

There are various means of resistance available to people who are oppressed by racist or colonial regimes or foreign occupations (that is, according to the Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions), including through the use of armed force. Nowadays, the Palestine solidarity movement has committed itself to the route of nonviolent resistance. Do you think this alone will end Israeli apartheid? Solidarity movements are, of course, by their very nature nonviolent. In South Africa, even as an international solidarity movement was being organized, the ANC (African National Congress) and the SACP (South African Communist Party) came to the conclusion that they needed an armed wing of their movement: Umkhonto We Sizwe. They had every right to make that decision. Likewise, it is up to the Palestinian people to employ the methods they deem most likely to succeed in their struggle. At the same time, it is clear that if Israel is isolated politically and economically, as the BDS campaign is striving to do, Israel could not continue to implement its apartheid practices. If, for example, we in the United States could force the Obama administration to cease its $8 million-a-day support of Israel, this would go a long way toward pressuring Israel to end the occupation.

This has been one of Israel’s worst fears, so much so that the state launched a vigorous campaign to criminalize BDS through legislation. Its top ally, the United States, has also attacked and criminalized the movement. Since 2014, state and local legislatures and even the U.S. Congress have enacted more than one hundred measures penalizing groups and businesses that boycott Israel. Thirty-two U.S. states have passed anti-boycott laws—this in a country that claims to uphold free speech. In its fierce crackdown on the movement, the United States has followed Israel’s lead in dishonestly branding BDS as anti-Semitic. But it’s not anti-Semitic. It’s anti-Zionist, and conflating the two not only is dangerous, but it dismisses our valid grievances as a population denied our human rights and our rightful land. Once again, as Palestinians, we are punished if we protest violently and nonviolently.

Once the ACCF’s study was published, Koch Industries carried out the next phase of its echo chamber system. The study was quickly promoted by a think tank called the Institute for Energy Research, which sent out a press release on August 13 that highlighted the study’s findings. The IER was an outgrowth of the Institute for Humane Studies, the libertarian think tank cofounded by Charles Koch.IV By 2009, the IER was funded by Koch Industries and other companies, and a former Koch Industries lobbyist named Wayne Gable sat on IER’s board of directors. After the study was promoted by the IER, it was then recycled by another Koch Industries–affiliated think tank. This one was called the American Energy Alliance, and it was essentially the political action arm of the IER. The AEA was organized under the tax code in a way that it could be directly involved in politics, while the IER was organized as an “education” foundation that could not lobby or get involved in political campaigns. Where the IER was high minded, the AEA was something more of a street brawler. The AEA was headed by a former Koch Industries lobbyist named Thomas Pyle, who remained in close contact with his former colleagues at Koch’s lobbying shop. The AEA produced a series of political radio advertisements that were based on the new ACCF findings, along with other statistics that highlighted the potential economic threat of a cap-and-trade bill. A narrator in one of the radio ads intoned: “This tax will further cripple our already struggling economy—costing more American jobs. . . . Higher taxes and more job losses—what could Congress be thinking?” A corresponding fact sheet for the ad cited the ACCF for this claim. The AEA political ads were targeted in a way that benefited from keen knowledge of how the Waxman-Markey bill was then working its way through the Senate. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina was a particular target. “Why would Senator Lindsey Graham support a new national energy tax, called cap and trade?” one advertisement began. Citing the ACCF study, the advertisement claimed that “cap and trade . . . could significantly increase electricity bills, gas prices, and cost American jobs.” In all of these statements and advertisements, the same set of numbers were used again and again: More than two million jobs lost. Electricity prices would be 50 percent higher by 2030. These facts were also carried into Congress in the form of direct testimony. When the Senate Finance Committee sought to learn more about the economics of climate change, the committee invited Margo Thorning to testify. The ACCF study was submitted as evidence beforehand.

EARLY IN 1986, I learned of a rumor that Kurt Waldheim, a former United Nations secretary-general and a candidate for Austria’s presidency, had a file as a Nazi war criminal—in the United Nations no less! There were always whispers about Waldheim’s past but a UN file was something new. “Do you have such a file?” I asked the United Nations Secretariat. “We don’t know,” came the answer. “Why not?” I asked. “Because we’re not allowed to open the archives.” During World War II, Churchill had established a tribunal of the sixteen Allied governments (some in exile) to document Nazi war crimes for future prosecution. The tribunal’s findings were handed over to the United Nations when it was established. The files were stored in one of the UN buildings in New York. I asked once more to see them. “You can’t,” a UN official explained. “When the archives were deposited in the United Nations, it was agreed they will be opened only with the unanimous consent of all sixteen countries.” “What the…” I muttered, outraged. In the face of such obstinacy I set out on a yearlong public and diplomatic campaign to convince these sixteen governments to give their consent. In this I was greatly helped by Edgar Bronfman Sr. and Israel Singer of the World Jewish Congress. It was like peeling a diplomatic onion. One layer led to another, and then to another, until at last all the countries had agreed. We had opened the padlock. When I walked into the unlocked storeroom, I saw rows and rows of cardboard boxes containing yellowing files. Picking up a box marked with the letter W, I started going file by file. Sure enough, there was a file marked WALDHEIM KURT. It detailed acts of wanton murder that this Austrian Nazi officer’s unit carried out in the war. Declassified documents later showed that the CIA had been aware of some details of Waldheim’s wartime past since 1945. They didn’t publish the information and Waldheim was able to assume the august post of United Nations secretary-general, in which he was warmly welcomed around the world.

BDS on college campuses is a savvy, well-funded political operation whose sponsors and organizers include groups and individuals with ties to Islamist agendas. I didn’t make this up. A much smarter person than me said this in his sworn testimony in front of the United States Congress. Here is Dr. Jonathan Schanzer, former terrorism finance analyst for the United States Department of the Treasury: The overlap of former employees of organizations that provided support to Hamas who now play important roles [in the BDS movement]… speaks volumes about the real agenda of key components of the BDS campaign.10 Schanzer, now senior vice president at the Washington, DC–based think tank the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, is an expert in uncovering financial ties that are designed to be hidden. In his testimony, Dr. Schanzer describes a head-spinning web of financial and personal connections between BDS and supporters of terrorism. The BDS US campus operation represents a savvy rebranding of the Palestinian cause to make it more palatable—and, you know, less terror-y—for the American people. Key figures in the BDS movement come from a particularly uncompromising strain of Palestinian nationalism that calls for a State of Palestine to stretch from the river to the sea (yes, without Israel). Apparently, when they saw that their message was not resonating with Western society (not surprisingly, I would say), they decided to pivot and started pouring their resources into American colleges in order to influence future leaders and voters in America and Europe. “Investing in the future they are,” as Yoda would say.

Merging the SEC and CFTC was a political nonstarter because they were overseen by separate committees in Congress. The congressional oversight committees jealously guarded their turf because the market players regulated by the two agencies could be counted on to provide lucrative campaign contributions.

Ranjeet Kumar Shukla is a prominent figure in Indian politics and entrepreneurship. He has made significant contributions to both fields and is widely respected for his leadership, business acumen, and philanthropy. This article will delve into his background, achievements, and his contributions to Indian society. Early Life Ranjeet Kumar Shukla was born on January 25th, 1976, in Hajipur, Bihar. He received his education from the University of Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh. After completing his studies, he began his career as a businessman in Hajipur. He quickly rose through the ranks and became a successful entrepreneur. However, he felt the need to give back to society and decided to enter politics. Political Career Shukla joined the Indian National Congress and became a vital member of the party. He played an important role in many of the party's campaigns, including Bharat Jodo Yatra, which aimed at uniting the country. Shukla's contributions to the Congress are vast, and he is well-regarded as a spokesperson for the party. His eloquence and persuasiveness have made him a prominent figure in Indian politics. Entrepreneurship A part from his political career, Shukla is also an accomplished entrepreneur. He founded Adityavarnamiti Real Estates Pvt Ltd and Vijay Babanagari The Horizon City Pvt Ltd, both of which are well-known real estate companies in India. Shukla's leadership and business acumen have been critical to the success of these companies. He has shown that he can excel in both politics and business. Philanthropy Shukla is also a philanthropist and is actively involved in various social and charitable activities aimed at helping the underprivileged sections of society. He believes in giving back to society and has worked tirelessly to make a positive impact on the lives of people. Shukla's charitable work has earned him widespread respect and admiration. Conclusion In conclusion, Ranjeet Kumar Shukla is a multifaceted personality with a successful career in politics, entrepreneurship, and philanthropy. His contributions to the Indian National Congress, his business ventures, and his philanthropic efforts have made him a well-respected figure in India. His story is a testament to the power of hard work, determination, and dedication in achieving success in various fields. Ranjeet Kumar Shukla is an inspiration to many young Indians who aspire to make a difference in their society.

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.

It’s June 2018, and I’m in Washington to testify to the U.S. Congress about Cambridge Analytica, a military contractor and psychological warfare firm where I used to work, and a complex web involving Facebook, Russia, WikiLeaks, the Trump campaign, and the Brexit referendum.

During the lunch break, he explained, he had found evidence, citing a message he’d sent to Congress in December 1906 in which he had written, “I can recommend a law prohibiting corporations from contributing to the campaign expense of any party... Let individuals contribute as they desire, but let us prohibit in effective fashion all corporations from making contributions for any political purpose directly or indirectly.

Thus far, Trump’s bet has paid off to an astonishing degree. Nobody has taken up his dares. Congress has done little, though it may be beginning to stir. The courts, limited by the slow pace of litigation and legitimate substantive and procedural legal barriers to action, offer little short-term relief. So far, anyway, the only real pushback has come from prosecutors and state attorneys general who have probed the conduct of his campaign and foundation. And it has come from a dogged and relentless press, which has accomplished a great deal of disclosure—disclosure that, in turn, gives rise to the possibility of political response. As other billionaires eye the presidency, it’s not hard to imagine them following the example of minimal ethical compliance and preserving their business entanglements. Contrary to former OGE director Shaub’s admonition, as far as some very rich people were concerned, divestment has, in fact, been too high a price to pay for the presidency. Now, it seems, it doesn’t need to be paid after all. As Trump has set the presidency to protecting his personal business interests and dared the polity to stop him, the polity has responded with a shrug. Perhaps a disgusted shrug, but a shrug nonetheless.

Cheng’s intelligence bureau had worked for years using cutouts, front corporations and sham companies in a program designed to compromise members of the US Congress. You would run out of digits trying to compute the amounts of money they had spent. The approach was always the same. Shower the politicians with cash, campaign contributions if you had to, outright bribes if you could convince them to take it. The goal was to compromise them so that the Bureau might extort official acts and secret information—to own them. The Chinese thought their program was unique. In fact rogues from the US intelligence community, people who had left the government in some cases decades earlier and who went private setting up their own companies, were doing the same thing. Only they were doing it on a much larger scale and with much greater success.

of Clinton’s close aides, who had saved some of Clinton’s e-mails on Weiner’s laptop. Having declared the Clinton e-mail case closed in July, when he delivered an unprecedented public rebuke of her “extremely careless” conduct, Comey now told Congress that he was reopening the Clinton investigation. Ever since The New York Times broke the news on March 2, 2015, that Clinton used a personal e-mail account and private server as secretary of state, risking exposure of classified documents to hostile foreign powers, the subject of her e-mails had stalked her campaign, fusing with the damaging

Benenson and Margolis reached out to Jon Favreau, the vaunted speechwriter for Barack Obama, to help draft the kind of visionary message that had eluded Hillary in her first campaign for the presidency. Favreau, then thirty-three, had seen a lot in his short life as a political operative. He had helped navigate Obama through the famous “race” speech in Philadelphia in 2008, the first inaugural address ever given by a person of color, and several reports to Congress on the state of the union. By putting words in the mouth of a politician with a unique gift for giving wings to oratory, Favreau had ascended to an elite rung of political speechwriters by the time he arrived at the White House in 2009.