Congress Won Quotes

That not all men are piggy, only some; that not all men belittle me, only some; that not all men get mad if you won’t let them play Chivalry, only some; that not all men write books in which women are idiots, only most; that not all men pull rank on me, only some; that not all men pinch their secretaries’ asses, only some; that not all men make obscene remarks to me in the street, only some; that not all men make more money than I do, only some; that not all men make more money than all women, only most; that not all men are rapists, only some; that not all men are promiscuous killers, only some; that not all men control Congress, the Presidency, the police, the army, industry, agriculture, law, science, medicine, architecture, and local government, only some. I sat down on the lawn and wept.

The Battle of Gettysburg was fought in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania in 18-something-or-nother. The year doesn‘t matter.They considered it the turning point of the war, and President Lincoln showed up to give his big speech. Who really cares what it was called? I don‘t. After it was all over and the North won, Congress passed the 13th amendment to free the slaves. It outlawed owning another person, yada, yada, yada, but it was a waste of time. All of it. Every bit. Completely pointless. All those people died and it didn't change anything, because it doesn't work if they don't enforce it. They just ignore it, turn their backs and say it‘s not their problem, but it is. It's everyone's problem. They can say slavery ended all they want, but that doesn't make it true. People lie. They'll tell you what they think you wanna hear, and you‘ll believe it. Whatever makes you feel better about your dismal little lives. So, whatever. Go on being naive. Believe what the history book tells you if you want. Believe what Mrs. Anderson wants me to tell you about it. Believe the land of the free, blah, blah, blah, star spangled banner bullshit. Believe there aren‘t any slaves anymore just because a tall guy in a big ass top hat and a bunch of politicians said so. But I won‘t believe it, because if I do too, we‘ll all fucking be wrong, and someone has to be right." -Carmine DeMarco

Also unfortunately, Congress is far too busy asking if baseball players are really as strong as they seem and trying to choke bankers with wads of cash to grant more funds to such trifling matters as the avoidance of space bullets, so they won't give NASA the money

It took Congress less than an hour to vote unanimously for war on Japan—except for one nay vote by the longtime Montana pacifist Jeannette Rankin, who had also voted against entering World War I.

The Gandhi-Irwin truce, signed in New Delhi on March 5, 1931, marked a turning point in the Indian revolution and in the affairs of the British Empire. Not that Gandhi won much. I was surprised that he had conceded so much, and Nehru was bitter. The Mahatma seemed to have given in on almost every issue. Not even his eloquent defence of what he believed he had achieved, imparted to me in long talks on the succeeding days, convinced me that he had not, to an amazing extent, surrendered. It would take some time for me to realise that Gandhi, with his subtle feeling for the course of history, had actually achieved a great deal. For the first time since the British took away India from the Indians, they had been forced, as Churchill bitterly complained, to deal with an Indian leader as an equal. For the first time the British acknowledged that Gandhi represented the aspirations and indeed the demands of most of the Indians for self-government. And that from then on, he, and the Indian National Congress he dominated, would have to be dealt with seriously.

But our leaders can’t tell the truth. We won’t let them. We’ve created a society where the politicians aren’t allowed to criticize the people. There’s no tough love coming out of the White House or Congress. They’ve gone from leaders and legislators to wedding caterers. If they want to keep the gig, they better give us what we want.

As Christians, we have had growing political involvement over the last forty years, but does anyone really believe that the Republicans, Democrats, White House, Supreme Court, or Congress will transform even one human heart? Are these civil servants supposed to be light and salt, or is that the task of the church of Jesus Christ? Unless there is a new heart, there won’t be a new person. Unless people are changed, we can’t have a transformed society, no matter who’s in charge.

Lord Mountbatten came to be described in Congress circles as the greatest Viceroy and Governor-General this country ever had. The official date for handing over power was fixed for June 30, 1948, but Mountbatten with his ruthless surgery gave us a gift of vivisected India ten months in advance. This is what Gandhi had achieved after thirty years of undisputed dictatorship and this is what Congress party calls 'freedom' and 'peaceful transfer of power'. The Hindu-Muslim unity bubble was finally burst and a theocratic state was established with the consent of Nehru and his crowd and they have called 'freedom won by them with sacrifice' - whose sacrifice? When top leaders of Congress, with the consent of Gandhi, divided and tore the country - which we consider a deity of worship - my mind was filled with direful anger.

Never mind that in 1982 five black candidates from majority-white districts won seats in the North Carolina State House of Representatives. Or that from 1983 to 1995 a majority-white district in Missouri was represented in Congress by Alan Wheat, a black Democrat. Or that between 1991 and 1997 Gary Franks, a black Republican from Connecticut, represented a congressional district that was 88 percent white. Or that in 1996 Sanford Bishop, a black Democrat from Georgia, easily won reelection to Congress in a district that was only 35 percent black. Or that in 2010 Tim Scott of South Carolina and Allen West of Florida, both black Republicans, were elected to Congress from districts that are overwhelmingly white. Or that Representatives Emanuel Cleaver of Missouri and Keith Ellison of Minnesota are black Democrats who represent districts that are more than 60 percent white.

Dear men in Congress, You think banning birth control is conservative progress? You think sanctioning my ovaries won’t bring me to violence? How about I tell you what to do with your caucus? It is now illegal to think about me topless. To keep your lotion where your socks is. To refer to powerful women as monsters like those jocks at Fox did.

By 1938 much of the New Deal was dead. The programs that were not killed by the Supreme Court had been killed by Congress, which had seen the election of a significant number of conservatives.

When Lyndon Johnson was lobbying Congress to pass his Great Society programs, he reportedly said, ‘If we pass this the niggers will all vote Democratic for the next two centuries.’ I don’t know if he said that, but that has been the consequence. People do whatever it takes to get free money, because without an education and job opportunity they can’t make it in America. We have to change that or we won’t want to live in the poor socialist empire that will result.

Lebedev: France has a clear and defined policy... The French know what they want. They just want to wipe out the Krauts, finish, but Germany, my friend, is playing a very different tune. Germany has many more birds in her sights than just France... Shabelsky: Nonsense! ...In my view the German are cowards and the French are cowards... They're just thumbing their noses at each other. Believe me, things will stop there. They won't fight. Borkin: And as I see it, why fight? What's the point of these armaments, congresses, expenditures? You know what I'd do? I'd gather together dogs from all over the country, give them a good dose of rabies and let them loose in enemy country. In a month all my enemies would be running rabid.

Martin Luther King Jr. was the greatest movement leader in American history. But, as Hillary Clinton once correctly pointed out, his efforts would have been futile without those of the machine politician Lyndon Johnson, a seasoned congressional deal maker willing to sign any pact with the devil to get the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act passed. And the work doesn’t stop once legislation is passed. One must keep winning elections to defend the gains that social movements have contributed to. If the steady advance of a radicalized Republican Party, over many years and in every branch and at every level of government, should teach liberals anything, it is the absolute priority of winning elections today. Given the Republicans’ rage for destruction, it is the only way to guarantee that newly won protections for African-Americans, other minorities, women, and gay Americans remain in place. Workshops and university seminars will not do it. Online mobilizing and flash mobs will not do it. Protesting, acting up, and acting out will not do it. The age of movement politics is over, at least for now. We need no more marchers. We need more mayors. And governors, and state legislators, and members of Congress . .

One has but to read the debates in Congress and state papers from Abraham Lincoln down to know that the decisive action which ended the Civil War was the emancipation and the arming of the black slave; that, as Lincoln said, "Without the military help of black freedmen, the war against the south could not have been won." The freedmen, far from being the inert recepients of freedom at the hands of philanthropists, furnished 200k soldiers in the Civil War who took part in nearly 200 battles and skirmishes, and in addition perhaps 300k others as effective laborers and helpers In proportion to population, more Negroes than whites fought in the Civil War.

Of the House of Representatives, Rep. James G. Blaine later remarked, “There is no place where so little deference is paid to reputation previously acquired, or to eminence won outside; no place where so little consideration is shown for the feelings or the failures of beginners. What a man gains, he gains by sheer force of his own character,

Meanwhile, real African American heroes—blacks who fought and won the battles for civil rights—don’t figure largely in Zinn’s account. The significant achievements of black labor and civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph, for example, are obscured by Zinn—perhaps because Randolph was an anti-communist who quit the National Negro Congress in 1940 because it “had fallen under the control” of Communist Party allies.32 There are only three mentions of Randolph in A People’s History—two of them quotations that have no bearing on what Randolph accomplished and are adduced simply to support Zinn’s picture of the black population “in the streets” and spoiling for a socialist revolution.

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".

If Abraham Lincoln had erred in allowing the press to criticize the government during our Civil War, Woodrow Wilson vowed, "I won't repeat his mistakes." The president didn't repeal the First Amendment; he had, after all, recently sworn to uphold the Constitution. The press could print what it liked, of course, but the post office didn't have to deliver it. The Wilson administration ordered the confiscation of anything unpatriotic, which is to say, anything critical of his administration. Total war demanded totalitarian power, Mr. Wilson told a compliant Congress. "There are citizens of the United States," the president thundered, "who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life. Such creatures of passion, disloyalty and anarchy must be crushed." Anyone who protested or even voiced reluctance was called a traitor.

On December 1, 2006, federal deputies were brawling in Mexico’s Congress hours before Felipe Calderón was due to enter the chamber to be sworn in as president. It was a fight for space. The leftist deputies claimed their candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, had really won the election but been robbed of his rightful victory. They were trying to gain control of the podium to stop Calderón from taking the oath and assuming office. The conservative deputies were defending the podium to allow the presidential accession. The conservatives won the scrap. There were more of them, and they seemed to be better fed. Among those attending the ceremony were former U.S. president George Bush (Bush the First) and California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. I was covering the Congress door, snatching interviews as guests went in. The elderly Bush hobbled past with six bodyguards with bald heads and microphones at their mouths. I asked him what he thought about the ruckus in the chamber. “Well, I hope that Mexicans can resolve their differences,” he replied diplomatically. Schwarzenegger strolled past with no bodyguards at all. I asked what he thought about the fisticuffs. The Terminator turned round, stared intensely, and uttered three words: “It’s good action!” I phoned the quote back to headquarters and it went out on a wire story. Suddenly, Schwarznegger’s statement was being bounced around California TV stations. Then the BBC led their newscast with it: “It takes a lot to impress Arnold Schwarznegger but today when he was in Mexico …” I got frantic phone calls from the governor’s office in Los Angeles. Was his quote perhaps being used out of context? Well, I replied, I asked him straight and he told me straight.

The trials continued week after week, until nearly all the old Bolsheviks who had formed the party during and after the October Revolution had been liquidated. In fact, of the nearly two thousand delegates to the 1934 party congress, half were arrested and many sent to the firing squad. The military fared no better. Three out of five field marshals were arrested, tried, and executed, as well as thousands of lesser grade officers.

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.

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

Hoover’s greatest challenge was one of the least visible: the humble screw thread. Screws, nuts, and bolts are universal fasteners. They function in industrial societies, as one writer put it, like salt and pepper “sprinkled on practically every conceivable kind of apparatus.” Yet every such society encounters, early on, the vexing problem of incompatible screw threads. Different screws have different measurements, including the thread angles. If those don’t line up between the males and the females, you are, so to speak, screwed. .... Screw thread incompatibilities grew even more worrisome with the advent of cars and planes—complex vibrating objects whose failure could mean death. The problem had hobbled the armed forces in the First World War, which led Congress to appoint a National Screw Thread Commission. Still, it took years, until 1924, before the first national screw thread standard was finally published. It wasn’t a big-splash innovation like the Model T or the airplane, but that hard-won screw thread standard quietly accelerated the economy nonetheless.

THE ONLY THING THAT STANDS BETWEEN AMERICA AND OBLIVION IS A TOTAL immigration moratorium. There’s no possibility of quick fixes. The entire immigration bureaucracy has to be shut down. It’s evident that the government can’t be trusted to use three brain cells in admitting immigrants, so its discretion has to be completely revoked. No matter how clearly laws are written, government bureaucrats connive to confer citizenship on people that a majority of Americans would not want to let in as tourists, much less as our fellow citizens. Instead of trying to do the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” thing, mopping the floor while the water is still pouring in, we need to stop the inflow, then take time to assimilate the immigrants already here. No other fix will work. Congress could just insist that immigrants pay taxes, learn English, not collect welfare, and have good moral character, except the problem is: It already has. All those laws were swept away by INS officials, judges, and Democratic administrations. Doing it again won’t produce a different result. We trusted the government, and it screwed up.

Why are you still here? And why won’t you give me back my key, dammit?” “Because your daughter asked me to check on you five years ago, and for some reason that I can’t explain, I really enjoy that arching thing you do with your eyebrow when you pretend to be shocked by things I’m saying. Very Maleficent of you. You can admit it—you watch the movie and practice, don’t you?” Myrna’s frown deepens to villainess levels at the mention of her daughter. “Ungrateful child. Never comes to visit. Too busy with her superficial life to even remember the woman who gave birth to her.” This isn’t the first time she’s said it, or even the twentieth time. “Yep, she’s really superficial, what with being a member of Congress and all.” “I’m sure she slept her way to the top.” Ouch, Myrna is especially pissed today. I play along with her anyway, because at least this way I know she’s getting her heart rate up. Being pissed off is about as close to cardio as she gets. “You know, I’ll have to check. Chances are she really did—with every man, woman, and tranny in her congressional district. She’s going to need surgery to tighten up that cooch of hers.” “Get out!

The 2018 election also saw victory for Palestinian American and Detroit native Rashida Tlaib. Like Omar, her election should not have come as such a surprise; she was well known and respected in her prior role as a state representative, regarded as someone who would vigorously fight for Detroit. She was a thorn in the side of big businesses that tried to exploit or neglect Detroit neighborhoods and an even bigger thorn in the side of Donald Trump. When Tlaib won her bid for Congress, representing Michigan’s Thirteenth District, she became the first Palestinian American to sit in Congress. She and Omar became the first two Muslim women elected to Congress.

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

There was an original purpose to the Second Amendment, but it wasn’t to keep people safe. It was to preserve white supremacy and slavery. The Second Amendment is in the Constitution because Patrick Henry (Virginia’s governor at the time that the Constitution was being debated) and George Mason (the intellectual leader of the movement against the Constitution, the “anti-federalists”) won a debate against James Madison (the guy who wrote most of the Constitution and its original ten amendments). Henry and Mason wanted the Second Amendment in there to guard against slave revolts. Although, overall, white Southerners outnumbered their enslaved populations, that numerical advantage did not hold in every region. In parts of Virginia, for instance, enslaved Black people outnumbered whites. Predictably, whites were worried about slave revolts because, you know, holding people in bondage against their will is not all that easy to do without numerical and military superiority. The principal way of quelling slave revolts was (wait for it): armed militias of white people. Gangs of white people roving around, imposing white supremacy, is nothing new. But the slavers worried that the new Constitution put the power of raising militias with the federal government and not with the individual states. That would mean that the federal government, dominated by Northerners, could choose to not help the South should their population of oppressed humans demand freedom. In a May 2018 New York Times article, Professor Carl Bogus of Roger Williams University School of Law explained the argument like this: During the debate in Richmond, Mason and Henry suggested that the new Constitution gave Congress the power to subvert the slave system by disarming the militias. “Slavery is detested,” Henry reminded the audience. “The majority of Congress is to the North, and the slaves are to the South.” Henry and Mason argued that because the Constitution gave the federal government the power to arm the militias, only the federal government could do so: “If they neglect or refuse to discipline or arm our militia, they will be useless: the states can do neither—this power being exclusively given to Congress.” Why would the federal government “neglect” a Southern militia? Henry and Mason feared the Northerners who “detested” slavery would refuse to help the South in the event of a slave uprising. Madison eventually gave in to the forces of slavery and included the Second Amendment, along with his larger Bill of Rights.

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.

Sometimes, as in the case of the copper companies, the nationalizations were achieved through legislation that won overwhelming support. (By now, no one in Chile loved the American companies; even the head of Chile’s Roman Catholic bishops declared that nationalization was right and just.) At other times the methods skirted or even overstepped the bounds of legality. The government would simply approve the seizures of farms and factories, one of those “loopholes” Allende was relying on. Perhaps the most important—and pernicious—method was by squeezing the companies economically, as he tried to do with El Mercurio. The government had the authority to approve price hikes and wage increases. Companies that were targets for takeovers were prohibited from raising their prices but were forced to raise their workers’ pay. Moreover, as the government extended its control of the banks, credit for distressed companies dried up. Forced bankruptcies were a favorite tool of Allende’s Socialists. And who was there to run these companies once they were taken over? Ambassador Davis reports: “Government-appointed managers were usually named on the basis of a political patronage system that would have put Tammany Hall to shame.” Many formerly profitable companies were soon incurring heavy losses. In the countryside, where peasants—often illiterate—were seizing control of the estates, there was resistance even to the simplest methods of accounting and cost calculation. As Allende told Debray, “We shall have real power when copper and steel are under our control, when saltpeter is genuinely under our control, when we have put far-reaching land reform measures into effect, when we control imports and exports through the state, when we have collectivized a major portion of our national production.” But it wasn’t just the economy that Allende was trying to control. He was also taking steps to centralize the government and restrict political freedom. He saw his most important political reform as replacing the bicameral legislature with a single chamber in order to strengthen the presidency and weaken congress’s ability to block his objectives. It would also have the power to override judicial decisions. He called the proposed new body the “People’s Assembly,” but he never gained sufficient support from the “people” to call a plebiscite on the question.

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.

On the first day of the meeting that would become known as the United States Constitutional Convention, Edmund Randolph of Virginia kicked off the proceedings. Addressing his great fellow Virginian General George Washington, victorious hero of the War of Independence, who sat in the chair, Randolph hoped to convince delegates sent by seven, so far, of the thirteen states, with more on the way, to abandon the confederation formed by the states that had sent them—the union that had declared American independence from England and won the war—and to replace it with another form of government. “Our chief danger,” Randolph announced, “arises from the democratic parts of our constitutions.” This was in May of 1787, in Philadelphia, in the same ground-floor room of the Pennsylvania State House, borrowed from the Pennsylvania assembly, where in 1776 the Continental Congress had declared independence. Others in the room already agreed with Randolph: James Madison, also of Virginia; Robert Morris of Pennsylvania; Gouverneur Morris of New York and Pennsylvania; Alexander Hamilton of New York; Washington. They wanted the convention to institute a national government. As we know, their effort was a success. We often say the confederation was a weak government, the national government stronger. But the more important difference has to do with whom those governments acted on. The confederation acted on thirteen state legislatures. The nation would act on all American citizens, throughout all the states. That would be a mighty change. To persuade his fellow delegates to make it, Randolph was reeling off a list of what he said were potentially fatal problems, urgently in need, he said, of immediate repair. He reiterated what he called the chief threat to the country. “None of the constitutions”—he meant those of the states’ governments—“have provided sufficient checks against the democracy.” The term “democracy” could mean different things, sometimes even contradictory things, in 1787. People used it to mean “the mob,” which historians today would call “the crowd,” a movement of people denied other access to power, involving protest, riot, what recently has been called occupation, and often violence against people and property. But sometimes “democracy” just meant assertive lawmaking by a legislative body staffed by gentlemen highly sensitive to the desires of their genteel constituents. Men who condemned the working-class mob as a democracy sometimes prided themselves on being “democratical” in their own representative bodies. What Randolph meant that morning by “democracy” is clear. When he said “our chief danger arises from the democratic parts of our constitutions,” and “none of the constitutions have provided sufficient checks against the democracy,” he was speaking in a context of social and economic turmoil, pervading all thirteen states, which the other delegates were not only aware of but also had good reason to be urgently worried about. So familiar was the problem that Randolph would barely have had to explain it, and he didn’t explain it in detail. Yet he did say things whose context everyone there would already have understood.

It was only when a new single-party constituent assembly usurped the power of Congress in 2017, nearly two decades after Chávez first won the presidency, that Venezuela was widely recognized as an autocracy. This

James Monroe served as the fifth President of the United States between 1817 and 1825. He was from Virginia and the last of the Founding Fathers to serve as President and was a wounded veteran of the Revolutionary War. After the war he studied law and served as a delegate in the Continental Congress. As president he and John Quincy Adams, who served as his Secretary of State, eased the prevailing partisan tensions bringing about what was called an “Era of Good Feelings.” He easily won a second term in office and in 1823, announced that the United States opposed any European intervention in the Americas by European Countries by enacting the Monroe Doctrine. Monroe strongly supported the founding of independent colonies in Africa for the return of freed slaves. These colonies eventually formed the nation of Liberia, whose capital was named Monrovia in his honor. In 1825 Monroe retired to New York City where he died on the 4th of July, 1831.

He won that election in the byways,” Bill Deason says. Ava Cox says: “That’s what made Lyndon Johnson be elected the first time.… He told them: ‘I know what you people are up against. Because I’m one of you people.’ And it wasn’t the people of the cities who elected him, but it was the people from the forks of the creeks.” That was indeed the reason he won—and the reason no politician had thought he could win. The polls had not shown his strength at the forks of the creeks, for no poll bothered with the people at the forks of the creeks, as no candidate visited them. But Lyndon Johnson had visited these people. And they had sent him to Congress. N

Our neighbor, Hugo du Toit, was a very handsome Afrikaner, who, with his two sisters, was a close friend of Louis Botha, the first Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa, and also a close friend of General Jan Christiaan Smuts, the Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa from 1919 until 1924. He became a South African military leader during World War II. Although some accuse Smuts of having started apartheid, he later stood against it and was a force behind the founding of the United Nations. He is still considered one of the most eminent Afrikaners ever…. At his expansive farm house, Hugo had autographed photos of both men on his study wall. Parties were frequently held at my grandparents’ home and the thought of roasted turkeys and potatoes which Cherie had prepared, brings back warm memories of a delightful era, now lost forever.” The Colonial History of South Africa For many years South Africa was occupied primarily by Dutch farmers known as Boers who had first arrived in the Cape of Good Hope in 1652 when Jan van Riebeeck established the Dutch East India Company and later by British settlers who arrived in the Cape colony after the Napoleonic wars in the 1820’s, on board the sailing ships the Nautilus and the Chapman. For the most part the two got along like oil and water. After 1806, some of the Dutch-speaking settlers left the Cape Colony and trekked into the interior where they established the Boer Republics. There were many skirmishes between them, as well as with the native tribes. In 1877 after the First Boer War between the Dutch speaking farmers and the English, the Transvaal Boer republic was seized by Britain. Hostilities continued until the Second Boer War erupted in October of 1899, costing the British 22,000 lives. The Dutch speaking farmers, now called Afrikaners, lost 7,000 men and having been overrun by the English acknowledged British sovereignty by signing the peace agreement, known as the “Treaty of Vereeniging,” on May 31, 1902. Although this thumbnail sketch of South African history leaves much unsaid, the colonial lifestyle continued on for the privileged white ruling class until the white, pro-apartheid National Party, was peacefully ousted when the African National Congress won a special national election. Nelson Mandela was elected as the first black president on May 9, 1994. On May 10, 1994, Mandela was inaugurated as The Republic of South Africa's new freely elected President with Thabo Mbeki and F.W. De Klerk as his vice-presidents.

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.

than one hundred black Louisianans exercising political liberty. The duty of protecting citizens’ equal rights, the Court said, “rests alone with the States.” Such judicial conservatism and embrace of states’ rights doctrine, practiced by the justices, all of whom had been appointed by Republican presidents Lincoln and Grant, left a resounding imprint on what remained of Reconstruction.55 In the disputed election of 1876, Tilden in all likelihood won the popular vote by more than two hundred thousand votes and 3 percent, but did not become president. When election returns poured in, it appeared that Hayes had failed, but the three “unredeemed” Southern states of Louisiana, Florida, and South Carolina were fiercely and violently contested. With 185 electoral votes needed for victory, without the three disputed states Tilden had 184 and Hayes 166. Both sides claimed they had won and accused their opponents of fraud in the disputed states, although most of the bloodshed and intimidation committed in those states had been against black Republican voters. To resolve this unprecedented situation, Congress established a fifteen-member electoral commission, balanced between Democrats and Republicans. Because Republicans held a majority in the overall Congress, they prevailed 8–7 on repeated attempts to “count” the confused returns. As the midwinter crisis dragged on in Washington, it appeared Hayes would become president. Democrats controlled the House and launched a filibuster to block action on the count.56

Biden should be the first motherfucker that wants to fucking make sure the audit ... he came on TV, fucking addressed the nation in fucking said we were extremists. Why don’t you just say, “hey, maybe these guys want to be heard?” We’ll talk to ... we’ll talk to Joe Biden. We’re not, we’re not fucking the NBA players that won’t even talk to Trump. We’ll talk to Joe Biden and we’ll talk to him. me: Who ... exactly would do that? Who would do the talking to Joe Biden? Like, is there an organization for what’s happening here? Dominican Guy: (proudly) I’ll talk to Joe Biden myself.

A Senate of Josh Hawleys certainly won’t stop Trump. Neither will House Republicans led by a Speaker who has made himself a willing hostage to Trump and his most unhinged supporters in Congress. I am very sad to say that America can no longer count on a body of elected Republicans to protect our republic.

You do know who I am, don’t you, Trip? You understand how serious I am about protecting my clients while paving their way into history. Can you really be that stupid to think I would take you at your word? I protect my investments…even from themselves.” “I have a wife, daughters.” “You should have thought of them before you hired two sex workers in less than twenty-four hours.” He was visibly shaking now. “I warned you what would happen if you crossed me,” I reminded him. “I didn’t cross you. This isn’t what it looks like,” he sputtered. “The girl you hired this morning? She turned eighteen last week. Your oldest daughter is what? Sixteen?” I asked. “I-It’s a sex addiction. I’ll get help,” Trip decided. “We’ll keep it quiet, I’ll get treatment, and everything will be fine.” I shook my head. “I see it’s not sinking in yet. You’re finished. There’s no way for you to throw yourself on the mercy of the court of public opinion, because they’ll eat you alive. Especially seeing as how you missed the vote on veterans benefits because you were paying to have your cock sucked.” Little beads of sweat dotted his forehead. “You threw it all away because you couldn’t keep your dick in your pants. Your career, your future. Your family. Your wife will leave you. Your daughters are old enough that they’ll hear every salacious detail of Daddy’s extracurricular sex life. They’ll never look at you the same again.” I nodded at the open folder in his lap. “I’ve already had a press release drafted about how my firm was forced to sever ties with you after learning about your sexual exploits.” He closed his eyes, and I had to turn away when his lip began to tremble. “Please. Don’t do this. I’ll do anything,” he begged. He was yet another weak, pathetic addition to the long list of men who risked everything just to get off. “I’ll give you a choice. You’ll resign from Congress immediately. You’ll go home and tell your wife and daughters that you had an epiphany and that your time together is precious. You don’t want to work a job that keeps you away from them so much anymore. You’ll go to fucking therapy. Or you won’t. You’ll save your marriage or you won’t. One thing you won’t do is ever cheat on your wife again. Because if you do, I’ll deliver copies of every photo and every video to your wife, your parents, your church, and every member of the media between here and fucking Atlanta.” Trip put his head in his hands and let out a broken moan. I almost wished he’d put up more of a fight, then smothered that feeling. “Get out. Go home, and don’t ever give me a reason to share the information I’ve collected.” “I can be better. I can do better,” he said, rising from the chair like a puppet on strings. “I don’t give a fuck,” I said, leading the way to the door. He was weak. No one could build a foundation on weakness.

ROWLAND HAD ALWAYS ADMIRED ABRAHAM LINCOLN. SURE, LINCOLN was remembered for his monumental successes. Elected president twice. Saved the Union. Ended slavery. Won the war. But he’d always believed that the key to success was failure. And Lincoln had a long list of those. In 1832, defeated for election to the Illinois legislature. In 1833, failed in business. In 1835, the woman he loved died. In 1836, had a nervous breakdown. In 1838, denied being the speaker of the Illinois legislature. In 1843, defeated for Congress. In 1848, lost his bid to be reelected. In 1849, rejected for land officer. In 1854, lost the election for the U.S. Senate. In 1856, rejected for nomination as vice president. In 1858, defeated again for the U.S. Senate. No question. Lincoln failed his way to success. And the same could be said for himself. Yet his failure bordered on the unthinkable.

Identify items that seem likely to change. If the requirements have been done well, they include a list of potential changes and the likelihood of each change. In such a case, identifying the likely changes is easy. If the requirements don't cover potential changes, see the discussion that follows of areas that are likely to change on any project. Separate items that are likely to change. Compartmentalize each volatile component identified in step 1 into its own class or into a class with other volatile components that are likely to change at the same time. Isolate items that seem likely to change. Design the interclass interfaces to be insensitive to the potential changes. Design the interfaces so that changes are limited to the inside of the class and the outside remains unaffected. Any other class using the changed class should be unaware that the change has occurred. The class's interface should protect its secrets. Here are a few areas that are likely to change: Business rules. Business rules tend to be the source of frequent software changes. Congress changes the tax structure, a union renegotiates its contract, or an insurance company changes its rate tables. If you follow the principle of information hiding, logic based on these rules won't be strewn throughout your program. The logic will stay hidden in a single dark corner of the system until it needs to be changed.

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

Our child has Down Syndrome. USHA claims that we violated several health care laws, so now they are going to take him away at the end of the month. I’m wondering if the FBI can do anything,” “I’m sorry to hear that. No, the FBI can’t do anything, but I wish we could. When I worked for the Douglas County Sheriff’s department, we were called out a lot when parents objected to the heavy-handedness of USHA. USHA always won the argument. Once they were given power, they kept taking more and more, so now they’re practically as powerful as DOJ. I don’t think Congress realized what they were creating back in the 2010’s. Anyway, you must be wondering what I called you in here for.

While they were in training for the perilous mission, James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman were brutally murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Recognizing the doubts and fears that were tearing at the young people, Moses called them together and told them that anyone who decided not to go on would not be considered a coward. To those who chose to continue, all he could promise was that he would be at their side. No one withdrew. Mississippi Freedom Summer was the culmination of the civil rights struggle in the South, forcing the U.S. Congress to write into law the rights that grassroots activists had already won on the ground.

The United States is trapped in a bad equilibrium. Because Americans historically distrust the government, they typically aren’t willing to delegate to the government authority to make decisions in the manner of other democratic societies. Instead, Congress mandates complex rules that reduce the government’s autonomy and make decisions slow and expensive. The government then doesn’t perform well, which confirms people’s original distrust. Under these circumstances, they are reluctant to pay higher taxes, which they feel the government will waste. But while resources are not the only, or even the main, source of government inefficiency, without them the government won’t function properly. Hence distrust of government becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Despite these supposedly stringent controls, however, the system was hampered by one major factor: during the mid to late 1950s, the Soviet film industry began expanding at an almost exponential rate, epitomised by the international success of Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Cranes are Flying, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1957. This resurgence owed a lot to the 20th Party Congress in 1956, at which Khrushchev denounced Stalinism, thereby precipitating the ‘Thaw’ that initiated the most liberal cultural climate in the Soviet Union for 30 years. The film industry thrived as a result. In 1955, 65 features were produced; by the early 1960s, this had risen to over 100 per year. Cinemas likewise doubled in number, from 59,000 in 1955 to 118,000 in 1965. Aside from Kalatozov, other directors rose to prominence between the late fifties and mid sixties, such as Elem Klimov, Larissa Shepitko and Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky, and the only two Soviet directors Tarkovsky professed to admire, Otar Iosseliani and Sergei Parajanov.

For many years South Africa was occupied primarily by Dutch farmers known as Boers who had first arrived in the Cape of Good Hope in 1652 when Jan van Riebeeck established the Dutch East India Company and later by British settlers who arrived in the Cape colony after the Napoleonic wars in the 1820’s, on board the sailing ships the Nautilus and the Chapman. For the most part the two got along like oil and water. After 1806, some of the Dutch-speaking settlers left the Cape Colony and trekked into the interior where they established the Boer Republics. There were many skirmishes between them as well as with the native tribes. In 1877 after the First Boer War between the Dutch speaking farmers and the English the Transvaal Boer republic was seized by Britain. Hostilities continued until the Second Boer War erupted in October of 1899 costing the British 22,000 lives. The Dutch speaking farmers, now called Afrikaners, lost 7,000 men and having been overrun by the English acknowledged British sovereignty signing the peace agreement, known as the “Treaty of Vereeniging,” on May 31, 1902. Although this thumbnail sketch of South African history leaves much unsaid, the colonial lifestyle continued for the privileged white ruling class until the white, pro-apartheid National Party was peacefully ousted and the African National Congress won. Nelson Mandela was elected as the first black president on May 9, 1994. On May 10, 1994, Mandela was inaugurated as The Republic of South Africa's new freely elected President with Thabo Mbeki and F.W. De Klerk as his vice-presidents.

Favorable tax treatment isn’t a holy writ. But before saving money over decades in a special account, people need to have faith that future politicians won’t rewrite the rules…. Congress has shown how carelessly it is willing to break its end of the bargain.” —The Wall Street Journal, December 23, 2019

Now, in Lucknow, itself a great centre of Islamic learning and culture, the president of the Muslim League accused ‘the present leadership of the Congress’ of ‘alienating the Mussalmans of India more and more by pursuing a policy which is exclusively Hindu’. Jinnah claimed that in the six provinces where the Congress was in power, Gandhi’s party had ‘by their words, deeds and programmes shown that the Mussalmans cannot expect any justice or fair play at their hands’. When a report of this speech reached Gandhi in Segaon, he was moved to protest. The ‘whole of your speech’, he wrote to Jinnah, ‘is a declaration of war’. He added: ‘Only it takes two to make a quarrel. You won’t find me one, even if I cannot become a peace-maker'.

BN Jog, a contemporary RSS author argues that even after the 1937 elections, though often mentioned as proof that the Muslim electorate was largely 'secular' because of the poor results for the Muslim league, had already disproven the Congress claim: most Muslim votes had gone to other Muslim-dominated parties, chiefly the Unionist party of Sir Sikandar Hayat Khan in Panjab and the Krishak Praja party of Fazlul Haq in Bengal. Even the supposedly defeated Muslim League had won 108 of the 492 Muslim-reserved seats in 1937, against 26 for Congress. So, Jog concludes, the Muslim vote was largely motivated by sectional interests rather than by commitment to the national struggle.

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

To his eternal delight, the Chicago Daily Tribune printed its front page before the polls had closed, with the blazing headline: DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN. In one of the most famous photographs in American political history, a beaming Truman holds up the paper in triumph. He had reason to rejoice: Not only had he won a miraculous political victory, but the Democrats had retaken both houses of Congress. The Republican reign on Capitol Hill was over after two short years, and the Democrats reasserted their longstanding dominance in Washington.

Mr. Premier, we’re running out of time,” I said, “so let me cut to the chase. Before I walked into this room, I assume, the plan was for all of you to leave here and announce that the U.S. was responsible for the failure to arrive at a new agreement. You think that if you hold out long enough, the Europeans will get desperate and sign another Kyoto-style treaty. The thing is, I’ve been very clear to them that I can’t get our Congress to ratify the treaty you want. And there is no guarantee Europe’s voters, or Canada’s voters, or Japan’s voters, are going to be willing to keep putting their industries at a competitive disadvantage and paying money to help poor countries deal with climate change when the world’s biggest emitters are sitting on the sidelines. “Of course, I may be wrong,” I said. “Maybe you can convince everyone that we’re to blame. But that won’t stop the planet from getting warmer. And remember, I’ve got my own megaphone, and it’s pretty big. If I leave this room without an agreement, then my first stop is the hall downstairs where all the international press is waiting for news. And I’m going to tell them that I was prepared to commit to a big reduction in our greenhouse gases, and billions of dollars in new assistance, and that each of you decided it was better to do nothing. I’m going to say the same thing to all the poor countries that stood to benefit from that new money. And to all the people in your own countries that stand to suffer the most from climate change. And we’ll see who they believe.

Another way to reduce the binary is to shift to proportional representation, where seats in Congress get allocated in proportion to the votes won by each party.

There’s still a lingering afterglow here from the euphoria earlier. A feeling that maybe some great victory has been won and there is a reason to be optimistic. On the other hand, I see a guy tying a hangman’s noose when I get closer to the monument. He grins maniacally as he ties it. “Traitors get the rope,” he says in a hollow, emotionless voice that sends chills down my spine. “Hey man, you’re gonna do whatever you want to do, I’m not going to try to stop you. I’m just gonna say that I think that might backfire.” I say, pointing at the tied rope in his hands. “I think that if anyone in the media sees that they’re gonna say it’s racist. I think you’re running the risk of making your whole movement look bad. This isn’t my fight, but you might want to think about that. OK, I spoke my piece.” There is a pause, he stares at me, his expression unreadable. “Traitors get the rope,” he says in a hollow, emotionless voice that sends chills down my spine. It’s like he’s a recording. He just says the exact same thing, in the exact same way, every time anyone tries to talk to him. Why do I even care if these people make themselves look bad? They’re not my people. At least some of them look bad because they are bad; right? Do I really think the guy with the hangman’s noose is just misunderstood? In my travels, I’ve seen many instances where the media was unfair to Trump supporters, but I’ve also met some damn creepy mother-f*ckers, especially in the last few weeks. Maybe the old protester in me just hates to see all this effort go into an anti-government demonstration and have nothing good come out of it.

The corporations silenced the president. I, for one, had not realized that was how the system worked. And I am not a little concerned about what that precedent will mean for future presidents, presidential candidates, and candidates running for any elected office. All of them literally cannot win elections without social media and they apparently can be kicked off social media whenever the owners of the companies get mad at them. Even if the outcome in Trump’s case might seem reasonable on the surface, what system led to that outcome? This move puts private, for-profit social media companies in a position to control what any politician can say, not just Trump. But hey, that won’t contribute to the collapse of my democracy later on down the line, right?

He smiled on camera with movie stars for decades when he was a reality TV star; maybe he really did believe they were his friends, but now they won’t even talk to him. It’s like he traded all his old friends for this crowd, and now it’s all he has left. It almost sounds lonely. Well, at least he and the crowd have each other. At every event, they literally chant, “We love you!” and he insists they promise to love him more than any other politician. They have a co-dependent relationship.

Even those of us who didn’t get sick or get sucked into poverty were prisoners in our own homes during the lockdown. There were no bars, no movie theaters, no sports, no concerts, no public entertainment of any kind. If we left the house to buy food, we had to wear medical masks. No one had a face anymore! No one could smile at you. We were a giant, soulless blob with a thousand vacant eyes. Our entire population was cut off from everything that gave us joy and everyone around me succumbed to insanity ... they spent all their time bragging about arguments they’d won on the internet with people they had never met.

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.

For those of you who are familiar with the United States Government, the idea would be roughly the same, though this one should work since we won’t have a congress.

Men can't all think alike, and the trouble with the Southern people always has been that they won't tolerate any difference of opinion. If God Almighty had intended all men to think just alike, He might just as well have made but one man....My opinion is that the only true solution for Southern troubles is for the people to accept cordially and in good faith all the results of the war, including the reconstruction measures, the acts of Congress, negro suffrage, etc., and live up to them like men. If they would do this, and encourage Northern immigration, and treat all men fairly, whites and blacks, the troubles would soon be over, and in less than five years, the South would be in the enjoyment of greater prosperity than ever. -- JAMES LONGSTREET, Interview with correspondent from the Indianapolis Journal, September 24, 1874.

Let woman’s claim be as broad in the concrete as in the abstract. We take our stand on the solidarity of humanity, the oneness of life, and the unnaturalness and injustice of all special favoritisms, whether of sex, race, country, or condition. If one link of the chain be broken, the chain is broken. A bridge is no stronger than its weakest part, and a cause is not worthier than its weakest element. Least of all can woman’s cause afford to decry the weak. We want, then, as toilers for the universal triumph of justice and human rights, to go to our homes from this Congress, demanding an entrance not through a gateway for ourselves, our race, our sex, or our sect, but a grand highway for humanity. The colored woman feels that woman’s cause is one and universal; and that not till the image of God, whether in parian or ebony, is sacred and inviolable; not till race, color, sex, and condition are seen as the accidents, and not the substance of life; not till the universal title of humanity to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is conceded to be inalienable to all; not till then is woman’s lesson taught and woman’s cause won — not the white woman’s, nor the black woman’s, not the red woman’s, but the cause of every man and of every woman who has writhed silently under a mighty wrong. Woman’s wrongs are thus indissolubly linked with undefended woe, and the acquirement of her “rights” will mean the final triumph of all right over might, the supremacy of the moral forces of reason, and justice, and love in the government of the nations of earth.

When McCarthy and I spoke on November 5, we discussed the fact that although the election hadn’t yet been called for Joe Biden, it seemed likely that would happen soon. When Biden’s tally in the Electoral College reached 270, the dynamic would shift and people would start looking toward the future, the next administration, and the new Congress. McCarthy appeared to be dealing in reality. This made it all the more surprising when I saw his appearance on Fox News just a few hours later: “President Trump won this election,” Kevin proclaimed, “so everyone who is listening, do not be quiet! Do not be silent about this! We cannot allow this to happen before our very eyes.” McCarthy knew that what he was saying was not true.

The religious right and the alt-right are bonded together by shared grievances over a supposedly lost America in which Christians don’t have to bake cakes for gay couples and white people don’t have to bow to “multiculturalism” or “political correctness.” But this fused political bloc does not actually long for a mythical past of the formerly “great” America that Trump idealized for them. Instead, it envisions a future in which America, and the hard-won values it codified over the past seven decades—desegregation and church-state separation by the Supreme Court; laws passed by Congress to protect the rights of minorities such as the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the 1965 Immigration Act; the advance of rights for women and LGBTQ people—loses its standing as a moral and political leader in the world and is transformed into a nativist power that accords different rights to different groups of people, based on race, religion, and ethnicity. For the ideologues of this bloc, America has so lost its bearings that they must look now to leadership outside of the United States to lead it out of an abyss. Their shared target: modern, pluralistic liberal democracy that is led by what they would disparage as “globalists” who are destroying “Western civilization.

Over Donald’s lifetime, as his failures mounted despite my grandfather’s repeated—and extravagant—interventions, his struggle for legitimacy, which could never be won, turned into a scheme to make sure nobody found out that he’s never been legitimate at all. This has never been more true than it is now, and it is exactly the conundrum our country finds itself in: the government as it is currently constituted, including the executive branch, half of Congress, and the majority of the Supreme Court, is entirely in the service of protecting Donald’s ego; that has become almost its entire purpose.

Unlike my grandfather, Donald has always struggled for legitimacy—as an adequate replacement for Freddy, as a Manhattan real estate developer or casino tycoon, and now as the occupant of the Oval Office who can never escape the taint of being utterly without qualification or the sense that his “win” was illegitimate. Over Donald’s lifetime, as his failures mounted despite my grandfather’s repeated—and extravagant—interventions, his struggle for legitimacy, which could never be won, turned into a scheme to make sure nobody found out that he’s never been legitimate at all. This has never been more true than it is now, and it is exactly the conundrum our country finds itself in: the government as it is currently constituted, including the executive branch, half of Congress, and the majority of the Supreme Court, is entirely in the service of protecting Donald’s ego; that has become almost its entire purpose.

If you let your eight-year-old watch Game of Thrones, I'm not going to judge you. But just know that Moana or Frozen just won't have the same kind of giddy-up once they've seen Khaleesi in sexual congress with King of the North.

Congress is balking; in fact, they have got to the point where they won’t do anything if they think it’s what I want.

While whites were still the majority, they established preferences for blacks and Hispanics that took such deep root that Congress and state legislatures have been powerless to abolish them. These programs would provoke outrage if they were practiced in favor of whites, but they have been partially curbed only by state ballot initiatives and equivocal Supreme Court decisions. Demography would change this. In 2006, the state of Michigan voted to abolish racial preferences in college admissions and state contracting, but the measure passed only because whites were still a majority. Eighty-five percent of blacks and 69 percent of Hispanics voted to maintain racial preferences for themselves. When they have a voting majority nothing will prevent non-whites from reestablishing and extending preferences. Are there portents in the actions of Eric Holder, the first black attorney general, appointed by the first black president? J. Christian Adams, a white Justice Department lawyer resigned in protest when the department dropped a case of voter intimidation the previous administration had already won by default against the New Black Panther Party. In this 2008 case, fatigue-clad blacks waved billy clubs at white voters and yelled such things as “You are about to be ruled by the black man, cracker!” Mr. Adams called it “the simplest and most obvious violation of federal law I saw in my Justice Department career.” He believed the decision to dismiss the case reflected hostility to the rights of whites. He said some of his colleagues called selective prosecution “payback time,” adding that “citizens would be shocked to learn about the open and pervasive hostility within the Justice Department to bringing civil rights cases against nonwhite defendants on behalf of white victims.” Christopher Coates, who was the head of the voting section of the Civil Rights Division, agreed with this assessment. In sworn testimony before Congress, he called the dismissal of the Black Panthers case a “travesty of justice” and described a “hostile atmosphere” against “race-neutral enforcement” of the Voting Rights Act. He said the department had a “deep-seated opposition to the equal enforcement of the Voting Rights Act against racial minorities and for the protection of white voters who have been discriminated against.” How will the department behave when whites become a minority?

All I have I would have given, gladly, not to be standing here today.” The chamber became hushed. He had struck exactly the right note of sorrowful humility. It was a good start, George thought. Johnson continued in the same vein, speaking with slow dignity. If he felt the impulse to rush, he was controlling it firmly. He wore a dark-blue suit and tie, and a shirt with a tab-fastened collar, a style considered formal in the South. He looked occasionally from one side to the other, speaking to the whole of the chamber and at the same time seeming to command it. Echoing Martin Luther King, he talked of dreams: Kennedy’s dreams of conquering space, of education for all children, of the Peace Corps. “This is our challenge,” he said. “Not to hesitate, not to pause, not to turn about and linger over this evil moment, but to continue on our course so that we may fulfill the destiny that history has set for us.” He had to stop, then, because of the applause. Then he said: “Our most immediate tasks are here on this hill.” This was the crunch. Capitol Hill, where Congress sat, had been at war with the president for most of 1963. Congress had the power to delay legislation, and used it often, even when the president had campaigned and won public support for his plans. But since John Kennedy announced his civil rights bill they had gone on strike, like a factory full of militant workers, delaying everything, mulishly refusing to pass even routine bills, scorning public opinion and the democratic process. “First,” said Johnson, and George held his breath while he waited to hear what the new president would put first. “No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long.” George leaped to his feet, clapping for joy. He was not the only one: the applause burst out again, and this time went on longer than previously. Johnson waited for it to die down, then said: “We have talked long enough in this country about civil rights. We have talked for one hundred years or more. It is time, now, to write the next chapter—and to write it in the books of law.” They applauded again. Euphoric, George looked at the few black faces in the chamber: five Negro congressmen, including Gus Hawkins of California, who actually looked white; Mr. and Mrs. Wright in the presidential box, clapping; a scatter of dark faces among the spectators in the gallery. Their expressions showed relief, hope, and gladness. Then his eye fell on the rows of seats behind the cabinet, where the senior senators sat, most of them Southerners, sullen and resentful. Not a single one was joining in the applause. •

Today most Puerto Ricans are unhappy with their current political status, and the most popular alternative is statehood, while a minority prefer more autonomy. The most recent poll, just three months before the hurricane, showed a 97 percent majority for statehood, although opponents said the vote was rigged and refused to take part in the poll. Five years earlier, statehood won 61 percent of the vote. 10 Yet Congress will not grant statehood to the island in the foreseeable future because, as with the District of Columbia, Republicans oppose what they see as the creation of two new Senate votes aligned firmly with the Democrats.

After opposition parties won control of the Venezuelan congress in a landslide election in December 2015, they hoped to use the legislature to check the power of autocratic president Nicolás Maduro. Thus, the new congress passed an amnesty law that would free 120 political prisoners, and it voted to block Maduro’s declaration of a state of economic emergency (which granted him vast power to govern by decree). To fend off this challenge, Maduro turned to the supreme court, which was packed with loyalists. The chavista court effectively incapacitated the legislature by ruling nearly all of its bills—including the amnesty law, efforts to revise the national budget, and the rejection of the state of emergency—unconstitutional. According to the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo, the court ruled against congress twenty-four times in six months, striking down “all the laws it has approved.

program emanating from the highest echelons of the U.S. government to prevent Salvatore Allende from taking power. Having won the election with a plurality of the votes, Allende's presidency needed confirmation by the Chilean congress.

The assassination of Indira Gandhi, on the last day of October 1984, just ahead of the general elections, had a cataclysmic effect. It is common wisdom that the RSS worked for the Congress party in the December 1984 elections. Whatever be the case, the Congress won 414 of 545 seats in the Lok Sabha, its biggest ever win that has never been bettered. The BJP was routed as it could merely win two seats. Atal Bihari Vajpayee also lost. The BJP merely got around 7 per cent of the votes against the Congress’s 49 per cent. Reading the writing on the wall, Atal had decided to abandon New Delhi, the seat that he got elected from in 1977 and 1980.

Of the Russian exiles, Lenin is the last I should have picked as a man of destiny. [Angelica] Balabanoff says that she cannot remember where she first met Lenin and that even when she became conscious of his existence he made no impression upon her. Many others would say the same, but I remember vividly my first meeting with him. It was at dinner in a small Greek restaurant in Soho, not far from the house which bears the tablet commemorating the fact that Karl Marx once lived there. I met him again at Stuttgart, [at the International Socialist Congress] in 1907. In the meantime he had acquired the reputation of being a brilliant student of Marxian economics, a dangerous antagonist in all intra-party controversies and a master of revolutionary tactics and sectarian conspiracies. At the conference he was usually surrounded by a small group of whispering disciples. … Some of Lenin's enemies believed that he was a paid emissary of the Russian police. His tactics and the dissensions which he promoted among the Russian socialists aroused suspicion. He was a fanatic, a disorganizer, a sectarian, who gave no indication in pre-war days of having the qualities of a national leader. He won his battles but they were always directed against his comrades.

Autumn Psalm A full year passed (the seasons keep me honest) since I last noticed this same commotion. Who knew God was an abstract expressionist? I’m asking myself—the very question I asked last year, staring out at this array of racing colors, then set in motion by the chance invasion of a Steller’s jay. Is this what people mean by speed of light? My usually levelheaded mulberry tree hurling arrows everywhere in sight— its bow: the out-of-control Virginia creeper my friends say I should do something about, whose vermilion went at least a full shade deeper at the provocation of the upstart blue, the leaves (half green, half gold) suddenly hyper in savage competition with that red and blue— tohubohu returned, in living color. Kandinsky: where were you when I needed you? My attempted poem would lie fallow a year; I was so busy focusing on the desert’s stinginess with everything but rumor. No place even for the spectrum’s introverts— rose, olive, gray—no pigment at all— and certainly no room for shameless braggarts like the ones that barge in here every fall and make me feel like an unredeemed failure even more emphatically than usual. And here they are again, their fleet allure still more urgent this time—the desert’s gone; I’m through with it, want something fuller— why shouldn’t a person have a little fun, some utterly unnecessary extravagance? Which was—at least I think it was—God’s plan when He set up (such things are never left to chance) that one split-second assignation with genuine, no-kidding-around omnipotence what, for lack of better words, I’m calling vision. You breathe in, and, for once, there’s something there. Just when you thought you’d learned some resignation, there’s real resistance in the nearby air until the entire universe is swayed. Even that desert of yours isn’t quite so bare and God’s not nonexistent; He’s just been waylaid by a host of what no one could’ve foreseen. He’s got plans for you: this red-gold-green parade is actually a fairly detailed outline. David never needed one, but he’s long dead and God could use a little recognition. He promises. It won’t go to His head and if you praise Him properly (an autumn psalm! Why didn’t I think of that?) you’ll have it made. But while it’s true that my Virginia creeper praises Him, its palms and fingers crimson with applause, that the local breeze is weaving Him a diadem, inspecting my tree’s uncut gold for flaws, I came to talk about the way that violet-blue sprang the greens and reds and yellows into action: actual motion. I swear it’s true though I’m not sure I ever took it in. Now I’d be prepared, if some magician flew into my field of vision, to realign that dazzle out my window yet again. It’s not likely, but I’m keeping my eyes open though I still wouldn’t be able to explain precisely what happened to these vines, these trees. It isn’t available in my tradition. For this, I would have to be Chinese, Wang Wei, to be precise, on a mountain, autumn rain converging on the trees, a cassia flower nearby, a cloud, a pine, washerwomen heading home for the day, my senses and the mountain so entirely in tune that when my stroke of blue arrives, I’m ready. Though there is no rain here: the air’s shot through with gold on golden leaves. Wang Wei’s so giddy he’s calling back the dead: Li Bai! Du Fu! Guys! You’ve got to see this—autumn sun! They’re suddenly hell-bent on learning Hebrew in order to get inside the celebration, which explains how they wound up where they are in my university library’s squashed domain. Poor guys, it was Hebrew they were looking for, but they ended up across the aisle from Yiddish— some Library of Congress cataloger’s sense of humor: the world’s calmest characters and its most skittish squinting at each other, head to head, all silently intoning some version of kaddish. Part 1

Pelosi won't send direct payments during your foreclosure because Pelosi is getting direct payments from those foreclosing on you.

It is hard to believe that Lenin would not have won the case had his health permitted him to argue it before the court of the party congress. But when the

Owing to my involvement in mental health treatment reform, the industrial complex that I am most familiar with is the “pharmaceutical-industrial complex.” Two high-profile politicians who have revolved between the doors of government and pharmaceutical corporations are Billy Tauzin and Mitch Daniels.6 When in Congress, Billy Tauzin, a Democrat turned Republican, played a key role in shepherding the Medicare prescription drug law into passage in ways that it would become a financial bonanza for Big Pharma. Tauzin fought hard—and won—the battle to ensure that the federal government would be prohibited from negotiating discounts with drug companies. The law was signed by George W. Bush in December 2003. A few months later, Tauzin announced that he was retiring from Congress to take the job as director of Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), a trade group representing giant pharmaceutical corporations. Through February 2010, Tauzin received an estimated annual salary of $2 million as head of PhRMA, where he became, essentially, Big Pharma’s leading lobbyist.

I don't vote. The 2 guys you get to pick to "run the country" are there as a charade to make you think you have choice. And to be fair, I'm sure these people make a lot of the day to day decisions that don't matter very much. But when you get down to it, if someone from the Rockefeller family, the Rothschild family, the duponts, or some of the other true owners of the country want something to happen, it's going to happen whether you like it or not. If they want you to have a car and house that run on oil or gas, then that's what you are going to get. Because those families own oil and gas companies. They own all the important land, they own the hospitals, the schools, tv stations that make the Grammys, x factor or American idol seem much more important than real events that you should actually care about that affect you. They own a huge chunk of the federal reserve, they lobby the congress, the senate, governors, judges, etc.to get exactly what they want when they want. You won't find these people on the Forbes list, because they don't fucking want you to know what they own and what they control. They want you to think the "walmart" Walton family are the richest family. Haha! Vote if you want to, but in reality it's like voting for Ronald McDonald vs. Grimace instead of the true executives of mcdonalds that actually run the company and make all the important decisions.

I think one of the things that people misunderstand is that they see the disagreements that we have, sometimes, as if it's dysfunction. And the disagreement is not dysfunction. The disagreement is the result of the design of this form of government. The whole idea was to find as many different points of view as we can identify in the country and put them under one dome and ask them to commit themselves to a process to reconcile their differences and put the country on a path forward. So that disagreement is not dysfunction. That disagreement is how it was intended to work. Where I think we fail sometimes is when we have members who won't commit themselves to the process. They're committed to their own ideology, less to a collaborative process of governing. The dome of the Capitol was intended to sit atop disagreement, but to provide us a venue to reconcile those disagreements, knowing that we're not gonna win every fight, and that we live to fight another day. Not enough people understand that.