Federal Express Quotes

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It was Thomas Edison who brought us electricity, not the Sierra Club. It was the Wright brothers who got us off the ground, not the Federal Aviation Administration. It was Henry Ford who ended the isolation of millions of Americans by making the automobile affordable, not Ralph Nader. Those who have helped the poor the most have not been those who have gone around loudly expressing 'compassion' for the poor, but those who found ways to make industry more productive and distribution more efficient, so that the poor of today can afford things that the affluent of yesterday could only dream about.
Thomas Sowell
There's no use in denying it: this has been a bad week. I've started drinking my own urine. I laugh spontaneously at nothing. Sometimes I sleep under my futon. I'm flossing my teeth constantly until my gums are aching and my mouth tastes like blood. Before dinner last night at 1500 with Reed Goodrich and Jason Rust I was almost caught at a Federal Express in Times Square trying to send the mother of one of the girls I killed last week what might be a dried-up, brown heart. And to Evelyn I successfully Federal Expressed, through the office, a small box of flies along with a note, typed by Jean, saying that I never, ever wanted to see her face again and, though she doesn't really need one, to go on a fucking diet. But there are also things that the average person would think are nice that I've done to celebrate the holiday, items I've bought Jean and had delivered to her apartment this morning: Castellini cotton napkins from Bendel's, a wicker chair from Jenny B. Goode, a taffeta table throw from Barney's, a vintage chain-mail-vent purse and a vintage sterling silver dresser set from Macy's, a white pine whatnot from Conran's, an Edwardian nine-carat-gold "gate" bracelet from Bergdorfs and hundreds upon hundreds of pink and white roses.
Bret Easton Ellis (American Psycho)
Chief Fox maintained a neutral expression, but I knew he had to be wondering exactly how insane Ted was on a scale of one to Lizzie Borden.
Annabel Chase (Great Balls of Fury (Federal Bureau of Magic, #1))
Think hard. Be as specific as possible. Ask yourself: “Exactly what is it that I am after every day?” If you are Federal Express, your clarity of purpose is get it there. If you are Disney, it is make people happy. If you are the Ohio State
Urban Meyer (Above the Line: Lessons in Leadership and Life from a Championship Program)
We have left behind the rosy agrarian rhetoric and slaveholding reality of Jeffersonian democracy and reside in the bustling world of trade, industry, stock markets, and banks that Hamilton envisioned. (Hamilton’s staunch abolitionism formed an integral feature of this economic vision.) He has also emerged as the uncontested visionary in anticipating the shape and powers of the federal government. At a time when Jefferson and Madison celebrated legislative power as the purest expression of the popular will, Hamilton argued for a dynamic executive branch and an independent judiciary, along with a professional military, a central bank, and an advanced financial system. Today, we are indisputably the heirs to Hamilton’s America, and to repudiate his legacy is, in many ways, to repudiate the modern world.
Ron Chernow (Alexander Hamilton)
This may come as a surprise to some of you, but Federal Express is not a wholly owned subsidiary of Bear, Stearns & Co. Inc. I mention this because we have been spending $50,000 a month with them and there is no explanation to justify this expenditure unless it was an intercompany transfer.
Alan C. Greenberg (Memos from the Chairman)
When the First Amendment was finally approved, it contained two separate clauses on religion, each with an independent scope of action. The first clause (called the Establishment Clause) prohibited the federal government from establishing a single national denomination; the second clause (called the Free Exercise Clause) prohibited the federal government from interfering with the people’s public religious expressions and acknowledgments.
David Barton (Separation of Church and State: What the Founders Meant)
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.
Michael J. Fox (Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist)
Because the American federal government uses mercenaries in warfare and American state governments pay corporations to run prisons, the use of violence in the United States is already highly privatized. What is novel is a president who wishes to maintain, while in office, a personal security force which during his campaign used force against dissenters. As a candidate, the president ordered a private security detail to clear opponents from rallies, but also encouraged the audience itself to remove people who expressed different opinions. A protestor would first be greeted with boos, then with frenetic cries of “USA,” and then be forced to leave the rally. At one campaign rally the candidate said, “There’s a remnant left over. Maybe get the remnant out. Get the remnant out.” The crowd, taking its cue, then tried to root out other people who might be dissenters, all the while crying “USA.” The candidate interjected: “Isn’t this more fun than a regular boring rally? To me, it’s fun.” This kind of mob violence was meant to transform the political atmosphere, and it did.
Timothy Snyder (On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century)
You “burn” your way into the mind by narrowing the focus to a single word or concept. It’s the ultimate marketing sacrifice. Federal Express was able to put the word overnight into the minds of its prospects because it sacrificed its product line and focused on overnight package delivery only. In a way, the law of leadership—it’s better to be first than to be better—enables the first brand or company to own a word in the mind of the prospect. But the word the leader owns is so simple that it’s invisible. The leader owns the word that stands for the category. For example, IBM owns computer. This is another way of saying that the brand becomes a generic name for the category. “We need an IBM machine.” Is there any doubt that a computer is being requested? You can also test the validity of a leadership claim by a word association test. If the given words are computer, copier, chocolate bar, and cola, the four most associated words are IBM, Xerox, Hershey’s, and Coke. An astute leader will go one step further to solidify its position. Heinz owns the word ketchup. But Heinz went on to isolate the most important ketchup attribute. “Slowest ketchup in the West” is how the company
Al Ries (The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing)
[T]he Federal Communications Commission should reestablish two principles that formerly served this country well: the public service requirement and the fairness doctrine. Every television and radio station should once again be required to devote a meaningful percentage of its programming to public service broadcasting. The public, after all, owns the airwaves through which signals are broadcast, and the rights-of-way in which cables are strung. And every television and radio station should once again have to follow the fairness doctrine: those with opposing views should have the right to respond to viewpoints expressed on the station.
Bernie Sanders (Outsider in the White House)
To blindly trust government is to automatically vest it with excessive power. To distrust government is simply to trust humanity - to trust in the ability of average people to peacefully, productively coexist without some official policing their every move. The State is merely another human institution - less creative than Microsoft, less reliable than Federal Express, less responsible than the average farmer husbanding his land, and less prudent than the average citizen spending his own paycheck.
James Bovard
Willing to take heat on the issue, Grant showed courage and fairness in endorsing merciful treatment for Lee. “Although it would meet with opposition in the North to allow Lee the benefit of Amnesty,” Grant told Halleck, “I think it would have the best possible effect towards restoring good feeling and peace in the South to have him come in.” Any chance for such a harmonious outcome was shattered in late May when federal judge John C. Underwood, a northern abolitionist, convened a grand jury in Norfolk, Virginia, for the express purpose of indicting Lee and other Confederate leaders for treason.
Ron Chernow (Grant)
When I placed the album cover side by side with the screenshot of the game screen, the two symbols matched exactly. 2112’s title track is an epic seven-part song, over twenty minutes in length. The song tells the story of an anonymous rebel living in the year 2112, a time when creativity and self-expression have been outlawed. The red star on the album’s cover was the symbol of the Solar Federation, the oppressive interstellar society in the story. The Solar Federation was controlled by a group of “priests,” who are described in Part II of the song, titled “The Temples of Syrinx.” Its lyrics told me exactly where the Crystal Key was hidden:
Ernest Cline (Ready Player One)
Only the myopic magnifying lens of the television camera maintains the demonstration, march, and picketing as a modality of political expression; they have otherwise faded into meaninglessness since the end of the Vietnam War with the shift of urban form and activity. These acts and activities have been displaced over the past decade from the square and main street to the windswept emptiness of City Hall Mall or Federal Building Plaza. To encounter a ragtag mob of protesters in such places today renders them enve more pathetic, their marginality enforced by a physcial displacement into so unimportant, uninhabited, and unloved a civic location.
Trevor Boddy
The final standards do a good job of setting the bar for a more environmentally responsible kind of farming but, as perhaps was inevitable as soon as bureaucratic and industrial thinking was brought to bear, many of the philosophical values embodied in the word "organic" - the sorts of values expressed by Albert Howard - did not survive the federal rule making process.
Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals)
Some USDA inspectors have expressed grave concern about the unhygienic conditions in meat plants, and yet they have little voice to enact change. They no longer have the authority to stop the line if they notice something suspicious, nor can they take remedial action. In fact, in order for a federal inspector's complaint to be seriously considered, the company itself must agree that there is a problem.
Melanie Joy (Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows: An Introduction to Carnism)
The trial, despite the subserviency of the court to the Nazi authorities, cast a great deal of suspicion on Goering and the Nazis, but it came too late to have any practical effect. For Hitler had lost no time in exploiting the Reichstag fire to the limit.   On the day following the fire, February 28, he prevailed on President Hindenburg to sign a decree “for the Protection of the People and the State” suspending the seven sections of the constitution which guaranteed individual and civil liberties. Described as a “defensive measure against Communist acts of violence endangering the state,” the decree laid down that:      Restrictions on personal liberty, on the right of free expression of opinion, including freedom of the press; on the rights of assembly and association; and violations of the privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications; and warrants for house searchers, orders for confiscations as well as restrictions on property, are also permissible beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed.   In addition, the decree authorized the Reich government to take over complete power in the federal states when necessary and imposed the death sentence for a number of crimes, including “serious disturbances of the peace” by armed persons.8   Thus with one stroke Hitler was able not only to legally gag his opponents and arrest them at his will but, by making the trumped-up Communist threat “official,” as it were, to throw millions of the middle class and the peasantry into a frenzy of fear that unless they voted for National Socialism at the elections a week hence, the Bolsheviks might take over.
William L. Shirer (The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany)
De facto segregation, we tell ourselves, has various causes. when African Americans moved into a neighborhood like Ferguson, a few racially prejudiced white families decided to leave, and then as the number of black families grew, the neighborhood deteriorated, and "white flight" followed. Real estate agents steered whites away from black neighborhoods, and blacks away from white ones. Banks discriminated with "redlining," refusing to give mortgages to African Americans or extracting unusually severe terms from them with subprime loans. African Americans haven't generally gotten the educations that would enable them to earn sufficient incomes to live in white suburbs, and, as a result, many remain concentrated in urban neighborhoods. Besides, black families prefer to live with one another. All this has some truth, but it remains a small part of the truth, submerged by a far more important one: until the last quarter of the twentieth century, racially explicit policies of federal, state, and local governments defined where whites and African Americans should live. Today's residential segregation in the North, South, Midwest, and West is not the unintended consequence of individual choices and of otherwise well-meaning law or regulation but of unhidden public policy that explicitly segregated every metropolitan area in the United States. The policy was so systematic and forceful that its effects endure to the present time. Without our government's purposeful imposition of racial segregation, the other causes - private prejudice, white flight, real estate steering, bank redlining, income differences, and self-segregation - still would have existed but with far less opportunity for expression. Segregation by intentional government action is not de facto. Rather, it is what courts call de jure: segregation by law and public policy.
Richard Rothstein (The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America)
Though the Son of Man expressed His federation with humanity, He was very careful to note that He was like man in all things save sin. He challenged His hearers to convict Him of sin. But the consequences of sin were all His as the Son of Man. Hence the prayer to let the chalice pass; His endurance of hunger and thirst; His agony and bloody sweat; perhaps even His seeming older than He actually was; His condescension to wash the feet of His disciples; His absence of resentment as the swine-owning capitalists ordered Him from their shores; His endurance of false charges of being a winebibber, a glutton; His gentleness, which expressed itself in hiding when His enemies would have stoned Him; above all, His endurance of worry, anxiety, fear, pain, mental anguish, fever, hunger, thirst, and agony during the hours of His Passion-all these things were to inspire men to imitate the Son of Man. Nothing that was human was foreign to Him.
Fulton J. Sheen
India’s primordial nationalisms—whether expressed in language, religion, caste, or even commensality—would have pulled the country apart, as happened in several other postcolonial states, had it not been for the fact that India consciously gave itself a constitutional order that incorporated universal franchise and the rule of law; guaranteed individual rights and a federal system that promulgated separation of powers at the center and limits on the central government’s authority over the states; and established recurring elections that tested the strength of contending political parties and endowed them with the privilege of rule for limited periods of time. By adopting such a framework, India enshrined the twin components that mark all real democracies: contestation, or the peaceful struggle for power through an orderly process that confirms the preferences of the polity, and participation, or the right of all adult citizens, irrespective of wealth, gender, religion, or ethnicity, to vote for a government of their choice.
Bibek Debroy (Getting India Back on Track: An Action Agenda for Reform)
But except for committed anarchists, the assassination attempt was widely condemned. In fact, it turned the tide of public opinion that, up until this moment, had been sympathetic to the strikers. Americans feared anarchists more than robber barons. Labor leaders, sensing the mood, went on the attack. “This man Berkman is an anarchist and, of course, is not identified with us,” said Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor. “I cannot use language strong enough to express my condemnation of such an act as Berkman’s.
James McGrath Morris (Revolution By Murder: Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, and the Plot to Kill Henry Clay Frick (Kindle Single))
Because the American federal government uses mercenaries in warfare and American state governments pay corporations to run prisons, the use of violence in the United States is already highly privatized. What is novel is a president who wishes to maintain, while in office, a personal security force which during his campaign used force against dissenters. As a candidate, the president ordered a private security detail to clear opponents from rallies, but also encouraged the audience itself to remove people who expressed different opinions.
Timothy Snyder (On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century)
{Miller, who was president of American Federation of Musicians, had this to say about Robert Ingersoll at his funeral} On behalf of 15,000 professional musicians, comprising the American Federation of Musicians, permit me to extend to you our heart-felt and most sincere sympathy in the irreparable loss of the model husband, father, and friend. In him the musicians of not only this country, but of all countries, have lost one whose noble nature grasped the true beauties of our sublime art, and whose intelligence gave those impressions expression in words of glowing eloquence that will live as long as language exists.
Owen Miller
No matter which telethon it was, though, a sick-looking child would have been trotted out with the express purpose of inspiring your sympathy, or rather, pity. These sick, pitiful images of disabled people contributed to the assumption that most folks had about us – that it was because of medical condition that we weren’t out and about in society. We were seen as helpless and childlike, as the kind of people for whom you felt pity and raised money to cure their disease. Not the kind of people who fought back. It was time to share our side of the story. You can’t just take over a federal building and not tell anyone why you did it.
Judith Heumann (Being Heumann: The Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist)
and confused if someone does not appreciate their niceness. Others often sense this and avoid giving them feedback not only, effectively blocking the nice person’s emotional growth, but preventing risks from being taken. You never know with a nice person if the relationship would survive a conflict or angry confrontation. This greatly limits the depths of intimacy. And would you really trust a nice person to back you up if confrontation were needed? 3. With nice people you never know where you really stand. The nice person allows others to accidentally oppress him. The “nice” person might be resenting you just for talking to him, because really he is needing to pee. But instead of saying so he stands there nodding and smiling, with legs tightly crossed, pretending to listen. 4. Often people in relationship with nice people turn their irritation toward themselves, because they are puzzled as to how they could be so upset with someone so nice. In intimate relationships this leads to guilt, self-hate and depression. 5. Nice people frequently keep all their anger inside until they find a safe place to dump it. This might be by screaming at a child, blowing up a federal building, or hitting a helpless, dependent mate. (Timothy McVeigh, executed for the Oklahoma City bombing, was described by acquaintances as a very, very nice guy, one who would give you the shirt off his back.) Success in keeping the anger in will often manifest as psychosomatic illnesses, including arthritis, ulcers, back problems, and heart disease. Proper Peachy Parents In my work as a psychotherapist, I have found that those who had peachy keen “Nice Parents” or proper “Rigidly Religious Parents” (as opposed to spiritual parents), are often the most stuck in chronic, lowgrade depression. They have a difficult time accessing or expressing any negative feelings towards their parents. They sometimes say to me “After all my parents did for me, seldom saying a harsh word to me, I would feel terribly guilty complaining. Besides, it would break their hearts.” Psychologist Rollo May suggested that it is less crazy-making to a child to cope with overt withdrawal or harshness than to try to understand the facade of the always-nice parent. When everyone agrees that your parents are so nice and giving, and you still feel dissatisfied, then a child may conclude that there must be something wrong with his or her ability to receive love. -§ Emotionally starving children are easier to control, well fed children don’t need to be. -§ I remember a family of fundamentalists who came to my office to help little Matthew with his anger problem. The parents wanted me to teach little Matthew how to “express his anger nicely.” Now if that is not a formula making someone crazy I do not know what would be. Another woman told me that after her stinking drunk husband tore the house up after a Christmas party, breaking most of the dishes in the kitchen, she meekly told him, “Dear, I think you need a breath mint.” Many families I work with go through great anxiety around the holidays because they are going to be forced to be with each other and are scared of resuming their covert war. They are scared that they might not keep the nice garbage can lid on, and all the rotting resentments and hopeless hurts will be exposed. In the words to the following song, artist David Wilcox explains to his parents why he will not be coming home this Thanksgiving: Covert War by David Wilcox
Kelly Bryson (Don't Be Nice, Be Real)
By rejecting the notion of a single covenant of grace under two administrations, the Baptists were in fact rejecting only half of this concept; they accepted, as we have previously seen, the notion of a single covenant of grace in both testaments, but they refused the idea of the two administrations. For the Baptists, there was only one covenant of grace which was revealed from the Fall in a progressive way until its full revelation and conclusion in the new covenant. This model is clearly expressed in Chapter 7, paragraph 3, of the 1689 Confession: “This covenant is revealed in the gospel; first of all to Adam in the promise of salvation by the seed of the woman, and afterwards by farther steps, until the full discovery thereof was completed in the New Testament.
Pascal Denault (The Distinctiveness of Baptist Covenant Theology: A Comparison Between Seventeenth-Century Particular Baptist and Paedobaptist Federalism)
On a few occasions I got slammed by young, presumably straight dudes, when I tweeted about glimpsing Alexander Skarsgård naked in a locker room in West Hollywood or that I thought Adam Driver on Girls was the sexiest man on television. “I didn’t follow you to sign up for this gay shit,” someone tweeted back, and another wondered, “Why are you such a fag?” I shrugged it off and didn’t make a federal case out of it, or call the local chapter of GLAAD. I didn’t even bother to block them. Because once you start choosing how people can and cannot express themselves then this opens the door to a very dark room in the corporation from which there’s really no escape. Can’t they in return police your thoughts, and then your feelings and then your impulses? And, finally, can they police, ultimately, your dreams?
Bret Easton Ellis (White)
On the other hand, some of the family’s impatience with the public is justified. When I use Federal Express, I accept as a condition of business that its standardized forms must be filled out in printed letters. An e-mail address off by a single character goes nowhere. Transposing two digits in a phone number gets me somebody speaking heatedly in Portuguese. Electronic media tell you instantly when you’ve made an error; with the post office, you have to wait. Haven’t we all at some point tested its humanity? I send mail to friends in Upper Molar, New York (they live in Upper Nyack), and expect a stranger to laugh and deliver it in forty-eight hours. More often than not, the stranger does. With its mission of universal service, the Postal Service is like an urban emergency room contractually obligated to accept every sore throat, pregnancy, and demented parent that comes its way. You may have to wait for hours in a dimly lit corridor. The staff may be short-tempered and dilatory. But eventually you will get treated. In the Central Post Office’s Nixie unit—where mail arrives that has been illegibly or incorrectly addressed—I see street numbers in the seventy thousands; impossible pairings of zip codes and streets; addresses without a name, without a street, without a city; addresses that consist of the description of a building; addresses written in water-based ink that rain has blurred. Skilled Nixie clerks study the orphans one at a time. Either they find a home for them or they apply that most expressive of postal markings, the vermilion finger of accusation that lays the blame squarely on you, the sender.
Jonathan Franzen (How to Be Alone)
Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war. The human beauty we’re talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body. Of course, in men’s sports no one ever talks about beauty or grace or the body. Men may profess their “love” of sports, but that love must always be cast and enacted in the symbology of war: elimination vs. advance, hierarchy of rank and standing, obsessive statistics, technical analysis, tribal and/or nationalist fervor, uniforms, mass noise, banners, chest-thumping, face-painting, etc. For reasons that are not well understood, war’s codes are safer for most of us than love’s." - from "Federer Both Flesh and Not
David Foster Wallace (Both Flesh and Not: Essays)
In urging the court to invalidate the Trespass Act, Hamilton expounded the all-important doctrine of judicial review—the notion that high courts had a right to scrutinize laws and if necessary declare them void. To appreciate the originality of this argument, we must recall that the country still lacked a federal judiciary. The state legislatures had been deemed the most perfect expression of the popular will and were supposed to possess supreme power. Mrs. Rutgers’s lawyers asserted state supremacy and said congressional action could not bind the New York legislature. At bottom, Rutgers v. Waddington addressed fundamental questions of political power in the new country. Would a treaty ratified by Congress trump state law? Could the judiciary override the legislature? And would America function as a true country or a loose federation of states? Hamilton left no doubt that states should bow to a central government: “It must be conceded that the legislature of one state cannot repeal the law of the United States.
Ron Chernow (Alexander Hamilton)
One Sunday in the fall of 1898, thirty-three years after the end of the Civil War, the Reverend Francis Grimké stood before his church in Washington, DC, and preached a sermon titled “The Negro Will Never Acquiesce as Long as He Lives.” After a period of federal intervention in the South, Jim Crow violence had returned with a vengeance, and Grimké, like so many other black Christians, looked on in horror as a white, supposedly Christian, nation violently oppressed its African-American citizens. After describing the discouragement and horrors faced by black people, the pastor turned his attention to white churches, saying, “Another discouraging circumstance is to be found in the fact that the pulpits of the land are silent on these great wrongs. The ministers fear to offend those to whom they minister.” He then noted the sorts of sins that white Christians were comfortable calling out—alcohol, gambling, breaking the sabbath—before wondering at their silence in response to so much visible racial terror. I can almost hear the anger and confusion in his voice as he revealed the hypocrisy of the white churches and their pastors. “They are eloquent in their appeals to wipe out these great wrongs, but when it comes to Southern brutality, to the killing of Negroes and despoiling them of their civil and political rights, they are, to borrow an expression from Isaiah, ‘dumb dogs that cannot bark.
David W. Swanson (Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Solidarity)
Congress displayed contempt for the city's residents, yet it retained a fondness for buildings and parks. In 1900, the centennial of the federal government's move to Washington, many congressmen expressed frustration that the proud nation did not have a capital to rival London, Paris, and Berlin. The following year, Senator James McMillan of Michigan, chairman of the Senate District Committee, recruited architects Daniel Burnham and Charles McKim, landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., and sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens to propose a park system. The team, thereafter known as the McMillan Commission, emerged with a bold proposal in the City Beautiful tradition, based on the White City of Chicago's 1893 Columbian Exposition. Their plan reaffirmed L'Enfant's avenues as the best guide for the city's growth and emphasized the majesty of government by calling for symmetrical compositions of horizontal, neoclassical buildings of marble and white granite sitting amid wide lawns and reflecting pools. Eventually, the plan resulted in the remaking of the Mall as an open lawn, the construction of the Lincoln Memorial and Memorial Bridge across the Potomac, and the building of Burnham's Union Station. Commissioned in 1903, when the state of the art in automobiles and airplanes was represented by the curved-dash Olds and the Wright Flyer, the station served as a vast and gorgeous granite monument to rail transportation.
Zachary M. Schrag (The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro (Creating the North American Landscape))
Donald Trump repeatedly promised he would hire "the best people." He did not. That is not my opinion; it is President Trump's, which he expresses frequently. Trump has said that his first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, was "dumb as a rock" and "lazy as hell." His attorney general, Jeff Sessions, was "scared stiff and Missing in Action," "didn't have a clue," and "should be ashamed of himself." Trump described one of his assistants, Omarosa Manigault Newman, as "wacky," "deranged," "vicious, but not smart," a "crazed, crying lowlife," and finally a "dog." After lasting only eleven days as communications director, Anthony Scaramucci "was quickly terminated 'from' a position that he was totally incapable of handling" and was called "very much out of control." An anonymous adviser to the president was called "a drunk/drugged-up loser." Chief strategist Steve Bannon was "sloppy," a "leaker," and "dumped like a dog by almost everyone." His longtime lawyer Michael Cohen was "TERRIBLE," "hostile," "a convicted liar & fraudster," and a "failed lawyer." The president was "Never a big fan!" of his White House counsel Don McGahn and "not even a little bit happy" with Jerome Powell, his selection to head the Federal Reserve, whom he called an "enemy." His third national security advisor, John Bolton, was mocked as a "tough guy [who] got us into Iraq." When the president was irritated with his former chief of staff, John Kelly, the president's press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, declared that Kelly "was totally unequipped to handle the genius of our great president.
John Dickerson (The Hardest Job in the World: The American Presidency)
A law, by the very meaning of the term, includes supremacy. It is a rule which those to whom it is prescribed are bound to observe. This results from every political association. If individuals enter into a state of society, the laws of that society must be the supreme regulator of their conduct. If a number of political societies enter into a larger political society, the laws which the latter may enact, pursuant to the powers intrusted to it by its constitution, must necessarily be supreme over those societies, and the individuals of whom they are composed. It would otherwise be a mere treaty, dependent on the good faith of the parties, and not a government, which is only another word for political power and supremacy. But it will not follow from this doctrine that acts of the large society which are not pursuant to its constitutional powers, but which are invasions of the residuary authorities of the smaller societies, will become the supreme law of the land. These will be merely acts of usurpation, and will deserve to be treated as such. Hence we perceive that the clause which declares the supremacy of the laws of the Union, like the one we have just before considered, only declares a truth, which flows immediately and necessarily from the institution of a federal government. It will not, I presume, have escaped observation, that it expressly confines this supremacy to laws made pursuant to the constitution; which I mention merely as an instance of caution in the convention; since that limitation would have been to be understood, though it had not been expressed.
Alexander Hamilton (The Federalist Papers)
The chorus of criticism culminated in a May 27 White House press conference that had me fielding tough questions on the oil spill for about an hour. I methodically listed everything we'd done since the Deepwater had exploded, and I described the technical intricacies of the various strategies being employed to cap the well. I acknowledged problems with MMS, as well as my own excessive confidence in the ability of companies like BP to safeguard against risk. I announced the formation of a national commission to review the disaster and figure out how such accidents could be prevented in the future, and I reemphasized the need for a long-term response that would make America less reliant on dirty fossil fuels. Reading the transcript now, a decade later, I'm struck by how calm and cogent I sound. Maybe I'm surprised because the transcript doesn't register what I remember feeling at the time or come close to capturing what I really wanted to say before the assembled White House press corps: That MMS wasn't fully equipped to do its job, in large part because for the past thirty years a big chunk of American voters had bought into the Republican idea that government was the problem and that business always knew better, and had elected leaders who made it their mission to gut environmental regulations, starve agency budgets, denigrate civil servants, and allow industrial polluters do whatever the hell they wanted to do. That the government didn't have better technology than BP did to quickly plug the hole because it would be expensive to have such technology on hand, and we Americans didn't like paying higher taxes - especially when it was to prepare for problems that hadn't happened yet. That it was hard to take seriously any criticism from a character like Bobby Jindal, who'd done Big Oil's bidding throughout his career and would go on to support an oil industry lawsuit trying to get a federal court to lift our temporary drilling moratorium; and that if he and other Gulf-elected officials were truly concerned about the well-being of their constituents, they'd be urging their party to stop denying the effects of climate change, since it was precisely the people of the Gulf who were the most likely to lose homes or jobs as a result of rising global temperatures. And that the only way to truly guarantee that we didn't have another catastrophic oil spill in the future was to stop drilling entirely; but that wasn't going to happen because at the end of the day we Americans loved our cheap gas and big cars more than we cared about the environment, except when a complete disaster was staring us in the face; and in the absence of such a disaster, the media rarely covered efforts to shift America off fossil fuels or pass climate legislation, since actually educating the public on long-term energy policy would be boring and bad for ratings; and the one thing I could be certain of was that for all the outrage being expressed at the moment about wetlands and sea turtles and pelicans, what the majority of us were really interested in was having the problem go away, for me to clean up yet one more mess decades in the making with some quick and easy fix, so that we could all go back to our carbon-spewing, energy-wasting ways without having to feel guilty about it. I didn't say any of that. Instead I somberly took responsibility and said it was my job to "get this fixed." Afterward, I scolded my press team, suggesting that if they'd done better work telling the story of everything we were doing to clean up the spill, I wouldn't have had to tap-dance for an hour while getting the crap kicked out of me. My press folks looked wounded. Sitting alone in the Treaty Room later that night, I felt bad about what I had said, knowing I'd misdirected my anger and frustration. It was those damned plumes of oil that I really wanted to curse out.
Barack Obama (A Promised Land)
To this point, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky has been the Republican flavor of the year. Events from the IRS scandal to NSA revelations to the Obamacare train wreck have corroborated libertarian suspicions of federal power. And Paul has shown serious populist skills in cultivating those fears for his political benefit. For a while, he succeeded in a difficult maneuver: Accepting the inheritance of his father's movement while distancing himself from the loonier aspects of his father's ideology. But now Rand Paul has fallen spectacularly off the tightrope. It turns out that a senior member of his Senate staff, Jack Hunter, has a history of neo-Confederate radio rants. And Paul has come to the defense of his aide. . . . This would not be the first time that Paul has heard secessionist talk in his circle of confederates--I mean, associates. His father has attacked Lincoln for causing a "senseless" war and ruling with an "iron fist." Others allied with Paulism in various think tanks and websites have accused Lincoln of mass murder and treason. For Rand Paul to categorically repudiate such views and all who hold them would be to excommunicate a good portion of his father's movement. This disdain for Lincoln is not a quirk or a coincidence. Paulism involves more than the repeal of Obamacare. It is a form of libertarianism that categorically objects to 150 years of expanding federal power. . . . Not all libertarians, of course, view Appomattox as a temporary setback. A libertarian debate on the topic: "Lincoln: Hero or Despot?" would be two-sided, lively and well attended. But Paulism is more than the political expression of the Austrian school of economics. It is a wildly ambitious ideology in which Hunter's neo-Confederate views are not uncommon. What does this mean for the GOP? It is a reminder that, however reassuring his manner, it is impossible for Rand Paul to join the Republican mainstream. The triumph of his ideas and movement would fundamentally shift the mainstream and demolish a century and a half of Republican political history. The GOP could no longer be the party of Reagan's internationalism or of Lincoln's belief in a strong union dedicated to civil rights.
Michael Gerson
Benjamin Franklin wrote little about race, but had a sense of racial loyalty. “[T]he Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably [sic] very small,” he observed. “ . . . I could wish their Numbers were increased.” James Madison, like Jefferson, believed the only solution to the problem of racial friction was to free the slaves and send them away. He proposed that the federal government sell off public lands in order to raise the money to buy the entire slave population and transport it overseas. He favored a Constitutional amendment to establish a colonization society to be run by the President. After two terms in office, Madison served as chief executive of the American Colonization Society, to which he devoted much time and energy. At the inaugural meeting of the society in 1816, Henry Clay described its purpose: to “rid our country of a useless and pernicious, if not dangerous portion of the population.” The following prominent Americans were not merely members but served as officers of the society: Andrew Jackson, Daniel Webster, Stephen Douglas, William Seward, Francis Scott Key, Winfield Scott, and two Chief Justices of the Supreme Court, John Marshall and Roger Taney. All opposed the presence of blacks in the United States and thought expatriation was the only long-term solution. James Monroe was such an ardent champion of colonization that the capital of Liberia is named Monrovia in gratitude for his efforts. As for Roger Taney, as chief justice he wrote in the Dred Scott decision of 1857 what may be the harshest federal government pronouncement on blacks ever written: Negroes were “beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the White race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior that they have no rights which a White man is bound to respect.” Abraham Lincoln considered blacks to be—in his words—“a troublesome presence” in the United States. During the Lincoln-Douglas debates he expressed himself unambiguously: “I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.” His opponent, Stephen Douglas, was even more outspoken, and made his position clear in the very first debate: “For one, I am opposed to negro citizenship in any form. I believe that this government was made on the white basis. I believe it was made by white men for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever, and I am in favor of confining the citizenship to white men—men of European birth and European descent, instead of conferring it upon negroes and Indians, and other inferior races.
Jared Taylor (White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century)
told my people that I wanted only the best, whatever it took, wherever they came from, whatever it cost. We assembled thirty people, the brightest cybersecurity minds we have. A few are on loan, pursuant to strict confidentiality agreements, from the private sector—software companies, telecommunications giants, cybersecurity firms, military contractors. Two are former hackers themselves, one of them currently serving a thirteen-year sentence in a federal penitentiary. Most are from various agencies of the federal government—Homeland Security, CIA, FBI, NSA. Half our team is devoted to threat mitigation—how to limit the damage to our systems and infrastructure after the virus hits. But right now, I’m concerned with the other half, the threat-response team that Devin and Casey are running. They’re devoted to stopping the virus, something they’ve been unable to do for the last two weeks. “Good morning, Mr. President,” says Devin Wittmer. He comes from NSA. After graduating from Berkeley, he started designing cyberdefense software for clients like Apple before the NSA recruited him away. He has developed federal cybersecurity assessment tools to help industries and governments understand their preparedness against cyberattacks. When the major health-care systems in France were hit with a ransomware virus three years ago, we lent them Devin, who was able to locate and disable it. Nobody in America, I’ve been assured, is better at finding holes in cyberdefense systems or at plugging them. “Mr. President,” says Casey Alvarez. Casey is the daughter of Mexican immigrants who settled in Arizona to start a family and built up a fleet of grocery stores in the Southwest along the way. Casey showed no interest in the business, taking quickly to computers and wanting to join law enforcement. When she was a grad student at Penn, she got turned down for a position at the Department of Justice. So Casey got on her computer and managed to do what state and federal authorities had been unable to do for years—she hacked into an underground child-pornography website and disclosed the identities of all the website’s patrons, basically gift-wrapping a federal prosecution for Justice and shutting down an operation that was believed to be the largest purveyor of kiddie porn in the country. DOJ hired her on the spot, and she stayed there until she went to work for the CIA. She’s been most recently deployed in the Middle East with US Central Command, where she intercepts, decodes, and disrupts cybercommunications among terrorist groups. I’ve been assured that these two are, by far, the best we have. And they are about to meet the person who, so far, has been better. There is a hint of reverence in their expressions as I introduce them to Augie. The Sons of Jihad is the all-star team of cyberterrorists, mythical figures in that world. But I sense some competitive fire, too, which will be a good thing.
Bill Clinton (The President Is Missing)
I’m going to invite you to contemplate a fictional scenario. Say that we are all citizens in a New England town with a traditional town meeting. As usual, a modest proportion of the citizens eligible to attend have actually turned out, let’s say four or five hundred. After calling the meeting to order, the moderator announces: “We have established the following rules for this evening’s discussion. After a motion has been properly made and seconded, in order to ensure free speech under rules fair to everyone here, each of you who wishes to do so will be allowed to speak on the motion. However, to enable as many as possible to speak, no one will be allowed to speak for more than two minutes.” Perfectly fair so far, you might say. But now our moderator goes on: “After everyone who wishes to speak for two minutes has had the floor, each and every one of you is free to speak further, but under one condition. Each additional minute will be auctioned off to the highest bidder.” The ensuing uproar from the assembled citizens would probably drive the moderator and the board of selectman away from the town hall—and perhaps out of town. Yet isn’t this in effect what the Supreme Court decided in the famous case of Buckley v. Valeo? In a seven-to-one vote, the court held that the First Amendment–guarantee of freedom of expression was impermissibly infringed by the limits placed by the Federal Election Campaign Act on the amounts that candidates for federal office or their supporters might spend to promote their election.3 Well, we’ve had time to see the appalling consequences.
Robert A. Dahl (How Democratic Is the American Constitution?: Second Edition (Castle Lecture Series))
The Northern press, as a whole, did not discourage these claims; a portion of it always magnified rebel success and belittled ours, while another portion, most sincerely earnest in their desire for the preservation of the Union and the overwhelming success of the Federal armies, would nevertheless generally express dissatisfaction with whatever victories were gained because they
Ulysses S. Grant (Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant: All Volumes)
Let us also think of the appendix that the Baptists joined to the publication of the Second London Confession of Faith where, several times, they express their desire to maintain good relations with the paedobaptists regardless of their divergences of opinion on the question of baptism:
Pascal Denault (The Distinctiveness of Baptist Covenant Theology: A Comparison Between Seventeenth-Century Particular Baptist and Paedobaptist Federalism)
She had opened the refrigerator door and was looking at her supply of frozen microwave dinners with an expression of distaste when the doorman buzzed. Deciding to forget about dinner, something she'd done too often lately, she depressed the switch. "Yes, Dennis?" "Mr. Payne and Mr. McCoy are here to see you, Ms. Granger," Dennis said smoothly. "From the FBI." "What?" Jay asked, startled, sure she'd misunderstood. Dennis repeated the message, but the words remained the same. She was totally dumbfounded. "Send them up," she said, because she didn't know what else to do. FBI? What on earth? Unless slamming your apartment door was somehow against federal law, the worst she could be accused of was tearing the tags off her mattress and pillows. Well, why not? This was a perfectly rotten end to a perfectly rotten day.
Linda Howard (White Lies (Rescues, #4))
Publications aren’t the only forms of expression now governed by Hazelwood’s ruling that speech can be limited when administrators claim ownership of the statement and think it’s “unsuitable.” Courts have applied the standard to plays, homework assignments, team mascots, and even cheer-leading.62 A cheerleader in Texas was kicked off the squad after she refused to cheer for a basketball player whom she had accused of sexually assaulting her at a party. (He and another boy had been arrested, but a grand jury had refused to indict them.) Her suit was thrown out by a federal district judge and a three-judge panel on the Fifth Circuit, which cited Hazelwood among other factors, noting, “In her capacity as cheerleader, [she] served as a mouthpiece through which [the school] could disseminate speech.” The school, the judges ruled, “had no duty to promote [her] message by allowing her to cheer or not cheer, as she saw fit.”63
David K. Shipler (Rights at Risk: The Limits of Liberty in Modern America)
By the way, I couldn’t believe it when I learned about this thing called Federal Express. It seems nothing short of a miracle. I wish I could Federal Express you back here because I miss you, and Hawaii, and those days on the estate, and absolutely all of it. There’s no need for fifty kisses if you know the first one is the right one. Let me know if you want more flowers, because Daddy says they don’t have flowers in Manhattan. Why would you want to live in a place with no flowers? Miss you to infinity, Matilda I read and reread the note so many times the words blurred together.
Alex Brunkhorst (The Gilded Life of Matilda Duplaine: A Novel)
A negative passion cannot become universal. You cannot imagine a federation of hatreds. You might almost wish to see such a scenario come about. But the worst situation doesn't always materialize. The fact remains that from this point on there is something which is completely beyond social regulation. If this is not the end of History, it is certainly the end of the social. We are no longer in anomie, but in anomaly. Anomaly is what escapes not only the law but the rule. What is outside the game, `offside', no longer in a position to play. The outlaw space bred violence; this offside space breeds virulence. But as to what exactly is being bred in anomaly, we have no notion. When a system becomes universal (the media, networks, the financial markets, human rights), it automatically becomes anomalous and secretes virulences of all kinds: financial crashes, AIDS, computer viruses, deregulation, disinformation. Hatred itself is a virus of this kind. Take Paulin, the man from Guadeloupe who went around murdering old ladies a few years ago. A monstrous individual, but cool, and with no apparent hatred in him. He had no identity, and was of indeterminate sex and mixed race. He committed his murders without violence or bloodshed. And he recounted them with an odd detachment. Being indifferent to himself, he was eliminating people who were themselves indifferent. But we can assume that behind all this there was a deep fund of radical hatred. Doubtless Paulin `had the hate', but he was too classy, too educated, to express it openly.
Jean Baudrillard (The Perfect Crime)
Why the us government Should Maintain students Healthcare Claims education and learning is probably the finest ventures in ensuring the people stay a greater existence from the contemporary setting. Over time, education and learning methods have transformed to guarantee individuals gain access to it in the very best ways. Besides, the adjustment can be a purposeful relocate making sure that learning meets pupils distinct needs nowadays. Consequently, any country that is focused on establishing in the current technical period must be ready to devote in schooling no matter what. We appreciate that lots of claims have was able to meet the most affordable threshold in offering secondary and basic education. It is actually commendable for schooling is focused and attends on the needs in the present environment. In addition to, we certainly have observed reduced rates of dropouts due to correct education and learning systems into position. Nevertheless, it is not enough because there are many other factors that, in turn, lower the superiority of education. We appreciate the reality that educational costs is mainly purchased and virtually totally given through the express or low-successful businesses. Sadly, small is defined in range to be sure the unique treatment of learners. It has led to the indiscriminate govt accountability. Apart from putting everything in place, the government must also provide the proper healthcare of a learner because it' s the foundation of excellent learning. The arranged provision of health care to students is defined around the periphery, plus it is amongst the essential things that degrade the grade of training. Standard attendance is actually a necessity for pupils to acquire much more and carry out greater. For that reason, government entities need to ensure an original set up of arranged healthcare to pupils to ensure they are certainly not stored away from university because of health care problems. Re-Analyzing the goal of Government in mastering It can be only by re-dealing with government entitiesAnd#039; s role in supplying primary and secondary education and learning that people can completely set up the skewed the outdoors of learner’s health care and the desire to influence the state to reconsider it. The cause of why the government must pay for the student’s healthcare is that its responsibility is unbalanced. It provides maintained to purchase basic training effectively but has did not shield the health-related requirements of any learner. Aside from, it is suitably interested in increasing the size of young menAnd#039; s and ladiesAnd#039; s chances in obtaining technical and professional education. But it has not searched for has and aims unacceptable method of achieving the medical care requirements of any learner. As a result, education require is not met because its services are skewed. The possible lack of equilibrium in government activities replicates the malfunction to discrete primarily sharply amid the steps right for authorities financing and activities to become implemented. Financing healthcare for students, which is equally essential, is neglected, though Financing education is largely accepted. For that reason, this is a deliberate demand government entities to perform the circle by paying for student' s health care. When there is stability in federal government commitments in education and learning, its requirements will probably be fulfilled. So, the state should pay for pupil' s medical care. If they are healthful, they find out better. In addition to, a large stress will probably be lifted, and will also unquestionably raise enrolment in professional coachingcenters and colleges, along with other studying companies.
Sandy Miles
A perhaps more relevant example is taken from a 1999 Gallup experiment (see Newport 2004), which asked respondents what the federal government should do with the budget surplus. When respondents were given a choice between “tax cuts” or “increased spending on government programs,” nearly three-quarters of respondents chose the tax cut option. But when the question was reframed as a choice between tax cuts and spending on specific government programs such as Medicare and public education, the percentages were very nearly reversed. While citizens often express considerable enthusiasm for “cutting government,” that enthusiasm very nearly vanishes when they are asked to consider “government” at the operational level – that is, at the level of specific programs that the government undertakes.
Christopher Ellis (Ideology in America)
During the campaign, Hamilton had been troubled by new secession threats among Federalists. Nothing was more antithetical to his conception of Federalism. A friend, Adam Hoops, recalled running into Hamilton in Albany in early March and asking him about the secession rumors. “The idea of disunion he could not hear of without impatience,” recalled Hoops, “and expressed his reprobation of it using strong terms.”69 In a tremendous visionary leap, Hamilton foresaw a civil war between north and south, a war that the north would ultimately win but at a terrible cost: “The result must be destructive to the present Constitution and eventually the establishment of separate governments framed on principles in their nature hostile to civil liberty.
Ron Chernow (Alexander Hamilton)
Shipping an idea went from taking a month by boat to a few days by plane to overnight by Federal Express to a few minutes by fax to a moment by e-mail to instantaneous by Twitter. Now what? Will it arrive yesterday? So, what’s left is to make—to give—art. What’s left is the generosity and humanity worth paying for. What’s left is to take that resistance (the very same resistance we embraced and rewarded for decades) and destroy it.
Seth Godin (Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? How to drive your career and create a remarkable future)
It were doubtless to be wished, that the power of prohibiting the importation of slaves had not been postponed until the year 1808, or rather that it had been suffered to have immediate operation. But it is not difficult to account, either for this restriction on the general government, or for the manner in which the whole clause is expressed. It ought to be considered as a great point gained in favor of humanity, that a period of twenty years may terminate forever, within these States, a traffic which has so long and so loudly upbraided the barbarism of modern policy; that within that period, it will receive a considerable discouragement from the federal government, and may be totally abolished, by a concurrence of the few States which continue the unnatural traffic, in the prohibitory example which has been given by so great a majority of the Union. Happy would it be for the unfortunate Africans, if an equal prospect lay before them of being redeemed from the oppressions of their European brethren! Attempts
Alexander Hamilton (The Federalist Papers)
Screaming with rage, one woman with a tiny American flag in her hair flailed at the Senator, striking him on the shoulder. He stumbled, then righted himself and hurried on. An elbow caught him in the ribs. A man aimed a kick at his shins. At last Kennedy reached the Federal Building and darted through the swinging door, secured behind him by uniformed guards. Outside, his pursuers pounded their fists on the tinted glass, howling with frustration. Suddenly, one large pane gave way, the jagged shards shattering on the marble floor as the demonstrators stepped back and cheered, shaking their fists over their heads. Surrounded by a ring of security men, Kennedy told reporters, “People have strong emotions—and strong feelings—and they’ve certainly expressed them. They have—ah—a right to their position. Anyone in public life has to expect this.” But pouring cream into a Styrofoam cup of coffee, his hand trembled. And well it might. For something had happened that day on the slippery stones between the soaring white tower named for Jack Kennedy and the Aztec pyramid of City Hall which Ted himself had dedicated only seven years before. Something had happened there to puncture a notion deeply cherished by the Kennedys, by the city in which they had come to power, and by the nation which had embraced them with such warmth. Many Americans had allowed themselves to believe that John Kennedy’s accession to the presidency had completed the assimilation of the Irish into mainstream America. His style, grace, and wit, his beautiful wife and handsome children persuaded many that centuries of Gaelic rage and frustration had been dissipated in “one bright, shining moment.
J. Anthony Lukas (Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families (Pulitzer Prize Winner))
If Jefferson enunciated the more ample view of political democracy, Hamilton possessed the finer sense of economic opportunity. He was the messenger from a future that we now inhabit. We have left behind the rosy agrarian rhetoric and slaveholding reality of Jeffersonian democracy and reside in the bustling world of trade, industry, stock markets, and banks that Hamilton envisioned. (Hamilton’s staunch abolitionism formed an integral feature of this economic vision.) He has also emerged as the uncontested visionary in anticipating the shape and powers of the federal government. At a time when Jefferson and Madison celebrated legislative power as the purest expression of the popular will, Hamilton argued for a dynamic executive branch and an independent judiciary, along with a professional military, a central bank, and an advanced financial system. Today, we are indisputably the heirs to Hamilton’s America, and to repudiate his legacy is, in many ways, to repudiate the modern world.
Ron Chernow (Alexander Hamilton)
If you hadn’t been there, I’m not entirely sure I would’ve been able to stop myself from hurting the guy worse. That’s why I need to get to the lake house and be alone.” She sniffed. There was so much in that one little derisive sound that he had to look her way. “What?” Her expression went deadpan. “You realize that is a completely ridiculous plan, right?” He frowned. “Come on, Finn.” She pursed those red-glossed lips like she could barely tolerate his foolishness. “That is such a man plan.” “A man plan.” “Yes. You don’t know how to be among the living anymore so you’re going to…go live alone in a cave. Right. Good thinking. That will pop your how-to-be-human skills right back into place.” He made a frustrated sound and pulled into the lot of the hotel to park so he could face her, make her understand. “You saw what happened today. I’m not fit to be around other people right now. I beat a guy down for taking a picture. And I was…aggressive with you last night.” “Aggressive?” Her mouth flattened, and she put a finger to her chest. “I kissed you. I was the aggressor. You were just…complicit in the aggressiveness. And you’re lucky I haven’t gone two years’ celibate, because had I been in your shoes, I would’ve convinced you to go up to my room and used you eight ways to Sunday and back again by now. You’d be limping.” His libido gave a hard kick and knocked the logical thoughts out of his head for a moment. “I—” “You need to be around people.” That snapped his attention back to where it needed to be—mostly. “No.” “You promised your boss you’d be around friends. You made me promise your boss that I’d make sure you did that. You made me lie to the FBI. That’s got to be a federal offense or something.” “Made is a strong word.” “Finn.” He groaned. “What would you have me do? You want to babysit me, Livvy? Come stay at my lake house and make sure I don’t turn into a deviant?” She stared at him, her gaze way too sharp, and then tipped her chin up in challenge. “Is that an invitation? Because you know you shouldn’t test me. I could babysit the hell out of you, Finn Dorsey. I know who you used to be. You don’t get to become a bad guy. I will make you do slumber-party things like play charades or watch crappy nineties movies or incessant reruns of Friends. You won’t be able to fight your old goofy side. It will emerge like a freaking butterfly and smother scary Finn.” He blinked and stared, and then he couldn’t help it—he laughed. “A freaking butterfly?” She smiled triumphantly. “A goofy freaking butterfly.” He let out a long breath, some of the tension from the morning draining out of him. “You’re weird.” “So are you.
Roni Loren (The Ones Who Got Away (The Ones Who Got Away, #1))
Encourage; Don’t Nitpick. Keep in mind that there’s no shortage of good, workable ideas, but that there’s a tremendous shortage of receptivity to ideas. Don’t be like one of those “wet blankets” that shot down the radio, the telephone, Federal Express, the personal computer, and NIKE shoes as “dumb ideas.
Jim Collins (BE 2.0 (Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0): Turning Your Business into an Enduring Great Company)
In the undeclared class war, expressed through the weary, aggravating, and ultimately enraging wait for the American Dream, those I came to know developed a visceral hate for the ally of the “enemy” cutters in line—the federal government. They hated other people for needing it. They rejected their own need of it—even to help clean up the pollution in their backyard.
Arlie Russell Hochschild (Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right)
Compliance of Student Loan consolidation by The Student Loan Help Center The Student Loan Help Center firmly believes in strict compliance with the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA). The Student Loan Help Center has a zero tolerance policy in regards to violations of the FCC’s TCPA regulations. The Student Loan Help Center does not include unsolicited advertisements or unsolicited calls. We do make solicited calls prior to obtaining written consent via a website form. Refer to the “Small Entity Compliance Guide” for information. In adopting the written consent requirement, however, the FCC will recognize prior express written consent secured under the methods described in the E-SIGN Act. Permission obtained via an email, website form, text message, telephone keypress, or voice recording, as provided in the E-SIGN Act, will suffice as prior express written consent. The Student Loan Help Center does not include any cell phone text messaging platform, robocalls, autodialers, voiceblasting or any other device that can be considered automated telephone equipment without written consent. The Student Loan Help Center has a clearly written privacy policy, available to anyone upon request. We limit our calls to the period between 8 a.m. and 9 p.m., local time. The Student Loan Help Center assists consumers with federal student loan consolidation preparation and filing services. We are not affiliated with or endorsed by the U. S. Department of Education. Like filing a tax return, you can file a consolidation without professional assistance and without charge at loanconsolidation.ed.gov The Student Loan Help Center has no tolerance with misrepresentations. In our efforts to avoid confusion we have placed disclaimers at the bottom of every page of our websites. The Student Loan Help Center shows a Caller ID on every outbound call (8137393306, 8137508039, 8138038132, 8135751175 & 8133454530). The Student Loan Help Center is a private company. As such The Student Loan Help Center requires a FEE. That fee is disclosed to the client, in writing, before any billing is performed. The Student Loan Help Center has a very specific fee schedule. The Student Loan Help Center keeps the client’s records for a minimum of two years.
The Student Loan Help Center
The problems I write of in this section do not focus on only violent practices inside correctional facilities, detention centers, or federal, state, and local prisons and jails. Just as importantly, these internal dynamics are significant because they express and reinforce sexual inequality and gender injustice in the larger society.
Mark Lewis Taylor (The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America)
Boyd concluded, “The prospect of being burned alive naturally terrified us, and, as a last resource, I contrived to get a message conveyed to the Federal officer in command. He exerted himself with effect, and had the incendiaries arrested before they could execute their horrible purpose. In the meantime it had been reported at head-quarters that I had shot a Yankee soldier, and great was the indignation at first felt and expressed against me. Soon, however, the commanding officer, with several of his staff, called at our house to investigate the affair. He examined the witnesses, and inquired into all the circumstances with strict impartiality, and finally said I had ‘done perfectly right.’" Spying
Charles River Editors (Belle Boyd: The Controversial Life and Legacy of the Civil War’s Most Famous Spy)
Although, approximately 2,800 of the Kennedy assassination documents have been released, only 52 files have not been previously seen. It comes as no surprise that President Trump held up releasing the remaining files, stating that his decision was reached on the advice of the CIA and the FBI. After over a half century, President Trump cited national security as the reason for the hold up and granted an additional 6 months for the Federal Agencies to review hundreds of documents, which will now be held back until March 12, 2018. The new release date is set for April 26, 2018. In a memo expressing his concerns raised by the intelligence officials, Trump wrote: “I am ordering today that the veil finally be lifted however, I have no choice but to accept those redactions rather than allow potentially irreversible harm to our nation’s security.” Journalists are poring over the documents but it will take some time before the released papers, many of which were hand written, will fully be understood. The concerns expressed, include Lee Harvey Oswald’s trip to Mexico City where he met with Cuban and Soviet Intelligence Agencies. Although Administration officials said that there is no cover-up and that the delay is just an effort to avoid compromising national security, suspicions that the government is covering up secrets about the case are bound to reappear. Most Americans still believe that someone other than Oswald must have been involved in the assassination and this delay in releasing all the documents just fuels the fire.
Hank Bracker
They listened to a series of speeches by civil rights luminaries, capped off by a rousing, crowd-pleasing address by Martin Luther King. While the SCLC named their protest “Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom,” its stated goals of expressing black unity and urging federal action on civil rights made the moniker that Jimmy gave it, “the March on Washington,” equally appropriate. That name, of course, was subsequently claimed by the much larger and more famous civil rights demonstration six years later. The huge crowds and celebrated oratory of the 1963 “March on Washington for Jobs and Justice” completely superseded the Prayer Pilgrimage in both size and importance, but the thousands who attended the 1957 affair made it the largest civil rights demonstration to date and a significant moment in the rising civil rights movement of the mid-1950s. Jimmy concluded his article with this assessment of the impact of the Prayer Pilgrimage: “The southern people went home determined beyond the expectations of even King. No one in the South is big enough to stop this march of people and no one can call it off.” 66
Stephen M. Ward (In Love and Struggle: The Revolutionary Lives of James and Grace Lee Boggs (Justice, Power, and Politics))
Hamilton, still full of fight, quarreled on the street with Commodore James Nicholson, head of the Democratic Society and honorary captain of the Federal Ship Hamilton in 1788. Nicholson accused his former ally of being “an abetter of Tories” and used “other harsh expressions.” Hamilton promptly challenged Nicholson to a duel, and Nicholson accepted. Moments later Hamilton had a second confrontation with prominent opponents of the treaty, shouting that he would “fight the whole party one by one . . . the whole detestable faction.” The former secretary of the treasury had become a mere “street Bully,” sneered Beau Ned Livingston.
Mike Wallace (Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898)
They were all unconscious worshippers of the State. Whether the State they worshipped was the Fascist State or the incarnation of quite another dream, they thought of it as something that transcended both its citizens and their lives. Whether it was tyrannical or paternalistic, dictatorial or democratic, it remained to them monolithic, centralized, and remote. This was why the political leaders and my peasants could never understand one another. The politicians oversimplified things, even while they clothed them in philosophical expressions. Their solutions were abstract and far removed from reality; they were schematic halfway measures, which were already out of date. Fifteen years of Fascism had erased the problem of the South from their minds and if now they thought of it again they saw it only as a part of some other difficulty, through the fictitious generalities of party and class and even race...All of them agreed that the State should be something about it, something concretely useful, and beneficent, and miraculous, and they were shocked when I told them that the State, as they conceived it, was the greatest obstacle to the accomplishment of anything...We can bridge the abyss only when we succeed in creating a government in which the peasants feel they have some share...Plans laid by a central government, however much good they may do, still leave two hostile Italys on either side of the abyss. The difficulties we were discussing, I explained to them, were far more complex than they realized...First of all, we are faced with two very different civilizations, neither of which can absorb the other...The second aspect of the trouble is economic, the dilemma of poverty. The land has been gradually impoverished: the forests have been cut down, the rivers have been reduced to mountain streams that often run dry, and livestock has become scarce. Instead of cultivating trees and pasture lands there has been an unfortunate attempt to raise wheat in soil that does not favor it. There is no capital, no industry, no savings, no schools; emigration is no longer possible, taxes are unduly heavy, and malaria is everywhere. All this is in large part due to the ill-advised intentions and efforts of the State, a State in which the peasants cannot feel they have a share, and which has brought them only poverty and deserts...We must make ourselves capable of inventing a new form of government, neither Fascist, nor Communist, nor even Liberal, for all three of these are forms of the religion of the State. We must rebuild the foundations of our concept of the State with the concept of the individual, which is its basis...The individual is not a separate unit, but a link, a meeting place of relationships of every kind...The name of this way out is autonomy. The State can only be a group of autonomies, an organic federation, The unit or cell through which the peasants can take part in the complex life of the nation must be the autonomous or self-governing rural community. This is the only form of government which can solve in our time the three interdependent aspects of the problem of the South; which can allow the co-existence of two different civilizations, without one lording it over the other or weighing the other down; which can furnish a good chance for escape from poverty...But the autonomy or self-government of the community cannot exist without the autonomy of the factory, the school, and the city, of every form of social life. This is what I learned from a year of life underground.
Carlo Levi (Christ Stopped at Eboli: The Story of a Year)
It is therefore pertinent to consider not only the bad side of government – which Americans can easily recognise – but also the good. For American conservatives are in danger of appearing as though they had no positive idea of government at all, and were in the business simply of opposing all new federal programs, however necessary they may be to the future and security of the nation. Most of all, they seem to be losing sight of the truth that government is not only natural to the human condition, but an expression of those extended loyalties over time, which bind generation to generation in a relation of mutual commitment.
Roger Scruton (Confessions of a Heretic, Revised Edition)
The feeling against the Mormons as expressed by the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin was: The blood of American citizens cries for vengeance from the barren sands of the Great Basin. The insulted dignity of the nation demands retribution from their infamous murderers. Virtue, Christianity and decency require that the vile brood of incestuous miscreants who have perpetrated this atrocity shall be broken up and dispersed. And the tide of popular opinion, now rolling up from every end of the land, calls loudly upon the Government to let no longer delay ensue before beginning the good work. And even should the news of the Mormon massacre upon the plains not suffice to incite to full activity the entire power of the Federal Officers, the position now taken by Brigham Young must do so. He has not waited to be attacked, but has commenced offensive warfare. The Independence of Utah Territory has been declared, and the determination announced of adhering to no laws except such as the Mormons make themselves.
Juanita Brooks (The Mountain Meadows Massacre)
Another objection made to the right of secession is based upon obscure, indefinite, and inconsistent ideas with regard to allegiance. It assumes various shapes, and is therefore somewhat difficult to meet, but, as most frequently presented, may be stated thus: that the citizen owes a double allegiance, or a divided allegiance—partly to his State, partly to the United States: that it is not possible for either of these powers to release him from the allegiance due to the other: that the State can no more release him from his obligations to the Union than the United States can absolve him from his duties to his State. This is the most moderate way in which the objection is put. The extreme centralizers go further, and claim that allegiance to the Union, or, as they generally express it, to the Government—meaning thereby the Federal Government—is paramount, and the obligation to the State only subsidiary—if, indeed, it exists at all.
Jefferson Davis (The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government)
In all free governments the constitution or organic law is supreme over the government, and in our Federal Union this was most distinctly marked by limitations and prohibitions against all which was beyond the expressed grants of power to the General Government. In the foreground, therefore, I take the position that those who resisted violations of the compact were the true friends, and those who maintained the usurpation of undelegated powers were the real enemies of the constitutional Union.
Jefferson Davis (The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government)
My point is that Federal Express is a luxury, and business can still be done by using the U.S. Mail. I can assure you that future use of Federal Express is going to be very closely monitored. The fact that it wasn’t up to now is my fault, and I take full blame.
Alan C. Greenberg (Memos from the Chairman)
This distinction (revealed/concluded) summarized the difference between the covenant of grace in the Old Testament and the covenant of grace in the New Testament. In the Old, it was revealed; in the New, it was concluded (“fully revealed,” according to the expression of the 1689). John Owen comes to exactly the same understanding in his exegesis of Hebrews 8:6.
Pascal Denault (The Distinctiveness of Baptist Covenant Theology: A Comparison Between Seventeenth-Century Particular Baptist and Paedobaptist Federalism)
Follow-up Call (Script) Seller: “Hello Mr. Prospect, my name is Tom Freese, and I’m the regional manager for KnowledgeWare in Kansas City. I wanted to contact you about the CASE application development seminar we are hosting at IBM’s Regional Headquarters on August 26. Do you remember receiving the invitation we sent you? (Pause for a response) “Frankly, we are expecting a record turnout—over one hundred people, including development managers from Sprint, Hallmark Cards, Pepsi Co., Yellow Freight, Kansas Power & Light, the Federal Reserve Bank, Northwest Mutual Life, American Family Life, St. Luke’s Hospital, Anheuser-Busch, MasterCard, American Express, Worldspan, and United Airlines, just to name a few. “I wanted to follow up because we haven’t yet received an RSVP from your company, and I wanted to make sure you didn’t get left out.” Granted, this was a highly positioned approach, but it was also 100 percent accurate. I wanted prospects to know that IBM was endorsing this event. I also wanted to let them know that I expected “everyone else” to participate. I accomplished this by rattling off an impressive list of marquee company names that we were “expected” to attend. Most importantly, I wanted to make sure that they didn’t get left out.
Thomas Freese (Secrets of Question-Based Selling: How the Most Powerful Tool in Business Can Double Your Sales Results (Top Selling Books to Increase Profit, Money Books for Growth))
INCENTIVES – “From all business, my favorite case on incentives is Federal Express. The heart and soul of their system—which creates the integrity of the product—is having all their airplanes come to one place in the middle of the night and shift all the packages from plane to plane. If there are delays, the whole operation can’t deliver a product full of integrity to Federal Express customers. And it was always screwed up. They could never get it done on time. They tried everything—moral suasion, threats, you name it. And nothing worked. Finally, somebody got the idea to pay all these people not so much an hour, but so much a shift—and when it’s all done, they can go home. Well, their problems cleared up overnight.” – Here Charlie is talking about incentives. All of us who have held hourly jobs know that if workers are paid by the hour they will work more slowly than if they are paid them by the job. Why? Because if they are paid by the hour, they have an incentive to work more slowly in order to put more hours on the clock and make more money. But if they are paid by the job, there is an incentive to work quickly so they can get onto the next job and make more money. Federal Express aligned management’s goals with employee incentives. With hourly pay their employees were never in a hurry, but when pay was given for a specific task—getting a plane loaded—suddenly they were in a rush to get the job done. The key wasn’t paying workers by the task or shift; the key was letting them go home if they finished early, which was a kind of financial reward in that they were getting paid for the full shift even if they left early.
David Clark (Tao of Charlie Munger: A Compilation of Quotes from Berkshire Hathaway's Vice Chairman on Life, Business, and the Pursuit of Wealth With Commentary by David Clark)
In the summer of 1966, Seale was hired to run a youth work program at the North Oakland Neighborhood Anti-Poverty Center funded by the federal War on Poverty. Through his role as a social service provider, he came to understand even more clearly the economic and social needs of black youth. Beyond delivering services, Bobby brought his revolutionary nationalist theory to the job and used the opportunity to push up against the ideological bias in the government program. Rather than merely guiding young blacks into a government-prescribed path, he used his authority to help them stand up against oppressive authority, particularly against police brutality. One day Seale’s boss instructed him to take a group of young black men and women on a tour of the local police station. When the group arrived, the police officers pulled out notepads and pencils and started to interview the teenagers about the character of gangs in the neighborhood. Seale protested, instructing his group to remain silent and announcing that his program would not be used as a spy network to inform on people in the community. The officers claimed that they simply wanted to foster better relations with the community. In response, Seale turned the conversation around, creating an opportunity for the teenagers to describe their experiences with police brutality in the neighborhood. It was the first time the young people had had the opportunity to look white police officers in the eye and express their anger and frustration. One teenager berated the police for an incident in which several officers had thrown a woman down and beaten her in the head with billy clubs. “Say you!” said a sixteen-year-old girl, pointing at a policeman. “You don’t have to treat him like that,” Seale said to the girl. “I’ll treat him like I want to, because they done treated me so bad,” she replied. Bobby sat back as the girl grilled the officer about whether he had received proper psychiatric treatment. The officer turned red and started to shake. “The way you’re shaking now,” she said, “the way you’re shaking now and carrying on, you must be guilty of a whole lot! And I haven’t got no weapon or nothin.’”69 The poverty program provided a paycheck, some skills, and an opportunity to work with young people. But Newton and Seale were still searching for a way to galvanize the rage of the “brothers on the block.” They wanted to mobilize the ghetto the way that the Civil Rights Movement had mobilized blacks in the South. They dreamt of creating an unstoppable force that would transform the urban landscape forever. The problem was now clear to Huey and Bobby, but they did not yet have a solution. Huey and Bobby were not the only ones looking for answers.
Joshua Bloom (Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (The George Gund Foundation Imprint in African American Studies))
The fourth and final element of your marketing strategy is your guarantee. Think of what Federal Express did with overnight delivery: “When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight.
Gino Wickman (Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business)
The NCAA needed its proof of Michael’s new and improved grade point average by August 1. On July 29 Michael took his final BYU test—another Character Course. Sean sent the test to Utah by Federal Express, and the BYU people promised to have the grade ready by two o’clock the following afternoon. “The Mormons may be going to hell,” said Sean. “But they really are nice people.” With Michael’s final A in hand, Sean rushed the full package to the NCAA’s offices in Indianapolis. The NCAA promptly lost it. Sean threatened to fly up on his plane with another copy and sit in the lobby until they processed it—which led the NCAA to find Michael’s file. On August 1, 2005, the NCAA informed Michael Oher that he was going to be allowed to go to college, and play football.
Michael Lewis (The Blind Side)
In his first inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln had expressed his support for a constitutional amendment to ensure that “the Federal Government shall never interfere with the domestic institutions of the states.” He had, he declared, “no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists.” The Republican Party, then in control of both houses of Congress, had taken a similar stance. “Never on earth did the Republican Party propose to abolish Slavery,” wrote Horace Greeley, a Republican spokesman. “Its object with respect to Slavery is simply, nakedly, avowedly, its restriction to the existing states.” In 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled in the Dred Scott case that any attempt to prohibit the spread of slavery was unconstitutional and that African Americans had no right to U.S. citizenship. Chief Justice Robert Taney wrote that blacks “were so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that [all blacks] might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery.
Daniel Rasmussen (American Uprising: The Untold Story of America's Largest Slave Revolt)
It is interesting that the main group in the United States expressing fears that the US Muslim community constitutes a threatening antidemocratic population are the far more numerous fundamentalist and evangelical Christians who could pose a much more profound threat to democracy. It is not fundamentalist Muslims who today are serious candidates for federal and statewide offices in the United States. It is Christians who are positioning themselves to remake our 240-year-old democratic and church/state arrangements.
David P. Gushee (Defending Democracy from Its Christian Enemies)
Inner-city slums could be cleared, blacks removed to more distant second-ghetto areas, central business districts redeveloped, and transportation woes solved all at the same time — and mostly at federal expense.
Mark H. Rose (Interstate: Express Highway Politics 1939-1989)
According to the Congressional Budget Office, low-income families have so far lost at least $23billion in income and federal benefits, while high-income families have gained more than $35 billion (Expressed another way: 20.2 million poor households – earning under $10,000 – lost an average of $400 each in benefit cuts, while 1.4 million wealthy families - $80,000+ - received an average of $8,4000 in tax cuts).
Mike Davis
According to the Congressional Budget Office, low-income families have so far lost at least $23billion in income and federal benefits, while high-income families have gained more than $35 billion (Expressed another way: 20.2 million poor households – earning under $10,000 – lost an average of $400 each in benefit cuts, while 1.4 million wealthy families - $80,000+ - received an average of $8,400 in tax cuts).
Mike Davis
Building on the Pentagon’s anthrax simulation (1999) and the intelligence agency’s “Dark Winter” (2001), Atlantic Storm (2003, 2005), Global Mercury (2003), Schwartz’s “Lockstep” Scenario Document (2010), and MARS (2017), the Gates-funded SPARS scenario war-gamed a bioterrorist attack that precipitated a global coronavirus epidemic lasting from 2025 to 2028, culminating in coercive mass vaccination of the global population. And, as Gates had promised, the preparations were analogous to “preparing for war.”191 Under the code name “SPARS Pandemic,” Gates presided over a sinister summer school for globalists, spooks, and technocrats in Baltimore. The panelists role-played strategies for co-opting the world’s most influential political institutions, subverting democratic governance, and positioning themselves as unelected rulers of the emerging authoritarian regime. They practiced techniques for ruthlessly controlling dissent, expression, and movement, and degrading civil rights, autonomy, and sovereignty. The Gates simulation focused on deploying the usual psyops retinue of propaganda, surveillance, censorship, isolation, and political and social control to manage the pandemic. The official eighty-nine-page summary is a miracle of fortune-telling—an uncannily precise month-by-month prediction of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic as it actually unfolded.192 Looked at another way, when it erupted five years later, the 2020 COVID-19 contagion faithfully followed the SPARS blueprint. Practically the only thing Gates and his planners got wrong was the year. Gates’s simulation instructs public health officials and other collaborators in the global vaccine cartel exactly what to expect and how to behave during the upcoming plague. Reading through the eighty-nine pages, it’s difficult not to interpret this stunningly prescient document as a planning, signaling, and training exercise for replacing democracy with a new regimen of militarized global medical tyranny. The scenario directs participants to deploy fear-driven propaganda narratives to induce mass psychosis and to direct the public toward unquestioning obedience to the emerging social and economic order. According to the scenario narrative, a so-called “SPARS” coronavirus ignites in the United States in January 2025 (the COVID-19 pandemic began in January 2020). As the WHO declares a global emergency, the federal government contracts a fictional firm that resembles Moderna. Consistent with Gates’s seeming preference for diabolical cognomens, the firm is dubbed “CynBio” (Sin-Bio) to develop an innovative vaccine using new “plug-and-play” technology. In the scenario, and now in real life, Federal health officials invoke the PREP Act to provide vaccine makers liability protection.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
In combat deployment (where he earned a Silver Star for bravery and two Purple Hearts), Smith gained the central insight that would power Federal Express from an idea into a viable business, from a business into a great company. Like Manchester, he realized that people will do unreasonable things to come through—not for grand ideas or incentives or bosses or hierarchies or even recognition, but for each other.
James C. Collins (BE 2.0 (Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0): Turning Your Business into an Enduring Great Company)
What the current aura of disenchantment means for the future of American and world politics is uncertain. Will members of the public turn their backs on politics and turn to aesthetic appreciation, enjoying the comforts of religion, or building Shangri-las in their own minds?20 The post–World War II record-low voter turnout in the 2014 midterm elections might be one indication that Americans are washing their hands of even the most basic expressions of political engagement. But there are other indications that the legions of discontented do not reject the idea of progress as such and will not retreat from politics; instead what we are seeing is a rejection of liberal universalist visions of progress and the political programs associated with them. In a 2013 address before the Federal Assembly, Russian president Vladimir Putin declared that “attempts to push supposedly more progressive development models onto other nations actually resulted in regression, barbarity and extensive bloodshed.”21 Putin’s military incursions in Russia’s near (and not- so-near) abroad aside, increasing numbers of Westerners seem to agree with the sentiment of his remarks, punishing establishment politicians as “globalists” and rewarding inward-looking populists. From Brexiteers bucking the European Union to America-firsters looking to make their country “great again,” from supporters of the National Front in France to loyalists of the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands or the Freedom Party of Austria, nationalists are on the ascent, seeking progress for themselves and their compatriots on their own terms.
Matthew W. Slaboch (A Road to Nowhere: The Idea of Progress and Its Critics)
When it came to federalism, however, there were different types. Regional (territorial) federalism has been the characteristic form in the West: the United States, Canada and so on. Ethnic federalism, in contrast, has been an African development following the Nigerian post-civil war constitution of the mid-1970s. It followed the logic of colonial indirect rule. As an expression of self-determination, ethnic federalism acknowledges the ethnic group—and not the population of a region—as the political self with the right to self-determination. The general principle is: for each ethnic group, a homeland. And inside each homeland, customary rights for members of the ethnic group indigenous to that homeland. In Ethiopia too, as had been in colonized Africa, those residing in the homeland but ancestrally not of it, were disenfranchised. This legal innovation turned ethnic difference into a source of advantage for those acknowledged in law as indigenous and discrimination against those who were not. The politicization of ethnicity created an enfranchised majority alongside disenfranchised minorities in each homeland. This is what C&S termed tribalism, the inevitable consequence of indirect rule.
Mahmood Mamdani (Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism)
extensive use of case studies, including GE, eBay, TAL, Dell, Toyota, Southwest, UPS, Federal Express, and IBM to illustrate our themes and gain insight from what these innovators have recognized and created. By understanding the principles of this book, you will gain insight into the new marketplace reality and learn
Linda S. Sanford (Let Go To Grow: Escaping The Commodity Trap)
accommodate, within reason, the religious practices of workers and applicants unless they impose an “undue hardship” on the business. It is the latest in a line of Supreme Court cases that have elevated religious rights over secular interests, whether exercised by powerful corporations, government agencies or prison inmates. The majority opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia stressed two points that outline the role religion can have in the workplace. Employers must do more than handle religious practices in the same way they do secular ones, he wrote, because federal law gives faith-related expression “favored treatment, affirmatively obligating employers” to accommodate things they could otherwise refuse. Moreover, he wrote, an applicant or employee alleging religious discrimination doesn’t have to prove the employer was motivated by bias.
Anonymous
Government-subsidized private sector job creation is one way forward. Recently, the federal government sponsored a promising short-term subsidized jobs program through something called the TANF Emergency Fund. States that chose to participate were allowed to use TANF dollars to provide employers (mostly in the private sector) with incentives to hire unemployed workers, targeting those on TANF or those who were in a spell of extended unemployment. Each state was given considerable leeway to design the program however it saw fit, often in close collaboration with employers. Across the District of Columbia and the thirty-nine states that took part in the program, employers created more than 260,000 jobs with an investment of only $1.3 billion dollars. Roughly two-thirds of participating employers said they created positions that would not have existed otherwise, and the businesses that took part expressed, on the whole, eagerness to participate in such a program in the future. Further, many participants remained employed after the subsidy ended, and those who had experienced significant trouble finding work especially made gains. Researchers who studied the program noted that it garnered “strong support from employers, workers, and state and local officials from across the political spectrum.” Creating a subsidized jobs program modeled on the TANF Emergency Fund would be one way to improve the circumstances of America’s $2-a-day poor.
Kathryn J. Edin ($2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America)
HENRY CLIMBED INTO my truck and buckled his seatbelt with the grimmest expression I had ever seen. His hair stood out in every direction, and his hands shook. “You okay, buddy?” I asked, trying to be gentle. “Do you want to go see Robin instead? She’d be glad to cut it, Henry.” Millie had followed him out, tapping her way down the sidewalk with a concerned frown between her dark brows. She now stood holding onto the passenger side door. I could tell she wanted to ride along, but Henry didn’t seem to want her to. “It’s a man date, right Henry? Men go to the barber. Not the salon.” Henry tapped his fingertips together nervously and wouldn’t look right or left. “Kite flying is an official sport in Thailand!” Henry blurted. Amelie bit her lip but stepped back from the passenger door. “Bye, Millie. I’ll bring him back. Don’t worry,” I called. She nodded and tried to smile, and I pulled away from the curb. Henry’s tapping became a cadence. Clack clack. Click click. It sounded like the rhythm Millie made with her stick when she walked. “Henry?” No response. Just clicking, all the way to the barbershop. I pulled up to Leroy’s shop and put my truck in park. I jumped out and came around to Henry’s door. Henry made no move to disembark. “Henry? Do you want to do this?” Henry looked pointedly at my shaggy locks and clicked his fingers. “I need a haircut, Henry. So do you. We’re men. We can do this.” “Ben Askren, Roger Federer, Shaun White, Troy Polamalu, David Beckham, Triple H.” “Triple H?” I started to laugh. Henry was listing athletes with long hair. “You’re getting desperate, Henry.” “Larry Fitzgerald? Tim Lincecum?” “Tim Lincecum, huh? He plays for the Giants, doesn’t he? Your favorite team, right?” Henry didn’t respond. “Ah, shit. What the hell. I didn’t want to cut my hair anyway. I kind of think your sister likes it.” The clicking slowed. “You wanna go buy a kite? I hear it’s an official sport in Thailand,” I said. Henry smiled the smallest ghost of a smile and nodded once.
Amy Harmon (The Song of David (The Law of Moses, #2))
In defending HUD before the Supreme Court, President Gerald Ford's solicitor general, Robert Bork, expressed the government's opposition to placing public housing in white areas: "There will be an enormous practical impact on innocent communities who have to bear the burden of the housing, who will have to house a plaintiff class from Chicago, which they wronged in no way." Thus, the federal government described nondiscriminatory housing policy as punishment visited on the innocent. The Supreme Court rejected Bork's objection, upholding lower court orders that HUD must henceforth construct apartments in predominately white areas of Chicago and its suburbs. The CHA-HUD response was to cease building public housing altogether.
Richard Rothstein (The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America)
The interpretations of that model were wildly different from one artist to the next. They reaffirmed the idea that expression is unique to each individual and that raw information, in art and elsewhere, is much less interesting than the interpretation and insights derived from it.
Ben Feder (Take Off Your Shoes: One Man's Journey from the Boardroom to Bali and Back)
In the East the opposing forces stood in substantially the same relations towards each other as three years before, or when the war began; they were both between the Federal and Confederate capitals. It is true, footholds had been secured by us on the sea-coast, in Virginia and North Carolina, but, beyond that, no substantial advantage had been gained by either side. Battles had been fought of as great severity as had ever been known in war, over ground from the James River and Chickahominy, near Richmond, to Gettysburg and Chambersburg, in Pennsylvania, with indecisive results, sometimes favorable to the National army, sometimes to the Confederate army; but in every instance, I believe, claimed as victories for the South by the Southern press if not by the Southern generals. The Northern press, as a whole, did not discourage these claims; a portion of it always magnified rebel success and belittled ours, while another portion, most sincerely earnest in their desire for the preservation of the Union and the overwhelming success of the Federal armies, would nevertheless generally express dissatisfaction with whatever victories were gained because they were not more complete.
Ulysses S. Grant (Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant)
In connection with that analysis, we addressed the factual question whether members of the Trump Campaign "coordinat[ed]"—a term that appears in the appointment order—with Russian election interference activities. Like collusion, "coordination" does not have a settled definition in federal criminal law. We understood coordination to require an agreement—tacit or express—between the Trump Campaign and the Russian government on election interference. That requires more than the two parties taking actions that were informed by or responsive to the other's actions or interests. We applied the term coordination in that sense when stating in the report that the investigation did not establish that the Trump Campaign coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.
The Washington Post (The Mueller Report)
Most white Americans believe elections should be a choice of policies rather than expressions of racial identity. If Americans vote for a candidate because of his racial agenda, representative government is crippled. Democratic systems operate well only when politicians recognize that even if their opponents’ approaches may be different, all parties are trying to work for the good of the country as a whole. When politics fracture along racial lines, it becomes easy to assume that elected officials work for narrow, ethnic interests, and political contests become very bitter. The ultimate logic of politics in a racially fractured electorate is a system of quotas in which seats in elective bodies are set aside in proportion to the racial composition of the population. This is the formula hopelessly divided countries such as Lebanon and immediate post-white-rule Zimbabwe and South Africa hit upon. It could be the solution for other divided countries such as Iraq, Sudan, Fiji, Malaysia, or Sri Lanka, where politics is a perpetual squabble over ethnic interests. There is already implied support for proportional racial representation in the federal approach to voter districts. The US Department of Justice has long required that congressional districts be gerrymandered to create black and Hispanic majorities that are expected to vote along racial lines and send one of their own to Congress. The department also routinely sues cities that choose their governing bodies in at-large elections. If, for example, a city is 30 percent black but has no blacks on the city council because all candidates must appeal to the entire city, voting must be switched to a ward system, with wards drawn so that blacks—by voting for people like themselves have approximately 30 percent of the council seats. In 2006, the Justice Department used precisely this argument to threaten Euclid, Ohio, with litigation if it did not replace its at-large elections with a system of eight separate wards. In 2010, Hispanics made the same argument when they sued the city of Compton: They claimed that an at-large voting system shut them out and kept the city council all black.
Jared Taylor (White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century)
Walking north along Hastings, Jimmy would have come to the future site of the Brewster Homes, one of the first two federally funded—and segregated—housing projects in the city. The project’s opening was a year away, but it had already been two years since the city began clearing the project site—designated by the Detroit City Plan Commission as the “East Side Blighted Area”—displacing hundreds of families (the vast majority of them African American) and several businesses. The project was part of the city’s racially coded slum clearance plan, which reinforced residential segregation and did little to ameliorate the city’s housing crisis. 100 The cleared site was in effect an expression of one of black Detroit’s major struggles—access to housing—anticipating the extreme wartime tensions around race and housing that exploded five years later with the controversy and mini-riot at the Sojourner Truth Homes.
Stephen M. Ward (In Love and Struggle: The Revolutionary Lives of James and Grace Lee Boggs (Justice, Power, and Politics))
Its eventual goals include the abolition of all drug laws (not just those against currently illegal narcotics and hallucinogens, but an end to prescription laws and the Food and Drug Administration as well), the abolition of the income tax, the abolition of all regulation of private sexual relations (from marriage to prostitution and everything in between), an end to public ownership and regulation of the airwaves, an end to overseas military bases and all warmaking not in direct defense of the homeland, an end to the welfare state, and an end to any legal restrictions whatsoever on speech and expression. Libertarians’ policy prescriptions are based on a simple idea with very complicated repercussions: Government, if it has any purpose at all (and many libertarians doubt it does), should be restricted to the protection of its citizens’ persons and property against direct violence and theft. In their eyes, most modern government functions, if done by private individuals, would be seen as violence and theft. Libertarians’ economic reasoning leads them to the conclusion that, left to their own devices, a free people would spontaneously develop the institutions necessary for a healthy and wealthy culture. They think that state interference in the economy, whether through taxing or regulation, makes us all poorer rather than richer. Their ideas and policy prescriptions seem unbelievably radical in the current political context. But in many ways, libertarians argue, the United States was founded on libertarian principles. The Constitution defined a role for the federal government much smaller than what it practices today, and it restricted government to a limited set of mandated powers.
Brian Doherty (Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement)
If the pandemic first revealed the limits of the expertise at the once-revered CDC, now it was revealing the limitations of the expertise at the Federal Reserve. Both were exacerbated by the same problem that had gripped so much of America: an unwillingness to hear outside voices that expressed disagreement.
Joe Nocera (The Big Fail: What the Pandemic Revealed About Who America Protects and Who It Leaves Behind)