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Thursday, May 21, 2009

Essay #88: "The Party of No"

Recent writers of letters in the local newspaper avoid certain facts, because objective reality is their enemy.

1) Barack Obama won the election for President in November 2008. That an African-American won the popular vote is a major accomplishment (in this racist country), and the landslide in the electoral college is equally important. The People are now back in power.

2) The Japanese surrendered in 1945, but the permanent opposition to the People did not surrender in November. Those seeking to render the U.S. Constitution worthless continue to spew their propaganda, as regularly appears in local newspapers across the country, as well as on national hate-talk radio and on the faux TV news channels.

The Party of No – no facts, no rights, no healthcare, no accountability, no security, no jobs, no education, no solutions – is made up of the Republicans, fascists, racists, Federalists, Wall Street barons, members of P.N.A.C., all the unindicted traitors and criminals of the Bush Administration, the war profiteers, and just plain demagogues plotting together and separately to reverse the intent of the Constitution and to further destroy the Nation. Their evil job is not done.

3) The Republican National Debt today stands at 25 trillion dollars. If – and that is still a very big IF – Barack Obama and his team saves America and the world from suffering the decade-long Second Republican Depression that looms on our horizon, then he will have done a greater thing than F.D.R. did, because President Obama has only eight years to rescue the country. The matter is extremely urgent.

4) The economy of America and the world has not yet reached bottom. We have yet to go thru the turmoil that awaits from the Credit Card Crisis. If President Obama makes the right choices AND his plans get enacted in time, then the economy won't get too much worse. If what needs to be enacted is faulty or is blocked or watered down by the Party of No, then the Republican Great Depression of 1929 to 1938 will look like a picnic in the park in comparison.

5) A recent national poll by A.B.C. News found that only 21% of American voters will admit to being registered as Republicans. The Party of No has lost power because their lies are both the cause and the result of believing their own propaganda.

* *          * *          * *          * *

Barack Obama and his team are the only chance that America has to restore Constitutional law, to survive the Republican economic meltdown, and with a little luck maybe even prevent your grandchildren from living as slaves to the Oligarchy.

Copyright 2009 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved

Sunday, May 17, 2009

May 2009 Quotations

"I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork."
~~ Peter De Vries [1910-93]

"If you are unhappy before fame, you will probably be unhappy during fame."
~~ Haing S. Ngor [1940-96]

"Part of the loot went for gambling and part for women. The rest I spent foolishly."
~~ actor George Raft [1895-1980]

"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy: that is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."
~~ John Kenneth Galbraith [1908-2006]

"A nation glued to the television screen ... can fill up every 'unforgiving minute' with enough trash and preoccupation to still forever the deeper voices of the soul."
~~ Adlai Stevenson [1900-65], in 1959

"My activism pays the rent on being alive and being here on the planet."
~~ Alice Walker, in 1989

"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader."
~~ poet Robert Frost [1874-63]

"Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass."
~~ Anton Chekhov [1860-1904]

"Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself."
~~ William Faulkner [1897-1962]

"News is what someone, somewhere, doesn't want you to know. Everything else is advertising."
~~ Alfred Harmsworth, Lord Northcliffe [1865-1922]

"We are all travellers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend."
~~ Robert Louis Stevenson [1850-94]

"Oh! what a tangled web we weave / When first we practice to deceive!"
~~ Sir Walter Scott [1771-1832]

"Bad politicians are sent to Washington by good people who don't vote."
~~ William E. Simon

"To punish me for my contempt for authority, fate made me an authority myself."
~~ Albert Einstein [1879-1955]

"All good things – trout as well as eternal salvation – come by grace and grace comes by art and art does not come easy."
~~ Norman Maclean [1902-90]

"[Sociologist C. Wright] Mills is half forgotten -- perhaps because much of what he said is now taken for granted."
~~ Norman Birnbaum

"We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament, and embrace it with passion, if we want to be happy."
~~ Cyril Connolly [1903-74]

"This is the worst economy since the Great Depression."
~~ Richard Stengel, Time Magazine

"The problem with 'going with the flow' is that the flow is always downhill."
~~ G.E. Nordell

"Nothing is more costly, nothing is more sterile, than vengeance."
~~ Sir Winston Churchill [1874-1965]

"The world has been slow to realize that we are in the shadow of one of the greatest economic catastrophes of modern history."
~~ John Maynard Keynes [1883-1946], quoted by James K. Galbraith in written testimony to Congress, February 2009

"Great minds have purposes, others have wishes."
~~ Washington Irving [1783-1859]

"A useless life is an early death."
~~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe [1749-1842]

"There is a purpose to our lives that each day tugs at our sleeve as an annoying distraction."
~~ Robert Brault

"When a man does not know what harbor he is making for, no wind is the right wind."
~~ Seneca the Younger [4? B.C.E. - 65 A.D.]

"Is it weird in here, or is it just me?"
~~ comedian Steven Wright

"If a picture is worth a thousand words, what is the price of a song?"
~~ Lou Reed

"Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valley of silliness."
~~ Ludwig Wittgenstein [1889-1951]

"The most important thing that parents can teach their children is how to get along without them."
~~ Frank A. Clark

"Higher education in America is designed to fashion plowshares into doorstops."
~~ G.E. Nordell

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}