Clever turns of phrase, special splashes of wit, provocative insight — all in a sentence or two.
“The governor [Mississippi’s Haley Barbour] claimed that Americans had been particularly deprived of information on Obama’s youth, while they knew a great deal about the formative years of the other chief executives all the way back to the way the youthful George Washington ‘chopped down a cherry tree.’
“Let us reconsider the above paragraph in light of the fact that while Obama wrote an entire book about his childhood, Washington never chopped down the cherry tree.”
“I am not going to mention his name, since he’s already been rewarded with way too many TV interviews for a person whose seminal career achievement has been building a thriving congregation of about 50 people.”
Gail Collins referring to the minister in Florida, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.
“We’ve all become accustomed to a Congress that behaves as if it’s divided between Bloods and Crips rather than Republicans and Democrats….”
Tim Rutten in a Los Angeles Times opinion piece, 2006.
This reminds me of my favorite unlucky criminal of all time — a guy in Spain who tried to steal the luggage of hurdler Larry Wade. At the time, Maurice Greene was the fastest man on earth, and he was there, and he chased after the criminal and caught him and got Larry’s luggage back. It always struck me that the criminal was sitting in a jail cell muttering, “Yeah, of course, my luck, MAURICE GREENE had to be there. If it had been anyone else, I get away. If even the second-fastest man in the world was there, I outrun the guy. But, no, it had to be Maurice Greene.”
If you like baseball read this article and the related one. Best line in the article listing the 32 fastest pitchers is this:
“Lefty Grove could throw a lamb chop past a wolf.”
I had to hold off from including about a dozen more great lines.
“[F]rom 1980 to 2005, more than 80 percent of total increase in Americans’ income went to the top 1 percent.”
Timothy Noah, beginning a series at Slate Magazine on The Great Divergence: Trying to understand income inequality, the most profound change in American society in your lifetime. To elaborate:
. . . Economic inequality is less troubling if you live in a country where any child, no matter how humble his or her origins, can grow up to be president. In a survey of 27 nations conducted from 1998 to 2001, the country where the highest proportion agreed with the statement “people are rewarded for intelligence and skill” was, of course, the United States. (69 percent). But when it comes to real as opposed to imagined social mobility, surveys find less in the United States than in much of (what we consider) the class-bound Old World. France, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Spain—not to mention some newer nations like Canada and Australia—are all places where your chances of rising from the bottom are better than they are in the land of Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick.
All my life I’ve heard Latin America described as a failed society (or collection of failed societies) because of its grotesque maldistribution of wealth. Peasants in rags beg for food outside the high walls of opulent villas, and so on. But according to the Central Intelligence Agency (whose patriotism I hesitate to question), income distribution in the United States is more unequal than in Guyana, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, and roughly on par with Uruguay, Argentina, and Ecuador. Income inequality is actually declining in Latin America even as it continues to increase in the United States. . . .
“After taking an eight on a par four my friend Pat said: ‘You know, except for that one I put in the water I had six great shots on that hole.’ ”
Today is Labor Day. All across America, millions of people are discovering that the best way to celebrate Labor Day is by not working.
Do you live to work, or do you work to live?
If you are married, look at your wedding album: Are there any pictures in there of you at work?
And on your tombstone, do you want it to say, “I wish that I could have spent more time at work”?
Here is what Robert Kennedy had to say about this, 42 years ago:
Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product… if we should judge America by that — counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead, and armored cars for police who fight riots in our streets. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it tells us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.
When Kennedy said these words, the unemployment rate in America was 3.7%. Today, it is almost three times as high. Too many of our working brothers and sisters are out of work, thanks to more than a decade of economic mismanagement. 10% of us are unemployed, and the other 90% work like dogs to try to avoid joining them. Which is just what the bosses want.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. I look forward to a Labor Day where every worker has a job, every worker has a pension, every worker has paid vacations, and every worker has the health care to enjoy life.
My opponents call that France. I call it America, an America that is Number One.
Not #1 in wasted military expenditures.
Not #1 in number of foreign countries occupied.
Number One in jobs. Number One in health. Number One in education. Number One in happiness.
As Robert Kennedy famously said, “I dream of things that never were, and ask, ‘Why not?'” Why not? Let’s make it happen.
And then all of us who are Americans, including the ones today who are jobless, homeless, sick and suffering, we all can then say, “I am proud to be an American.”
Are you with me?
Truth,
Congressman Alan Grayson
Source:MichaelMoore.com
“JEFFERSON CITY, MO . . . – A rabid Doberman Pinscher jumped on stage at a Tea Party rally in Missouri on Labor Day and barked at the crowd for nearly twenty minutes before people realized he was not a candidate.”
All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten
“He also told us about the green-yellow-red behavior system and said that he won’t get any reds but we should expect a few yellows.”
That’s Mack’s mom reporting on Mack’s first day of kindergarten in 2006. Mack later said that it’s not that he might purposefully break a rule, it’s that you don’t always know the rules. Indeed. It’s difficult to go through kindergarten, or any other part of life, without a few yellows.
That same Mack debuts for the Grizzlies today at QB. Real football. Helmets. Pads. Tackling.
“I can understand why the people who persuaded Obama to go for the capillaries might still be claiming that they have the right strategy; but I don’t understand why Obama is still listening to them.”
“But Obama’s instinctive caution has steered him away from casting these questions as moral or civil rights issues. On none of them has he shown anything resembling courage.”
“When my so-called phone rings, my first reaction is ‘Shit. What’s wrong now?’ When I get an email or text message, I feel a tingle of optimism.”
Scott Adams from a blog post on the need for a new name for the device we call a phone.
Another line:
“Ask a teen how often he makes phone calls on his texter.”
“The average human eye blinks at a speed (between) three-tenths and four-tenths of a second. So if you are the batter and you blink at the point of Chapman’s release, the ball will pass you before you open your eyes again.”
Matt Bynum of Hillerich and Bradsby quoted by Paul Daugherty – SI.com.
Estimated time from Chapman’s hand until the ball crosses the plate at 104 mph — 0.36 seconds.
“Great summer tune for a family road trip.”
Customer Review on iTunes for Cee Lo’s “Fuck You.”
“When people say this isn’t the America they grew up in, they’re right. Nobody gets to grow old in the America they grew up in.”
And another:
“During the last election, I noticed that at the Republican town halls, people complained constantly about immigration. But what they complained most about wasn’t the possibility of lost jobs, or crime. It was that when they called their bank, a recorded message told them to press 2 for Spanish.”
“These opinions have an agenda. They seek to demonize the Obama Presidency and mainstream liberal politics in general. The conservatism they prefer is not the traditional conservatism of such figures as Taft, Nixon, Reagan, Buckley or Goldwater. It is a frightening new radical fringe movement, financed by such as the newly notorious billionaire Koch brothers, whose hatred of government extends even to opposition to tax funding for public schools.”
We have been reading about the “radio priest”—the young Catholic Father who broadcasts his beliefs from a small chapel in Michigan, and gets as many as three hundred and ninety thousand letters a day from members of the radio audience. He employs eighty-three secretaries to handle this mail—a larger payroll, you must admit, than most young shepherds command. He speaks against birth control, pacifism, and internationalism; and in favor of the multiplication of the body as commanded by God, and of the sanctity of patriotism. This, it seems to us, is a phenomenal leadership. We get accustomed to thinking of the radio merely as an instrument for increasing the sale of trademarked products and the vanity of tenors; yet here is an advocate of the sanctity of patriotism and other barbarous causes, with so many listeners and converts that he can’t handle them without secretaries. We happen to be, in a small way, on the other side of the fence from Father Coughlin on all his points; but we must confess, after reading the statistics about his audience, that being on the other side of the fence from him is like standing all alone in a million-acre field. What an impressive thing it is! Talking against internationalism over the radio is like talking against rain in a rainstorm: the radio has made internationalism a fact, it has made boundaries look so silly that we wonder how mapmakers can draw maps without laughing; yet there stands Father Coughlin in front of the microphone, his voice reaching well up into Canada, his voice reaching well down into Mexico, his voice leaping national boundaries as lightly as a rabbit—there he stands, saying that internationalism will be our ruin, and getting millions of letters saying he is right. Will somebody please write us one letter saying that he is wrong—if only so that we can employ a secretary?
“But what makes the Post still worth reading is its news pages. They are separate from the editorial page operation, which is a notably weak part of the overall product. If you took an equal number of random Washington, D.C., citizens off the street and gave them the job of running the newspaper’s editorial and op-ed pages, you could hardly do worse. You might well do better.”
“Those who like to believe they have picked themselves up by the bootstraps sometimes forget that they wouldn’t even have boots were it not for the women who came before.”
From The Mother of All Grizzlies about Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg by Dahlia Lithwick. An excerpt:
To which I would just add that Palin and the Mama Grizzlies also owe a debt of thanks directly to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who almost single-handedly convinced the courts and legislatures to do away with gender classifications in matters ranging from a woman’s right to be executor of her son’s estate (Reed v. Reed, 1970), to a female Air Force lieutenant’s right to secure housing allowances and medical benefits for her husband (Frontiero v. Richardson, 1973), and the right of Oklahoma’s “thirsty boys” (her words) to buy beer at the Honk n’ Holler at the same age as young women (Craig v. Boren, 1976).
“In England, an elderly Swedish tourist lay down on the luggage conveyor belt, after her suitcase, believing that was how she was told to board her plane. Confused? Or prophetic?”
Unknown
“What it came down to was that a significant fraction of the American population, backed by a lot of money and political influence, simply does not consider government by liberals (even very moderate liberals) legitimate. . . .
“What happens when Obama is elected? It will be even worse than it was in the Clinton years. For sure there will be crazy accusations, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see some violence.”
Paul Krugman October 2008
“If President Obama has a big economic initiative up his sleeve, as he hinted recently, now would be a good time to let the rest of us in on it.”
“Love is the master-key that opens the gates of happiness, of hatred, of jealousy, and, most easily of all, the gate of fear. How terrible is the one fact of beauty!”
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., born 201 years ago today in Cambridge, Massachusetts, quoted at The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor
“In The Poet at the Breakfast Table (1872) [Holmes] wrote, ‘We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible.’ ”
Holmes wrote poetry, helped found The Atlantic, practiced medicine, taught at Harvard Medical School, and was the father of a supreme court justice.
From two years ago today:
“I’ve heard of trophy brides before, but this is the first time I’ve ever heard of a trophy vice presidential candidate.”
NewMexiKen
And so let freedom ring — from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire.
Let freedom ring — from the mighty mountains of New York.
Let freedom ring — from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania.
Let freedom ring — from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado.
Let freedom ring — from the curvaceous slopes of California.
But not only that.
Let freedom ring — from Stone Mountain of Georgia.
Let freedom ring — from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee.
Let freedom ring — from every hill and molehill of Mississippi, from every mountainside, let freedom ring!
And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual,
“Free at last, free at last.
Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.”
__________
Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., 47 years ago today
“This is going to be almost inconceivably ugly.”
Paul Krugman writing that “all signs are that the next few years will be a combination of economic stagnation and political witch-hunt.”