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Thoreau's Civil Disobedience - 1 - 0 views

thoreau.eserver.org/civil1.html
shared by Anne Hulthen on 30 Oct 13 - Cached
  • He who gives himself entirely to his fellow-men appears to them useless and selfish;
    • Anne Hulthen
      Anne Hulthen on 30 Oct 13
       
      This is kind of like Jimmy Carter, How sometimes the best person doesn't make the best president, because they lack the ability to persuade the caucus or play the politician.
  • All machines have their friction; and possibly this does enough good to counterbalance the evil. At any rate, it is a great evil to make a stir about it. But when the friction comes to have its machine, and oppression and robbery are organized, I say, let us not have such a machine any longer. 
  • "This principle being admitted, the justice of every particular case of resistance is reduced to a computation of the quantity of the danger and grievance on the one side, and of the probability and expense of redressing it on the other."(
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • there be some absolute goodness somewhere; for that will leaven the whole lump.(15) There are thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to the war, who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to them; who, esteeming themselves children of Washington and Franklin, sit down with their hands in their pockets, and say that they know not what to do,
  •  It is not so important that many should be as good as you, as that
  • Practically speaking, the opponents to a reform in Massachusetts are not a hundred thousand politicians at the South, but a hundred thousand merchants and farmers here, who are more interested in commerce and agriculture than they are in humanity, and are not prepared to do justice to the slave and to Mexico, cost what it may.
  •   All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it.
  • There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men. When the majority shall at length vote for the abolition of slavery, it will be because they are indifferent to slavery, or because there is but little slavery left to be abolished by their vote. They will then be the only slaves.
  • "I should like to have them order me out to help put down an insurrection of the slaves, or to march to Mexico; — see if I would go";
  • ow many men are there to a square thousand miles in this country? Hardly one. Does not America offer any inducement for men to settle here? The American has dwindled into an Odd Fellow (17) — one who may be known by the development of his organ of gregariousness, and a manifest lack of intellect and cheerful self-reliance; whose first and chief concern,
  • and yet these very men have each, directly by their allegiance, and so indirectly, at least, by their money, furnished a substitute
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Revolution? Or The Realization Of Orwell's Vision? | The Smirking Chimp - 0 views

www.smirkingchimp.com/...24107 corporations corporate corporatism corporatist capitalism democracy USA fascism totalitarianism congress
shared by avivajazz jazzaviva on 01 Oct 09 - Cached
  • avivajazz jazzaviva on 01 Oct 09
     
    "The government, and the politicians who pretend to represent ordinary Americans, are a wholly owned and operated subsidiary of the corporate state. " Corporations, as they endlessly scheme for complete control over the planet's finite resources, will order the planet's social order into whatever structure is necessary to insure corporate dominance over the individual. Orwell recognized the corporate entities driven ambition to abolish represenative government in favor of corporate oligarchy. For anyone who isn't blind it's easy to recognize that representative democracy in the U.S. has been cast aside
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Senator Levin: "Your Clients Lost. Goldman Profits" | Kris Broughton | Big Think - 0 views

bigthink.com/19866 goldman-sachs goldman congress investigation banksters fraud corruption politics economy economics
shared by avivajazz jazzaviva on 04 May 10 - Cached
  • avivajazz jazzaviva on 04 May 10
     
    I was tooling around the internet for awhile yesterday, looking for a transcript of the Congressional hearings that featured Goldman Sachs executives and traders as the star witnesses, before I realized that nowhere in print was there any real sense of what had gone on. Congressional hearings may have been effective at some point in the past, but these days, the witnesses are usually far too polished and used to dissembling for hours at a time to be of any real value, and the senators and congressmen who are asking the questions are usually too polite to do more than ask questions of little or no value. Senator Carl Levin tried to deviate from that formula on Tuesday. He was harsh, unyielding and relentless. "Your clients lost. Goldman profits" rang out several times during his opening address. But Senator Levin didn't have enough of an understanding of the business to really pin back the ears of any of the witnesses, including Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman Sachs chairman. I couldn't figure out for the life of me why his staffers didn't line up a few disgruntled traders and insiders to give the senator a three or four day crash course on the business. His gambling analogies were something that might appeal to my grandmother, who puts gambling of any kind up there with the cardinal sins, but missed the mark when it came to characterizing Wall Street's shenanigans.
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Elena Kagan: We Need an Assertive Liberal Counterweight to Scalia ~ Not a Mediator (or ... - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...hat-we-need----a_b_571133.html kagen scotus progressives
shared by avivajazz jazzaviva on 11 May 10 - Cached
  • avivajazz jazzaviva on 11 May 10
     
    "What the Court needs right now is someone who will fight for the rights of people who aren't part of the upper crust. What we need to hear is that Elena Kagan knows how to stand firm and doesn't think that compromise is the only way out of disagreement or that making the other side happy no matter how closed minded and belligerent they are is somehow admirable. We've had enough of that lately."
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AlterNet: The Nightmare of Christianity: How Religious Indoctrination Led to Murder - 0 views

www.alternet.org/...142605 ReadItLater
shared by ken meece on 11 Oct 09 - Cached
  • Former Arkansas governor and Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee is among the 2.5 million Americans who have attended Gothard's Basic Seminar. According to Huckabee, who once earmarked state funds to distribute Gothard's literature in Arkansas prisons, Gothard was responsible for "some of the best programs for instilling character into people."
  • Oral Roberts University. ORU at the time was beginning to unravel under the weight of scandalous revelations that its new president, Richard Roberts--the scion of its beloved founder--had allegedly looted university coffers to pay for his daughter's junkets to the Bahamas and bankroll his wife's shopping sprees. (Oral Roberts's other son, Ronnie, was a cocaine-addicted closet homosexual who committed suicide in 1982)
  • "Discipleship Training School" of Youth with a Mission (YWAM), a Christian Reconstructionist-inspired missionary group that trained bright-eyed youngsters to spread the gospel of Colorado Springs to under-evangelized Third World nations.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • another student of YWAM bluntly put it, the school's training methods resembled "cult mind-controlling techniques."
  • Crowley's mock-religious order, Ordo Templi Orientis, following in the footsteps of famous Crowley followers such as Scientology cult founder L. Ron Hubbard and Jack Parsons, the eccentric rocket fuel inventor who prayed to the Greek god Pan after each successful launch.
  • Crowley, like him, was raised by fundamentalist Christian parents he loathed.
  • Crowley's philosophy of sex "magick," narcotic hallucination and self-degradation (he allegedly ordered his followers to have oral sex with goats and drink the blood of cats) was forged in reaction to his parents' Puritanism and, in fact, was first practiced in English boarding schools, where homosexual experimentation was practically de rigueur.
  • neo-evangelical macho Christ
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Bailout for the People || Basic Income Guarantees || Cancerous Monetary System in USA - 0 views

dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/...-cook-plan-by-richard-c-cook-2 cook plan economy depression recession economics economic crisis income poverty wealth production disparities inequalities basic income guarantee
shared by avivajazz jazzaviva on 15 Oct 09 - Cached
  • avivajazz jazzaviva on 15 Oct 09
     
    Isn't it fiinally time to enact a "basic income guarantee"? The lack of individual and family income security in the midst of a highly-developed economy is a travesty under any circumstances. But the contradiction of "poverty in the midst of plenty" that has plagued the world since the start of the Industrial Revolution is becoming much more grave in the U.S. and abroad. The problem, of course, is one of distribution of earnings, and excess production capacity relative to available income... Winston Churchill gave eloquent testimony to this conundrum of the modern age when delivering the Romanes Lecture at Oxford University on June 19, 1930. This was a few months after the crash of the U.S. stock market marked the start of the Great Depression. Churchill said: "Who would have thought that it would be easier to produce by toil and skill all the most necessary or desirable commodities than it is to find consumers for them? Who would have thought that cheap and abundant supplies of all the basic commodities would find the science and civilization of the world unable to utilize them? Have all our triumphs of research and organization bequeathed us only a new punishment: the Curse of Plenty? Are we really to believe that no better adjustment can be made between supply and demand? Yet the fact remains that every attempt has failed. Many various attempts have been made, from the extremes of Communism in Russia to the extremes of Capitalism in the United States. They include every form of fiscal policy and currency policy. But all have failed, and we have advanced little further in this quest than in barbaric times. Surely it is this mysterious crack and fissure at the basis of all our arrangements and apparatus upon which the keenest minds throughout the world should be concentrated.
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Radical Reference | Answers for Those Who Question Authority | Radical Libraries, Radic... - 0 views

radicalreference.info reference research activism library progressive justice social equality librarianship radical social justice progressives politics activists
shared by avivajazz jazzaviva on 29 Sep 09 - Cached
  • avivajazz jazzaviva on 29 Sep 09
     
    # activism feminism left politics progressive research socialnetworking # 07 Aug 06 lauralf Laura Lo Forti a collective of volunteer library workers who believe in social justice and equality. progressive citizenmedia citizenjournalism research
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Meet the Dirty Dozen : Banksters + Brokers Who Bilked the Planet : Rolling Stone - 0 views

www.rollingstone.com/...print banksters bankers fed sector leaders industry greenspan rubin brokers collapse 2008 2009 global economics corruption politics economy
shared by avivajazz jazzaviva on 27 Feb 10 - Cached
  • avivajazz jazzaviva on 27 Feb 10
     
    Meet the bankers and brokers responsible for the financial crisis - and the officials who let them get away with it. Matt Taibbi
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Who Cares if Elena Kagan is a Lesbian? Progressives Shouldn't Keep This Argument Alive ... - 0 views

www.alternet.org/...elena_kagan_is_not_a_lesbian kagan lesbian gay
shared by avivajazz jazzaviva on 11 May 10 - Cached
  • avivajazz jazzaviva on 11 May 10
     
    "Kagan's sexual orientation is irrelevant. The only side this line of questioning helps is the far right, who have already mounted a whisper campaign about her sexuality. "
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Think Again: God - By Karen Armstrong | Foreign Policy - 1 views

www.foreignpolicy.com/...god_0 ReadItLater
shared by ken meece on 19 Oct 09 - Cached
  • An inadequate understanding of God that reduces “him” to an idol in our own image who gives our likes and dislikes sacred sanction is the worst form of spiritual tyranny. Such arrogance has led to atrocities like the Crusades. The rise of secularism in government was meant to check this tendency, but secularism itself has created new demons now inflicting themselves on the world.
  • In the West, secularism has been a success, essential to the modern economy and political system, but it was achieved gradually over the course of nearly 300 years, allowing new ideas of governance time to filter down to all levels of society. But in other parts of the world, secularization has occurred far too rapidly and has been resented by large sectors of the population,
  • Shiism had for centuries separated religion from politics as a matter of sacred principle, and Khomeini’s insistence that a cleric should become head of state was an extraordinary innovation.
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • In the same spirit, Hassan al-Banna (1906-1949), founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, began his movement by translating the social message of the Koran into a modern idiom, founding clinics, hospitals, trade unions, schools, and factories that gave workers insurance, holidays, and good working conditions. In other words, he aimed to bring the masses to modernity in an Islamic setting. The Brotherhood’s resulting popularity was threatening to Egypt’s secular government, which could not provide these services.
  • John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama have invoked faith as a shared experience that binds the country together -- an approach that recognizes the communal power of spirituality without making any pretense to divine right.
  • it is not God or religion but violence itself -- inherent in human nature -- that breeds violence. As a species, we survived by killing and eating other animals; we also murder our own kind. So pervasive is this violence that it leaks into most scriptures, though these aggressive passages have always been balanced and held in check by other texts that promote a compassionate ethic based on the Golden Rule
  • "religious" wars, no matter how modern the tools, always begin as political ones.
  • In recent Gallup polling conducted in 35 Muslim countries, only 7 percent of those questioned thought that the September 11 attacks were justified. Their reasons were entirely political.
  • Fundamentalism is not conservative. Rather, it is highly innovative -- even heretical -- because it always develops in response to a perceived crisis. In their anxiety, some fundamentalists distort the tradition they are trying to defend.
  • All fundamentalism -- whether Jewish, Christian, or Muslim -- is rooted in a profound fear of annihilation.
  • The Bible and the Koran may have prohibited usury, but over the centuries Jews, Christians, and Muslims all found ways of getting around this restriction and produced thriving economies. It is one of the great ironies of religious history that Christianity, whose founder taught that it was impossible to serve both God and mammon, should have produced the cultural environment that, as Max Weber suggested in his 1905 book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, was integral to modern capitalism.
  • the religious critique of excessive greed is far from irrelevant. Although not opposed to business, the major faith traditions have tried to counterbalance some of the abuses of capitalism. Eastern religions, such as Buddhism, by means of yoga and other disciplines, try to moderate the aggressive acquisitiveness of the human psyche. The three monotheistic faiths have inveighed against the injustice of unevenly distributed wealth
  • Religion is not simply a matter of subscribing to a set of obligatory beliefs; it is hard work, requiring a ceaseless effort to get beyond the selfishness that prevents us from achieving a more humane humanity.
  • in their rebellion against the modern ethos, fundamentalists tend to overemphasize traditional gender roles. Unfortunately, frontal assaults on this patriarchal trend have often proven counterproductive.
  • But their reading of scripture is unprecedentedly literal. Before the modern period, few understood the first chapter of Genesis as an exact account of the origins of life; until the 17th century, theologians insisted that if a biblical text contradicted science, it must be interpreted allegorically.
  • Ironically, it was the empirical emphasis of modern science that encouraged many to regard God and religious language as fact rather than symbol, thus forcing religion into an overly rational, dogmatic, and alien literalism.
  • What has alienated many Muslims from the democratic ideal is not their religion but Western governments’ support of autocratic rulers, such as the Iranian shahs, Saddam Hussein, and Hosni Mubarak, who have denied people basic human and democratic rights.
  • a 2006 Gallup poll revealed that 46 percent of Americans believe that God should be the source of legislation.
  • A fatwa is not universally binding like a papal edict; rather, it simply expresses the opinion of the mufti who issues it. Muslims can choose which fatwas they adopt and thus participate in a flexible free market of religious thought, just as Americans can choose which church they attend.
  • Religion should be studied with the same academic impartiality and accuracy as the economy, politics, and social customs of a region, so that we learn how religion interacts with political tension, what is counterproductive, and how to avoid giving unnecessary offense.
  • In the Middle East, overly aggressive secularization has sometimes backfired, making the religious establishment more conservative, or even radical.
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Corporate Credo of 1948: Shareholder Profits Didn't Always Trump Every Other Possible C... - 0 views

www.calcpa.org/...Johnson_and_Johnson_Credo.pdf capitalism commonweal private public economy government credo social-responsibility corporatocracy deregulation society
shared by avivajazz jazzaviva on 09 Apr 12 - Cached
  • avivajazz jazzaviva on 09 Apr 12
     
    The corporation's responsibiities, per Johnson & Johnson CEO, 1948, in order of priority: 1. First responsibility is to those who use our product; we must offer high quality at low prices, and deliver our product with prompt, accurate service. 2.  Second responsibility is to all employees of the corporation, providing fair pay, job security, healthy working conditions, respect for each individual, and justice in management and governance of both employees and operations.    3. Third responsibility is to hire corporate executives possessing integrity, talent, common sense, personal wisdom, education, and experience. 4. Four responisibility is to the communities in which our corporate facilities are embedded. Corporations must be good citizens, contributing to the health and viability of the commonweal, supporting civic improvement, improved health, education, and government, reinvest in the corporation's larger community and infrastructure  by paying fair taxes, and being good stewards of the unsustainable resources used in conducting business activities. 6. Last responsibility is to shareholders/stockholders via creation of sound, sustainable profit and fair returns to investors. 5. 
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John F. Kennedy and the Press - John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum - 0 views

www.jfklibrary.org/...n-F-Kennedy-and-the-Press.aspx
shared by Anne Hulthen on 09 May 14 - No Cached
  • The public loved John F. Kennedy's press conferences, although some of his advisors worried about the risk of mistakes by the president and others thought the press showed insufficient respect for the dignity of his office
    • Anne Hulthen
      Anne Hulthen on 09 May 14
       
      He's making himself not only seem more relatable but more attainable as though we, ourselves, could become friends with the president. As if we were of his same class and he was speaking to us. Given the aspirational nature of late 50s/ early 60s society, it makes sense that this would be a greatly affective strategy. He was also making himself not only a public figure, but a celebrity. Seen on the screen nearly as often as Cary Grant or Humphrey Bogart.
  • 65 million people
    • Anne Hulthen
      Anne Hulthen on 09 May 14
       
      Here is the example of celebrity and glamour. By presenting himself to the public on his own terms, he therebye marketed himself to them and chose how he would portray himself instead of the media. 18 million watched him on average which is an incredible number. He had some draw that pulled them in, a quintessential thing that made everyone relate to him. Hope? Idealism? Can you commercialize these? Can intangible ideas be marketed?
  • even though we disapprove, there isn't any doubt that we could not
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • President Kennedy helped to significantly enlarge the role of television as a news medium,
  • but he continued to be a voracious consumer of print journalism
  • Oh, yes. No, no, I think it is invaluable, even though it may cause you—it is never pleasant to be reading things that are not agreeable news, but I would say that it is an invaluable arm of the presidency, as a check really on what is going on in the administration, and more things come to my attention that cause me concern or give me information.
    • Anne Hulthen
      Anne Hulthen on 09 May 14
       
      Appears educated and Sophisticated. Perhaps this was another aspect of the Kennedy appeal. Sophistication and Education were really two ideals of modern American life during the 1960s. The whole Kennedy family had this air of sophistication which captured the whole of America. They had this image of royalty. In the 60s, we see the image of the sophisticated family, who all read and discussed politics. America was changing it's image from vulgar to glamorous, Seeking to aquire a culture that the rest of the world always seemed to think we lacked. Kennedy played into our own ego's by presenting himself as a man of the world, ready to promote American intelligence and competence at home and abroad. His wife, Jackie, who spoke French and Spanish, added to this air of worldly appeal.
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The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Richard Hofstadter, Harper's Magazine, Novembe... - 0 views

karws.gso.uri.edu/...the_paranoid_style.html hofstatder radical rightwing ultraconservative conservative paranoia teaparty wingnuts
shared by avivajazz jazzaviva on 16 Sep 09 - Cached
  • avivajazz jazzaviva on 16 Sep 09
     
    ...the modern right wing, as Daniel Bell has put it, feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high.
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U.S. Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ), Co-Chair of Congressional Progressive Caucus ... - 0 views

en.wikipedia.org/...Ra%C3%BAl_Grijalva
shared by avivajazz jazzaviva on 13 Sep 09 - Cached
  • avivajazz jazzaviva on 13 Sep 09
     
    Raúl M. Grijalva (born February 19, 1948) has been U.S. Representative (D-AZ) since 2003. His father was a migrant worker from Mexico who entered the United States in 1945 through the Bracero Program and labored on southern Arizona ranches.
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How the Democratic Party Works, and Doesn't Work | Not a Sentimental Piece | Open Left - 0 views

www.openleft.com/...ic-party-works-and-doesnt-work democrats democractic party weakness progressives power authority passivity
shared by avivajazz jazzaviva on 20 Sep 09 - Cached
  • avivajazz jazzaviva on 20 Sep 09
     
    The reason why Democrats so often ignore and betray progressives is that we haven't given them incentives not to. Money, votes, and publicity are what count, and so far progressives have not leveraged these incentives effectively. Also, Democrats really need some leaders who are functional in the worlds of bluffing, bargaining, gambling, and fighting.
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DiscoverTheNetworks.org | Right-Wing 'Guide' to the Political Left - 0 views

www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp progressive social-democrats left-wing socialist leftist progressive-caucus guide portal portals guides bernie-sanders bernie.sanders pelosi social-democracy restrained unrestrained capitalism democratic-socialists
shared by avivajazz jazzaviva on 31 Aug 09 - Cached
  • avivajazz jazzaviva on 31 Aug 09
     
    Stark raving mad, this website trembles in fear at evil communists like Senator Bernie Sanders, I-VT, who wants to balance excesses of asset-owning, elite investors with needs of wage-earning peasants!
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Health-care bill wouldn't bring real reform | Howard Dean | Dec 17, 2009 - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...AR2009121601906.html healthcare reform HCR #HCR comments politics debate dean howarddean
shared by avivajazz jazzaviva on 17 Dec 09 - Cached
  • avivajazz jazzaviva on 17 Dec 09
     
    "Health-care bill wouldn't bring real reform TOOLBOX Resize Print E-mail Yahoo! Buzz ad_icon COMMENT 248 Comments | View All » POST A COMMENT You must be logged in to leave a comment. Log in | Register Why Do I Have to Log In Again? Log In Again? CLOSE We've made some updates to washingtonpost.com's Groups, MyPost and comment pages. We need you to verify your MyPost ID by logging in before you can post to the new pages. We apologize for the inconvenience. Discussion Policy Your browser's settings may be preventing you from commenting on and viewing comments about this item. See instructions for fixing the problem. Discussion Policy CLOSE Comments that include profanity or personal attacks or other inappropriate comments or material will be removed from the site. Additionally, entries that are unsigned or contain "signatures" by someone other than the actual author will be removed. Finally, we will take steps to block users who violate any of our posting standards, terms of use or privacy policies or any other policies governing this site. Please review the full rules governing commentaries and discussions. You are fully responsible for the content that you post. Who's Blogging » Links to this article By Howard Dean Thursday, December 17"
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Shake your fists, then get real | @Karoli on the "death" of healthcare reform, and my r... - 0 views

www.drumsnwhistles.com/...shake-your-fists-then-get-real healthcare reform HCR #HCR @karoli @avivao disqus comments blogs politics
shared by avivajazz jazzaviva on 16 Dec 09 - Cached
  • avivajazz jazzaviva on 16 Dec 09
     
    Lots of good points, @Karoli; much to meditate on. Would love clarification on the following comment, though: "Can anyone familiar with history point to any time where a bill has made it this far, been pulled back by proponents, and lived as a stronger version of itself?" How is it a "stronger version of itself?" I don't follow Congressional maneuvers with the same background knowledge or attention to detail that you do; I'm probably missing some key information that would clarify your meaning. Really like your myth-busting data. It's refreshing to see a recap of details that can easily escape us. In some cases, your data gives me a point of departure for further research, so I can come to my own conclusions. Without your article, sorting out the key questions to investigate would be much harder for me. Also, I agree that waiting for a better bill, with so many "people hanging by a thread," is a luxury that only the well-heeled can afford. For many legislators, insulated from financial woes, much of this healthcare debate is about anything and everything except healthcare reform. All that said, I'm obviously an idealist who yearns for global, systemic change. I would want to change the fundamental nature of dance competition's culture, if my daughter were involved. It would be hard for me to keep my eye on the pragmatic truths: deep, systemic change of any cultural institution (socioeconomic, sociocultural, or sociopolitical) is a project for centuries, for eons. It's evolutionary. For today, how does your daughter keep following her passion in a system that's unfair? For today, how do we facilitate efforts to get as many health insurance benefits for the most people in a system that's unjust? I'm not sure I entirely buy your solution―but overall, it's a hell of a lot more practical than the one I was about to employ: sinking into helplessness, hopelessness, and depression... In fact, it's a hell of a lot more idealistic than sinking into despair, too! I fe
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