"The job of the newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable."
--Finley Peter Dunne (1867-1936)

"Although publicly I continued to ignore the raging anti-war controversy … I knew, however, that after all the protests and the Moratorium [the nationwide protests of October 1969] American public opinion would be seriously divided by any military escalation of the war."
--The Nixon Memoirs

Skip: Man, I can't believe this. They was gonna burn all this shit. All this shit, and a nigger can't even find a job.

Kirby: Well, that's Uncle Sam for you, baby. Money to burn.

--from the movie, Dead Presidents

Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks his whip, but the really well-trained dog is the one that turns his somersault when there is no whip."
--George Orwell

To be left-wing means to side with the poor/oppressed -- whether you yourself are poor and/or oppressed or not. Case in point, Marlon Brando was a rich white man but he bailed the Black Panthers out of jail many a time back in the day.

"The idea that we're just gonna keep incarcerating, keep incarcerating, pretty soon we're not going to have a young African-American male population in America. They're all going to be in prison, or dead. One of the two."
--John Edwards, 2008 Democratic presidential candidate

"We've got to repudiate, you know, the most strident and insulting anti-American voices out there sometimes on our party's left ... We can't have our party identified by Michael Moore and Hollywood as our cultural values."
--Al From, CEO, Democratic Leadership Council

On 1/31/08, 1:45 p.m., an activist named Steve Chase e-mailed me the following ...

"Some feel we may not even have 'elections' at all. Bush will declare himself king with Cheney as court regent. What do you think? How can we cope?

"During his stump speeches, Reagan often told the story of a so-called welfare queen in Chicago who drove a Cadillac and had ripped off $150,000 from the government using 80 aliases, 30 addresses, a dozen Social Security cards and four fictional dead husbands. Reagan dutifully promised to roll back welfare. Journalists searched for this welfare cheat and discovered that she didn't exist. Nevertheless, he kept using the anecdote."
--Peter Dreier, director of urban and environmental policy program at Occidental College

When the DC Comics character Green Lantern was created in 1940, he was an individual with a magic ring, but twenty years later, his back story was rewritten so that being a Green Lantern meant one was part of a collective.