#election

When politicians start talking about large groups of their fellow Americans as 'enemies,' it's time for a quiet stir of alertness. Polarizing people is a good way to win an election, and also a good way to wreck a country. ↗

— Molly Ivins

#polarization #politics #elections

Proximity to power has an unsurprising ability to mutate a politician's spinal cord into bright yellow jelly. ↗

— Tariq Ali

#elections

I thought that that was an effort to inject a popular element, a democratic element into the selection of a person who, once he is selected and confirmed, is beyond electoral control. ↗

— Stephen Breyer

#confirmed #control #democratic #effort #electoral

Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. The last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster, who will get a version of it through a desiccated question, and then will submerge it in a Niagara of similar opinions, and convert them into--what else?--another piece of news. Thus we have here a great loop of impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing. ↗

— Neil Postman

#elections #irrelevance #media #nate-silver #news

President Obama's reelection started the countdown for lawmakers to address the fiscal cliff and the statutory debt limit. Unless the President and House Republicans can agree on changes to current law, the U.S. economy will be in recession by spring. ↗

— Mark Zandi

#agree #changes #cliff #current #current law

That natural selection can produce changes within a type is disputed by no one, not even the staunchest creationist. But that it can transform one species into another — that, in fact, has never been observed. ↗

— Robert J. Sawyer

#darwin #darwinism #evolution #natural-selection #neo-darwinism

Prior to my election, young Cherokee girls would never have thought that they might grow up and become chief. ↗

— Wilma Mankiller

#cherokee #chief #election #grow #grow up

This historic general election, which showed that the British are well able to distinguish between patriotism and Toryism, brought Clement Attlee to the prime ministership. In the succeeding five years, Labor inaugurated the National Health Service, the first and boldest experiment in socialized medicine. It took into public ownership all the vital (and bankrupted) utilities of the coal, gas, electricity and railway industries. It even nibbled at the fiefdoms and baronies of private steel, air transport and trucking. It negotiated the long overdue independence of India. It did all this, in a country bled white by the World War and subject to all manner of unpopular rationing and controls, without losing a single midterm by-election (a standard not equaled by any government of any party since). And it was returned to office at the end of a crowded term. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#british-people #clement-attlee #elections #india #indian-independence-act-

What are the chances that we will one day discover that DNA has absolutely nothing to do with inheritance? They are effectively zero. ↗

— Sam Harris

#evolution #inheritance #natural-selection #science #faith

I bought a selection of short, romantic fiction novels, studied them, decided that I had found a formula and then wrote a book that I figured was the perfect story. Thank goodness it was rejected. ↗

— Louise Brown

#bought #decided #fiction #figured #formula