Unfamiliar Quotations

I screwed up the Rachel Maddow link yesterday. Too good to miss, so re-sending this, fixed.

OF INTEREST IF YOU BREATHE OR LIVE IN A COASTAL AREA

Here’s how the proposed cut in coal-fired power plant emissions will help. (Not mentioned is how it will help mitigate inundation of the world’s major cities.)

It’s urgent and long-overdue that we make these cuts but — of course — all the usual suspects are decrying them.

Here Rachel Maddow shows how reliably they always do that, whether it is to fight the Clean Air Act or to keep us from dealing with the hole in the ozone layer or anything else. (Count on the Republican Party to fight restrictions on carcinogens — protecting the tobacco industry for so many decades — and to fight universal background checks. Count on them to fight access to affordable health care and to fight a livable minimum wage. Count on them to fight to keep from putting people back to work rebuilding our decaying national infrastructure. Count on them to fight to kill the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and to cut funds for protecting our embassies overseas — but to fight for lower taxes on the very most wealthy and their heirs.)

Did you know that Republicans have spent nearly half a billion dollars on anti-Obamacare ads? If only the Koch brothers had been around decades ago to defeat Social Security and Medicare and Unemployment Insurance and the minimum wage and the Clean Air Act, we might not be afflicted by these things today. I hate clean air!

Seriously: watch that Rachel Maddow clip to see how doom is always predicted when we try to make progress. A pattern that extends back decades.

Speaking of which, yesterday’s quote may bear repeating (my thanks to Jim Burt for spotting it):

A failure on the part of the Republican party to give the national policy wholehearted support, which, of course, includes outspoken criticism of incompetence, unwisdom and inefficiency, will have to be construed as meaning only one thing: that the party is gambling on the defeat of the United States and that it is staking its political future on a national disaster. If the Republican party in Congress merely sulks and opposes, waiting for trouble, and appearing to hope for trouble . . . the Republican party will have placed itself in the intolerable position of having a vested interest in the humiliation and defeat of the United States.

That was Walter Lippmann writing in 1941, days before Pearl Harbor. (Per Craig Shirley’s, December 1941.) Plus ça change . . .

Herewith some other . . .

Recent quotes of the day from this quirky site (thanks, Tom):

If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one? – Abraham Lincoln

It’s a small world, but I wouldn’t want to paint it. – Steven Wright

Remember that as a teenager you are at the last stage of your life when you will be happy to hear that the phone is for you. – Fran Lebowitz

If you’re not scared or angry at the thought of a human brain being controlled remotely, then it could be this prototype of mine is finally starting to work. – John Alejandro King

And one more:

Said the wife to her husband as she emerged from a clothing store dressing room (in a David Sipress New Yorker cartoon): “It’s two sizes too big, but it fits.”