Quote of the Day

While I'm sure a lot of Trump supporters had fair and legitimate reasons for their choice, it is an uncomfortable and unavoidable fact that everyone who voted for Donald Trump -- all 62,984,825 of them -- made the decision to elect a man who bragged about sexual assault, attacked a federal judge for being Mexican and grieving Gold Star parents who were Muslim, and had a long and well-documented history of racial discrimination in his businesses.  That doesn't mean every Trump voter approved of those things, but at a minimum they accepted or overlooked them.  And they did it without demanding the basics that Americans used to expect from all presidential candidates, from releasing tax returns to offering substantive policy proposals to upholding common standards of decency.

-- Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened, p. 413-414

Quote of the Day

Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist, has started ironically tweeting "Thanks, Comey," every time he sees some new outrage from the Trump White House.  Comey made a choice to excoriate me in public in July and then dramatically reopen the investigation on October 28, all while refusing to say a word about Trump and Russia.  If not for those decisions, everything would have been different.  Comey himself later said that he was "mildly nauseous" at the idea that he influenced the outcome of the election.

-- Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened, p. 406

Quote of the Day

In June 2017, Jim Clapper was asked how the Russia scandal compared with Watergate.  "I lived through Watergate.  I was on active duty then in the Air Force.  I was a young officer.  It was a scary time," he replied.  "I have to say, though, I think when you compare the two, Watergate pales, really, in my view, compared to what we're confronting now."  I also lived through Watergate.  I was a young attorney working for the House Judiciary Committee's impeachment inquiry into Richard Nixon.  I listened to the tapes.  I dug into all the evidence of Nixon's crimes.  And I agree with Jim Clapper.  What we are facing now -- an attack on our democracy by our principal foreign adversary, potentially aided and abetted by the President's own team -- is much more serious.

-- Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened, p. 375

Quote of the Day

It's not just that both Putin and Trump lie, it is that they lie in the same way and for the same purpose: blatantly, to assert power over truth itself.

-- Masha Gessen

Quote of the Day

We all have the ability to break out of our echo chambers and engage with people who don't agree with us politically.  We can keep an open mind and be willing to change our minds from time to time.  Even if our outreach is rebuffed, it's worth it to keep trying.  We're all going to share our American future together -- better to do so with open hearts and outstretched hands than closed minds and clenched fists.

-- Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened, p. 373

Quote of the Day

The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda.  It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.

-- Garry Kasparov

Quote of the Day

It took a little while for Mercer, the Kochs, and Fox News to realize that Trump could help take their war on truth to the next level, but their eventual support for his candidacy was invaluable.  In many ways, Trump is the embodiment of everything they had been working toward, and the perfect Trojan horse for Putin.

-- Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened, p. 369

Quote of the Day

The realization that I may have only a few good years remaining has hit me with real force, and I have done a lot of thinking as a result.  I would like to have come up with something profound, but I haven't.  I try to figure out what I really want to do every day, I try to say to myself, If this is one of the last days of my life, am I doing exactly what I want to be doing?  I aim low.  My idea of a perfect day is a frozen custard at Shake Shack and a walk in the park.  (Followed by a Lactaid.)  My idea of a perfect night is a good play and dinner at Orso.  (But no garlic, or I won't be able to sleep.)  The other day I found a bakery that bakes my favorite childhood cake, and it was everything I remembered; it made my week.

-- Nora Ephron, I Remember Nothing, p. 129

Quote of the Day

I know that the slow unfolding of this news has inured many people to how shocking all this is.  It feels a little like the frog in the pot that doesn't realize it's boiling because it happens so gradually.  But step back and think about it: the Russians hacked our election systems.  They got inside.  They tried to delete or alter voter information.  This should send a shiver down the spine of every American.

 -- Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened, p. 363

Quote of the Day

Bad presidents make for great music!

-- Tom Morello, "Prophets of Rage's Tom Morello on Why 'Bad Presidents Make for Great Music'"

Quote of the Day

Reporting since the election has made clear that Trump and his top advisors have little or no interest in learning about the Russian covert operation against American democracy.  Trump himself repeatedly called the whole thing a hoax -- and at the same time, blamed Obama for not doing anything about it ... But there is one area where Trump's team seems to have been intently interested: rolling back U.S. sanctions against Russia ... And as soon as the Trump team took control of the State Department, it started working on a plan to lift sanctions and return to Russia two compounds in Maryland and New York that the Obama administration had confiscated because they were bases for espionage.

-- Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened, p. 358

Quote of the Day

I have a pile of her letters.  When I look through them, it all comes back to me -- how much I'd loved the early letters, how charmed I'd been, how flattered, how much less charming they began to seem, how burdensome they became, and then, finally, how boring.  The story of love.

-- Nora Ephron, I Remember Nothing, p. 87

Quote of the Day

In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.

-- Michael J. Morell, "I Ran the C.I.A. Now I'm Endorsing Hillary Clinton."

Quote of the Day

When you want to change the world, you stand up and change it.  Don't wait for someone else to do it for you.

-- Tom Morello, "Prophets of Rage's Tom Morello on Why 'Bad Presidents Make for Great Music'"

Quote of the Day

Trump doesn't think in terms of morality or human rights, he thinks only in terms of power and dominance.  Might makes right.  Putin thinks the same way, albeit much more strategically.  And Trump appears to have fallen hard for Putin's macho "bare-chested autocrat" act.  He doesn't just like Putin -- he seems to want to be like Putin, a white authoritarian leader who could put down dissenters, repress minorities, disenfranchise voters, weaken the press, and amass untold billions for himself.  He dreams of Moscow on the Potomac.

-- Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened, p. 334

Quote of the Day

You always think that a bolt of lightning is going to strike and your parents will magically change into the people you wish they were, or back into the people they used to be.  But they're never going to.  And even though you know they're never going to, you still hope they will.

-- Nora Ephron, I Remember Nothing, p. 51

Quote of the Day

What should be beyond doubt is that foreign interference in our elections is wrong, period.  And the threat we face, from without and within, is bigger than one campaign, one party, or one election.  The only way to heal our democracy and protect it for the future is to understand the threat and defeat it.

-- Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened, p. 327

Quote of the Day

There are always challenges and there are always injustices to face up to.  Either bury your head in the sand or roll up your sleeves and do something about it.

-- Tom Morello, "Prophets of Rage's Tom Morello on Why 'Bad Presidents Make for Great Music'"

Meeting Rebecca Traister

I had the pleasure of hearing New York Times best-selling author Rebecca Traister speak last night about her important book All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation at the Herrick District Library.  Additionally, on Feb. 1, I was fortunate to be able to hear poet Lauren Haldeman and poet/memoirist Randall Horton read at Hope College, as a part of the Jack Ridl Visiting Writers Series.

Quote of the Day

Some people are blessed with a strong immune system.  Others aren't as lucky.  Their defenses have been worn down by disease or injury, so they're susceptible to all kinds of infections that a healthy person would easily fight off.  When that happens to someone you love, it's terrible to watch.  The "body politic" works in much the same way.  Our democracy has built-in defenses that keep us strong and healthy, including the checks and balances written into our Constitution.  Our Founding Fathers believed that one of the most important defenses would be an informed citizenry that could make sound judgments based on facts and reason.  Losing that is like losing an immune system, leaving a democracy vulnerable to all manner of attack.  And a democracy, like a body, cannot stay strong through repeated injuries.

-- Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened, p. 325

Quote of the Day

I met this poet named Brendan Kennelly.  I have known him for years; he is an unbelievable poet.  And he said, "Bono, if you want to get to the place where the writing lives, imagine you're dead."  There is no ego, there is no vanity, no worrying about who you will offend.  That is great advice.  I just didn't want to have to find out outside of a mental excursion.  I didn't want to find out the hard way.

-- Bono, The Rolling Stone Interview

Quote of the Day

Since the election, we've learned that Vice President Mike Pence used private email for official business when he was Governor of Indiana, like so many other state and federal officials across our country (including, by the way, many staff in the Bush White House, who used a private RNC server for government business and then "lost" more than twenty million emails).

-- Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened, p. 322

Quote of the Day

(Alcoholic parents) have moments when they're still the people you grew up idolizing; they have moments when you can't imagine they were ever anything but monsters.  And then, after a while, they're monsters full-time.  The people they used to be have enormous power over you...but the people they've turned into have no power over you at all.

-- Nora Ephron, I Remember Nothing, p. 38

Quote of the Day

The ongoing normalization of Trump is the most disorienting development of the presidential campaign, but the most significant may be the abnormalization of Clinton.

-- Jonathan Chait, "The Abnormalization of Hillary Clinton"

Quote of the Day

The world is not going to change itself.  That's up to you.  And if you sit on the sidelines of history right now you're gonna regret it.

-- Tom Morello, "Prophets of Rage's Tom Morello on Why 'Bad Presidents Make for Great Music'"

Quote of the Day

It's galling that [James] Comey took pains during the [email investigation] period to avoid saying anything at all about the investigation into possible connections between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence.  This double standard has still never been explained adequately and it leaves me astonished.

-- Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened, p. 318

Quote of the Day

Whenever I read a book I love, I start to remember all the other books that have sent me into rapture, and I can remember where I was living and the couch I was sitting on when I read them.

-- Nora Ephron, I Feel Back About My Neck, p. 119

Quote of the Day

In an effort to calm things down, two days after the Times article appeared, I called for the public release of all the emails I had provided the State Department.  I knew that would be a level of transparency unheard of in public life.  In fact, more of my emails are now publicly available than every other President, Vice President, and Cabinet Secretary in our country's history combined.  I had nothing to hide, and I thought that if the public actually read all of these thousands of messages, many people would see that my use of a personal account was never an attempt to cover up anything nefarious.  The vast majority of the emails weren't particularly newsworthy, which may be why the press focused on any gossipy nugget it could find and otherwise ignored the contents.  There were no startling revelations, no dark secrets, no tales of wrongdoing or negligence.  They did, however, reveal something I felt was worth seeing: the hard work and dedication of the men and women of the State Department.

-- Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened, p. 302-303

Quote of the Day

All that promotion takes a lot more work than I remember, but if you believe in the songs, you have to defend and present them.

-- Bono, The Rolling Stone Interview

Quote of the Day

The Times's argument was that using personal email reinforced the narrative that I had a penchant for secrecy, but I've always found that charge odd.  People know more about me and Bill than anybody in public life.  We've made public thirty-eight years of our tax returns (thirty-eight years more than a certain someone), all my State Department emails, the Clinton Foundation tax returns and donors, medical information -- yet we were secretive?  When we sometimes did draw a line after going further than anyone in public life to be transparent, we didn't do it to be secretive -- we did it to keep ourselves sane.  Not to mention that someone trying to keep her email secret would be pretty dumb to use @clintonemail.com!

-- Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened, p. 302

Quote of the Day

The state of rapture I experience when I read a wonderful book is one of the main reasons I read, but it doesn't happen every time or even every other time, and when it does happen, I'm truly beside myself.

-- Nora Ephron, I Feel Back About My Neck, p. 118

Quote of the Day

Since 2001, a half million jobs in department stores across the country have disappeared.  That's many times more than were lost in coal mining.  Just between October 2016 and April 2017, about eighty-nine thousand Americans lost jobs in retail -- more than all the people who work in coal mining put together.  Yet coal continues to loom much larger in our politics and national imagination.

-- Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened, p. 283