Quote of the Day

Could it be that women are meant to go only so far in the world?  No, that can't be it.  Women haven't plateaued; it is the rules we were playing by that are outdated.  We are learning to appreciate that with this uncertainty comes an empowering new sense of possibility.  I look around at all that women are doing in America today and I am inspired.  Women aren't just running for office in record numbers, they are winning in record numbers, too.  In the worlds of art, politics, and business, women aren't following anyone's rules -- they are creating their own game.

-- Jennifer Palmieri, Dear Madam President, p. 31

Quote of the Day

I have always thought that I could do any job a man can do just as well as him.  Only recently have I come to realize that I don't want to.  I want to do the job the best way I can do it, not the way he would.  That's what this letter is about -- how women can lead in a new way.  How we can create a new model of leadership in our own image, not a man's.

-- Jennifer Palmieri, Dear Madam President, p. 8-9

Quote of the Day

The people I love feel threatened.  I've always understood the responsibility of an artist -- but I feel it even greater now.  And I don't want to stay angry, but write and feel triumphant.

-- Janelle Monae

Quote of the Day

This [next] time [America has a female presidential candidate] our eyes will be more accustomed to the sight of a woman standing behind the podium center stage at the convention.  Our ears more attuned to a woman's raised voice projecting -- not shouting -- into the crowd.  Our sensibilities adjusted to focus on what she will do with the job, not question why she wants it.

-- Jennifer Palmieri, Dear Madam President, p. 8

Quote of the Day

When I first joined Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign, I had a grave misconception about the task before us.  Simply put, I didn't think it mattered that Hillary Clinton was a woman.  I just thought she was the best person for the job.  I didn't see all the complexities inherent in the task of electing the first woman president.  Worse, I didn't see the new possibilities having a woman in the Oval Office would open up.  We actually set out to prove that it didn't matter that Hillary Clinton was a woman.  And we did.  We showed that this woman could do the job of president as it had been done by every man before her -- reducing her to a female facsimile of the qualities we expect to see in a male president.  But I now see that path robbed Hillary of something very valuable.  Some measure of her own humanity, some of the qualities that were unique to her.  Qualities we may not find in a male president.

-- Jennifer Palmieri, Dear Madam President, p. 5-6

Quote of the Day

The intensity of the resistance to these [single] women is rooted in the (perhaps unconscious) comprehension that their expanded power signals a social and political rupture as profound as the invention of birth control, as the sexual revolution, as the abolition of slavery, as women's suffrage and the feminist, civil rights, gay rights, and labor movements.

-- Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies, p. 36

Quote of the Day

The journey toward legal marriage for gays and lesbians may seem at odds with what looks like a flight from marriage by heterosexuals.  But in fact, they are part of the same project: a dismantling of the institution as it once existed -- as a rigidly patrolled means by which one sex could exert legal, economic, and sexual power over another -- and a reimagining of it as a flexible union to be entered, ideally, on equal terms.

-- Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies, p. 30

Quote of the Day

Even when man's intellectual convictions shall be sincerely and fully on the side of Freedom and equality to woman, the force of long existing customs and laws will impel him to exert authority over her, which will be distasteful to the self-sustained, self-respectful woman....Not even amended constitutions and laws can revolutionize the practical relations of men and women, immediately, any more than did the Constitutional freedom and franchise of Black men transform white men into practical recognition of the civil and political rights of those who were but yesterday their legal slaves.
 
-- Susan B. Anthony

Quote of the Day

When you grow up LGBTQ, finding common ground with people you sometimes disagree with, that's all you've ever known.

-- Kyrsten Sinema

Quote of the Day

When the tears were spent, I realized that I still grieved the old -- the faith community I'd lost, while I was glad to be free of its narrowness.  I missed the individuals I'd loved and who had loved me.  I grieved not only the lack of compassion for me and anyone else who didn't meet the right criteria for belonging but also for community members' inability to be gentle with themselves.

-- Anna Redsand, To Drink from the Silver Cup, p. 276

Quote of the Day

It took a lot of time and a lot of being intentional to really allow myself to enjoy myself fully.  I think that's what confidence is, it's allowing yourself to enjoy who you are.  The confidence then just kind of follows.

-- Jax Anderson, "Meet Jax Anderson: Frontwoman for Flint Eastwood"

Quote of the Day

Blessed are the weird people -- poets, misfits, writers, mystics, painters, troubadours -- for they teach us to see the world through different eyes.

-- Jacob Nordby

Quote of the Day

A healthy response from those who have, for whatever reason, lost family and/or community, is to create family, to find new community, in order to satisfy that basic peopling need.  And yet what we create, while it may in some ways be better than what we lost because we have chosen it, can never exactly replace what is gone.

-- Anna Redsand, To Drink from the Silver Cup, p. 121-122

Quote of the Day

In 2016 our democracy was assaulted by a foreign adversary determined to mislead our people, enflame our divisions, and throw an election to its preferred candidate.  That attack succeeded because our immune system had been slowly eroded over years.  Many Americans had lost faith in the institutions that previous generations relied on for objective information, including government, academia, and the press, leaving them vulnerable to a sophisticated misinformation campaign.  There are many reasons why this happened, but one is that a small group of right-wing billionaires -- people like the Mercer family and Charles and David Koch -- recognized long ago that, as Stephen Colbert once joked, "reality has a well-known liberal bias."  More generally, the right spent a lot of time and money building an alternative reality.  Think of a partisan petri dish where science is denied, lies masquerade as truth, and paranoia flourishes.  Their efforts were amplified in 2016 by a presidential candidate who trafficked in dark conspiracy theories drawn from the pages of supermarket tabloids and the far reaches of the internet; a candidate who deflected any criticism by attacking others with made-up facts and an uncanny gift for humiliating zingers.  He helped to further blur news and entertainment, reality TV and reality.  As a result, by the time Vladimir Putin came along, our democracy was already far sicker that we realized.

-- Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened, p. 325-326

Quote of the Day

Now, I've met a lot of open-minded, big-hearted men and women who live and work in poor, rural communities.  It's hard to fault them for wanting to shake things up politically after so many years of disappointment.  But anger and resentment do run deep.  As Appalachian natives such as author J.D. Vance have pointed out, a culture of grievance, victimhood, and scapegoating has taken root as traditional values of self-reliance and hard work have withered.  There's a tendency toward seeing every problem as someone else's fault, whether it's Obama, liberal elites in the big cities, undocumented immigrants taking jobs, minorities soaking up government assistance -- or me.  It's no accident that this list sounds exactly like Trump's campaign rhetoric.

-- Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened, p. 276-277

Quote of the Day

Authoritarians who rely on lies to control their people are fundamentally not that different from neighborhood bullies.  They're more fragile than they look.

-- Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened, p. 458

Quote of the Day

If you see a problem in your community that needs fixing or an injustice that needs correcting, and you think, "Someone ought to do something about that," guess what?  That someone could easily be you.  Show up at a city council or school board meeting and suggest a solution.  If a problem is affecting your life, it's probably affecting someone else's -- and that person might just be willing to join you.

-- Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened, p. 454

Quote of the Day

I know there are a lot of people -- including a lot of Democrats -- who are not eager to see me leading such an [enlist] effort.  They feel burned by my defeat, tired of defending me against relentless right-wing attacks, and ready for new leaders to emerge.  Some of that sentiment is totally reasonable.  I, too, am hungry for new leaders and ideas to reinvigorate our party.  But if Al Gore, John Kerry, John McCain, and Mitt Romney can find positive ways to contribute after their own election defeats, so can I.  

-- Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened, p. 451-452

Quote of the Day

Concern yourself not with what you tried and failed in, but with what is still possible to do.

-- Pope John XXIII

Quote of the Day

Each of us must try to walk in the shoes of people who don't see the world the way we do.

-- Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened, p. 444

Quote of the Day

If 2016 taught us anything, it should be that we have an urgent imperative to recapture a sense of common humanity.

-- Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened, p. 444

Meeting Anna Redsand

I was pleased to hear author Anna Redsand speak last night and read from her memoir To Drink from the Silver Cup at the Out on the Lakeshore Community Center.  It was a pleasure to meet a "mother in the movement."

Quote of the Day

I'm coming around to the idea that what we need more than anything at this moment in America is what you might call "radical empathy."

-- Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened, p. 443-444

Quote of the Day

I have no tolerance for intolerance.  None.  Bullying disgusts me.

-- Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened, p. 443

Quote of the Day

I look at the people at Trump's rallies, cheering for his hateful rants, and I wonder: Where's their empathy and understanding?  Why are they allowed to close their hearts to the striving immigrant father and the grieving black mother, or the LGBT teenager who's bullied at school and thinking of suicide?  Why doesn't the press write think pieces about Trump voters trying to understand why most Americans rejected their candidate?  Why is the burden of opening our hearts only on half the country?

-- Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened, p. 443

Quote of the Day

There's been so much said and written about the economic hardships and declining life expectancy of the working-class whites who embraced Donald Trump.  But why should they be more angry and resentful than the millions of blacks and Latinos who are poorer, die younger, and have to contend every day with entrenched discrimination?

-- Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened, p. 442

Quote of the Day

Our challenge is to arrive at a consensus of values and a common vision of what we can do today, individually and collectively, to build strong families and communities.  Creating that consensus in a democracy depends on seriously considering other points of view, resisting the lure of extremist rhetoric, and balancing individual rights and freedoms with personal responsibility and mutual obligations.

-- Hillary Rodham Clinton, It Takes a Village

Quote of the Day

I've been thinking for a long time about how our country needs to become kinder and all of us need to become more connected to one another.  That's not just a sweet thought.  It's serious to me.  If I had won the election, this would have been a quiet but important project of my presidency.
 
-- Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened, p. 429-430

Quote of the Day

You're only as good as your record collection.

-- DJ Spooky

Quote of the Day

Studies have found that out of the more than a billion votes cast in the United States between 2000 and 2014, there were just 31 credible cases of voter impersonation.  Yet Trump has claimed that millions of people voted illegally in 2016.  A review by the Washington Post found only 4 documented instances of voter fraud out of 136 million votes cast in 2016 -- including an Iowa woman who voted twice for Trump.  As Trump's own lawyers asserted in a Michigan court: "All available evidence suggests that the 2016 general election was not tainted by fraud or mistake."  Nonetheless, [Kansas Secretary of State Kris] Kobach and Republicans across the country continue to use false claims about fraud to justify curtailing voting rights.

-- Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened, p. 419-420

Quote of the Day

No parent should fear for the life of an unarmed, law-abiding child when he walks out of the house.  That's not "identity politics."  It's simple justice.

-- Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened, p. 415