Hillary Clinton Archives - neal umphred dot com

conservatives not exactly enthralled by trump are a problem

THIS ONE IS A DOOZY! The question on Quora was, “Would liberals be surprised to learn that conservatives aren’t exactly enthralled with Donald Trump either?” One must make some assumptions when engaging other Internetally, so I assume that the person who posted this question is politically conservative. [Continue reading]

I live in an alternative reality where clinton won

I FEEL LIKE THE OLD MAN in Moonstruck. You know, at the end where everything is happening crazily around him and he puts his head in his hands on the kitchen table, utterly confused. This struck home for me when I opened an email from a friend with a link to an article published earlier today in The Washington Post. [Continue reading]

it’s our job to figure out what happened in benghazi!

EVERYWHERE I TURN—whether in conversation, on in emails with my Republican contacts, and especially on Facebook and the other social media on the internet—I hear people “quoting” then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on what happened to the effect that she said that the deaths in Benghazi “didn’t matter” or “doesn’t matter.” [Continue reading]

tales from the crypt of the rightwingnut blogosphere (where is susan berman?)

YOU KNOW THOSE “NEWS STORIES” that pop up all over the internet one day and you can’t avoid them? You know, the ones that read, “Hillary to be indicted for fribbing on the jimjam on her private server and lying about it!” [Continue reading]

is “voter fraud” a new political buzzword in the rightwing blogosphere?

WELCOME TO SIDE 4. Follow in your book and repeat after me as we learn three new terms in Turkish: ‘buzzword,’ ‘voter fraud,’ and ‘viral news story.’ Excellent! Now, before we go any further in the book, I have here a bit of background on two topics: voter-fraud and popular American political buzz-words. [Continue reading]

some (piss) poor writing about hillary’s “role” in benghazi

THE LAST WORD ANYONE would use to describe me is “conservative”—at least not regarding most issues related to politics. But there’s more to life than politics: I remain old-fashioned on the issue of prescriptive versus descriptive dictionaries (strongly believing in the former) and the misuse of the designated hitter in major league baseball (not at all what you think). [Continue reading]

I am what I am and that’s all that I am (on being a pragmatic progressive)

I POSTED A LINK ON FACEBOOK to an article that took to task a group acronymically known as PUBs, which stands for Progressive Unicorn Brigade. I don’t know how I have missed this reference over the past few years, but I hadn’t a clue as to what PUB meant! [Continue reading]

waterloo, watergate, whitewatergate, and just plain old gate

DO YOU WANT TO KNOW what Waterloo and Watergate and Whitewatergate have to with each other? And what does a just plain old gate have to do with anything and where does ABBA fit into this? What if I brought another, more recent gate into the conversation—like Benghazigate? [Continue reading]

vapid vacuous mindless journalism in my mailbox

INCONCEIVABLE! This is what is passing for news in today’s rightwingnut media world of faux news organizations and the ubiquitous bloggers all over the Internet: “Russell Brand labels ex-wife Katy Perry ‘vapid, vacuous and plastic’ in documentary.” [Continue reading]

FAVORITE QUOTES

"Everybody does better when everybody does better." – Jim Hightower's Daddy

"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool." – Richard Feynman

"So many of people have so much time and energy invested in cognitive dissonance as a lifestyle choice that they're never gonna give up on it now." – Nealism

"A man is to be cheated into passion, but to be reasoned into truth." – John Dryden, 1682

"Reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired" – Jonathan Swift, 1721

"What has not been reasoned in, cannot be reasoned out." – Sydney Smith, 1869

"You cannot reason people out of positions they didn’t reason themselves into." – anonymous

"Always tell the truth! It makes your lies that much more believable." —Nealism

"All the angels are gone. There's only devils left." – John Dutton

"My life has been full of terrible misfortunes, most of which never happened." – Michel de Montaigne

"You don't fight fascism because you're going to win. You fight fascism because it is fascist." – Jean-Paul Sartre

"There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life.” – Frank Zappa

"Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced." – James Baldwin

"If women learned to read there seemed to be a possibility that some day some good man might come home and find his wife reading, and the dinner not ready—and nothing could be imagined more horrible than that! That seems to be the haunting fear of mankind—that the advancement of women will sometime, someway, someplace, interfere with some man’s comfort." – Nellie L. McClung

"What people call the Christmas spirit [is] a kind of dream or hope we carry with us from childhood. But as adults ... we're imbued by the pragmatic routines of life, which makes it difficult for us to regard anything with childlike wonder. But, you know, it's alright for us to try. We put on silly hats and drape trees with sparkly lights and wrap gifts in garish paper and that's good for us. It's not only alright for us to allow children the transient experience of innocence and joy, it's our responsibility." – Lance Sweets

"When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression." – anonymous

"‘What saves a man is to take a step ... then another step." — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

"The old dreams were good dreams. They didn't work out, but I'm glad I had them.'" – Robert Kincaid

"Fascists in a democracy demand the right of free speech, but once in power will absolutely, definitively, not grant it to anyone other than themselves. That's their trick and they know it perfectly well." – William Gibson

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" – Carl Sagan

"Extraordinary conservatism keeps us extraordinarily ignorant.” – Avi Loeb

"If you value the wrong things, it doesn't matter how hard you work, you're going to end up in the wrong place. If you ask the wrong questions, it doesn't matter how much data you collect, your answers will be meaningless." – Mark Manson

"You are better off trying something and having it not work and learning from that than not doing anything at all." – Mark Zuckerberg

"When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. People know themselves much better than you do. That's why it's important to stop expecting them to be something other than who they are." – Maya Angelou.

"Sometimes fear needs fearing more than the things we fear." – Elizabeth Bligh

"If you think hiring a professional is expensive, wait until you see the cost of hiring an amateur." – Nealism

"Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. We should, therefore, claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant." – Karl Popper

“A state of skepticism and suspense may amuse a few inquisitive minds. But the practice of superstition is so congenial to the multitude that, if they are forcibly awakened, they still regret the loss of their pleasing vision.” – Edward Gibbon

"Time is a created thing. To say, ‘I don’t have time,’ is like saying, ‘I don’t want to.’” ~ Lao Tzu

"So long as opinion is strongly rooted in the feelings, it gains rather than loses instability by having a preponderating weight of argument against it. For if it were accepted as a result of argument, the refutation of the argument might shake the solidity of the conviction; but when it rests solely on feeling, worse it fares in argumentative contest, the more persuaded adherents are that their feeling must have some deeper ground, which the arguments do not reach; and while the feeling remains, it is always throwing up fresh intrenchments of argument to repair any breach made in the old." – John Stuart Mill

"Clearly, any real body must have extension in four directions: it must have length, breadth, thickness, and duration." – H.G. Wells

“When you speak truth to power, power fights back." – Alexandria Octavia-Cortez

"Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind." – Virginia Woolf

"People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." –Albert Einstein

"Until you value yourself, you won’t value your time. Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it." – M. Scott Peck

"The future has a way of arriving unannounced." – George F. Will

"Right now, I'm having amnesia and deja vu at the same time. I think I've forgotten this before." – Steven Wright

“How did it get so late so soon?” ― Dr. Seuss

"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble—it's what you know that just ain't so." – Mark Twain

"I don't trust anybody I'm not close enough to kill." – Kelly Burkhardt

"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use them.” – Philip K. Dick

"When everyone is a 'they,' everyone is no one." — Nealism

"I have lived with many Zen masters, all of them cats." – Eckhart Tolle