In case you missed this because you had to work or go to school or flee a fire today, here is Barack Obama, the last real president to sit in the Oval Office, and Dr. Maya Rooneymoore Cummings, the widow of Rep. Elijah Cummings, eulogizing the Congressman at a Friday service:
An excerpt:
“It’s been remarked that Elijah was a kind man. [...] There’s nothing weak about kindness and compassion. There’s nothing weak about looking out for others. There’s nothing weak about being honorable. You’re not a sucker to have integrity and to treat others with respect. I was sitting here and I was just noticing [a sign behind him saying] ‘The Honorable Elijah E. Cummings.’ And you know this is a title that we confer on all kinds of people who get elected to public office. We’re supposed to introduce them as ‘honorable.’ But Elijah Cummings was honorable before he was elected to office. There’s a difference. There’s a difference if you were honorable and treated others honorably—outside the limelight, on the side of a road, in a quiet moment counseling somebody you work with, letting your daughters know you love them. You know, as president, I knew I could always count on Elijah being honorable and doing the right thing.”
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"The slow-rising central horror of Watergate is not that it might grind down to the reluctant impeachment of a vengeful thug of a president whose entire political career has been a monument to the same kind of cheap shots and treachery he finally got nailed for, but that we might somehow fail to learn something from it. Already - with the worst news yet to come - there is an ominous tide of public opinion that says whatever Nixon and his small gang of henchmen and hired gunsels might have done, it was probably no worse than what other politicians have been doing all along, and still are. Anybody who really believes this is a fool. What almost happened here—and what was only avoided because the men who made Nixon president and who were running the country in his name knew in their hearts that they were all mean, hollow little bastards who couldn't dare turn their backs on each other—was a takeover and perversion of the American political process by a gang of cold-blooded fixers so incompetent that they couldn't even pull off a simple burglary...which tends to explain among other things why 25,000 young Americans died in Vietnam while Nixon and his brain trust were trying to figure out how to admit the whole thing was a mistake from the start."
~~Hunter S. Thompson, The Great Shark Hunt (1974)
BLAST FROM THE PAST
At Daily Kos on this date in 2007—Fire, Water and Political Leadership in the West:
It's hard not to fall into the land of cliche when contemplating the scope of the disaster engulfing southern California, with hundreds of square miles burned, hundreds of thousands of residents forced to flee, and hundreds of homes and businesses destroyed. The Santa Ana winds and the havoc they've carried with them provide the starkest reminder since Katrina that nature in its fury is (in the actual meaning of the word) awesome.
But there's a slower, more insidious and even more inevitable threat than fire Westerners are facing; a challenge inextricably tied to those fires, the conditions that created them, and the destruction wrought. Water, or actually our ever diminishing supply of it. A terrifying article in Sunday's NY Time's Magazine lays it out.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Friday weed-whacking: Hugh Hewitt’s misuse of legal jargon; OMB's (partial) handling of (some of the) Ukraine aid. Rogues' Gallery addition: Kash Patel, and how his game led to what's (allegedly) become a criminal probe of the Russia investigation.
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