"It is my belief that this is exactly the time when the American people need to hear from the person who, in approximately 40 days, will be responsible for dealing with this mess. It is going to be part of the president’s job to deal with more than one thing at once."

–Barack Obama    source

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"I believe that these guys should be able to speculate and do anything they want to make as much money as they want in any way that they want...in the good times. And then when things go bad we should help them out so they can do it again later. Because I believe in the free market, except when it might hurt a corporation." 

"What I don't understand is that this is from the giving and the buying of bad loans. We're about to give an 85 billion dollar loan to somebody who couldn't run a business."

Stephen Colbert
The Colbert Report 9/18/08
Interview with Maria Bartiromo

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On This Earth: Photographs from East Africa

Nick Brandt

As Nick Brandt states in the Afterword of this wonderful book, "...there is something profoundly iconic, mythological even, about the animals of East and Southern Africa." 

Paging through the stunning images he captured, one can't help but agree. From breathtaking panoramas to up-close and intimate portraits, Nick creates an "elegy to these beautiful creatures, to this wrenchingly beautiful world that is steadily, tragically vanishing before our eyes." 

Nick's photographs transcend traditional documentary wildlife photography and enter the realm of art. The images are infused with a sense of poignancy and a deep respect for life. And he does it all without a telephoto lens. (Once you've seen the photographs, that fact will properly knock you off your feet.) 

I'll close this post with more of Nick's words. 
"To me, every creature, human or nonhuman, has an equal right to live, and this feeling, this belief that every animal and I are equal, affects me every time I frame an animal in my camera."

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"What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books." 

–Thomas Carlyle

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"I don't own a cell phone or a pager. I just hang around everyone I know, all the time. If someone wants to get a hold of me, they just say 'Mitch,' and I say 'what?' and turn my head slightly."

–Mitch Hedberg

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"We should try to be the parents of our future rather than the offspring of our past."

–Miguel de Unamuno

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Obama's acceptance speech on Thursday falls exactly 45 years after civil rights leader Martin Luther King stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington during the March on Washington and delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech.

"It has been forgotten that the reason why he (King) is a hero and a great American is because he weathered the status of being the most hated man in America. That's not how we choose to remember it." -Rick Perlstein, historian

source

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"If we can connect in some tiny way with a human that doesn't agree with us, then maybe we won't blow up the planet."

–Nancy White

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"While there’s a chance that we’ll act against global warming only to find that the danger was overstated, there’s also a chance that we’ll fail to act only to find that the results of inaction were catastrophic. Which risk would you rather run?"

–Paul Krugman  (source)

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"So our new energy policy is: I have a cocaine problem. I'm out of cocaine. What's say we turn the kids' rooms into cocaineries."
Jon Stewart
on The Daily Show 6/26

"Killing the Constitution is the president's job. The court's job is to overturn elections."
Stephen Colbert
on The Colbert Report 6/26

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