franklin d roosevelt

'The political risks of failure are pretty high." A former congressional aide offered this ominous assessment following the House of Representatives' passage of "health care reform." Warning to the Senate: President Obama and his party face political catastrophe if you fail to do your part so that the president can sign a bill!

We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before, and it does not work. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises. ... I say after eight years of this administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started ... and an enormous debt to boot!   -Henry Morgenthau

 

Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin, a novel about daring, luck and mortality in 1970s New York, won the fiction prize on Wednesday night at the 60th annual National Book Awards. McCann, who has called his book an act of hope written in part as a response to the Sept.11, 2001 terrorist attacks, praised the generosity of American fiction and of the American people and dedicated his prize to a fellow Irish-American, "good old" Frank McCourt. "I think he's dancing upstairs," McCann said of the Angela

I think he's dancing upstairs   -Colum McCann

 

At Wednesday night's National Book Awards , honoree Gore Vidal got in one last dig at his arch-rival, conservative intellectual William F. Buckley, who died last year. Vidal, who received the award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, gave a long speech at the black tie affair at Cipriani Wall Street in New York, in which the 84-year-old writer recalled his first and "only" president - Franklin D. Roosevelt - and referenced his own mortality. At one point, Vidal called out "Bill Buckley  

Many have tried, and almost all have failed - but Barack Obama stands on the brink of becoming only the second U.S. president in history to achieve a sweeping overhaul of the country's troubled health-care system. The Senate's US$849 billion bill is ready, but health-care reform faces its toughest test on Saturday, when senators convene for a rare weekend session to vote on whether the debate on the bill can begin - its first hurdle before heading towards a historic finish line. That vote needs the su

is not just a milestone in a journey of a few months or a few years   -Harry Reid

 

THE temperature was soaring to 75 degrees, and I was walking on ice. Around me the Matanuska Glacier, about 100 miles from Anchorage, sparkled and shimmered in the afternoon sun. The only sound was an occasional rush of cool wind sweeping down from the towering Chugach Mountains and the crunch of my crampons as I made my way up a crevasse with a group of six other trekkers. "Stop," Matt Windsor, our guide, suddenly said.  

Equally significant, Reid is apparently very close to forging the 'Sweet 60' coalition needed to guarantee the bill is debated in the Senate. Sixty votes are needed because that's the number needed to invoke cloture , to shut-off a filibuster, which is what the Republican Party is expected to do to any health care reform bill that has fewer than 60 votes. If passed, the Senate bill would then have to be reconciled with the passed U.S. House health care reform bill, via a House/Senate conference committe  

It moves along fine if all the moving parts adhere to the rules of the road. But introduce a speedster, driven only by his "animal spirits" and his own set of rules -- by definition, ethics-free rules, heedless of others -- and calamity occurs. This in jargon-free essence is what happened a year ago, when the speedsters of Wall Street caused a financial collapse that led to loss and ruin, here and across the globe.  

With the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the United States entered World War II. In June 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt created the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) – the forerunner of today's CIA — to collect and analyze strategic information and to conduct espionage and special operations. For the first time in U.S. history, the nation had in the OSS a single intelligence service engaged in all basic secret activities: espionage, covert action, propaganda, and counterintelligence.  

One of the Honor Flight stops showcased President Franklin Roosevelt, whom many credit with getting America out of the depression. Vets were quick to point out the parallels between that era and today. As South Dakota vets visited the Roosevelt Memorial, they were struck by FDR's words about the New Deal and the depression, and how they relate to today's economy.