Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

We still have time to mess this up!

I can see Russia from this blog!

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

Screw the Judean People’s Front. Splitters.

Just a few bad apples.

I personally stopped the public option…

Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack!

Lighten up, Francis.

What fresh hell is this?

A snarling mass of vitriolic vicious jackals

Too inconsequential to be sued

Peak wingnut was a lie.

Gastritis Broke My Calculator

Good luck with your asparagus.

I showered with Rahm and all I got was this shitty blog.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity.

Han shot first.

Saul Alinsky is my co-pilot

Naturally gregarious and alpha

Word salad with all caps

Usually wrong but never in doubt.

We Survived Breitbartpocalypse!

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense.

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Anne Laurie has been a Balloon Juice writer since 2009.

Open Thread: Thursday Night Menu

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Take it away, Bad Horse’s Filly:

It has been a whirlwind week and Thursday took me by surprise. But no worries, I figured it out soon enough to dig up a recipe. Someone requested slow-cooker recipes a few weeks back, so I thought I’d do one of those this Thursday. Brunswick Stew is an old family favorite. I think my mom cut it out of the newspaper….in the 60’s!….and still has the original copy. There may even be on old Dear Abby column next to it. It is surprisingly good, even though it has lima beans. I hate lima beans, rates right up there with Brussels sprouts for me (sorry JeffreyW), but I’ve never even thought about eliminating them from this recipe. I’ve always been afraid it would alter the great flavor, so I just eat around them. Granny Smith apples were on sale this week, so Cinnamon Apple Cake it had to be.
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On the board tonight:

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1. Brunswick Stew
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2. Corn Bread
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3. Tossed Salad
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4. Cinnamon Apple Cake

Recipes and shopping list at the link, as always.

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Early Morning Open Thread

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I was looking for reviews of Treme, because even apart from David Simon’s track record, John Goodman and Melissa Leo are both on my “Actors To Watch, No Matter the Other Details” list. But cable does not happen in this household, and I’m too old & techno-cowardly to figure out bittorrent, so I won’t be able to watch actual episodes until the DVDs come out or HBO decides to Hulu. So, a link from an otherwise neutral-to-mildly-hostile review on the AOL site led me to Back of Town: Blogging Treme and (among other fine things) the following wisdom from Athenae:

Who has the right to tell your story and hear your story? Who has the right to be let in that deep? Telling a story is letting someone into your heart, into the things for you that are like the things of the church, the things you don’t talk about, that are knit into your muscle and bone. We were always trying to be conscious of that, at my last paper, that ain’t nobody obligated to give you shit about their lives and that if they do, you tread on that as if it’s sacred ground. We didn’t always get there but I’d never say we didn’t always try. Here’s the crazy thing, though: Show up on someone’s doorstep after their grandkid died in some horrific car accident or school shooting or something, call up somebody after 20 years who said he was molested by a priest, invite yourself to a funeral, join a Muslim family for dinner after their children have been spit at on the street, and more often than not people want you there. They invite you in. Feed you, even. They talk for hours. They want their story told.
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We all know as fucking human beings, somewhere deep down, that our own memories only live as long as we do and the way we teach each other how to live is to tell our stories. And if we can’t tell them ourselves, we tell them this way: Books. Newspapers. TV shows. Movies, even. Radio. We’ve expanded the campfire where we used to share tales of the hunt to the entire fucking world. This is how we do this now.

Happy Tuesday, everybody. And… what did you think of Treme?

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Fantasy Rotisserie SCOTUS Handicapping

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There have certainly been some… interesting… nominations for the soon-to-be-empty Supreme Court seat. And why not? It’s like a FRP (fantasy role playing; think Dungeons & Dragons) game for political wonks! After all, neither woman needs the aggravation, but wouldn’t it be fun to watch the Republicans go (even more) crazy if either Hillary Clinton or Anita Hill was nominated?

Some of the names floated by serious mainstream media outlets have already come as a surprise to me. I wasn’t surprised when the local Boston media immediately cornered Deval Patrick and demanded to know whether he’d abandon his campaign for re-election if he was nominated, because here in “The Hub of the Universe” we have a good opinion of our political prowess out of all proportion to our actual importance. But even inside Route 128, most people think of Governor Patrick as ‘Barack Obama Lite’, which would only make him valuable if the president had the megalomaniacal self-regard of a Glenn Beck or a John Boehner. Gov. Jennifer Granholm? Russ Feingold? Sen. Amy Klobuchar? Elliot Spitzer? Heck, why not Martha Coakley? She’s been “tough on crime” in the Rethuglican tradition (advocating fierce crackdowns on disturbances to the public order such as the Aqua Teen Hunger Force LED Graffiti-Terrorists, and punitive sentences for accused sexual predators except possibly those employed by the keepers of such order). And it would infuriate the “Independent (TP)” Scott Brown voters, even (especially) those who’ve already fallen out of love with He-Who-Drives-A-Truck.

As long as President Obama doesn’t nominate Mitt Romney… and I’m sure there are Sensible Centrists already promoting that travesty; the only question is whether Richard Cohen or Thomas Friedman will get the first thumbsucker into print… I’m prepared to find something positive. But if we’re going to play “In A Perfect World… “, my nomination would be Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Margaret H. Marshall:

Marshall was born in Newcastle, South Africa, the daughter of a steel executive. She attended University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa and was a leader of students who opposed the racist apartheid system. Marshall led a student organization for three years called the National Union of South African Students, which was dedicated to ending oppressive minority rule and achieving equality for all South Africans…
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She moved to Boston, Massachusetts in 1964 and attended Harvard University (earning a master’s degree in education in 1969) and Yale Law School. In 1984, she married then-New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis…
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From 1976 to 1989, she was an associate and a partner in private practice at the Boston law firm of Csaplar & Bok. From 1989 to 1992, she was a partner in the Boston law firm of Choate, Hall & Stewart. Also from 1991 to 1992, she was President of the Boston Bar Association, the oldest bar association in the United States. From 1992-1996, she was General Counsel to Harvard University.
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Marshall was appointed to be an Associate Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in 1996 by Republican Governor William F. Weld. She was named as Chief Justice in September 1999 by Republican Governor Paul Cellucci, to begin her term on October 14, 1999. She is the second woman to serve on the Supreme Judicial Court, the oldest appellate court in the Western Hemisphere, and the first to serve as Chief Justice in its more than 300 year history.
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In the course of her term, she has written over 200 opinions. Marshall wrote the decision in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health that declared that the Massachusetts Constitution does not permit the state to deny citizens the right to same-sex marriage.

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Early Morning Open Thread: Straw Men

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David Weigel at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference, Saturday, 11:45am:

[…] Nancy French’s Evangelicals for Mitt has been offering around 200 tickets for free, for anyone who wants to come and support Mitt Romney. At the party before Sean Hannity’s live taping of his TV show, French’s group handed out 800 copies of their man’s book, “No Apology,” and countless piggy banks. It’s hard to say how many of the people grabbing those favors will back Romney — one woman I spoke to, clutching two piggy banks, snorted when I asked if she’d vote for Romney.
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“These are for my grandkids,” she said.
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… [W]hile the outcome won’t matter in the long run, there’s a big difference between the narrative of a Paul victory, say, a Palin victory. Few, however, expect Romney to pull it out.
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“Evangelicals for Mitt,” laughed one GOP strategist who wasn’t backing any particular candidate. “You notice that their signs mention everything except religion.”

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David Weigel at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference, Saturday, 7:01pm:

In a surprise, Mitt Romney edged out Ron Paul to win the SRLC straw poll by a single vote.
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Romney took 439 votes (24 percent) to Paul’s 438 votes (also 24 percent), a result that disappointed a Paul-heavy crowd that had stuck around to watch the results. Sarah Palin came in third with 330 votes (18 percent), and Newt Gingrich came in fourth with 321 votes (18 percent); Mike Huckabee, who did not attend the event, scored 4 percent. Total ballots cast: 1,806.
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Romney, who also did not attend the conference, benefited from a grassroots effort from Evangelicals for Mitt, a group run by David and Nancy French — who’d helped Romney score a second-place finish at the 2006 SRLC. They’d purchased around 200 tickets, 800 copies of Romney’s book “No Apology,” and 2000 piggy banks with the Evangelicals for Mitt logo. Before the vote, French soft-peddled the meaning of the exercise, stressing that it was “not binding.” After the vote, French held court near the press boxes as his small team hugged and high-fived.
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“Is that not incredible?” French said into a cell phone. “Our guy wasn’t even here!”
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When I spoke to French, he stuck by his “not binding” comment, then basked in his victory. “We just wanted to show that Mitt has friends down here.”

Remember how offended the Repubs got when Michael Steele suggested their votes could be bought for “tchotchkes”? Looks like Mitt’s Minions gambled, correctly, that just enough of their votes could be bought with re-giftable doorstoppers and piggy banks for the kiddies.

Willard Romney will be the death of me yet. A Romney/Palin or Palin/Romney ticket, barring total societal breakdown, would be crushed by the Obama 2012 team like a grape beneath a juggernaut, but I’m not at all sure my blood pressure could survive 18 months of toxic smarm poured over a word-salad of equal parts MBA-jargon and Talibangelical-tongues.

These are the days of miracle and wonders… a loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires and babies…

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BoBo Brooks, New King of the Media Village Courtiers?

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I’m sorry, DougJ, but it looks like Matt Taibbi may despise David Brooks even more than you do. The man who delivered the ultimate smackdown on Thomas Friedman reports a new nadir for our modern op-ed courtiers:

David Brooks: … Unlike 90 percent of America, I was rooting for Duke last night. This was widely cast as a class conflict — the upper crust Dukies against the humble Midwestern farm boys. If this had been a movie, Butler’s last second heave would have gone in instead of clanging off the rim, and the country would still be weeping with joy.
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But this is why life is not a movie. The rich are not always spoiled. Their success does not always derive from privilege. The Duke players — to the extent that they are paragons of privilege, which I dispute — won through hard work on defense.
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Gail Collins: I’m sorry, when the difference is one weensy basket, I’d say Duke won neither by privilege nor hard work but by sheer luck. But don’t let me interrupt your thought here. I detect the subtle and skillful transition to a larger non-sport point.
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David Brooks: Yes. I was going to say that for the first time in human history, rich people work longer hours than middle class or poor people. How do you construct a rich versus poor narrative when the rich are more industrious?
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I had to read this thing twice before it registered that Brooks was actually saying that he was rooting for the rich against the poor. If he keeps this up, he’s going to make his way into the Guinness Book for having extended his tongue at least a foot and a half farther up the ass of the Times’s Upper East Side readership than any previous pundit in journalistic history…
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Only a person who has never actually held a real job could say something like this. There is, of course, a huge difference between working 80 hours a week in a profession that you love and which promises you vast financial rewards, and working 80 hours a week digging ditches for a septic-tank company, or listening to impatient assholes scream at you at some airport ticket counter all day long, or even teaching disinterested, uncontrollable kids in some crappy school district with metal detectors on every door.
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Most of the work in this world completely sucks balls and the only reward most people get for their work is just barely enough money to survive, if that. The 95% of people out there who spend all day long shoveling the dogshit of life for subsistence wages are basically keeping things running just well enough so that David Brooks, me and the rest of that lucky 5% of mostly college-educated yuppies can live embarrassingly rewarding and interesting lives in which society throws gobs of money at us for pushing ideas around on paper (frequently, not even good ideas) and taking mutual-admiration-society business lunches in London and Paris and Las Vegas with our overpaid peers.
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Brooks is right that most of the people in that 5% bracket log heavy hours, but where he’s wrong is in failing to recognize that most of us have enough shame to know that what we do for a living isn’t really working. I pull absolutely insane hours in my current profession, to the point of having almost no social life at all, but I know better than to call what I do for a living work. I was on a demolition crew when I was much younger, the kind of job where you have to wear a dust mask all day long, carry buckets full of concrete, and then spend all night picking fiberglass shards out of your forearms from ripping insulation out of the wall.
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If I had to do even five hours of that work today I’d bawl my fucking eyes out for a month straight. I’m not complaining about my current good luck at all, but I would wet myself with shame if I ever heard it said that I work even half as hard as the average diner waitress.
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Then again, maybe I’m looking at this from the wrong perspective. Would I rather clean army latrines with my tongue, or would I rather do what Brooks does for a living, working as a professional groveler and flatterer who three times a week has to come up with new ways to elucidate for his rich readers how cosmically just their lifestyles are? If sucking up to upper-crust yabos was my actual job and I had to do it to keep the electricity on in my house, then yes, I might look at that as work.
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But it strikes me that David Brooks actually enjoys his chosen profession…

Read (as Peggy Noonan would say, savor) the whole thing. I actually feel sorry for Gail Collins, who seems to have been stuck with the difficult task of distracting Bobo from sharing his Pundit Thots with some innocent bystander who might be driven to beat him senseless bloody for being an obnoxious tool.

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Things I Did Not Know About

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Bob Herbert’s latest New York Times column celebrates “A Voice of Reason“:

[…}One of the reasons so many conservative Republican absurdities became actual U.S. policy was the intellectual veneer slapped upon them by right-wing think tanks and commentators. The grossest nonsense was made to seem plausible to a lot of people — people who wanted to believe in a free lunch. When Mr. Reagan told the country that “government is the problem,” the intellectual handmaidens of the corporate and financial elite were right there to explain in exhaustive detail why that was so…
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The liberal or progressive community was slow to counter the remarkable effectiveness of this intellectual offensive from the right. But during the 1990s and into the early-2000s, that began to change. And one of the progressive organizations that has done a really good job (but has never been particularly well known) is about to celebrate its 10th anniversary.
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Demos, headquartered in New York City, grew out of a series of meetings of scholars, activists, journalists and elected officials who were concerned about the ever-increasing influence of the right on public policy. “The thinking was that there should be more moderate, liberal and left-of-center voices,” said Miles Rapoport, the group’s president. The group was formed in 2000, a year that would later see the disputed election that gave the presidency to Mr. Bush.
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It didn’t take long for Demos to begin issuing loud warnings about the danger that ever-increasing debt was posing to American households, while pointedly disputing the argument that over-the-top credit card debt was primarily the result of excessive consumer spending.
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Working people from the middle class down were in serious trouble, and Demos, along with many other voices (the bankruptcy expert and middle-class advocate Elizabeth Warren comes quickly to mind) was sounding the alarm long before the Great Recession hit like a Category 5 hurricane…
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[…] Ronald Reagan and the right-wing zealots who revere him have preached a gospel that, when carried to its logical conclusion, would all but abolish government. It’s a failed philosophy.
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Demos has responded with admirable real-world scholarship, a highly respected fellows program to encourage new writers and thinkers and steadfast efforts to promote civic engagement. (It’s a big champion, among other things, of same-day voter registration.)
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It’s not just comforting but essential to have sane countervailing voices like Demos to remind us that government action is necessary to plan for the common good, to set proper rules for economic activity and to be a bulwark against predatory practices in the private sector.
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Demos is holding its 10th anniversary celebration on May 11, and Ms. Warren will be one of the honorees. If you think about it, raise a toast in the group’s honor.

For some reason, I had not previously been aware of Demos’ website, www.demos.org. Looks like much more than one weekend’s worth of good reading over there.

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Ave Atque Vale, Justice Stevens

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Harold Meyerson betrays the very conventional wisdum of his Kaplan Daily fellows to praise “John Paul Stevens, the restrainer“:

Justice John Paul Stevens has long been labeled, correctly, as the leader of the Supreme Court’s liberal bloc, but I suspect that future historians will refine that distinction a little more carefully. Stevens’s chief contribution has been to lead opposition to the galloping judicial overreach of the court’s conservatives.
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It’s that opposition that’s on display in his two best-known dissents: First, in Bush v. Gore a decade ago, then, this year, in the Citizens United case.
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In the earlier case, Stevens gave voice to all those who felt queasy, constitutionally no less than politically, about the Supreme Court effectively bestowing the presidency on George W. Bush, in a decision that broke de facto, if not de jure, along the justices’ party lines…
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[…] That same skepticism towards judicial overreach suffused Stevens’s dissent in the recent Citizens United decision, which overturned nearly a century of established law to give corporations the right to make direct limitless investments in political campaigns. In his questioning from the bench during oral arguments, and then in his lengthy and impassioned dissent, Stevens was clearly appalled that Chief Justice John Roberts and his right-wing colleagues had inflated a case that raised rather narrow issues so that they could strike down a century of precedents and free corporations from constraints on their political influence that only rightwing ideologues could lament.
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Scholars will surely cite Stevens’s dissents as the leading examples of how judicial restraint became the mantra not of conservative justices but of liberal ones during the late 20th and early 21st centuries. And yet this shift, however epochal, has not been sufficiently acknowledged by either the news media or politicians. Indeed, Republican elected officials still get away with ritual condemnations of liberal judicial activism, as though it weren’t the right-wing justices, whom they elevated and supported, who were the real activists. Reacting to Stevens’s retirement announcement today, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said, “As we await the president’s nominee to replace Justice Stevens at the end of his term, Americans can expect Senate Republicans to make a sustained and vigorous case for judicial restraint and the fundamental importance of an even-handed reading of the law.”
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Would that McConnell actually meant what he said. If he did, he’d back a liberal nominee in the tradition of John Paul Stevens.

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Early Morning Open Thread

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I had a vague hope that the torrential rains of the past few weeks would have cut back on the tree pollen levels here, north of Boston. Unfortunately, a few sunny days, and the neighbors’ oaks and maples are burgeoning with their contribution to what’s being called the worst allergy season in years. The itchy eyes, nasal symptoms, and achy joints are bad enough, but it’s the brain fog that’s really driving me crazy. Why must histamines make one stupid?

A little morning energizer (h/t commentor JGabriel):

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Open Thread: Thursday Night Menu

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Take it away, Bad Horse’s Filly —

We have a cheese warehouse here. It’s an amazing place with 2000 square feet of refrigerated retail space filled with cheeses from all over the world. They even provide you with a jacket to wear while you shop. I drive by it on my way home from work almost every day. Sometimes I have to stop and buy some truly wonderful cheeses. Which is what I did for this recipe. Go for the best cheese you can find for this recipe and you won’t be disappointed. The lemon pie may see a bit out of place in this meal, but I had a request for one this week, so since I was making one, I thought I’d include the recipe.
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On the board tonight:
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Herbed Fettuccini
Apple Salad
Tangy Lemon Pie

As ever, recipes and shopping list at the link.

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Attack of on the ‘Lucky Duckies’

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The actual AP article “Nearly half of US households escape fed income tax” is slightly more informative than the usual RW-shouter suspects would like you to believe. But Jim Newell at Wonkette has the best short-form rebuttal for those emails from the low-information voters among your friends and loved ones:

The right — and yes, the Heritage Foundation has its insightful quotes all over this — love to take this data and claim, “half the country pays no taxes.” They pay their payroll taxes, and state taxes, and local taxes, and mortgage payments ,and insurance premiums, and whatever else that other people CAN AFFORD WITH ALL OF THEIR MONEY. How much do people primarily earning from large capital gains pay in federal income tax, btw?
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All that this statistic shows — and yes, deductions and credits may be over the top at the moment, but it’s a fucking great depression is why — is how wide the wealth gap has become here, because 50% of the country absolutely needs most every cent to maintain the basic consumption levels required to keep this economy propelling forward. Want to spread the tax base more broadly? Spread the wealth, baby!
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If we could just find useful jobs for people to do instead of telling them to drain the equity for their homes every year, maybe some of these wacky wacky statistics would resolve themselves.

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You Know Who Else Saw Pink Elephants?

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If you read between the lines at the ‘Kaplan Daily’, apparently the Republicans are giving up on rational thought altogether and going full-bore “alternative reality”. From an article headlined “Two Republican stars — Palin and Bachmann — align for first time“:

[…] Several thousand people came to a convention center here to see Bachmann and Palin, both of whom have been embraced by “tea party” conservatives for their fiery populism and ability to rile Democrats. Palin also headlined a fundraiser for Bachmann later in the day…
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They stepped onto the stage together, and when it was Palin’s turn to take the lectern, she called Bachmann “inspiring.”
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Palin has been traveling the country lately in support of GOP candidates, and she delivered a familiar indictment of Obama and Democratic leaders. She also praised Bachmann and other Republican women in Congress, whom she likened to the pink elephant in one 2008 GOP campaign button.
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“Someone had better tell Washington that that pink elephant is on the move, and Michele is leading the stampede,” Palin said.
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One of Bachmann’s Democratic opponents, State Sen. Tarryl Clark, has raised more than $1 million, a significant total for a challenger this early in the election cycle.
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But Bachmann sounds determined. She reminded another audience recently of her 2008 comment that Obama might have “anti-American views,” declaring, “I said I had very serious concerns that Barack Obama had anti-American views, and now I look like Nostradamus.”

I guess spouting nonsense quatrains that can be interpreted to mean whatever one’s deluded followers want to believe this week is a good enough strategy for the New Grifter wing of the Republican party…

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White Peoples’ Colorful Tribal Customs…

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Dave Weigel’s new blog at the ‘Kaplan Daily’ is a giant win for the sane people among us. Now he’s got a larger and presumably more “mainstream” (i.e., low information) audience for his keen sense of the ridiculous:

CNN’s decision to embed with the Tea Party Express as it traveled toward D.C. — Fox News did the same thing last year, in the run-up to the Sept. 12 taxpayer march on Washington — befuddled the right and left alike. Mediaite’s Tommy Christopher speculated that the network was out for “nuggets of gold,” video and photos of tea partyers waving racist signs.
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That’s not how CNN’s Shannon Travis describes his embed experience.
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“[H]ere’s what you don’t often see in the coverage of Tea Party rallies: Patriotic signs professing a love for country; mothers and fathers with their children; African-Americans proudly participating; and senior citizens bopping to a hip-hop rapper. … It is important to show the colorful anger Americans might have against elected leaders and Washington. But people should also see the orange-vested Tea Party hospitality handlers who welcome you with colorful smiles. There were a few signs that could be seen as offensive to African-Americans. But by and large, no one I spoke with or I heard from on stage said anything that was approaching racist.
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Almost everyone I met was welcoming to this African-American television news producer.

Of course, Weigel’s got plenty of important sercon posts about conservatives in general and Republicans in particular. But it’s his Menckenian eye for the ridiculous that I really appreciated when he was writing for The Washington Independent, and his new post will give access to more sources as well as larger targets.

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Wilma Mankiller, RIP

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From the AP story, via the New York Times:

Former Cherokee Nation Chief Wilma Mankiller, one of the nation’s most visible American Indian leaders and one of the few women to lead a major tribe, died Tuesday after suffering from cancer and other health problems. She was 64.
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Mankiller, whose first taste of federal policy toward Indians came when her family ended up in a housing project after a government relocation project, took Indian issues to the White House and met with three presidents. She earned a reputation for facing conflict head-on. As the first female chief of the Cherokees, from 1985 to 1995, Mankiller led the tribe in tripling its enrollment, doubling employment and building new health centers and children’s programs.
[…] In 1969, she got what she called ”an enormous wake-up call” and took her first step into Indian activism by participating in the 19-month occupation of Alcatraz Island. Seventy-nine Native Americans took over the site of the former federal prison to protest a policy that terminated the federal government’s recognition of tribal sovereignty and the exclusion of Indians from state laws. The policy was based on the belief that Native Americans would be better off if they assimilated as individuals into mainstream American society.
[…] As chief of the Tahlequah-based tribe, Mankiller was less of an activist and more of a pragmatist. She was criticized for focusing almost exclusively on social programs, instead of pushing for smoke shops and high-stakes gaming.
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Mankiller decided not to seek re-election in 1995, and accepted a teaching position at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., where she held an honorary degree. Among her other honors was a Presidential Medal of Freedom — the nation’s highest civilian award — presented in 1998.

Seeing this reminded me that I need to replace my copy of her excellent autobiography, Mankiller: A Chief and Her People. And on her website, I found news of an upcoming documentary to which I look forward with great interest…
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“The question I am asked most frequently is why I remain such a positive person, after surviving breast cancer, lymphoma, dialysis, two kidney transplants, and systemic myasthenia gravis. The answer is simple: I am Cherokee, and I am a woman. No one knows better than I that every day is indeed a good day. How can I be anything but positive when I come from a tenacious, resilient people who keep moving forward with an eye toward the future even after enduring unspeakable hardship? How can I not be positive when I have lived longer than I ever dreamed possible and my life plays itself out in a supportive community of extended family and friends? There is much to be thankful for. Though I am an ordinary woman, I have been blessed with many extraordinary experiences. I have been privileged to travel extensively, meet world leaders like Nelson Mandela, represent tribal people in meetings with several United States presidents, and work with visionary tribal leaders and activists.
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I learned at a fairly early age that I cannot always control the things that are sent my way or the things that other people do, but I can most certainly control how I think about them and react to them. I don’t spend a lot of time dwelling on the negative. I believe that having a good, peaceful mind is the basic premise for a good life. — from “The Way Home”, Every Day is a Good Day by Wilma Mankiller, p. 148

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