The Tea Party fought back against the tax. Against the corruption in the parties and the PAC's. We stand on our Constitution to take our country back. Vote for change." LINK to Steve Carlson video of this song (AOL News)
I've been reading "Plain Speaking", an oral history of Harry Truman (pictured at left), the President from Independence, MO. It's is surprisingly relevant in 2010, so I'm posting some of his quotes here. A Democrat, Truman stood for the common man and common sense, things I stand for in my campaign for the U.S. House of Representatives from the 4th Congressional District in Minnesota. Harry had some powerful ideas which can be applied to this Mugwump administration of Barack Obama, and steer us toward the path of common sense. Harry said our government could survive a bad president, we withstood 5 bad presidents just before the Civil War. Enjoy. -- Steve Carlson, Independence Party
Theodore Roosevelt (Truman favorite)
(circa 1910) "It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat." - (this is T. Roosevelt quote)
On Running for Office and Choosing Leaders:
"You know if a man doesn't enjoy running for office and doesn't think he can do something good for people by doing, it don't know what he's in politics for in the first place."
"In his second term Cleveland was more interested in the big-money people than he was in the common people, and he accomplished very, very little. It's a shame when that happens to a man, but it sometimes does."
Of Bill Bryan: Bryan said in 1876 "They had to bring me up a side stair outside the building, and then they had to poke me in at a window, and you, they've been trying to put me out over the transom ever since...If it hadn't have been for Bill Bryan, there wouldn't be any liberal outfit in the country at all now. Old Bryan kept liberalism alive, kept it going."
"Some men are greedier than others, and they get to thinking they are the power rather the instrument of power."
"People said that old [Pres. William] McKinley had his ears so close to the ground he got grasshoppers in them."
Of Teddy Roosevelt: A machine boss "wrote of him that he had 'various altruistic ideas and was...a little loose on the relations of capital and labor, on trusts and combinations and the right of a man to run his own business in his own way.' Another boss appealed to Roosevelt not to "let the Constitution stand between friends." He couldn't understand why Roosevelt first was angry and then laughed.
"That's right, some [presidents] have made good, and some haven't. Someday I'll tell you which is which. But Teddy [Roosevelt\...he was just a cracker-jack. He didn't do all he had in mind doing, of course. You never can do that, but there've just been very few Presidents who've done as much for the country as he did."
"[Taft] was no damn good at all. He didn't have the slightest idea of what being President meant. At least that's my opinion...he might have been a good judge, but I'm talking about the Presidency of the United States. And the fact that during the four years Taft was in the White House the country started going to hell."
On the Economy
"And the minute Teddy Roosevelt got out of the White House, the moneybags took over again, as they always do if you don't keep your eyes and ears open. Taft wasn't even in Washington most of the time, and he didn't have any understanding at all of the office."
On the Continuity of the U.S. Government
"That's the beauty of what those men who wrote the Constitution did. You can have a bad President. Why, I'll tell you--There was a time when we have five bad Presidents in a row and it...we might not have had a Civil War if it hadn't been for those five fellas, but the government survived. it's just a miracle is all, what this government is."
