“Whip Me if You Dare” Sudan Woman Wears Pants
This woman doesn’t have to take the whipping – she was a UN employee, and could claim diplomatic immunity. She wears a headscarf, she wears modest clothing. She could have quietly escaped. But like Rosa Parks, the black woman in segregated America, who refused to give up her seat and move to the back of the bus, Lubna Hussein has chosen to take a stand, even take a whipping, rather than back down.
Do you think it is un-Islamic for women to wear pants?
‘Whip me if you dare’ says Lubna Hussein, Sudan’s defiant trouser woman
Lubna Hussein, the Sudanese woman who is daring Islamic judges to have her whipped for the “crime” of wearing trousers, has given a defiant interview to the Telegraph.
As the morality police crowded around her table in a Khartoum restaurant, leering at her to see what she was wearing, Lubna Hussein had no idea she was about to become the best-known woman in Sudan.
She had arrived at the Kawkab Elsharq Hall on a Friday night to book a cousin’s wedding party, and while she waited she watched an Egyptian singer and sipped a coke.
She left less than an hour later under arrest as a “trouser girl” – humiliated in front of hundreds of people, then beaten around the head in a police van before being hauled before a court to face a likely sentence of 40 lashes for the “sin” of not wearing traditional Islamic dress.
The officials who tried to humiliate her expected her to beg for mercy, as most of their victims do.
Instead she turned the tables on them – and in court on Tuesday Mrs Hussein will dare judges to have her flogged, as she makes a brave stand for women’s rights in one of Africa’s most conservative nations.
She has become an overnight heroine for thousands of women in Africa and the Middle East, who are flooding her inbox with supportive emails. To the men who feel threatened by her she is an enemy of public morals, to be denounced in the letters pages of newspapers and in mosques.
As she recounted her ordeal in Khartoum yesterday Mrs Hussein, a widow in her late thirties who works as a journalist and United Nations’ press officer, managed cheerfully to crack jokes – despite the real prospect that in a couple of days she will be flogged with a camel-hair whip in a public courtyard where anyone who chooses may watch the spectacle.
Her interview with The Sunday Telegraph was her first with a Western newspaper.
“Flogging is a terrible thing – very painful and a humiliation for the victim,” she said. “But I am not afraid of being flogged. I will not back down.
“I want to stand up for the rights of women, and now the eyes of the world are on this case I have a chance to draw attention to the plight of women in Sudan.”
She could easily have escaped punishment by simply claiming immunity as a UN worker, as she is entitled to under Sudanese law. Instead, she is resigning from the UN – to the confusion of judges who last Wednesday adjourned the case because they did not know what to do with her.
“When I was in court I felt like a revolutionary standing before the judges,” she said, her eyes blazing with pride. “I felt as if I was representing all the women of Sudan.”
Like many other women in the capital, Mrs Hussein fell foul of Sudan’s Public Order Police, hated groups of young puritans employed by the government to crack down on illegal drinkers of alcohol and women who, in their view, are insufficiently demure.
Despite their claims of moral superiority, they have a reputation for dishonesty and for demanding sexual favours from women they arrest.
Mrs Hussein was one of 14 women arrested at the Kawkab Elsharq Hall, a popular meeting place for the capital’s intellectuals and journalists, who bring their families. Most of them were detained for wearing trousers. The police had difficulty seeing what Mrs Hussein was wearing under her loose, flowing Sudanese clothes. She was wearing green trousers, not the jeans that she said she sometimes wears, and wore a headscarf, as usual.
“They were very rude,” she said. “A girl at a table near mine was told to stand up and told to take a few steps and then turn around, in a very humiliating way. She was let off when they ‘discovered’ she was not wearing trousers.”
After her arrest, on the way to a police station, she tried to calm the younger girls.
“All the girls were forced to crouch on the floor of the pick-up with all the policemen sitting on the sides,” she said. “They were all very terrified and crying hysterically, except me as I had been arrested before during university days by the security services.
“So I began to try to calm the girls, telling them this wasn’t very serious. The response of the policeman was to snatch my mobile phone, and he hit me hard on the head with his open hand.
“On the way I felt so humiliated and downtrodden. In my mind was the thought that we were only treated like this because we were females.”
Christian women visiting from the south of Sudan were among the 10 women who admitted their error and were summarily flogged with 10 lashes each. But Mrs Hussein declined to admit her guilt and insisted on her right to go before a judge.
While waiting for her first court appearance, she said she was surprised to find herself held in a single cramped detention cell with other prisoners of both sexes. “How Islamic is that?” she asked. “This should not happen under Sharia.”
Mrs Hussein is a long-standing critic of Sudan’s government, headed by President Omar al-Bashir, the first head of state to face an international arrest warrant for war crimes. Sudan has been accused of committing atrocities in the Darfur region.
Before her arrest she had written several articles criticising the regime, although she believes she was picked at random by the morality police.
The regime has often caused international revulsion for religious extremism. In 2007 British teacher Gillian Gibbons was briefly imprisoned for calling the classroom teddy bear Mohammed.
The government is dominated by Islamists, although only the northern part of the nation is Muslim. Young women are frequently harassed and arrested by the regime’s morality police.
Mrs Hussein said: “The acts of this regime have no connection with the real Islam, which would not allow the hitting of women for the clothes they are wearing and in fact would punish anyone who slanders a woman.
“These laws were made by this current regime which uses it to humiliate the people and especially women. These tyrants are here to distort the real image of Islam.”
She was released from custody after her first court appearance last week, since when she has appeared on Sudanese television and radio to argue her case – which has made headlines around the world.
She is not only in trouble with police and judges. A day after her court appearance she was threatened by a motorcyclist, who did not remove his helmet. He told her that she would end up like an Egyptian woman who was murdered in a notorious recent case.
Since then she has not slept at home, moving between the houses of relatives. She believes her mobile telephone has been listened to by the security services using scanners.
But she has pledged to keep up her fight. “I hope the situation of women improves in Sudan. Whatever happens I will continue to fight for women’s rights.”
Sharing Your Faith in Qatar Gets Leader Deported
I heard a very strange tale and while there is nothing in the paper about it, I wonder where the truth lies. This week, the leader of the local Phillipine evangelical church (I don’t know the exact name) and his wife and three daughters and grandson were visited by the CID one morning and told that they had to be out of the country by night, that they needed to go back to the Phillipines. The person who told me could not imagine what might have caused this.
These are good people, she told me, and we are just about to do a performance about Joseph and his dreams, and his wife was making the costumes.
I thought about it, and said that well, it is an evangelical church, meaning you seek actively to bring souls to Jesus, and it is forbidden by law, in Qatar, to share our faith with Moslems. Is there any chance he was trying to convert Moslems?
She told me that people attending the church were expected to bring visitors, and that when visitors came, they were welcomed to the front of the church, where they were baptized.
I was horrorified. “Do they have any understanding of what is happening?” I asked her, and she replied no, and that most of the baptized visitors never come back. But, she added, the director still gets credit for all those baptisms, and his statistics look pretty good when he reports back to the church in the Phillipines.
In addition to her tithe (Christians are supposed to give 10% of their income to the church and charities) she said members of the congretation were tasked extra monies to pay the rent on the villa, to pay for food and travel of visitors who stayed there, etc, and she said it put a great burden on those who didn’t have sufficient income to contribute the extra. She said it wasn’t a voluntary contribution; if you didn’t contribute the extra, it was like you weren’t really a part of the church.
Last weekend, among those baptized, was a new Nigerian Moslem family who had been invited to visit. I can only imagine how I would feel, visiting a church, invited to the front to be welcomed, and then receiving a baptism I neither asked for nor wanted. I would never come back, but if I were Moslem, I might be horrified enough – and angry enough – to report it to the authorities. To me, at the very least, it is disrespectful.
There may be more to this story than the few details I was given. I expect the entire story is fascinating.
The Appeal by John Grisham
One of the things I like about John Grisham is that he really likes the underdog. In his books, the person often the least likely to prevail does so, usually because he has a smart attorney, one who is paying attention and taking good care of the client. Warning – this book review contains a spoiler, so don’t go any further if you don’t want to know too much about the plot and resolution.
The Appeal is the exception. No one wins, not even the apparent winner, who sails off in the end with his empty, unsatisfying life. He schemes, he exploits, he lies, he buys elections, and he makes a fortune – and he isn’t satisfied. He is married to a woman who sounds more like a greyhound, all skin and bones and self-absorption.
The subject matter is a case where a chemical company has dumped toxic wastes into the ground in Mississippi, it has penetrated into the groundwater, and polluted the entire water system of a small fictional town. Two lawyers, married to one another, sacrifice everything and face bankruptcy to win a case for their client who has lost both husband and son to cancer caused by the toxic chemicals dumped. They win.
There is an appeal.
What this book is about isn’t just about groundwater contamination, or even about buying elections in Mississippi – it is an indictment of every state that elects judges. The core of the novel is about how big money, big corporations, pick candidates and fund them, legally and illegally, and insure that they win. They pack the courts with judges who are opposed to large settlements.
God bless John Grisham. With all his great legal thrillers, he has made a bundle and can take risks like writing a book like The Appeal, which should be an eye opener, and should be read by every caring citizen.
Judges should not be elected. When the judiciary are elected, they have to think about their next election, with every legal decision. It taints objectivity. It corrupts objectivity. It eliminates objectivity. Without an objective judiciary – why bother? They will always rule on the side whose interests are the most powerful and profitable.
Here are a couple quotes that tell you where the novel is going. My Kuwaiti friends are going to love this – I have taken so many shots at Kuwait corruption – so here it is, my friends, exposure of the institutionalized corruption in my country:
Barry laughed and crossed his legs. “We do campaigns. Have a look.” He picked up a remote and pushed the button, and a large white screen dropped from the ceiling and covered most of the wall, then the entire nation appeared. Most of the states were in green, the rest were in a soft yellow. “Thirty-one states are in the green. The yellow ones have the good sense to appoint their courts. We make our living in the green ones.”
“Judicial elections.”
“Yes. That’s all we do, and we do it very quietly. When our clients need help, we target a supreme court justice who is not particularly friendly, and we take him, or her, out of the picture.”
“Just like that.”
“Just like that.”
“Who are your clients?”
“I can’t give you the names, but they’re all on your side of the street. Big companies in energy, insurance, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, timber, all types of manufacturers, plus doctors, hospitals, nursing homes, banks. We raise tons of money and hire the people on the ground to run aggressive campaigns.”
* * * * * * * *
The Senator did not know who owned the jet, not had he ever met Mr. Trudeau, which in most cultures would seem odd since Rudd had taken so much money from the man. But in Washington, money arrives through a myriad of strange and nebulous conduits. Often those taking it have only a vague idea of where it’s coming from; often they have no clue. In most democracies, the transference of so much cash would be considered outright corruption, but in Washington the corruption has been legalized. Senator Rudd didn’t know and didn’t care that he was owned by other people. He had over $11 million in the bank, money he could eventually keep if not forced to waste it on some frivolous campaign. In return for such an investment, Rudd had a perfect voting record on all matters dealing with pharmaceuticals, chemicals, oil, energy, insurance, banks and on and on.
I like almost every book I read by John Grisham. He is a man with a conscience, and he is trying to raise our awareness of corruptive factors before our system goes entirely under. I couldn’t put this book down, and I can hardly wait to read the next one.
The Doha Anglican Church
Back in Doha, church at the same time as always but for once, we are late because we didn’t realize the traffic pattern had changed, and we got lost, briefly, making us walk in after the service had started. As we walked in, we were greeted by a man we knew well when we used to attend, and he was so happy to see us! The congregation is about double the size as when we used to attend, may familiar faces, even after all these years, and there are our old friends, and they have saved two seats for us. 🙂
The service was a happy combination – familiar service sheet, familiar – and much loved – music, but some new things, too, more people serving, a little more formal service, and a priest-policeman who gave a powerful testimony. Soon, we understand, we will be able to start meeting on the new compound, where the big church will be built, and many congregations will share the same buildings, as they do at the Kuwait NEC.
Later, talking with my friend, we were talking about the policeman-preist’s testimony.
“I’m a little confused,” my friend started, “I got the impression testimony was an emotional story about how people get born-again, and he used those words, but it wasn’t like in the evangelical churches.”
“Yeh,” I responded, “being ‘born again’ encompasses a wide variety of experiences. You get the impression it has to come like a mighty wind, blowing you away, but this guy talks about listening to the gentle nudge, that is also the work of the holy spirit.”
“It was so gradual!” she exclaimed. “I thought it had to be like one great emotionally moving experience.”
“So what happens if you are born in the church, you are baptized and you believe from the time you are a little child?” I asked her. “And what happens if after being ‘born again’ you make some huge mistake, do you get ‘born again born again’?”
It’s all a question of style, how the holy spirit comes to each individual, how we believe. It isn’t right or wrong; it is how the spirit speaks to you. One of the things Jesus said over and over was to concern ourselves with our own relationship to God, and not with our neighbor’s short-comings. He said we each had enough of our own short-comings to keep us busy for an entire life. When he wants us to be involved with our neighbors – and we know who our neighbors are – it is with an open and helping hand, not a pointing finger.
The essence, in my mind, is the belief, and the listening, in your heart, for the whispers of the holy spirit. I pray to hear it, when it whispers. There are enough gales in my life – like moving, for example – I don’t need a mind-blowing, scales falling from my eyes experience, although the spirit has used one or two in my life to get my attention. I mostly just need to listen better.
Kuwait Paper Dump Badge
I admit it. When I saw Ansam on her new blog had a Kuwait Paper Dump certificate, I was green with envy! I knew I didn’t deserve one – I have only contributed once, and even my contribution wasn’t truly acceptable because I don’t have a fax, so I took photos and sent them to Abaid.
Yesterday, when I opened my e-mail, I almost cried. He sent me a badge for my support and positive mentions. Honestly, it is the best badge I have ever sported on Here, There and Everywhere.
I’m from Seattle, remember, where recycle cans are issued, and sorting and recycling is mandatory. I’m also from the hippie generation, the back-to-the-earth movement that springs up every now and then, you know, make your own paper, make your own soap, grow your own tomatoes and basil. That my son, his wife, my sisters and my nieces and nephews and this new generation of Kuwaitis are all into saving the environment – it is just icing on my cake. And the candle on my cake is the new badge. You can see it here, and you can see it for the rest of the life of the blog under Kuwait Paper Dump in the Blogroll.
For those of you not familiar with the website, 3baid gathers up paper from around Kuwait from restaurants, service providers, Kuwait resources, events, etc. and publishes them all in one place, eliminating our need to keep track of all those papers. When you want to know what the possibilities are from a particular restaurant, you will find the menu there. When you want to know who has mushroom pizzas, you can click on “mushroom pizzas” and find out which places have them. It is an amazing public service they provide at Paper Dump, and they do it entirely as volunteers, serving the community.
I am so totally honored. Thank you for the badge. Thank you, too, for your quiet, persistent leadership in the Kuwait environmental/Green movement.
Investment in Africa
This was in the morning’s e-mail. Unlike the e-mails I post inviting me to get lots and lots of free money, this one seems to have some interesting information. Here is one excerpt from their opening page, The Conversation Behind Closed Doors:
To make itself more attractive for US investment, Africa should:
Invest in education , health and infrastructure
Ensure the rule of law and a business-friendly climate for all investing companies
Show it is serious about attracting foreign investment
Market itself as aggressively as other regions of the world
Demonstrate opportunity cost of not investing
I would have to say there is nothing I disagree with there. I have not explored the whole site, but it looks legitimate, and interesting, if you, like me, are interested in Africa, and future solutions.
Hi
I’m reaching out to you because I thought you and the readers of here there and Everywhere would be fascinated by what my firm has recently uncovered about the attitudes toward corporate investment in Africa among leading U.S. corporations — according to senior officers of 30 American Fortune 100 corporations we interviewed. Why has Africa not attracted more interest from the U.S. business community? We have collected all of the answers and case studies into a news release introducing a study that launched yesterday commissioned by the US Chamber of Commerce:
http://www.usafricainvestment.com
We’re very excited about the revelations in this paper and would love it if you could let your readers know about what we’ve uncovered through a post or a tweet. If you are able to post please let me know so that I can share it with the team. If you have any questions or would like to speak to the partners who wrote this paper, let me know and I will set it up.
Thank you so much,
Fabiane
—
Fabiane Dal-Ri
fabiane@usafricainvestment.com
Joy in Kuwait
You might think it is the inner feminist in me that is rejoicing, and you would be only half right. The Kuwait elections brought me a lot of joy, for many reasons. First, as an equal opportunity woman, you need to know that I believe women are every bit as capable of veniality and stupidity as men, and that not being in power has only meant not having equal opportunity to abuse that power. And then – you take a look at the women who were elected – smart women. Capable women! Not-your-shy-shrinking-violet kind of women! Women who know how to organize, how to delegate, and how to discuss and resolve differences.
FOUR women! Four highly educated women, who inspired droves of supporters not only to vote – but also to campaign.
Across the board, it struck me as a very sober election. It was as if people thought this might be their last chance, and they took their vote very very seriously. In the fifth district, voters crossed tribal lines, broke with rigid alliances.
Here are three conversations that caused me to rejoice.
On election day, my good Kuwaiti friend, a guy about the same age as AdventureMan and I, leaned over and said “My dear, today I voted for a Shiite woman! This is Kuwait! This is the REAL Kuwait, where no-one ever cared, Shiite or Sunni, no-one ever asked, we all worked together. I voted for her because I thought she was the best candidate.”
He’s been educating me on Kuwait ever since we got here. He grew up about a block from the big food court down at Mubarakiyya. I was just glad to know he had voted – he had seemed so dejected, so hopeless after the last election, I wasn’t sure he would even give it one more try. Something inspired him. Something gave him the courage to hope just one more time.
I talked with a young friend who was active in the campaign of a winning candidate. Well, really mostly SHE talked, and I just listened with a big grin on my face. It doesn’t even matter who she campaigned for, this woman was PUMPED! She had committed, she had engaged, she was on the phones and on the campaign lines and her candidate won! I could hear the transformation in her voice – this is the Kuwait of tomorrow.
At an earlier time, she had told me that the decisions were all made by “elderly” people (meaning people over 40, I think, people like me!) and that young people were getting discouraged, waiting for their turn. All that was gone, as I listened to her voice. She knows she can make a difference NOW in Kuwait. I could not stop grinning. I think she is one of the leaders of tomorrow. 🙂
My third Kuwaiti friend said to me “so many of the winners were from good families, but not the big, rich families! This is the first time!” and she said it with sheer amazement. She said “I think we may be on our way to a true democracy!” I was shocked. I never thought I would hear those words, not after the cynicism and discouragement apparent during the last legislature, when many Kuwaits awoke with a shock to the fact that their legislature had been hijacked, their voices stolen. “This is not the real Kuwait” they kept assuring me after the last election, as they watched in shock and horror as the newly elected MP’s postured and promised and promised “grillings” but did nothing for the population who had elected them in terms of basics – housing, roads, electricity/energy, or groundwork for future development.
My joy is in the renewal of their spirit. It’s not my election. But oh, I dance with joy for your joy, Kuwait, and I celebrate your commitment to the future.
PS For our non-Kuwaiti readers – early in the election campaigns, one party announced a religious fatwa (edict) saying that it was forbidden to vote for women. I think it outraged people badly enough to create a huge backlash.
Eliot Pattison: Prayer of the Dragon
As you can see, I am into some serious reading. Not heavy reading, but books like carrots – I am the donkey, plodding way, packing my boxes, sorting, weeding, throwing out – it is time consuming, and it is pitiless work. I need the promise of a great excape at the end of my day to keep me going.
Prayer of the Dragon was a GREAT carrot. I like all of Eliot Pattison’s Inspector Shan Tao Yun series, set in Tibet. In his very first book, we meet Shan as he is still in the Tibetan prison camp, imprisoned for exposing corrupt officials in China. He learns a huge appreciation, in prison, for a different way of thinking, and his treasured companions become the Bhuddist monks with whom he is imprisoned. If you want to read this series, you can read any book as a stand-alone, but it helps to read them in order, starting with The Skull Mantra. The Chinese eventually free Shan; they find him useful – as long as he is not exposing corruption in the Chinese bureaucracy. He is free on parole; he lives with the sword over his head. At any time, if he crosses an important person, he can be sent back to the merciless gulag.
In The Prayer of the Dragon Inspector Shan finds himself involved in a series of murders on the mountainside, in a small mining village. The village headman has a great scam going, skimming the miners take, charging passage on the mountain trails, and keeping his village hidden from the Chinese bureaucracy.
Here is what I learned that surprised me. There appears to be a connection between the American Navaho nation and the native Tibetans. They share some body-prototype similarities, and they share many symbols and earliest legends. An first-nation Navaho and his niece are exploring similarities, and commonalities, when two members of their party are murdered while sleeping. The Navaho is charged, by the headman, with the death, because he survived although he is covered in blood. It doesn’t make sense, but it doesn’t have to. The headman needs a scapegoat, and he chooses the Navaho.
It is a fascinating read. Here is an excerpt from a conversation Inspector Shan has with the local director of Public Security:
“I know your type so well, Shan, ” Bing said. “God, how well I know you. I was responsible for ten barracks of prisoners, like you – pathetic, morose creatures with no vision, only bitterness about the past. They would sit in reeducation classes and copy out slogans from the little red books like robots, praising the Chairman, reading aloud apologies printed in other books, using someone else’s words. Never a one among them with the balls to stand up and say Fuck the Chairman, screw the Party secretaries, and screw the limo drivers who brought them to town.”
“I tried at first,” Shan replied in a weary voice. “They sent me to a special hospital for the criminally insane.”
“Unfortunately,” Bing said soberly, “you are the sanest person I have ever met.”
AdventureMan knows I love these books. “Do you want to go to Tibet?” he asks me, and I say “No, if I went I would want to hang around with Inspector Shan and his gang of monks, not do tourist things allowed by the Chinese.” These are great reads, Pattison is doing a great job of bringing the plight of the Tibetans to the conscience of his readers, depicting, in graphic, horrorific detail how the Chinese are systematically crushing and obliterating every shred of Tibetan culture, while claiming they are not. I think one of the very worst things they have done is taking over the Tibetan monastery system and corrupting it into something it was never meant to be, a cruel, ugly deformity.
I can hardly wait for the next book to come out. I am on the waiting list for The Lord of Death, yet another book about Chinese bureaucratic corruption and the adventures Inspector Shan has in Tibet confronting and evading all its manifestations.
Old Fashioned Piracy Goes High Tech
Thanks to blogger BitJockey, and news service Reuters for this update on the Somali pirates:
MADRID (Reuters) – Somali pirates are planning attacks on shipping using detailed information telephoned through by contacts in London, according to an intelligence report cited by Spanish radio on Monday.
The pirates have built up a network of informants in London with access to sensitive data from shipping companies about vessels, routes and cargoes, according to a European military intelligence report that Cadena Ser radio said it had seen.
The pirates receive their information by satellite phone and use sophisticated equipment to locate their targets, Cadena Ser said.
The intelligence report also said that the pirates seem to avoid attacks on ships of some nationalities, including British ships.
It listed several attacks in which the pirates had surprised crew with detailed information of their prey, including the nationalities of those on board.
Cadena Ser did not provide any more details about where the report originated, identifying it only as “European.”
Western nations have sent warships to try to stop the pirates, who have made millions of dollars from ransoming ships and their crews in strategic shipping lanes off the Horn of Africa that connect Europe to Asia.
They are currently holding about 20 vessels with nearly 300 hostages, according to monitoring groups.
Efforts to fight the pirates have been hindered by the gaps in international maritime law, which have sometimes left it unclear who, if anyone, can put them on trial.
Spanish authorities have disagreed among themselves over what to do with 14 Somalis caught last week by a Spanish warship. A judge tried to bring some of them to Spain while the government argued they should be sent to a court in Kenya.
(Reporting by Jason Webb; Editing by Kevin Liffey)
Wise Sayings about Governments – LOL for today
Thanks to Kim for a great contribution – my friends, I think you will like these. They sure gave me a grin:
Wise Sayings on Government
1. In my many years I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a Congress. — John Adams
2. If you don’t read the newspaper, you are uninformed; if you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed. — Mark Twain
3. Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But then I repeat myself. — Mark Twain
4. I contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle. — Winston Churchill
5. A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul. — George Bernard Shaw
6. A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man, which debt he proposes to pay off with your money. – G. Gordon Liddy
7. Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. — James Bovard
8. Foreign aid might be defined as a transfer of money from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries. — Douglas Casey
9. Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys. — P.J. O’Rourke
10. Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else. – Frederic Bastiat
11. Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it. — Ronald Reagan
12. I don’t make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts. — Will Rogers
13. If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it’s free. — P.J. O’Rourke
14. In general, the art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one party of the citizens to give to the other. — Voltaire
15. Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn’t mean politics won’t take an interest in you. – Pericles (430 B.C.)
16. No man’s life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session. — Mark Twain
17. Talk is cheap… except when Congress does it. – Anonymous
18. The government is like a baby’s alimentary canal, with a happy appetite at one end and no responsibility at the other. — Ronald Reagan
19. The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of the blessings. The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery. — Winston Churchill
20. The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin. — Mark Twain
21. The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools. — Herbert Spencer
22. There is no distinctly native American criminal class…save Congress. — Mark Twain
23. A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have. — Gerald Ford
Recent Comments
intlxpatr on A Lawless, Authoritarian … Kuwait Someday on A Lawless, Authoritarian … intlxpatr on Oh Thank You, Amazon! Rivergirl on Oh Thank You, Amazon! intlxpatr on Give to Those Who Ask Wikipedia Donate Button
Amazina
Early Voting in Florida
Here There and Everywhere 