After casting her ballot for Barack Obama, Amanda Jones said simply, "I feel good about voting for him." Ms. Jones, of Cedar Creek, Texas (a town just south of Austin), is African-American, and what gives her vote some historic punch is that she's 109 years old. Her father was a slave. Her mother was born right after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. She's been through it all--Jim Crow segregation, women's suffrage, the Great Depression, the poll tax, FDR, the civil-rights movement, desegregation, 13 years of George W (five as guv, eight as prez), and now: Barack Obama. This last change fills her with joy, she says.
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Good-bye, mr. pitt
His name wasn’t even on the ballot, but Harvey Pitt was a goner before the polls closed on November 5.
Pitt was George W.’s handpicked head of the Wall Street watchdog Securities and Exchange Commission. He came to the job straight from Wall Street, where he’d been a big-shot lawyer for Arthur Andersen and other giant firms that the agency purports to regulate.
Harvey is a washed-in-the-blood-of-the-lamb, 100% true believer in laissez-faire capitalism, committed to the notion that government must not regulate corporate power, but accommodate it.
He looks the part to a tee. Like an old Thomas Nast robber-baron caricature, Pitt is, shall we say, portly. He’s got a full beard, a belly accentuated by the red suspenders that he favors, and a gruff arrogance seemingly fueled by his own gaseousness.
That’s why I’ll miss him. Even in the face of mass finagling and outright robbery on the part of Enron, Arthur Andersen, and the rest of the Wall Street crowd, Pitt never ceased his eager accommodating. He was the perfect poster boy for the Bushites’ undying loyalty to corporate greed.
But, alas, Harvey was so inept and politically tone-deaf that he was too much for even the most corporate White House in history to bear. On Election Night, with the media focused elsewhere, Harvey was offed.