After 25 years of state service, Patricia Freund's career is on hold at best. The reason, she says, is because she has been outspoken about beliefs that public employees should keep their religious lives separate from their work lives. Her downfall, she says, came after she questioned why co-workers, particularly supervisors, attend the governor's annual prayer breakfast, an event she went to in 2000 and found offensive.
But of course this is just an isolated event, and it isn't happening to others.
"America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets. You can't ascribe our fall from grace to any single event or set of circumstances. You can't lose what you lacked at conception.
"Mass-market nostalgia gets you hopped up for a past that never existed. Hagiography sanctifies shuck-and-jive politicians and reinvents their expedient gestures as moments of great moral weight. Our continuing narrative line is blurred past truth and hindsight. Only a reckless verisimilitude can set that line straight."
--James Ellroy, American Tabloid
Ensure a Free and Fair Election (Ban Paperless Voting Machines
"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words."