Jim Hightower

Even the smallest dog can lift its leg on the tallest building.

The Bible declares that on the sixth day God created man. Right then and there, God should have demanded a damage deposit.

Democracy is not something that happens, you know, just at election time, and it’s not something that happens just with one event. It’s an ongoing building process. But it also ought to be a part of our culture, a part of our lives.

There’s enormous progressive activism and, more often than not, success at the grassroots level – everything from living wage campaigns to efforts to finance our elections are having terrific success.

When I entered politics, I took the only downward turn you could take from journalism.

Do something. If it doesn’t work, do something else. No idea is too crazy.

But, as my mother used to tell me, two wrongs don’t make a right. But I soon figured out that three left turns do.

There’s nothing in the middle of the road but a yellow stripe and dead armadillos.

This is a matter of public health. The public was sick and tired of DeLay and his corruption.

The middle of the road is for yellow lines and dead armadillos.

Little ol’ boy in the Panhandle told me the other day you can still make a small fortune in agriculture. Problem is, you got to start with a large one.

The good news, though, is that I find in my political travels that people, as regular citizens, are more interested than ever in getting together and having discussions. They want to hear about other viewpoints that differ entirely from what the administration is putting out.

It’s hard to believe President George Bush gave a speech in New Orleans about disaster recovery and failed to mention the word ‘farm’ or the word ‘rural.’

The only difference between a pigeon and the American farmer today is that a pigeon can still make a deposit on a John Deere.

The opposite for courage is not cowardice, it is conformity. Even a dead fish can go with the flow.

It’s hard for the donkeys to win the race if they’re going to carry the elephants on their backs.

But the good news is that out in the countryside, just about every place that’s got a zip code has somebody or some group of people battling the economic and political exclusion that Wall Street and Washington are shoving down our throats.

Politics isn’t about left versus right; it’s about top versus bottom.

If you don’t speak out now when it matters, when would it matter for you to speak out?

So now is the time, more than ever, for those who truly value all the principles of democracy, especially including dissent, to be the most forceful in speaking up, standing up and speaking out.

The issue isn’t just jobs. Even slaves had jobs. The issue is wages.

The corporations don’t have to lobby the government anymore. They are the government.

What’s new is that the White House itself has now been corporatized. It’s not politicians working for the corporate interests. They are the corporate interests. That’s where Bush came from, and Cheney and Rumsfeld.