↑ Grab this Headline Animator
"Well, we did it!"
Huge crowd, big win.
"So, believe it or not, tomorrow morning we're all getting on a plane and going to Washington, DC."
Great speech. She's going off.
To post this comment click here:
Otherwise click cancel.
Ok now I feel like a total curmudgeon for even bringing this up in the victory thread, sorry!
Resume partying, carry on!!
I seriously would lose it if I had to listen to Barry "blackwater" Hermanson for 2 more fucking months.
Lighter lit because as always, Jackie ROCKS!
Beers at my place! -- www.gregdewar.com
Huge win, be proud. - John McCain
There is a compartment in Jackie Speier's mind where she stores away the old memories of her fact-finding trip to the cult compound of Jonestown. When it opens, all the agony comes rushing back: She is there on the oppressively humid jungle airstrip in her polka-dot sundress and platform shoes, a congressional aide with clipboard in hand, rushing anxious defectors onto a waiting plane. Then the ambush, as Jonestown's henchmen open fire. She feels five bullets pierce her body, one blowing away a huge chunk of her thigh. She sees her boss and mentor, Rep. Leo Ryan, dead on the tarmac. She chills as flies and mosquitoes buzz around her wounds. She sips rum to deaden the searing pain. Left for dead with a handful of other wounded survivors throughout the night, she thinks of her parents back in the Bay Area and tape records them a farewell message. On the cataclysmic night of Nov. 18, 1978, the Rev. Jim Jones dispatched the death squad to the airstrip and then led more than 900 of his flock -- most of them from the Bay Area and about a third of them children -- into a "white night" that became the worst mass murder/suicide in modern history. Under his perverse sway and the watchful eye of armed guards, residents of his Peoples Temple compound in Guyana either drank cyanide-laced punch from a vat or had it injected into them. The carnage was incomprehensible. So, too, perhaps, was the survival of Jackie Speier. Ten operations and 25 years later, she still carries within her some of the bullets and all of the psychic determination from that experience. "After Guyana, I decided that life gives everybody their fair share of heartache and loss, and mine had just come early in life," she says now. "I was wrong, of course -- life isn't fair. Life is whatever you get, and what you do with it ... and I've had to learn that. Guyana was just the beginning of a cascade for me."
When it opens, all the agony comes rushing back: She is there on the oppressively humid jungle airstrip in her polka-dot sundress and platform shoes, a congressional aide with clipboard in hand, rushing anxious defectors onto a waiting plane. Then the ambush, as Jonestown's henchmen open fire.
She feels five bullets pierce her body, one blowing away a huge chunk of her thigh. She sees her boss and mentor, Rep. Leo Ryan, dead on the tarmac. She chills as flies and mosquitoes buzz around her wounds. She sips rum to deaden the searing pain. Left for dead with a handful of other wounded survivors throughout the night, she thinks of her parents back in the Bay Area and tape records them a farewell message.
On the cataclysmic night of Nov. 18, 1978, the Rev. Jim Jones dispatched the death squad to the airstrip and then led more than 900 of his flock -- most of them from the Bay Area and about a third of them children -- into a "white night" that became the worst mass murder/suicide in modern history.
Under his perverse sway and the watchful eye of armed guards, residents of his Peoples Temple compound in Guyana either drank cyanide-laced punch from a vat or had it injected into them.
The carnage was incomprehensible. So, too, perhaps, was the survival of Jackie Speier. Ten operations and 25 years later, she still carries within her some of the bullets and all of the psychic determination from that experience.
"After Guyana, I decided that life gives everybody their fair share of heartache and loss, and mine had just come early in life," she says now. "I was wrong, of course -- life isn't fair. Life is whatever you get, and what you do with it ... and I've had to learn that. Guyana was just the beginning of a cascade for me."
Just took the stage.
