Colin Hay, "Beautiful World"

All around is anger automatic guns

It’s death in large numbers no respect for women or our little ones

I tried talking to Jesus but He just put me on hold

Said He’d been swamped by calls this week

And He couldn’t shake His cold

Simon & Garfunkle On Expression

Here is my song for the asking
Ask me and I will play
So sweetly, I'll make you smile

This is my tune for the taking
Take it, don't turn away
I've been waiting all my life

Thinking it over, I've been sad
Thinking it over, I'd be more than glad
To change my ways for the asking

Ask me and I will play
All the love that I hold inside

- Simon & Garfunkel, Song for the Asking

Leonard Cohen On Praise

I did my best, it wasn't much

I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch

I've told the truth, I didn't come to fool you

And even though

It all went wrong

I'll stand before the Lord of Song

With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah

- Leohard Cohen, Hallelujah

Agranoff On The Sandman

I can tell you've got the itch, Kid, that you'd like to be a jock.

Well, give it up, the magic's gone, there's nothing left but schlock.

You deal with all the crazies, and the drugged-out suicide calls,

And the sponsors and the FCC have got you by the throat.

Programming tells you what to play, and they take no denying.

You read copy advertising crap you'd never think of buying.

The hours are long, the pay is squat, vacations are... but then

The cut would end, he'd face the mike, and weave magic once again.

- Mike Agranoff, Ballad of the Sandman

Geraghty Quoting Obama On Fundraising

Increasingly, I [Obama] found myself spending time with people of means - law firm partners and investment bankers, hedge fund managers and venture capitalists.

As a rule, they were smart,interesting people, knowledgeable about public policy, liberal in their politics, expecting nothing more than a hearing of their opinions in exchange for checks. But they reflected, almost uniformly, the perspectives of their class; the top 1 percent or so of the income scale that can afford to write a $2,000 check to a political candidate.

They believed in the free market and an educational meritocracy; they found it hard to imagine that there might be any social ill that could not be cured with a high SAT score. They had no patience with protectionism, found unions troublesome, and were not particularly sympathetic to those whose lives were upended by movements of global capital. Most were adamantly prochoice and were vaguely suspicious of deep religious sentiment…

I know that as a consequence of my fund-raising I became more like the wealthy donors I met, in the very particular sense that I spent more and more of my time above the fray, outside the world of immediate hunger, disappointment, fear, irrationality, and frequent hardship of the other 99 percent of the population - that is, the people I’d entered public life to serve.

- Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope, page 114