With the bailout of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, the Reagan revolution has at last realized the robber barons’ dream: privatize the profits and socialize the debt. Nicely done, fellas.

— a letter to the editor of The New York Times from Candida Pugh of Oakland, Calif.; Sept. 10; emphasis added.

We now see the compensation wasn’t deserved. I don’t think taxpayers want their money to go to the C.E.O.’s of these very large institutions.

— Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., on the exit pay packages of Daniel H. Mudd of Fannie Mae and Richard F. Syron of Freddie Mac who, The Times’ Eric Dash reports, are eligible for as much as $24 million in severance, retirement benefits and deferred compensation; Sept. 10.

The report says that eight officials in the royalty program accepted gifts from energy companies whose value exceeded limits set by ethics rules — including golf, ski and paintball outings; meals and drinks; and tickets to a Toby Keith concert, a Houston Texans football game and a Colorado Rockies baseball game.

The investigation also concluded that several of the officials “frequently consumed alcohol at industry functions, had used cocaine and marijuana, and had sexual relationships with oil and gas company representatives.”

— from a Times story by Charlie Savage on reports filed with Congress by Earl E. Devaney, the Interior Department’s inspector general, on “wrongdoing by a dozen current and former employees of the Minerals Management Service, which collects about $10 billion in royalties annually and is one of the government’s largest sources of revenue other than taxes”; Sept. 10.

Education is obviously not the issue Senator McCain spends the most time on. He’s been a quiet and consistent supporter of parents and educators who he thinks are making a difference.

— Lisa Graham Keegan, a McCain adviser and former Arizona education commissioner, explaining the brevity of presidential candidate John McCain’s education plan but suggesting that it should not be interpreted as a lack of commitment to education; Sept. 9.

I’m really frightened. I’ve been in blizzards and tornadoes, but never a hurricane. It’s frightening, but if the Lord’s going to take you, he’s going to find you wherever you are.

— Ginger Saracco of Galveston, Texas, after watching a storm surge from Hurricane Ike slam into a seawall; Sept. 12.

That project is moving right ahead. The money for that project was not diverted anywhere else. … So (for her) to say she said, ‘Thanks, but no thanks….’ I would say she said, ‘Thanks!’

— Tony Knowles, who served as governor of Alaska from 1994 to 2002; an Anchorage Daily News story by George Bryson says Republican vice presidential nominee Gov. Sarah Palin “still supports spending $400 million to $600 million on ‘the other Bridge to Nowhere,’ the Knik Arm Crossing, which would provide residents in Palin’s hometown of Wasilla faster access to Anchorage” according to Gov. Knowles; Sept. 11.

[Gov. Sarah Palin] strikes me as a target-rich environment.

— Saturday Night Live writer James Downey; Sept. 12.

He was on the wrong side of the rope line. It is a decision that is hard to comprehend.

— Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg, D-N.J., about former Democratic Sen. Joseph Lieberman’s visibility as Republican pitchman for Sen. John McCain; Sept. 9.

YouTube was being used by Islamist terrorist organizations to recruit and train followers via the Internet and to incite terrorist attacks around the world, including right here in the United States. I expect these stronger community guidelines to decrease the number of videos on YouTube produced by al-Qaeda and affiliated Islamist terrorist organizations.

— from a statement by Sen. Joseph Lieberman exhorting YouTube to ban videos that “incite” violence; YouTube agreed to ban some content in response; Sept. 12.

Your prayers reached where they were meant to reach. The truth prevailed.

— Jacob Zuma, president of the African National Congress, as his theme song, “Bring Me My Machine Gun” played, after a South African judge threw out “racketeering, corruption, money laundering and fraud [charges] related to a multibillion rand government arms deal in the late 1990s”; a New York Times story says “A court in Durban convicted Mr. Zuma’s business adviser of funneling about $170,000 to Mr. Zuma in exchange for help in winning contracts”; Sept. 12; emphasis added.

[I will not] respond to the garbage from the American empire.

— Tarek El Aissami, appointed Venezuela’s interior minister on Monday, responding to a report by The Times‘ Alexei Barrioneuvo that “[a] conspiracy to cover up the intended recipient of a suitcase filled with $800,000 in cash found in Argentina last year reached the highest levels of Venezuela’s government, with President Hugo Chávez ordering the head of his intelligence service to handle the situation” according to court testimony; Sept. 9.

These settlements are a major step forward in cleaning up an industry where false and misleading advertising practices have been all too rampant. It is unconscionable for lenders to entice students into loans that are not best for them.

— Andrew M. Cuomo, New York’s attorney general, on a settlement with seven student loan companies that outlined a code of conduct and required that “a total of $1.4 million [be placed] into a fund to help educate students and their families about financial aid,” reported The Times‘ Johnathan D. Glater; Sept. 9.

That statute is unconstitutionally overbroad on its face because it prohibits the anonymous transmission of all unsolicited bulk e-mails including those containing political, religious or other speech protected by the First Amendment to the United State Constitution.

— from a ruling by the Virginia Supreme Court today striking down the commonwealth’s “anti-spam” law after reconsidering the conviction of Jeremy Jaynes of Raleigh, N.C., the first person tried under the law, convicted of sending tens of thousands of e-mails through America Online servers, and sentenced to nine years in prison; Sept. 12.

Q: With another anniversary of 9/11 upon us, how does the President feel about the failure to find Osama bin Laden?
MS. PERINO: President Bush has been working and directing thousands of men and women across our intelligence community to help us find Osama bin Laden, his deputies, and to disrupt plans to attack America again, wherever they might be plotted. He has not let up on that, and that fight and that hunt will continue to go on until he is brought to justice.

— exchange between reporter and press secretary Dana Perino at a White House briefing; Sept. 10.

The Republicans talk a lot about experience. When you’re the author, architect and enabler of eight years of devastating foreign policy mistakes, that’s not experience. It’s very bad judgment.

— Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., arguing that Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., lacks the temperament and judgment to be president; Sen. Reid said, “Our dangerous world calls for leaders with sound judgment, not those with a temperament prone to recklessness. Our country deserves more than token shifts and lip service to change. We need to take decisive action to reverse eight years of foreign policy mistakes”; Sept. 12.

Now let me review some of the descriptive phrases that have been used by some of you that have made my own personal interfaces with the Press Corps difficult: “dictatorial and somewhat dense,” “a liar,” “a torturer” “does not get it.” In — In some cases I have never even met those that use those comments. Yet they felt qualified to make character judgments that are communicated to the world. My experience is not unique and we can find other such examples as the treatment of Secretary Brown during Katrina. In my opinion, this is the worst display of journalism imaginable by those of us that are bound by a strict value system of selfless service, honor, and integrity.

— from an address to the Military Reporters and Editors Forum Luncheon by Lieutenant General (Ret.) Ricardo S. Sanchez; Oct. 12, 2007.

Q: Is Osama bin Laden as important now as he was seven years ago?
MS. PERINO: I think that what we have tried to do is disrupt any area from becoming a safe haven where terrorists could plot and plan attacks. The leadership of al Qaeda has largely been replaced over the years, but they have more people that keep coming up through the ranks and are trained to plot and plan against us. I think — the President believes it’s important for us to hunt and track down and bring to justice Osama bin Laden. And it would be important for Americans, but it’s important for justice most of all.

— exchange between reporter and press secretary Dana Perino at a White House briefing; Sept. 10.

The rise of a free and self-governing Iraq will deny terrorists a base of operation, discredit their narrow ideology, and give momentum to reformers across the region. This will be a decisive blow to terrorism at the heart of its power, and a victory for the security of America and the civilized world.

— from an address by President Bush at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pa.; May 24, 2004.

I’m sitting at Eros, a Greek diner on Seventh Avenue, loving my omelette as I seek shelter from the rain, when I see a busboy remove a container of dirty dishes — with a copy of my review in today’s paper on top. Get it while it’s hot, I guess.

— from the “On The Runway” blog of New York Times fashion critic Cathy Horyn; Sept. 9.

photo credits:

• Hurricane Ike hits Galveston: Associated Press
• Sen. Joseph Lieberman leaving stage: Damon Winter, The New York Times
• Sen. Lieberman mug: Alex Wong, Getty Images
• Steve Jobs: Daniel Acker, Bloomberg News
• Gap models: Marcio Madeira, Style.com

Quotabull is a weekly feature of Scholars & Rogues.

The object of the political war is not to shrink the state or shut it down; it is to capture the thing and run it for your constituents’ benefit.

— from “The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule” by Thomas Frank; p. 39; emphasis added.

When our economy is hurting, the last thing we should do is raise taxes as Barack Obama plans to do and has done. The American people cannot afford a Barack Obama presidency.

— statement from Republican presidential candidate John McCain after the Labor Department reported that the national unemployment rate rose to a five-year high of 6.1 percent last month as American companies cut about 84,000 jobs; Sept. 5.

Today’s jobs report is a reminder of what’s at stake in this election — John McCain showed last night that he is intent on continuing the economic policies that just this year have caused the American economy to lose 605,000 jobs.

— statement from Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama following the jobs report release; Sept. 5.

While these numbers are disappointing, what is most important is the overall direction the economy is headed. Last week, the economy posted a strong gain of 3.3 percent at an annual rate in the second quarter, led by growth in consumer spending, exports, and a well-timed and appropriately sized stimulus package. This level of growth demonstrates the resilience of the economy in the face of high energy prices, a weak housing market, and difficulties in the financial markets.

— statement from the White House after release of jobs report; Sept. 5.

Republican presidential candidate John McCain addressing the GOP convention.

The Walter Reed Middle School in North Hollywood, Calif.

[S]everal readers have suggested that perhaps one of the tech geeks charged with setting up the audio/visual bells and whistles for the evening was tasked with getting pictures of Walter Reed Army Medical Center but goofed and got this instead. At first I thought, No, that’s ridiculous. This is a major political party with big time professionals putting this together. Nothing is left to chance. I mean, is this the RNC or a scene out Spinal Tap or Waiting for Guffman?

— Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo; Sept. 5.

If, after all, the eradication of all sin requires the effective elimination of all privacy, and if that, in turn, leads to the establishment of a trivial, oppressive, perhaps even totalitarian society, then it surely follows that a substantive and free society must be prepared to tolerate at least some sin. And that leads us, quite naturally, to the devices that tolerant societies employ to handle an acceptable level of sin: hypocrisy and privacy.

— from a commencement address by veteran broadcaster Ted Koppel at Stanford University; June 14, 1998; emphasis added.

You work quite hard. I’ve got to be in there with my hands. I’m 65, for God’s sake. I don’t want to do all that stuff anymore. … It’s dispiriting. This is just partisan poison, and after a while you get tired of covering it.

— from an interview with Britt Hume of Fox News, who is retiring after 32 years in television news; Sept. 5.

It’s discouraging. We’re going to fix the house, but I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to sell it.

— Racquel Barnhart, 38, of Pearlington, Miss, who experienced flooding from hurricanes Katrina and Gustav, on her desire to move away; Sept. 2.

Since passage of the Patriot Act, many companies based outside of the United States have been reluctant to store client information in the U.S. There is an ongoing concern that U.S. intelligence agencies will gather this information without legal process. There is particular sensitivity about access to financial information as well as communications and Internet traffic that goes through U.S. switches.

— Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington; John Markoff of The New York Times reports that “Data is increasingly flowing around the United States, which may have intelligence — and conceivably military — consequences”; Aug. 29.

We discovered the Internet, but we couldn’t keep it a secret.

— Andrew M. Odlyzko, a professor at the University of Minnesota who tracks the growth of the global Internet; U.S. share of Internet traffic has fallen from 70 percent to 25 percent; Aug. 29.

We’re not asking for extra work, but if operating results are better, I want to share this with the faculty. We think this is an innovative approach that benefits both faculty and administration, and ultimately benefits our students.

— Lester A. Lefton, president of Kent State University, on the school’s use of “a new and unusual tactic to improve its status, retention rate, and fund raising—paying cash bonuses to faculty members if the university exceeds its goals in those areas,” reports The Chronicle of Higher Education; the bonuses “are built into a contract, approved last month, that covers 864 full-time, tenure-track faculty members who teach and do research on the university’s eight campuses,” reported The Chronicle’s Kathryn Masterson; Sept. 5.

It is as if China has made a gift to the United States Navy of 200 brand new aircraft carriers.

— a Chinese blogger quoted in a Times story by Keith Bradsher, who reports that China’s central bank “has been on a buying binge in the United States over the last seven years, snapping up roughly $1 trillion worth of Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed debt issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac [but those] investments have been declining sharply in value when converted from dollars into the strong yuan, casting a spotlight on the central bank’s tiny capital base. The bank’s capital, just $3.2 billion, has not grown during the buying spree …”; Sept. 4.

I have asked my accountant to review all the data recently made available to me by the Punta Cana Hotel in the Dominican Republic concerning my investment 20 or so years ago in purchasing a unit in that hotel for occasional use over the years. Once my accountant obtains and verifies the facts, I will follow his recommendations.

— statement from Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., who is chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, which writes the federal tax code, on a report by David Kocieniewski of The New York Times that the congressman “has earned more than $75,000 in rental income from a villa he has owned in the Dominican Republic since 1988, but never reported it on his federal or state tax returns”; Sept. 5.

Q: I want to ask about Pakistan. Obviously, the Pakistani government is complaining about the U.S. military effort there, and it’s a pretty big departure from our past practice. Can you talk about what the communications have been like between the two governments? And also, can you talk about whether you all have concluded whether this was worth it?
MS. PERINO: Well, one, in regards to the reports about that incident, we have not commented and I won’t today. But what I will reiterate is that we’ve been working closely with the new civilian government of Pakistan that is feeling its way and working to establish itself. It obviously had a very big scare yesterday with an attack on the Prime Minister’s motorcade. And thankfully, that attack was not successful. We have a lot of cooperation that’s ongoing with them, and a lot of need to increase communication. And one of the things you saw just about three weeks ago was a meeting off the coast with Admiral Mullen and other generals, with their generals, so that we can work on jointly tackling the problems that we have in Pakistan.
Q: They’re not emphasizing cooperation. They’re emphasizing right now that they’re upset that this happened.
MS. PERINO: Well, I understand that. And we’re focused on trying to improve coordination and communication.
Q: Does that mean you’re trying to improve letting them know ahead of time when something like this is going to happen, or what does that mean?
MS. PERINO: I‘m just not going to comment on the incident in any way. And to answer your question, I would have to do that. So I’ll decline to comment on it.

— exchange between reporter and press secretary Dana Perino at White House briefing; Sept. 4; emphasis added.

Silence is disturbing. It is disturbing because it is the wavelength of the soul. If we leave no space in our music—and I’m as guilty as anyone else in this regard—then we rob the sound we make of a defining context. It is often music born from anxiety to create more anxiety. It’s as if we’re afraid of leaving space. Great music’s as much about the space between the notes as it is about the notes themselves. A bar’s rest is as important and significant as the bar of demi-, semi-quavers that precedes it. What I’m trying to say here is that if ever I’m asked if I’m religious I always reply, “Yes, I’m a devout musician.” Music puts me in touch with something beyond the intellect, something otherworldly, something sacred.

— from the commencement address by Sting at the Berklee College of Music; May 15, 1994.

There’s a shot! Oswald has been shot. Oswald has been shot. A shot rang out. Mass confusion here. All the doors have been locked. [pause] Holy mackerel!

— veteran TV newsman Ike Pappas, who had been an arm’s length from Lee Harvey Oswald when he was shot by Jack Ruby in Dallas, reporting the event live to listeners of WNEW radio in New York; Mr. Pappas died this week; Sept. 2.

The European Union has sent no warships to Georgia, because it does not believe in that kind of thing, and is now creaking its way through the painfully slow process of sending some civilian monitors to Georgia, just as soon as Russia gives its consent. Oh, and the EU has fast-tracked €1m in humanitarian aid, with an extra €5m to come later.

A weakened, distracted America has just promised a billion dollars (€700m) in aid for Georgia with about half of that earmarked for “fast-track” delivery, sent two warships to Georgia bearing humanitarian relief supplies, and is about to send the USS Mount Whitney, flagship of the 6th Fleet, into the Black Sea. It has also sent the vice president, as mentioned above.

In the words of the old joke, if that is a distracted America, I’d hate to imagine what an America with its eye on the ball might do.

— from the Economist.com blog; Sept. 4.

Stories yesterday pointed out that overcrowded hospitals [in Haiti] were being flooded, tens of thousands of the luckiest people were in some kind of shelters, and that there were entire families stranded on rooftops, not begging, but screaming for help.

On the same day, the Bush administration announced it would seek to immediately send $1 billion in aid to Georgia to help rebuild that country unnerved by Russian intervention in a brewing civil war.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Haitians have no homes, no food and no hope.

This isn’t the first time this ailing nation has been overlooked, Four years ago, the misery was nearly the same after two late-summer hurricanes left more than 80,000 people with absolutely nothing to eat. Disease was rampant as dead bodies floated everywhere, and the government couldn’t even find the machinery or fuel to create mass graves for thousands of dead.

The United States provided $60,000 in aid. It was embarrassing and cruel.

There’s not even a mention of any aid being funneled to the Haitians this time.

— from an editorial in the Aurora (Colo.) Sentinel; Sept. 3.

For many people — particularly anyone over the age of 30 — the idea of describing your blow-by-blow activities in such detail is absurd. Why would you subject your friends to your daily minutiae? And conversely, how much of their trivia can you absorb? The growth of ambient intimacy can seem like modern narcissism taken to a new, supermetabolic extreme — the ultimate expression of a generation of celebrity-addled youths who believe their every utterance is fascinating and ought to be shared with the world. Twitter, in particular, has been the subject of nearly relentless scorn since it went online. “Who really cares what I am doing, every hour of the day?” wondered Alex Beam, a Boston Globe columnist, in an essay about Twitter last month. “Even I don’t care.”

— from a discussion of “ambient awareness” in a New York Times Magazine feature by Clive Thompson headlined “Brave New World of Digital Intimacy”; Sept. 5.

photo credits:

• Sen. John McCain addressing GOP convention: Image Shack
• Walter Reed Middle School: Talking Points Memo
• Inner Harbor Navigation Canal in New Orleans: Skip Bolen, European Pressphoto Agency
• Sting: BBC
• Ike Pappas: Associated Press

Quotabull is a weekly feature of Scholars & Rogues.

This represents the final bodies from Katrina, the last unknown victim of Katrina. This represents the pain and suffering.

— New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin; Laura Maggi of The Times-Picayune reported that “[s]even people who died during Hurricane Katrina were interred Friday morning in one of six mausoleums created to hold the remains of those who were not identified after the storm or whose families did not claim them; Aug. 29.

People are bringing five or six suitcases. We want to carry more people and less luggage.

— St. Charles Parish Emergency Preparedness Director Tab Troxler as residents of New Orleans and surrounding parishes begin evacuation of the Gulf Coast as Hurricane Gustav approaches; Aug. 30.

We’re well positioned and we’ve got a good set of plans and now we’re waiting to put them into motion.

—Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, adding that more than 1,000 buses were ready to facilitate evacuation of New Orleans; Aug. 29.

If we seek to understand American foreign policy in terms of a rational engagement with international problems, or even as an effective means of projecting power, we are looking in the wrong place. The government’s interests have always been provincial. It seeks to appease lobbyists, shift public opinion at crucial stages of the political cycle, accommodate crazy Christian fantasies and pander to television companies run by eccentric billionaires. The US does not really have a foreign policy. It has a series of domestic policies which it projects beyond its borders.

— George Monbiotin his Guardian commentary, “The US missile defence system is the magic pudding that will never run out”; Aug,. 19.

Our history will be what we make it. And if there are any historians about 50 or 100 years from now — and there should be preserved the kinescopes of one week of all three networks — they will there find, recorded in black and white and in color, evidence of decadence, escapism, and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live. We are currently wealthy, fat, comfortable, and complacent. We have a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information.

Our mass media reflect this.

But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse, and insulate us, then television, and those who finance it, those who look at it, and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late.

— from Edward R. Murrow’s address to the Radio-Television News Directors Association & Foundation as depicted in the movie “Good Night and Good Luck.”

Bringing back the brooch

Before the Democratic National Convention, a plethora of questions swirled around the blogosphere. Would Barack Obama finally win over Hillary Clinton’s most loyal supporters? Would Bill Clinton’s speech come off as sincere or forced? And most important of all, what would Michelle Obama wear?

Apparently, Mrs. Obama put considerable thought into that last question, and it really paid off. Her simple blue dress received rave reviews from giddy commenters on this website, and with her jeweled pin, she may have single-handedly brought back the brooch. Grandmas, guard your jewelry boxes.

— teaser copy by Stephanie Lysaght of the Los Angeles Times prefacing a poll asking where Michelle Obama’s convention dress was “too frumpy,” “too matronly,” “flawless first lady,” or “too sexy”; Aug. 29.

During a get-out-the-vote drive, you don’t want to get out the wrong vote.

— Diane Rinaldo, political advertising director at Yahoo, which has worked with both the Obama and McCain campaigns; Washington Post writer Peter Whoriskey reported “Although both the Obama and John McCain campaigns are reluctant to discuss details, the ability to identify sympathetic voters based on their Internet habits, and then to target them with ads as they move across the Web, is one of the defining aspects of the 2008 presidential campaign. Digital advertising networks and large Web companies such as Yahoo and Microsoft are using Web behavior — which news articles people read, which blogs they visit or what search terms they enter — to target voters who may be sympathetic to a certain cause. Using a method known as ‘sentiment detection,’ some companies even boast that they can tell whether the blog you go to is for or against the Iraq war”; Aug. 30.

The separation of church and state can sometimes be frustrating for women and men of religious faith. They may be tempted to misuse government in order to impose a value which they cannot persuade others to accept. But once we succumb to that temptation, we step onto a slippery slope where everyone’s freedom is at risk. … The real transgression occurs when religion wants government to tell citizens how to live uniquely personal parts of their lives. The failure of Prohibition proves the futility of such an attempt when a majority or even a substantial minority happens to disagree. Some questions may be inherently individual ones, or people may be sharply divided about whether they are. In such cases, like Prohibition and abortion, the proper role of religion is to appeal to the conscience of the individual, not the coercive power of the state.

— from an address by Sen. Ted Kennedy at Liberty Baptist College (now Liberty University) in Lynchburg, Va.; Oct. 3, 1983.

At noon on Tuesday, two young men walked onto the podium at the Democratic National Convention carrying four women’s suit jackets — red, orange, light blue and teal — and holding each one up to the lights to see which would look best in the hall. It was Hillary Clinton’s night, and nothing was being left to chance.

— from a commentary by Dana Milbank of The Washington Post; Aug. 27.

So it is with conviction that I support this resolution as being in the best interests of our nation. A vote for it is not a vote to rush to war; it is a vote that puts awesome responsibility in the hands of our President and we say to him — use these powers wisely and as a last resort.

— from the floor speech of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton on S.J. Res. 45, “A Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq”; Oct. 10, 2002.

I certainly do remember that trip to Bosnia, and as Togo said, there was a saying around the White House that if a place was too small, too poor, or too dangerous, the president couldn’t go, so send the First Lady. That’s where we went. I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base. But it was a moment of great pride for me to visit our troops …

— from a speech on Iraq by Sen. Hillary Clinton at at The George Washingon University; March 17.

[A] democracy requires a certain amount of common ground. I don’t believe you can solve complex questions like this at the grass-roots level or at the national level or anywhere in between if you have too much extremism of rhetoric and excessive partisanship. Times are changing too fast. We need to keep our eyes open. We need to keep our ears open. We need to be flexible. We need to have new solutions based on old values. We can’t get there unless we can establish some common ground. And that seems to me to impose certain specific responsibilities on citizens and on political leaders.

— from a speech by President Bill Clinton at Georgetown University; July 6, 1995.

Give me a break. This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen.

— President Bill Clinton, challenging Sen. Barack Obama’s claim that the senator had always opposed the Iraq war; Jan. 11.

Pro-and anti-Democrat protesters yesterday besieged the streets of Denver, Colorado, United States (US), venue of the Democratic National Convention. They made their voices heard on issues ranging from the Iraqi war, abortion rights, gay marriage and rights for swingers (a club of people who swap wives, husbands or partners). … Policemen swarmed every block in the city on horses, motorcycles and vans. Helmet wearing cops, armed to the teeth with guns, clubs and combat style outfits patrolled the area.

— from a story by Constance Ikokwu for the Nigerian newspaper This Day; Aug. 26.

Gov. Sarah Palin and Sen. John McCain at rally. [AP photo]

Here’s what I’m worried about. McCain had to protect his reputation as an opponent of status quo Washington. He had to pick someone with the shortest Washington résumé. He did that. He picked someone the right wing is going to be happy about. But it’s a gamble. The question is, what does it do to the argument that Obama’s not ready?

— Ed Rogers, a Republican lobbyist and former aide to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush, discussing the selection of Alaska governor Sarah Palin as Sen. John McCain’s running mate; Aug. 29.

She really doesn’t have the experience for this job.

— councilwoman Dianne Woodruff of Wasilla, where Gov. Sarah Palin served as mayor, on her performance as governor; Aug. 29.

Go, Sarah. We’re pumped over here. We’re really, really excited. My kids went to school with her. Todd buys his guns here.

— McCain supporter Roy Wallis, owner of Chimo Guns in downtown Wasilla; Aug. 29.

The President is looking forward to the honor of speaking at the Republican Convention on Monday night. The speech expresses gratitude. The President will thank his family, his administration, and most of all, the friends, supporters and volunteers in the convention hall who have supported him and the Republican agenda for these past eight years.

The speech reviews the major issues facing the country, from terrorism and war to the economy and the direction of our culture. Above all, the speech reflects on the role of the presidency and the qualities that are demanded by the job, and makes the case that John McCain is the best qualified to be our next leader and commander-in-chief. In particular, it highlights McCain’s unique judgment, perspective, and experience to deal with the unexpected, to stand firm on his convictions, put the country above himself, and make hard decisions necessary to protect the American people.

— White House press secretary Dana Perino at a press briefing; Aug. 29.

The American workforce continues to be the marvel of the world. Yet many working families have been weathering tough economic times. There are families across our country struggling to make ends meet. There is an understandable concern about the high price of gas and food. And many Americans are worried about the health of our housing and job markets. I share these concerns about our economy.

— President Bush, in his weekly radio address; Aug. 30.

photo credits:

• Edward R. Murrow: The Edward R. Murrow Center of Public Diplomacy at Tufts University
• Michelle Obama and her daughters, Malia and Sasha: Rodolfo Gonzalez, Associated Press
• Sen. Ted Kennedy: Susan Walsh, Associated Press
• Sen. Hillary Clinton: Paul J. Richards, AFP/Getty Images

Quotabull is a weekly feature of Scholars & Rogues.

Young man, you have the gift of gab. Keep it up and some day you’ll be President of the United States.

— an old Republican to a young Warren G. Harding after his first political speech, according to a New York Times obituary of President Harding; Aug. 3, 1923.

I predicted that New Orleans would come back as a stronger and better city. That’s the prediction I made. I also pledged that we’d help. And $126 billion later, three years after the storm — we’ve helped deliver $126 billion of U.S. taxpayers’ money. (Applause.) And I thank you for applauding on that statement, but I know you’re applauding the American taxpayer. A lot of people around the country care deeply about the people down here. And so it was — you know, it was money that we were happy to spend.

— President Bush, speaking at the historic Jackson Barracks in New Orleans on the recovery of the Gulf Coast region three years after Hurricane Katrina; Aug. 20.

Let no one suffer the illusion that $126 billion has gone straight to where it is needed and where it belongs.

— Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., in an interview with The Associated Press, saying that the New Orleans recovery was far from complete and that key projects won’t be finished without more federal money; Aug. 20.

Q: Gordon, can you tell us where the negotiations stand with Iraq and the United States, Secretary Rice’s talks? And what are the major sticking points in that agreement for the troop withdrawal?
MR. JOHNDROE: I think you probably heard from Secretary Rice, now in Baghdad — you certainly have some comments from her on the plane, that she made last night on the plane into Baghdad. Discussions are ongoing. We have made some progress in the recent days on an agreement with the Iraqis, but there is no final agreement yet. We will continue to have these discussions with the Iraqis.

— exchange between reporter and White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe at Crawford, Texas, press briefing; Aug. 21.

Diplomats are just as essential to starting a war as soldiers are for finishing it. … You take diplomacy out of war, and the thing would fall flat in a week.

— Will Rogers

No leader has taken greater risks in the struggle against terrorism than President Musharraf of Pakistan and no country has more at stake in the fight. This past week, in his address to the American people, President Bush commended President Musharraf’s strong leadership. Pakistan’s success will be a success for all of us in the fight against terrorism and Pakistan deserves support from us all.

— Paul Wolfowitz, speaking at the 38th Verkunde Conference on Security Policy in Munich, Germany; Feb. 2, 2002.

The only option is negotiation. Using force against the militants in the tribal area is only in the interests of the U.S.

— Shafi Ullah, 29, a civil servant in Pakistan; a poll conducted by the International Republican Institute shows that 71 percent of responding Pakistanis oppose their country’s cooperation in the U.S. war on terror; Aug. 22.

George McGovern understood from the very depths of his being that napalm, and gas, and 500,000 Americans in the swamps of Vietnam was not the answer to the people of Vietnam or the people of the United States. George McGovern, ladies and gentlemen, had another solution for Vietnam. … George’s concept for underdeveloped countries is food; his concept is shelter, education, health, opportunity, and to bring a sense of brotherhood to submerged billions of people, wherever they may be.

— Sen. Abraham Ribicoff, D-Conn., nominating Sen. George McGovern for president at the Democratic National Convention; Aug. 28, 1968.

1. Larry Ellison, Oracle Corp., $84.6 million
2. John Thain, Merrill Lynch & Co., $83.1 million
3. Leslie Moonves, CBS Corp., $67.6 million
4. Richard Adkerson, Freeport-McMoran Copper & Gold Inc., $65.3 million
5. Bob Simpson, XTO Energy Inc., $56.6 million
6. Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman Sachs Group Inc., $53.9 million
7. Kenneth Chenault, American Express Co., $51.7 million
8. Eugene Isenberg, Nabors Industries Ltd., $44.6 million
9. John Mack, Morgan Stanley, $41.7 million
10. Glenn Murphy, Gap Inc., $39.1 million

— The Associated Press’s list of the highest-paid chief executive officers in 2007; says the AP: “The total pay figures are rounded, and are based on the AP’s compensation formula, which adds up salary, perks, bonuses, above-market interest on pay set aside for later, and company estimates for the value of stock options and stock awards on the day they were granted last year”; Aug. 21.

Q: But the Iraqis — officials are saying on the record this 2011 date. Do you dispute that? Do you have any reason to lead us away from it?
MR. JOHNDROE: I am not going to negotiate from the podium. President Bush and Prime Minister Maliki had a good conversation this morning in discussing the agreement. And our team and the Iraqi team are continuing discussions now. I think it’s fair to say — and I think everyone understands this — that when negotiations are hopefully coming to an end, when you can see the end in sight, there are a lot of details that have to be worked out, and I think we’re in the process of working out details right now.

— exchange between reporter and White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe at Crawford, Texas, press briefing; Aug. 22.

It is now evident that speculators in the energy futures markets play a much larger role than previously thought, and it is now even harder to accept the agency’s laughable assertion that excessive speculation has not contributed to rising energy prices.

— Rep. John D. Dingell, D-Mich., in a Washington Post story by David Cho that reports a Commodity Futures Trading Commission inspection of the books of Vitol, a private Swiss energy conglomerate, found that the firm held 11 percent of all oil contracts in July on the New York Mercantile Exchange; the commission said Vitol was “holding oil contracts as a profit-making investment rather than a means of lining up the actual delivery of fuel”; Aug. 21.

[A]s a group, the 173 [Republican and Democratic convention] donors have been heavily engaged in the struggle for federal political influence since the last presidential election. Since 2005, their Political Action Committees, executives and other employees have contributed, under campaign finance law limits, $180 million to federal candidates and political parties, an average of over $1 million per organization. Contributions to the conventions are unlimited and come directly from corporate treasuries, so they can increase this amount considerably. During the same period, these convention donors have also spent over $1.3 billion to lobby the federal government, an average of $7.6 million per organization. Large convention donations may give the donors’ lobbyists more clout with those they seek to influence.

— from a report by the Campaign Finance Institute (in collaboration with the Center for Responsive Politics) titled “Party Conventions’ Financiers Have Spent Nearly $1.5 billion on Federal Campaign Contributions and Lobbying Since 2005″; Aug. 20; emphasis added.

This is probably one of the single most significant food safety actions done for fresh produce in many years.

— Robert Brackett, chief scientist for the Grocery Manufacturers Association; according to a New York Times story by Gardiner Harris, the GMA originally “petitioned the [Food and Drug Administration] in 2000 to allow manufacturers to irradiate a wide variety of processed meats, fruits and vegetables and prepared foods”; Aug. 21.

It’s a total cop-out. They don’t have the resources, the authority or the political will to really protect consumers from unsafe food.

— Patty Lovera, assistant director of Food and Water Watch, on the FDA’s decision to allow some irradiation of food; Aug. 21.

$17,400,000

— the total lobbying expenditures of the Grocery Manufacturers of America since 1998, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

I would ban that too if I knew the students were using it in class. What we want to encourage in these students is active intellectual experience, in which they develop the wide range of complex reasoning abilities required of the good lawyers.

— Robert S. Summers, a professor at Cornell Law School who has banned use of laptop computers in his course, in a New York Times story about some colleges’ decisions to provide iPhones and Internet-enabled iPods to students; Aug. 20.

A larger question is whether the IOC is genuinely trying to govern in these Olympics, or whether it has become a mere bag man for Chinese organizers and corporate sponsors. It’s hardly without precedent for a state to cheat, or for a sports federation like FIG to fail in its oversight or fold under pressure from a host government.

— from a column by Washington Post writer Sally Jenkins castigating the International Olympic Committee for inaction regarding whether some Chinese gymnastics were legally old enough to compete in the Beijing Games; Aug. 22.

If you were going to choose a gender-specific role model, why one of these four cardboard characters? As American women have won more and more rights, the feminist movement has had the luxury of branching off in many, even contradictory, directions. Feminist icons run the gamut from activist Gloria Steinem to porn star Jenna Jamison … not to mention our first viable female Presidential candidate in Hillary Clinton. One friend suggested we organize a boycott of the Sex and the City movie. But it’s just not that important. In an ideal world, former fans wouldn’t show up because they’ve moved on. The movie—neither a hit nor a stinker—would simply go out with a whimper, just like any idea whose time had come and gone.

— Lindsey Gerdes, a staff editor for BusinessWeek in New York, in her Starting Out column; March 25.

Occasionally, I get a letter from someone who is in ‘contact’ with aliens. I am invited to ask them anything. And over the year’s I’ve prepared a little list of questions. The aliens are very advanced, remember. So I ask things like, ‘Please provide a short proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem’. I write out the simple theorem equation with the exponents. It’s a simulating exercise to think of questions to which no human today knows the answers, but where a correct answer would be recognised as such. It’s even more challenging to formulate such questions in fields other than mathematics. Perhaps we should hold a contest and collect the best responses in ’10 Questions to Ask an Alien’.

— the late astronomer Carl Sagan from “The Demon Haunted World.”

photo credits:

• Sen. George McGovern: Rapid City (S.D.) Journal
• Chinese gymnast He Kexin: Xinhua
• the most distant galaxies known: European Space Agency et al

Quotabull is a weekly feature of Scholars & Rogues.

In China, size matters. People want to have a car that shows off their status in society. No one wants to buy small.

— Zhang Linsen, the 44-year-old founder of a media and graphic design company in Songjiang, China; he owns a black Hummer H2; July 28; emphasis added.

It’s a cultural thing. When the kids are hungry, they go to their mother, not their father. And when there is less food, women are the first to eat less.

— Herve Kone, director of a group that promotes development, social justice and human rights in Burkina Faso, quoted in the Washington Post Foreign Service’s Kevin Sullivan story about the impacts of the African food crisis on women and children; July 20.

Sports clubs are part of grass-roots democracy in the U.S. This structure simply does not exist in China at the moment. I think without government support there will not be high-level sports in China today.

— Susan Brownell, a professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis who is spending the year researching China and the Olympics at Beijing Sport University, arguing that the Chinese school sport system is an inevitable outgrowth of the communist state; Ariana Eunjung Cha of the Washington Post Foreign Service reports: “Modeled after those in the former Soviet Union, China’s sports schools aim to train, push and discipline more than 250,000 pupils into superstar athletes. They have produced nearly all of the Chinese Olympians who will compete this month”; Aug. 3.

It was the art historian Anne Hollander who noted that, even naked, the body is subject to fashion and that the body beautiful differs according to an era’s prevailing mores and tastes. Because the Greek word gymnasium translates as something more or less like “nuditorium,” it seems clear that few events offer a richer opportunity to see how physical beauty is currently constructed than the Beijing Games.

— from a commentary by New York Times fashion writer Guy Trebay, headlined “When Action Figures Come Out to Play”; Aug. 13.

I never imagined I could suffer such a tragedy.

— Liu Yan, 26, considered one of the China’s top classical dancers, after an accidental fall during a rehearsal 12 days before the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics that may have left her paralyzed; David Barboza of The New York Times reports: “The organizers of the opening ceremony initially asked witnesses and friends not to disclose the accident ahead of the Olympic Games on Aug. 8, according to people who have visited Liu in the hospital”; Aug. 14.

This report makes clear that too many corporations are using tax trickery to send their profits overseas and avoid paying their fair share in the United States.

— Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., on a Government Accounting Office report (pdf) that reveals, according to Lynnley Browning of The New York Times, that “[t]wo out of every three United States corporations paid no federal income taxes from 1998 through 2005″; Aug. 13.

The culture, the custom of the Cajun people, it’s gone. It’s another one of the rights that big government has taken away from the people.

— Chris Daughdrill, who breeds fighting roosters in Loranger, La.; Louisiana today becomes the last state to outlaw cockfights; the Associated Press says cockfighting remains legal in Puerto Rico, American Samoa and Guam; Aug. 10.

I think that Denver officials would be well-advised not to believe everything that the FBI warns them about. That’s how things can get out of hand, due to fabricated, exaggerated projections about violence or protest. They don’t learn. What you saw in 2000 was the claim that 75,000 anarchists were descending, the secret funding of permanent police equipment, the denial of permits for protesters. You saw the same thing in 2004. You will see the same thing in 2008. … They’ve learned nothing from 1968.

— 1968 Chicago convention protester Tom Hayden, discussing security planning for the 2008 Democratic convention: Rocky Mountain News‘ M.E. Sprengelmeyer wrote: “He thinks Big Brother posturing helps scare away peaceful protesters, gives the community a false sense of security and can, in some cases, provoke confrontations at demonstrations that would otherwise be routine and mostly peaceful”; Aug. 11.

We will have all of the standard precautions and services in place that we would at any other show, including stagehands, ushers, ticket takers, venue security, police, fire, paramedics, etc. Every event booked into the building must also meet our insurance requirements, and this show will be no exception. From our perspective, this will really be no different than any other event we book into any of our facilities.

— Jenny Schiavone of Denver’s Theaters and Arenas, on preparations for a free protest concert by Rage Against The Machine at the 10,500-seat Denver Coliseum; “Tent State University” organizers say they expect 50,000 protesters; Aug. 15.

Today, I joined my Republicans colleagues on the floor of Congress to protest against Speaker Pelosi’s decision to adjourn Congress for the rest of the summer without a vote on a comprehensive energy bill to lower gas prices and increase American-made energy. What began 10 days ago as a spontaneous uprising on the floor of the U.S. House after Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) sent Congress home for a five-week break without allowing a vote on the American Energy Act, has become an unprecedented nationwide protest.

Today, I am proudly standing with my Republican colleagues, staffers, and tourists visiting the Capitol to demand action on the ‘all of the above’ energy plan that I support. I will stand with every American who expects more out of Congress and demands action now. And although the microphones and camera are turned off, our message will be heard and we will not rest until Speaker Pelosi has allowed an up-or-down vote on the American Energy Act.

— from a post titled “Blogging from the floor of the House” on the blog of Rep. John R. “Randy” Kuhl, R-N.Y., in support of the American Energy Act; Aug. 11; emphasis added.

A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society. Of course, there are many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life.

— Alexander Solzhenitsyn, on the occasion of Class Day Afternoon Exercises at Harvard University; June 8, 1978.

MS. PERINO: Well, I would tell you that the administration at all levels has been in contact with counterparts in Georgia and Russia, including Secretary Rice and National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley. So we have ongoing conversations. I’m not at liberty to describe them, but the President — what I can tell you is President Bush has worked very hard over the years to develop good relationships with other leaders in which he can have frank and candid discussions and be very blunt about our concerns.

Q: But how does that play out — the infrastructure, if you will, that he’s built, how is that playing out now? Because he comes out in the Rose Garden and it is a strong statement of support for Georgia and some condemnation of what Russia is doing. And so did he — did the Russians know this was coming?

MS. PERINO: The public statements reflect the private conversations.

— exchange between reporter and press secretary during White House press briefing; Aug. 13; emphasis added.

[W]e must support young democracies in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. In countries like Belarus, Burma, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Syria, and Zimbabwe, people continue to live under oppressive regimes, and we will work for the day when all these nations are free. By opposing these despots and helping young democracies grow, we will lay the foundation of peace and prosperity for generations to come. Throughout Captive Nations Week, we renew our pledge that as people across the world find their own paths to freedom, they will also find a friend in the United States of America.

— from a proclamation declaring Captive Nations Week by President Bush; July 18.

With its actions in recent days, Russia has damaged its credibility and its relations with the nations of the free world. Bullying and intimidation are not acceptable ways to conduct foreign policy in the 21st century.

— President Bush on the conflict between Georgia and Russia; Aug. 15; emphasis added.

All departments and agencies have a responsibility to prepare and to provide intelligence in a manner that allows the full and free exchange of information, consistent with applicable law and presidential guidance.

— from an executive order by President Bush titled “Further Amendments to Executive Order 12333, United States Intelligence Activities”; July 31.

As low as I set the price, you’re the first person to call.

— Michael Kohan, owner of an SUV, to Times reporter Nick Bunkley, after Mr. Kohan had listed his V8-powered 2006 Land Rover LR3 (book value $31,000) with “a navigation system, xenon lights, parking assist sensors, heated leather seats and three sunroofs” for only $18,000 on eBay and Craigslist; Aug. 12

It was decided not to report the story in our news summary on the grounds that Edwards is not a candidate for public office, and not on any short list for Vice President or any other public office, so it struck us as a problem for him and his family, not the American public.

— Linda Winslow, executive producer of the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, explaining to PBS ombudsman Michael Getler why NewHour did not report former Sen. John Edwards’ admission of an affair on the day the rest of the mainstream media did; Mr. Getler wrote that the “the decision not to report the Edwards confirmation story struck me as both patronizing to people who depend on PBS for news, and journalistically mind-boggling”; Aug. 13.

The film is a platform to create indelible interactions between the long-haul trucking community and the brand and elevate the conversation beyond products and product specs.

— Mark Leger, managing director at the Chicago office of Fathom Communications, an agency that specializes in branded entertainment, online advertising and direct marketing, on a documentary called “Drive and Deliver” about long-haul trucking; The Times‘ Stuart Elliot revealed in his advertising column that the 45-minute film’s $2-million budget was underwritten by truck manufacturer Navistar to promote a new big-rig model, the LoneStar, stickered at $120,000 to $140,000; Aug. 12.

The tax on cars with engine capacities of 3 to 4 liters will rise to 25 percent from 15 percent, with the rate for engines of more than 4 liters doubling to 40 percent. The rate on cars with engines that are 1 liter or less will fall from 3 percent to 1 percent.

— from a Xinhua news story; according to a joint statement by two Chinese agencies, “We hope the new policy will help restrain the production and sales of high-emission vehicles while promoting the development of low-emission cars”; Aug. 13.

The rappers have gone in and created a lot of hit music based upon my influence. And they’ll tell you if you ask.

— Isaac Hayes, from an interview in the 1990s; Mr. Hayes died last week at 65; Aug. 10.

Most of Wearing’s work over the last decade has revolved around the experience of the individual, whether alone or in the context of family. She approaches this theme with clearheaded sensitivity and compassion, often using the work to create neutral if tightly controlled spaces in which to allow her subjects to speak for themselves.

Such is the case in the two series on view here. “Pin Ups” consists of seven roughly poster-sized paintings, each depicting a single scantily clad (or in one case nude) model in an alluring posture. Wearing found these models — two men and five women, all nonprofessionals — through an ad she placed on the Internet.

— from a Los Angeles Times review by Holly Myers of an exhibit of the work of Gillian Wearing; Aug. 15; emphasis added.

photo credits:

• Olympic gymnast Shawn Johnson: Lluis Gene, AFP/Getty Images
• Tom Hayden and John Froines: University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law
• Navistar’s LoneStar: Popular Mechanics
• Isaac Hayes: Norman Seeff, Cycle Media
• Gillian Wearing’s “Rowena”: Joshua White, Regen Projects

Quotabull is a weekly feature of Scholars & Rogues.

It’s my day off, so I was home, and the ground starts rockin’ and rollin’. So I thought, ‘You know what? I’m gonna go to the bar, drink with my bros, and if this is the Big One, I’ll go down with a cold one.’

— Ed’s Pub patron Michael Gallardo after a 5.4-magnitude earthquake shook the Los Angeles area; July 30.

Resolved, That the House of Representatives —
(1) acknowledges that slavery is incompatible with the basic founding principles (2) acknowledges the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality, and inhumanity of slavery and Jim Crow;
(3) apologizes to African Americans on behalf of the people of the United States, for the wrongs committed against them and their ancestors who suffered under slavery and Jim Crow; and
(4) expresses its commitment to rectify the lingering consequences of the misdeeds committed against African Americans under slavery and Jim Crow and to stop the occurrence of human rights violations in the future.

— from House Resolution 194, passed by voice vote; the measure had 120 sponsors, including two Republicans; July 30.

As Bill Allen’s business and political involvement grew, so did his stature. He was named Alaskan of the Year in 1994. When his personal presence in Juneau ran afoul of the state’s lobbying law in 2002, he successfully urged the Legislature to change the law so he wouldn’t have to register — and give up his campaign contributions.

— from an Anchorage Daily News story by Tom Kizzia, Sabra Ayres and Kevin Diaz about Bill Allen, CEO of construction firm Veco, which has been linked to an indictment of Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska; May 7, 2007.

The Senator and his staff, working with the Appropriations Committee staff, will review these requests before making decisions on whether to submit each individual request. Each review takes into account the 302(b) budget allocation of the relevant appropriations subcommittee, the President’s budget request, merits of the requested project, existing federal programs to fund such projects, the amounts of State matching funds or local matching funds, local support, and a variety of other factors.

— from the preface to a list of fiscal 2009 earmark requests at the Senate Web site of Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska; emphasis added.

I hope he drops out simply because I think he would suffer humiliation. The public, given the atmosphere and given what’s happened, is going to presume guilt. … He still has, even if he is guilty, a rather distinguished career representing Alaska, and we shouldn’t forget that.

— Anchorage pollster and political consultant Marc Hellenthal, discussing the re-election prospects of Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, following his indictment on corruption charges; July 29.

While people are innocent until proven guilty, we know enough facts to suggest Mr. Stevens is going to be looking for a deal. And the voters of Alaska, committed to reform, are going to throw him out of office. This is one seat that should stay in Republican hands. It will not, however, if Ted Stevens decides to hang on. For the longest time Ted Stevens has done all things for the good of Ted Stevens. Now is the time for him to fall on his sword and take one for the GOP team.

— Erick Erickson of the conservative blog RedState.com, offering advice to Sen. Ted Stevens; June 29.

[Sen. McCain] has never requested nor offered to take a position on legislation in exchange for, or because of, contributions to I.R.I.

— Brian Rogers, a spokesman for presidential candidate John McCain, in Mike McIntire’s New York Times story about the senator’s 15-year leadership role in the International Republican Institute; Mr. McIntire reports that “[o]perating without the sort of limits placed on campaign fund-raising, the institute under Mr. McCain has solicited millions of dollars for its operations from some 560 defense contractors, lobbying firms, oil companies and other corporations, many with issues before Senate committees Mr. McCain was on”; July 28.

For McCain, it’s the cheapest and most efficient way to keep himself in the game when he’s up against a candidate who’s essentially going to have unlimited funds.

— Kenneth M. Goldstein, director of the Advertising Project at the University of Wisconsin, of presidential candidate John McCain’s adept use of “free” media; Jim Rutenberg of The New York Times reports that “T[t]he number of times Senator John McCain’s new advertisement attacking Senator Barack Obama for canceling a visit with wounded troops in Germany last week has been shown fully or partly on local, national and cable newscasts: well into the hundreds [but] [t]he number of times that spot actually, truly ran as a paid commercial: roughly a dozen”; July 30.

He’s the biggest celebrity in the world, but is he ready to lead?

— tagline from new political ad for presidential candidate John McCain attacking opponent Barack Obama, using film snippets of pop singer Britney Spears and famous-for-being-famous celeb Paris Hilton; July 30.

[Sen.] Chuck Schumer [D-N.Y.] and the Democrat Senatorial Campaign Committee [DSCC] have recently placed television buys totaling approximately $44.8 million in targeted Senate races across the country. I will not allow our Republican candidates to be outspent by the DSCC this cycle.

— National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., promising to match Democrats’ spending dollar for dollar; but Aaron Blake of The Hill newspaper reports that “[t]he DSCC had about $22 million more than the NRSC at the end of June. While the NRSC is slightly ahead of its sluggish pace from last cycle, with $24.6 million on hand, the DSCC continues to raise more and has $46.2 million on hand”; July 30.

Instead of investigating and pursuing accountability for shoddy and dangerous school buildings, the authorities are resorting to reeducation through labor to silence and lock up concerned citizens like teacher Liu Shaokun and others.

— Sharon Hom, executive director of Human Rights in China, after Liu Shaokun, a teacher at Guanghan Middle School in Deyang City in southwest Sichuan Province, was ordered to a labor camp for a year after posting photographs of quake-damaged schools online, reports Graham Bowley of The New York Times; July 31.

The Ministry of Culture this month banned performances by any foreign entertainer who had ever attended an event deemed to “threaten national sovereignty,” such as a Free Tibet rally. Police now require foreign singers to produce performance licenses that used to be an always-overlooked formality, and the Culture Ministry decreed that the words of all songs must be approved in advance.

— from a story by Jill Drew of the Washington Post Foreign Service on police crackdowns in China; Ms. Drew reports that “[w]ith the Olympic Games just nine days away, Beijing is winding tighter each day, and visitors need wander no farther than the city’s bar district to experience the preparatory fervor. Police are out in force, carrying out orders to increase security and clean up the district, called Sanlitun, with zeal”; July 30.

Everyone who enters the square will pass through security checks to enter. We will increase and improve the security checks as the number of tourists keeps growing, to maintain the safety of the square.

— Jia Yingting, deputy director of the Tiananmen Square management committee, on increased security in Tiananmen Square for the Beijing Olympics; July 30.

Of course, indifference can be tempting — more than that, seductive. It is so much easier to look away from victims. It is so much easier to avoid such rude interruptions to our work, our dreams, our hopes. It is, after all, awkward, troublesome, to be involved in another person’s pain and despair. Yet, for the person who is indifferent, his or her neighbor are of no consequence. And, therefore, their lives are meaningless. Their hidden or even visible anguish is of no interest. Indifference reduces the Other to an abstraction.

— from a speech by Elie Wiesel titled “The Perils of Indifference”; April 12, 1999.

You have 150 years of man trying to produce an aggressive dog. But you have tens of thousands of years of Mother Nature preceding that. Dogs are pack animals. They survived because of their pack. … It’s hard-wired into their genes that they do no harm to each other.

— Tim Racer, a founder of Bay Area Doglovers Responsible About Pit bulls (BAD RAP), who took in 10 of the 49 dogs in former NFL player Michael Vick’s dogfighting ring; Brigid Schulte of The Washington Post recounts unexpectedly successful efforts to rehabilitate the dogs; July 7.

There’s a culture to an organization that influences people’s behavior, and our culture has been collegial and respectful. … I heard theirs was not as collegial. … In the past few weeks, she has been a complete team player.

— David Plouffe, campaign manager for presidential candidate Barack Obama, on the selection of Patti Solis Doyle as chief of staff for Sen. Obama’s future vice presidential pick; Ms. Doyle had been dismissed from the campaign of Sen. Hillary Clinton after working for Sen. Clinton for 17 years; Lois Romano of The Washington Post reports on the fall and subsequent revival of Ms. Doyle’s career; July 30.

Valuations have fallen to unprecedented levels that have no relationship to reality. Wall Street is saying there is no future to a lot of media companies. [But] The Times isn’t going away for a long, long time. … I think [its valuation] is overly negative. All it’s going to take is advertising bouncing back.

— Edward Atorino, media analyst for Benchmark Capital, in an analysis of The New York Times‘ disappointing second-quarter earnings by Jay Yarow and Jon Fine of BusinessWeek; July 30; emphasis added.

People feel a real need for a term that refers to one’s romantic partner that does not sound childish. ‘Partner’ sounds too official. ‘Companion’ sounds too unromantic. ‘Lover’ is too explicit. ‘Boyfriend’ and ‘girlfriend’ seem inappropriate unless you’re a teenager. ‘POSSLQ’ sounds too stupid or bureaucratic.

— Jesse Sheidlower of Manhattan, editor at large of the Oxford English Dictionary, in a USA Today story by Sharon Jayson exploring the linguistic condundrum of romantic labeling; POSSLQ, an acronym for “Persons of Opposite Sex Sharing Living Quarters,” was used in the late 1970s by the U.S. Census, reports Ms. Jayson; June 23.

We’ve gotten to the age where we don’t feel like fighting anymore because the end is a lot closer than the beginning.

— comic Cheech Marin on ending a decades-long feud with Tommy Chong; the two are reuniting for their first comedy tour in more than 25 years; July 30.

She’s boring. She doesn’t even have a boyfriend.

— Francois Navarre, the co-owner of X17, the photo agency that set the standard for aggressive 24/7 coverage of Britney Spears, according to Harriet Ryan of the Los Angeles Times; Ms. Ryan reported that “The Spears of today may not be any more boring than dozens of celebrities who fill magazines, but she is decidedly duller than her former self. Photographers who relied on her for hourly material for the gossip blogs are confronted by a lack of access and a lack of drama. She rarely goes out and when she does, she behaves herself. No umbrella attacks. No head shaving. No fake British accent. No panty-free car exits”; July 30.

photo credits:

• Sen. Ted Stevens at 2008 Capitol event with “The Incredible Hulk”: Scott J. Ferrell, Congressional Quarterly
• some of Michael Vick’s pit bulls: The Washington Post
• Britney Spears at a July 21 event for Jenny McCarthy’s charity Generation Rescue: GoBritney.com

Quotabull is a weekly feature of Scholars & Rogues.

He is convinced that with the help of God he will win.

— Svetozar Vujacic, a lawyer for Radovan Karadzic, who was “twice indicted for genocide for the massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in the town of Srebrenica in 1995 and for the 43-month siege of Sarajevo,” on his plans to conduct his own defense at the Hague tribunal; July 23.

Always be prepared for demonstrators, even if the local organization tells you that there will not be any. It is the responsibility of the Lead Advance to have in place an effective plan for dealing with demonstrators.

— from the Presidential Advance Manual dated October 2002 used to prepare locations for visits by President Bush; emphasis added.

Wall Street got drunk — that’s one reason I asked you to turn off your TV cameras.

— President Bush’s candid assessment of the housing and financial markets at a closed Republican fund-raiser in Houston; Miya Shay, a reporter at the Houston television affiliate of ABC, obtained a videotape of the president’s comments; July 23.

Q: … I understand the President obviously could be more candid in his comments in a private situation. But why is it that he could not have been candid in these kind of terms on this subject when —
MS. PERINO: He said these other things before, and I think you should go back and look at the press conferences over the past year as the markets have been in a downturn, especially when it comes to talking about the housing issue and subprime issue. So I think that he has said things similar in public before, and we do have private moments as everybody gets to have a private moment. The President was at a private residence at a private fundraiser, and obviously everybody got a chance to see that because someone decided to release some video of it. It is what it is.
Q: That’s pretty sharp criticism of Wall Street, in particular, for the way it handled —
MS. PERINO: I actually don’t think that — I don’t think the criticism is any different, it’s just said with a little bit more candor and more bluntly.

— exchange between reporter and press secretary Dana Perino at a White House press briefing; July 23.

NASA does not track UFOs. NASA is not involved in any sort of cover up about alien life on this planet or anywhere in the universe. Dr Mitchell is a great American, but we do not share his opinions on this issue.

— from a NASA statement after astronaut and moon-walker Edgar Mitchell, a veteran of the Apollo 14 mission, said during an Australian radio interview that the fact that extra-terrestrials have visited Earth on several occasions has “been well covered up by all our governments for the last 60 years or so, but slowly it’s leaked out and some of us have been privileged to have been briefed on some of it”; July 24.

It is important for the Advance Team and all volunteers to be on the lookout for potential demonstrators. Volunteers should be instructed to contact the Advance person on site (whether it is the Lead, Press or Site Advance) when they see demonstrators. Always check with local police to inquire of any demonstration permits issued prior to a visit.

— from the Presidential Advance Manual dated October 2002 used to prepare locations for visits by President Bush; emphasis added.

He made it possible not just for blacks to sit at the black desk, but to sit at every desk in American politics. He is my political father.

.
Donna Brazile, Jackson’s field director in 1984 who became the first African American to manage the campaign of a major party’s nominee when she ran Al Gore’s effort in 2000, reports Kevin Merida of The Washington Post, on Rev. Jesse Jackson; July 13.

The soldiers from the movement, a lot of them lack the ability to be critical of the community because so much of their life has been challenging the forces against their community. The black community needs more than ever for a self-reflection, places where we can talk seriously about our own responsibility to our children and the values we want for our children. We don’t have enough places where we are brutally honest about how we parent or why it is that so few of us are married.

— Sheryll Cashin, a Georgetown law professor, in Kevin Merida’s Post story about the waning influence of Rev. Jesse Jackson; July 13.

Barack Obama didn’t just come down on a beam of light from another planet. Jesse is part of that history. Whatever else you say about Jesse, you can’t deny him that.

— Kevin Alexander Gray, who managed Rev. Jesse Jackson’s South Carolina campaign in 1988, from Kevin Merida’s Post story; July 13.

If, in my low moments, in word, deed or attitude, through some error of temper, taste, or tone, I have caused anyone discomfort, created pain, or revived someone’s fears, that was not my truest self. If there were occasions when my grape turned into a raisin and my joy bell lost its resonance, please forgive me. Charge it to my head and not to my heart. My head — so limited in its finitude; my heart, which is boundless in its love for the human family. I am not a perfect servant. I am a public servant doing my best against the odds. As I develop and serve, be patient: God is not finished with me yet.

— Rev. Jesse Jackson in his address to the Democratic National Convention; July 18, 1984.

A protester hangs a sign in the “free speech zone” near the site of the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston.

These squads should be instructed always to look for demonstrators. The rally squad’s task is to use their signs and banners as shields between the demonstrators and the main press platform. If the demonstrators are yelling, rally squads can begin and lead supportive chants to drown out the protestors (USA!, USA!, USA!). As a last resort, security should remove the demonstrators from the event site. The rally squads can include, but are not limited to, college/young republican organizations, local athletic teams, and fraternities/ sororities.

— from the Presidential Advance Manual dated October 2002 used to prepare locations for visits by President Bush; emphasis added.

To ensure our government continues to speak out for those who have no other voice, I recently issued a directive instructing all senior U.S. officials serving in undemocratic countries to maintain regular contact with political dissidents and democracy activists. The challenge for future presidents and future Congresses is to ensure that America always stands with those seeking freedom — and never hesitates to shine the light of conscience on abuses of human rights across the world.

— President Bush, in remarks on the “Freedom Agenda”; July 24; emphasis added.

They believe their constitutional rights were violated, as do I, and that’s the stuff lawsuits are made of. When you are punished by not being allowed to listen to your president speak because of speech you have on your bumper sticker, that is a classic First Amendment issue.

— Dan Recht, lawyer for three people “forcibly removed” from one of President Bush’s town meetings because they displayed a bumper sticker on their car — reading “No More Blood for Oil” — condemning the administration’s Middle East policies; March 30, 2005.

We opened our eyes in this bookstore.

— Najah al-Hayawi, 62, the eldest son of “Abdul Rahman al-Hayawi, … a mild-mannered Sunni Muslim with an appreciation for Arabic calligraphy, [who founded] the Renaissance, … the oldest bookshop on a street that has preserved a literary tradition through empire, colonialism and monarchy,” reports Sudarsan Raghavan of the Washington Post Foreign Service; “car bombing … killed his son and his brother and razed his family’s bookshop on Baghdad’s storied Mutanabi Street”; July 12.

As a former prosecutor and a former attorney general, Gov. Gilmore is a forceful advocate for transparency by public officials. Neither Gov. Gilmore nor his staff noticed this clerical error as the Senate form was signed and forwarded to the Secretary of the Senate, but the Governor today instructed his staff and his financial adviser to amend the Senate disclosure form and provide the correct information as soon as possible.

— statement from the Senate campaign organization of former Virginia governor James S. Gilmore III, a Republican, after The Washington Post’s Tim Craig reported Mr. Gilmore had “submitted false information on two financial disclosure forms that hid his ties to a government contractor embroiled in a legal dispute over allegations that two of its executives had conspired to defraud the federal government”; July 24.

If the demonstrators appear to be a security threat notify the Secret Service immediately. If demonstrators appear likely to cause only a political disruption, it is the Advance person’s responsibility to take appropriate action. Rally squads should be dispatched to surround and drown out demonstrators immediately.

— from the Presidential Advance Manual dated October 2002 used to prepare locations for visits by President Bush; emphasis added.

Remember — avoid physical contact with demonstrators! Most often, the demonstrators want a physical confrontation. Do not fall into their trap! Also, do not do anything or say anything that might result in the physical harm to the demonstrators. Before taking action, the Advance person must decide if the solution would cause more negative publicity than if the demonstrators were simply left alone.

— from the Presidential Advance Manual dated October 2002 used to prepare locations for visits by President Bush; emphasis in original.

America isn’t easy. America is advanced citizenship. You’ve gotta want it bad, ’cause it’s gonna put up a fight. It’s gonna say, “You want free speech? Let’s see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who’s standing center stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours.” You want to claim this land as the land of the free? Then the symbol of your country cannot just be a flag. The symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest. Now show me that, defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms. Then you can stand up and sing about the land of the free.

— President Andrew Shepherd, played by Michael Douglas, in the movie “The American President.”

It is organized violence on top which creates individual violence at the bottom. It is the accumulated indignation against organized wrong, organized crime, organized injustice which drives the political offender to his act. To condemn him means to be blind to the causes which make him. I can no more do it, nor have I the right to, than the physician who were to condemn the patient for his disease. You and I and all of us who remain indifferent to the crimes of poverty, of war, of human degradation, are equally responsible for the act committed by the political offender.

— Emma Goldman, in her address to the jury; she and Alexander Berkman were sentenced to two years in jail for conspiring to “induce persons not to register” for the draft; July 9, 1917.

People here have never seen a pole dance, and for that reason they don’t associate it with stripping or women of ill repute. I knew if I could give people a positive first impression of this as a clean, fun, social activity, people wouldn’t just accept it, they’d embrace it.

— Luo Lan, 39, of China whose pole-dancing-for-fitness school now has five studios with plans to open six more this year; July 20.

photo credits:

• Rev. Jesse Jackson with former president Bill Clinton: Janet Mayer
• DNC protester in Boston: William B. Plowman, Getty Images
• pole dancing in China: Shiho Fukada, The New York Times

Quotabull is a weekly feature of Scholars & Rogues.

Our economy has demonstrated remarkable resilience.

— President Bush at a press conference; July 16.

We’re spending like a drunken sailor.

— Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., predicting the federal budget deficit would double this year; according to Manu Raju of The Hill newspaper, the Congressional Budget Office has estimated that, for the first nine months of fiscal 2008, the government ran up a $268 billion deficit, $148 billion more the same period last year; July 17.

The government of my country snubs honest simplicity, but fondles artistic villainy, and I think I might have developed into a very capable pickpocket if I had remained in the public service a year or two.

— Mark Twain, in “Roughing It,” published in 1886.

Our results, frankly, reflect all the difficulties weighing on the media sector … but we have been in down cycles before and know how to manage through them.

— Craig Dubow, Gannett Co. chairman and chief executive, after Gannett reported that second-quarter profits were down 36 percent from a year ago; revenue fell 10 percent, shares were off 7 percent and USA Today advertising sales dropped 17 percent; July 17; emphasis added.

[The loss reflects] a weakening economy and a continued challenging business environment in the publishing division.

— Marshall Morton, president and chief executive of Media General, owner of 22 dailies and 275 weeklies and other publications, on its second-quarter loss of $129,000 vs. a $5.2 million profit a year ago; its newspaper ad revenues fell 17 percent; July 17; emphasis added.

Unprecedented fuel prices have created a real crisis in the airline industry, and Delta has been a leader in responding with quick, decisive action.

— Edward Bastian, president and chief financial officer of Delta Air Lines, following the announcement that Delta posted a $1 billion loss in the second quarter because of high fuel costs; Delta said it will reduce flights and cut about 4,000 jobs this year; July 17; emphasis added.

My co-workers are doing a great job working through the significant challenges facing our industry. We will continue to work together to react to the market and maintain our focus on providing quality service to customers.

— Larry Kellner, Continental Airlines’ chairman and chief executive officer, after Continental reported a second-quarter loss of $3 billion; Continental plans to reduce domestic flights, retire 67 aircraft and cut 3,000 jobs; July 17.

It seems to me that other financial institutions not accepting these checks is only furthering the panic. Sure, IndyMac will give you a check, but what good is it if no other institution will accept it?

— Sheryl MacPhee, 46, of South Pasadena, Calif., who tried to deposit a check from an IndyMac branch in another bank only to be told she could not have access those funds for up to eight weeks; regulators from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. have taken over the ailing bank; July 16.

My hope is that people take a deep breath and realize that their deposits are protected by our government.

— President Bush, at an unscheduled press conference, reminding Americans that the federal government insured their deposits up to $100,000; July 17.

It affects everybody, and you need not be a home owner, or have credit or be a consumer. People are getting used to a new terminology; they know all sorts of credit-crunch-related terms. Money can be made now, but generally it’s a hugely unfortunate economic time. There’s a lot of talk about how bad it is.

— Martin Slaney, head of derivatives at GFT Global Markets in London, discussing the global economic slowdown; July 17.

You see a consensus developing that the current system is unsustainable. But actually saying what has to happen next is a little bit scary if you’re in a campaign, especially if some of your most prominent supporters have such deep ties to these entities.

— David C. John, a senior research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, discussing the rumors of insolvency regarding Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and the virtual silence about them from presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama; July 17.

The business was going nowhere, so the only thing I could fund the business with was more credit cards. I just started panicking.

— Jeremy Riney, describing how he started Music America Records in Los Angeles by financing his business with personal credit cards until he owed about $100,000; The Washington Post’s Simone Baribeau reports that “[s]mall businesses will charge 2 1/2 times more this year than they did in 2002, when credit card charges ran about $140 billion”; July 4.

Blindsided, distraught, disrespected. All those adjectives. I definitely feel insulted. … I didn’t realize my salary was that much compared to everyone else’s. They basically dumped mine and got nothing in return.

— former Denver Nuggets center Marcus Camby after being traded to the Los Angeles Clippers; Mr. Camby will earn a base salary of $8 million and could make as much as $11.7 million if he hits all his incentive bonuses; July 16.

A lot of the busy guys used to brag that they had patients waiting six months or a year. Granted, I thought it was exaggerated for their own p.r., but now you almost never hear that. Now you hear a month or two.

— Dr. Michael A. C. Kane, a plastic surgeon in Manhattan, about complaints from plastic surgeons that the economic downturn is affecting their business; June 16.

These United States are confronted with an economic affliction of great proportions. We suffer from the longest and one of the worst sustained inflations in our national history. It distorts our economic decisions, penalizes thrift, and crushes the struggling young and the fixed-income elderly alike. It threatens to shatter the lives of millions of our people. Idle industries have cast workers into unemployment, human misery and personal indignity. … In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.

— from the first inaugural address by President Ronald Reagan; Jan. 20, 1981.

When we work on tough issues in the U.S. system, which is the best system in the world, it takes a while. There’s never unanimity, but I am feeling very good.

— Treasury secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. about his plan for the federal government to rescue the nation’s two largest mortgage finance companies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; July 17.

The economy has continued to expand, but at a subdued pace.

— Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, in testimony before the Senate Banking Committee in which he did not utter the word “recession”; July 17.

Those will do more than any $300 you might send out to the taxpayers.

— Sen. Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., criticizing Democrats’ plan to provide more consumer incentives and agreeing with the White House position that adopting legislation to limit home foreclosures and expanding domestic production of oil would to more to stimulate the economy; July 16.

It’s just amazing. It’s irresponsible. This guy does not have any love or care for the sport. The unfortunate is that we are learning that things that look too good to be true are too good to be true.

— British cyclist David Millar after Italian rider Riccardo Riccò became the third rider in the Tour de France to test positive for the performance enhancer EPO; July 17.

We’re absolutely stunned by what is happening and by the behavior of one of our riders. He seems to have secretly used banned substances, hiding everything from everybody else in the team.

— from a statement by Caudio Corti, manager of the Barloworld team, denying knowledge of drug use by one of his Tour de France riders, Moises Duenas Nevado of Spain; July 17; emphasis added.

[Police found] numerous small medical materials like syringes, needles, and medical drip bags which theoretically a cyclist should not have in his room.

— Gerard Aldige, the state prosecutor in Tarbes, France, discussing what was found in Duenas Nevado’s hotel room; July 17.

As our society becomes more fragmented, more bombarded with images, more numbed to feeling, more restless and impatient, what the artist has to offer becomes more and more essential to the health of the community. In a sense, there are three basic artistic strategies which fulfill this function. One is to make art which states the problems or wounds of society; which makes people aware of the underpinnings of the society and wakes them up to act or make changes in their lives or in their communities. The second is to make art which offers an alternative; that demonstrates human behavior which becomes a paradigm for what creativity, cooperation, freedom and playfulness could be. The third is to make art which in itself provides glimpses of a larger consciousness or reflects upon the inexplicable. Some artists mirror the time in which they live. Others convey in their work a sense of timelessness and continuity. That we have this variety of approaches is healthy and meaningful.

— from a speech titled “Some Thoughts About Art, America
And Jumping Off The Cliff” by Meredith Monk, an American composer, delivered in April 1990.

I leave with the belief that this eclipse of the soul will soon pass and with it the lunacy that sees artists as enemies and ideas as demons.

— from a speech at the National Press Club by John Frohnmayer after being deposed in February 1992 as chair of the National Endowment for the Arts by President George H.W. Bush; Republican challenger Patrick J. Buchanan had threatened to make a campaign issue out of President Bush’s support for the then-controversial NEA and Mr. Frohmayer’s leadership.

This is to ensure that we have flexible funds to devote to both building our collections and undertake targeted strategic initiatives where we feel we can really make a difference.

— James Woods, chief executive of the J. Paul Getty Trust in Los Angeles, announcing the trust would cut 114 jobs so it could free resources to spend on its visual-arts programs; May 14.

A cat can draw
the blinds
behind her eyes
whenever she
decides. Nothing
alters in the stare
itself but she’s
not there. Likewise
a future can occlude:
still sitting there,
doing nothing rude.

— from “A cat/a future” by Kay Ryan, chosen to be the nation’s 16th poet laureate by the Librarian of Congress; July 17.

photo credits:

• credit cards: Ilya Genkin, Istockphoto.com
• Italian cyclist Ricardo Riccò: Nicholas Bouvy, European Pressphoto Agency

Quotabull is a weekly feature of Scholars & Rogues.

I’ll approach Obama with fearless honesty. He’s a liberal. I oppose liberals. That’s all that’s involved here.

— Rush Limbaugh on presidential candidate Barack Obama; Mr. Limbaugh has renewed his contract with Premiere Radio Networks and Clear Channel Radio, which will pay him more than $400 million; Mr. Limbaugh once referred to Sen Obama and actor Halle Berry as “Halfrican American” on the Jan. 24, 2007, broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show; July 6.

We have sort of become a nation of whiners. You just hear this constant whining, complaining about a loss of competitiveness, America in decline.

— former senator Phil Gramm, one of presidential candidate John McCain’s top economic advisers, likening the nation’s economic problems to a “mental recession“; July 10.

The baby boomers — that prominent group of middle-agers whose massive numbers invite never-ending dissection and speculation — have once again spoken. What they have said is, ” Waaaaaahhh.”

— lede from a Washington Post story by Monica Hesse reporting a Pew Research Center survey measuring “the pessimism, dissatisfaction and general curmudgeonliness of 2,413 adults in various generations”; July 10.

Why should I help you embarrass me?

— response of Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, to New York Times reporter David Kocieniewski, whose story revealed that Rep. Rangel has four rent-controlled apartments “on the 16th floor overlooking Upper Manhattan in a building owned by one of New York’s premier real estate developers … [He uses] uses his fourth apartment, six floors below, as a campaign office, despite state and city regulations that require rent-stabilized apartments to be used as a primary residence”; July 11.

There is no military solution to this war. No amount of U.S. soldiers can solve the grievances that lay at the heart of someone else’s civil war. We must begin a phased redeployment of our forces starting May 1st, with the goal of removing all combat forces by March 30th, 2008. Letting the Iraqis know that we will not be there forever is our last, best hope to pressure the Iraqis to take ownership of their country and bring an end to their conflict.

— from a press release on the campaign Web site of presidential candidate Barack Obama; March 20, 2007.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are also working through this challenging period. They play an important role in our housing markets today and need to continue to play an important role in the future. Their regulator has made clear that they are adequately capitalized.

— Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. in testimony before the House Financial Services Committee; Times reporters Stephen Labaton and Charles Duhigg reported he and Fed chairman Ben Bernanke “sought to reassure the markets about the financial health of the nation’s two largest mortgage finance companies as their stock prices plunged to their lowest level in 17 years on fears that they could face the possibility of a government bailout”; July 11.

… a significant reduction … an ambitious goal … we made progress, significant progress, toward a comprehensive approach … hope Congress funds that effort … help developing nations afford … become good stewards … We’re also taking steps to promote … we can become less dependent … we’re going to have to spend some money … to trade freely … the best way to help alleviate poverty … we had good discussions … We also made some progress on alleviating sickness … committed … pledged to provide … to help deal with … stepped forward to support … committed with partner nations … the United States is involved … working to expand our efforts … we had a comprehensive agenda … accountability is an important part of fulfilling our obligations … agreed to release detailed reports … will help ensure … we agreed on steps to deal with … increasing access … we agreed to take new steps … we accomplished a lot.

— from remarks by President Bush following the G8 summit in Toyako, Japan; July 9.

As we listened to the leaders around the room there was universal praise for the major economies process. There was universal recognition that having these countries in the room trying to find common ground was an enormous contribution to the U.N. negotiations. A declaration was adopted, and Jim will go into that. But the most significant take-away from this meeting, in addition to the very substantive leaders’ declaration, was the desire of all leaders to continue this process. And indeed, there was agreement to hold another meeting of the leaders of the major economies at next year’s summit in Italy. The meeting concluded not only with that decision, but with specific recognition for the contributions of President Bush, and a round of applause for the President for initiating this process.

— Dan Price, assistant to the president for international economic affairs and deputy national security advisor, during a White House press briefing on a two-hour-long meeting of the leaders of the major economies, also known as G8, in Toyako, Japan; July 9.

[O]ur dialogue at political, policy, and technical levels has built confidence among our nations and deepened mutual understanding of the many challenges confronting the world community as we consider next steps under the Convention and continue to mobilize political will to combat global climate change.

— from a declaration by the leaders of Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, the European Union, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States on energy security and climate change at the G8 meeting in Toyako, Japan; July 9.

Costello: Well, then, who’s on first?
Abbott: Yes.
Costello: I mean the fellow’s name.
Abbott: Who.
Costello: The guy on first.
Abbott: Who.
Costello: The first baseman.
Abbott: Who!
Costello: The guy playing —
Abbott: Who is on first!
Costello: I’m asking YOU who’s on first.
Abbott: That’s the man’s name.
Costello: That’s who’s name?
Abbott: Yes.

— from “Who’s on first” routine by Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, reportedly translated into nearly 30 languages.

The law itself is a massive intrusion into the due process rights of all of the phone subscribers who would be a part of the suit. It is a violation of the separation of powers. It’s presidential election-year cowardice. The Democrats are afraid of looking weak on national security.

— Bruce Afran, a New Jersey lawyer representing several hundred plaintiffs suing Verizon and other companies, after the Senate voted 69 to 28 to approve what Times reporter Eric Lichtblau called “the biggest revamping of federal surveillance law in 30 years”: July 10.

I don’t think shortening the track is what’s going to help stop these events, because 99.9 percent of the time we’re not having a tough time stopping the cars. It’s just when we get in trouble and you can’t stop them. Another 320 feet isn’t going to do it, in my opinion.

— Johnny West, crew chief for Funny Car drag race Jack Beckman, on the decision to decrease the distance Funny Cars and Top Fuel dragsters race from a quarter mile — 1,320 feet — to 1,000 feet because of the 300-plus mph speeds the vehicles attain; this follows the death of drag racer Scott Kalitta on June 22; July 10.

The question then is, How can white people move to start making the major institutions that they have in this country function the way it is supposed to function? That is the real question. And can white people move inside their own community and start tearing down racism where in fact it does exist? Where it exists. It is you who live in Cicero and stop us from living there. It is white people who stop us from moving into Grenada. It is white people who make sure that we live in the ghettos of this country. it is white institutions that do that. They must change. In order — In order for America to really live on a basic principle of human relationships, a new society must be born. Racism must die, and the economic exploitation of this country of non-white peoples around the world must also die — must also die.

— Stokely Carmichael, speaking in Berkeley, Calif., in October 1966.

But, alas, they had no idea just who would come — youthful Wiffle ball players, yes, but also angry neighbors and their lawyer, the police, the town nuisance officer and tree warden and other officials in all shapes and sizes. It turns out that one kid’s field of dreams is an adult’s dangerous nuisance, liability nightmare, inappropriate usurpation of green space, unpermitted special use or drag on property values, and their Wiffle-ball Fenway has become the talk of Greenwich and a suburban Rorschach test about youthful summers past and present.

— from a New York Times story by Peter Applebome, headlined “Build a Wiffle Ball Field and Lawyers Will Come”; July 10.

Actor Pam Anderson performing a split while wearing 4-inch heels
during an appearance on Australia’s “Big Brother” program; July 10.

We are not going to discuss the steps we have taken or may take to prevent a recurrence.

— New York Times spokeswoman Catherine J. Mathis, refusing to discuss — even as workers began removal — alteration of the Times‘ building facade whose design has allowed climbers and protesters to ascend the building; July 10.

In the Congo, women develop quickly, both physically and emotionally, due to the substantial responsibility society places on them from early childhood. In Kinshasa, the vast majority of teenagers are sexually active with men that are substantially older.

— from the argument for leniency presented by ex-diplomat Gons G. Nachman, 42, convicted of having sex with teenage girls in the Congo and Brazil and taping the encounters; prosecutor Ron Walutes countered in court papers, “Children in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Brazil have the same inherent value as children in the United States”; the judge delayed sentencing so that Mr. Nachman could be examined by a forensic psychologist; July 10.

photo credits:

• Rush Limbaugh: Nigel Parry, The New York Times
• Leaders of major developed nations at G8 summit in Japan: Pablo Martinez Monsivais, Associated Press
• Scott Kalitta’s souped-up Toyota Solara on fire at 300 mph: Associated Press
• Stokely Carmichael: BlackPast.org
• Wiffle ball field in Greenwich, Conn.: Rob Bennett, The New York Times
• Pamela Anderson: Reuters

Quotabull is a weekly feature of Scholars & Rogues.

The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

— from the Declaration of Independence; July 4, 1776.

The executive branch shall construe the provisions of H.R. 3199 that call for furnishing information to entities outside the executive branch, such as sections 106A and 119, in a manner consistent with the President’s constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch and to withhold information the disclosure of which could impair foreign relations, national security, the deliberative processes of the Executive, or the performance of the Executive’s constitutional duties.

— from a March 13, 2006, signing statement by President Bush explaining how he will interpret the USA PATRIOT Improvement and Reauthorization Act of 2005; despite oversight provisions in the law that directed he inform Congress regarding the FBI’s use of the act’s expanded police powers, President Bush, in effect, told Congress he felt no obligation to do so; emphasis added.

In the annals of the human race, the separation of one people into two, is an event of no uncommon occurrence. The successful resistance of a people against oppression, to the downfall of the tyrant and of tyranny itself, is the lesson of many an age, and of almost every clime. It lives in the venerable records of Holy Writ. It beams in the brightest pages of profane history.

— from “An address, delivered at the request of the committee of arrangements for celebrating the anniversary of Independence, at the City of Washington on the Fourth of July 1821 upon the occasion of reading The Declaration of Independence” by John Quincy Adams.

Provisions of the Act, such as sections 2104 and 6024, purport to require congressional committee approval prior to certain obligations or expenditures of funds appropriated by the Act. The executive branch shall construe such provisions to require only prior notification to congressional committees, as any other construction would be contrary to the constitutional principles set forth by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1983 in INS v. Chadha.

— from an Aug. 2, 2005, signing statement by President Bush attached to the Department of Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2006; emphasis added.

Now even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us — the spin masters, the negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of “anything goes.” Well, I say to them tonight, there is not a liberal America and a conservative America — there is the United States of America. There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America — there’s the United States of America.

The pundits, the pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an “awesome God” in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.

— from the keynote address by Sen. Barack Obama to the 2004 Democratic Convention; July 27, 2004.

I cannot give you that list.

— response of Michelle Boardman, deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice, after Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., asked her during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing to provide a list of laws that President Bush has decided, through signing statements, not to enforce; June 28, 2006.

I am proud that we worked together with such bipartisan spirit in the weeks following the despicable attacks on our Nation. My Administration will work together with the Congress to address additional needs as they become known during the second session of the 107th Congress.

— from a Jan. 10, 2002, signing statement by President Bush attached to the Department of Defense and Emergency Supplemental Appropriations for Recovery from and Response to Terrorist Attacks on the United States Act of 2002; emphasis added.

A realistic president recognizes that he is president within the Constitution and that the Constitution provides the framework in which he can exert considerable power. But the power depends on persuasion, and it depends on consent. And our great presidents have, on the whole, exerted that power within the Constitution.

— from a 1980s clip of Arthur M. Schlesinger, author of “The Imperial Presidency,” aired on PBS; March 1, 2007; emphasis added.

The executive branch shall construe as calling solely for notification the provisions of the Act that purport to require congressional committee approval for the execution of a law. … Section 513 of the Act purports to direct the conduct of security and suitability investigations. To the extent that section 513 relates to access to classified national security information, the executive branch shall construe this provision in a manner consistent with the President’s exclusive constitutional authority, as head of the unitary executive branch and as Commander in Chief, to classify and control access to national security information and to determine whether an individual is suitable to occupy a position in the executive branch with access to such information.

— from an Oct. 9, 2006, signing statement by President Bush attached to the Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act, 2007 in which he tells Congress he has the power to edit DHS reports regarding whether it obeys privacy rules while handling background checks, ID cards and watchlists; emphasis added.

Section 503(c) of the Homeland Security Act of 2002, as amended by section 611 of the Act, provides for the appointment and certain duties of the Administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Section 503(c)(2) vests in the President authority to appoint the Administrator, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, but purports to limit the qualifications of the pool of persons from whom the President may select the appointee in a manner that rules out a large portion of those persons best qualified by experience and knowledge to fill the office. The executive branch shall construe section 503(c)(2) in a manner consistent with the Appointments Clause of the Constitution.

— from an Oct. 9, 2006, signing statement by President Bush attached to the Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act, 2007; according to The Boston Globe’s Charlie Savage, “To shield FEMA from cronyism, Congress established new job qualifications for the agency’s director in last week’s homeland security bill. The law says the president must nominate a candidate who has ‘a demonstrated ability in and knowledge of emergency management’ and ‘not less than five years of executive leadership”; Oct. 6, 2006; emphasis added.

The president hasn’t vetoed any bills, but basically he has done a personal veto. He has said which laws he will not follow and … put himself above the law, even the same law he has signed.

— Sen. Patrick Leahy during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing; June 28, 2006.

Provisions of the Act, including sections 841, 846, 1079, and 1222, purport to impose requirements that could inhibit the President’s ability to carry out his constitutional obligations to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, to protect national security, to supervise the executive branch, and to execute his authority as Commander in Chief. The executive branch shall construe such provisions in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President.

— from a Jan. 28 signing statement by President Bush attached to the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008; emphasis added.

Congress is Republican-controlled. Polling shows that a large majority of Americans are willing to give up their civil liberties to prevent another terror attack. The USA Patriot Act passed with overwhelming support. So why didn’t the President simply ask Congress for the authority he thought he needed?

The answer seems to be, quite simply, that Vice President Dick Cheney has never recovered from being President Ford’s chief of staff when Congress placed checks on the presidency. And Cheney wanted to make the point that he thought it was within a president’s power to ignore Congress’ laws relating to the exercise of executive power. Bush has gone along with all such Cheney plans.

No president before Bush has taken as aggressive a posture — the position that his powers as commander-in-chief, under Article II of the Constitution, license any action he may take in the name of national security — although Richard Nixon, my former boss, took a similar position.

— excerpt from FindLaw column by John W. Dean, former counselor to President Richard M. Nixon; Dec. 30, 2005; emphasis added.

Sections 8007, 8011, and 8093 of the Act prohibit the use of funds to initiate a special access program, a new overseas installation, or a new start program, unless the congressional defense committees receive advance notice. The Supreme Court of the United States has stated that the President’s authority to classify and control access to information bearing on the national security flows from the Constitution and does not depend upon a legislative grant of authority. Although the advance notice contemplated by sections 8007, 8011, and 8093 can be provided in most situations as a matter of comity, situations may arise, especially in wartime, in which the President must act promptly under his constitutional grants of executive power and authority as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces while protecting certain extraordinarily sensitive national security information. The executive branch shall construe these sections in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President.

— from a Jan. 2, 2006, signing statement by President Bush attached to the Department of Defense, Emergency Supplemental Appropriations to Address Hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico, and Pandemic Influenza Act, 2006; emphasis added.

As the letter from the Acting Attorney General explained in considerable detail, the assertion of Executive Privilege here is intended to protect a fundamental interest of the Presidency: the necessity that a President receive candid advice from his advisors and that those advisors be able to communicate freely and openly with the President, with each other, and with others inside and outside the Executive Branch. In the present setting, where the President’s authority to appoint and remove U.S. Attorneys is at stake, the institutional interest of the Executive Branch is very strong. The Acting Attorney General’s letter clearly identifies the subject matter of the deliberations and communications at issue and provides an extensive treatment of the issues implicated by the subpoenas and the legal basis for the President’s assertion of Executive Privilege.

— from a July 7, 2007, letter from Fred F. Fielding, counsel to President Bush, to Sen. Patrick J. Leahy and Rep. John Conyers Jr. asserting executive privilege “with respect to the testimony sought from Sara M. Taylor and Harriet E. Miers covering White House consideration, deliberations or communications, whether internal or external, relating to possible dismissal or appointment of United States Attorneys”; emphasis added.

I have to wonder if the White House’s refusal to provide a detailed basis for this executive privilege claim has more to do with its inability to craft an effective one.

— comment of Sen. Patrick J. Leahy following receipt of Mr. Fielding’s letter; July 11, 2007.

The clear message of these decisions taken together is that the Court is willing to allow Congress some leeway in putting limitations on executive power but that it is wholly unwilling to permit Congress to participate in administering the laws itself or through its agents.

— Alan B. Morrison, a Washington lawyer who filed a brief as a friend of the Court supporting a special prosecutor law adopted by Congress in the wake of investigations of Reagan Administration officials and former officials; the law provided for judges to appoint special prosecutors in such cases, insulated from presidential control. The Reagan Administration argued that this was an unconstitutional encroachment on the president’s power; the Court ruled 7-1 against the administration; June 30, 1988.

The executive branch shall construe section 11(c) of the Act, relating to executive branch reports to the Congress concerning investigations of alleged criminal and fraudulent activities in connection with a specified project, in a manner consistent with the constitutional authorities of the President to supervise the unitary executive branch and to withhold information the disclosure of which could impair the performance of the Executive’s constitutional duties, including the conduct of investigations and prosecutions to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.

— from a Dec. 25, 2006, signing statement by President Bush attached to the National Transportation Safety Board Reauthorization Act of 2006; emphasis added.

In late 1947 Clark Clifford and James Rowe instructed Harry Truman, “The worse matters get, up to a fairly certain point—real danger of imminent war—the more is there a sense of crisis. In times of crisis the American citizen tends to back up his President.” The result was the famed war scare of 1948, in which that accidental President started trumpeting “the critical nature of the situation in Europe,” the necessity for “speedy action,” the “great urgency” of the problem of the Soviet threat. He did this even though, as State Department counselor Charles Bohlen explained in a confidential January 1948 memo, the government considered its position “vis-à-vis the Soviet better now than at any time since the end of the war.”

— excerpt from a commentary in The Nation. by Eric Alterman; Feb. 7, 2002.

RUSH LIMBAUGH: Is this really part of an effort by some in the Senate to try to convince the American people we don’t face a threat anymore, and there’s no reason to run the risk of violating people’s civil liberties, blah, blah, blah?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, it’s been focused especially on the Democrats in the Senate Judiciary Committee. Pat Leahy, chairman of the committee, has opposed parts of the statute that we think are essential in terms of going forward, including specifically this retroactive liability provision. But I don’t like to question people’s motives. I assume he’s got reasons why he believes the way he does, but the fact is it’s their inability to resolve that issue that’s delayed passage on this legislation.

I think there are people out there, frankly, Rush, that don’t like what we’ve done, that are opposed to the bold action and tough decisions the President has made since 9/11. I think there were a lot of people who were panicky in the aftermath of 9/11, but now that we’ve demonstrated our ability to defend the country for the last six-and-a-half years, they want to act as though there’s no threat and we don’t need to take these important measures.

But the fact of the matter is, the threat is still there, it still exists. I look at it every day in our intelligence brief. We need to perpetuate and protect our capabilities here, as well as in terms of our ability to interrogate prisoners.

— excerpt from radio interview of Vice President Dick Cheney, conducted by Rush Limbaugh; Jan. 30; emphasis added.

Debates about the extent of presidential constitutional powers are as old as the republic itself, as the debates between James Madison and Alexander Hamilton illustrated. There is, however, general agreement that the past wartime presidents, including Lincoln, Wilson and F.D.R., have exerted their constitutional powers to the utmost. At the same time, any president should endeavor to work cooperatively with Congress as much as possible.

— from a written statement from the presidential campaign of Sen. John McCain, quoted in a New York Times analysis by James Risen; June 22.

photo credits:

• Declaration of Independence: Library of Congress
• Agenda for America poster: 4president.org
• Michael Brown, former head of FEMA: Allen Fredrickson, Reuters
• President Nixon leaving the White House, Aug. 9, 1974: Nixon Presidential Library & Museum
• President Bush: Joyce N. Boghosian, The White House
• President Harry S. Truman with pistols: Harry S. Truman Library and Museum
• Vice President Cheney: David Bohrer, The White House

Quotabull is a weekly feature of Scholars & Rogues.

I don’t have pet peeves. I have major, psychotic hatreds.

— George Carlin, who died early this week at age 71; June 23

At this very moment, as we sit here, women around the world are giving birth, raising children, cooking meals, washing clothes, cleaning houses, planting crops, working on assembly lines, running companies, and running countries. Women also are dying from diseases that should have been prevented or treated. They are watching their children succumb to malnutrition caused by poverty and economic deprivation. They are being denied the right to go to school by their own fathers and brothers. They are being forced into prostitution, and they are being barred from the bank lending offices and banned from the ballot box.

— excerpt from Hillary Rodham Clinton’s address to the U.N. 4th World Conference on Women in Beijing, China; Sept. 5, 1995.

Democrats never agree on anything, that’s why they’re Democrats. If they agreed with each other, they would be Republicans.

— Will Rogers

Sen. Specter: In our initial conversation, you talked about the stability and humility in the law. Would you agree with those articulations of the principles of stare decisis, as you had contemplated them, as you said you looked for stability in the law?

Judge Roberts: Yes, Mr. Chairman, I would. I would point out that the principle goes back even farther than Cardozo and Frankfurter. Hamilton, in Federalist No. 78, said that, To avoid an arbitrary discretion in the judges, they need to be bound down by rules and precedents. So, even that far back, the founders appreciated the role of precedent in promoting evenhandedness, predictability, stability, adherence of integrity in the judicial process.

— exchange between Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., then-chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and John Roberts during confirmation hearings on Judge Roberts’ nomination to be chief justice of the United States; Sept. 13, 2005.

Since our decision in Miller, hundreds of judges have relied on the view of the Amendment we endorsed there; we ourselves affirmed it in 1980.

— from Justice John Paul Stevens’ dissent in District of Columbia v. Heller, in which the U.S. Supreme Court, in throwing out a D.C. ordinance against handguns, ruled that the Constitution protects an individual’s right to have a gun; Miller was a 1939 case that directly addressed the Second Amendment; June 26; emphasis added.

You guys are great on ‘Beat the Clock.’

— an exasperated Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., as members of the House Judiciary Committee questioned David Addington, chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, and John Yoo, formerly of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, on definitions of torture and executive authority; June 27.

Cities routinely build in the flood plain. That’s not an act of God; that’s an act of City Council.

— Kamyar Enshayan, a professor and director of an environmental center at the University of Northern Iowa and a Cedar Falls, Iowa, City Council member, explaining that recent Midwest flooding has more to do with human nature than nature; June 19.

The congressman’s appropriations projects are carefully vetted to ensure they are consistent with the needs and interests of his constituency, and there is no connection between his fundraising efforts and his work in Congress.

— Vincent Perez, spokesman for Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, explaining that no connection exists between a $4 million earmark for Digital Fusion and $18,000 in campaign contributions from Digital Fusion executives; The Washington Post’s Robert O’Harrow Jr. reports that “[m]ore than a year after Congress pledged to curb pork barrel funding known as earmarks, lawmakers are gearing up for another spending binge, directing billions toward organizations and companies in their home districts”; June 13.

This legislation will bring unprecedented transparency to lobbyists’ activities. On the first day of the 110th Congress, we passed a landmark rules package, and this is another important step to strengthen accountability and public trust.

.
— from a July 31, 2007, press release on the Senate Web site of Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, in which he announced his vote supporting the final House-Senate agreement on the Honest Leadership, Open Government Act of 2007, an act that, according to his release, would “[s]trengthen Senate Ethics Rules, similar to already enacted House Reforms: Includes a variety of changes to Senate rules, including a ban on gift and travel by lobbyists and full disclosure of earmarks.” [emphasis added]

This is a con job. It’s a diversion. These guys ought to be given a Mandrake the Magician permanent title, for pretending that this has anything to do with solving gas prices today.

— Rep. David R. Obey, D-Wisc., chairman of the Appropriations Committee, after adjourning a hearing in which, according to a story by David M. Herszenhorn of The New York Times, “he was ambushed by Republicans with an amendment to allow drilling on the outer continental shelf off both coasts”; June 27.

A two-page “survival guide” issued in 2007 to interns in Rep. Don Young’s (R–AK) office lists nine transportation lobbyists as “The A Team” and informs interns that “[t]hese people can talk to whomever they want” when phoning the office. Phone calls from other Members of Congress, however, must be directed to two Young staffers, according to the memorandum. The document is titled “The 2111″, a reference to Rep. Young’s Rayburn Office Number.

— from a report on the Web site of Taxpayers for Common Sense; June 18.

When you see a 15 percent yearly increase, that is an epidemic that is out of control. And yet we don’t see a response that recognizes it is an epidemic out of control.

— Phill Wilson, head of the Black AIDS Institute in Los Angeles, in a Washington Post story by David Brown reporting that “[t]he number of young homosexual men being newly diagnosed with HIV infection is rising by 12 percent a year, with the steepest upward trend in young black men” according to a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; June 27.

Years ago, when there was an accident or an injury, neighbors would usually come and help each other. Nowadays, there are fewer family farms and fewer children on those farms, and it’s just not as easy for neighbors to help one another anymore.

— UPS pilot Bill Gross, whose non-profit group Farm Rescue helps farmers who have suffered a major illness, injury or natural disaster; June 27.

President Bush has set forth a clear and detailed plan for making our public schools excellent, so that every child in this country can have access to a quality education. He has included in that plan not only the objectives, but the support and the flexibility that states and school districts and schools and parents need in order to reach the objective.

President Bush has assumed this as his mission — the mission that no child will be left behind. He’s made it clear that he sees the urgency involved in making our classrooms safer and equipping every child with reading and math skills, and closing the inexcusable achievement gap that exists among students attending public schools across this country — primarily among minority students and economically disadvantaged students.

— from remarks by Dr. Roderick Paige during his swearing-in as Secretary of Education; Jan. 21, 2001.

Q: Has the President ever considered an executive order that would ban torture specifically? There’s a letter out now from a bipartisan group of former Secretaries of State, including Secretary of State George Shultz, with whom the President was a couple of weeks ago, and former Defense Secretaries and military officials saying that there should be an executive order with the force of law saying that torture is unacceptable.

MS. PERINO: Well, we certainly respect the views of George Shultz. And one thing I would point to is that we have a set of laws that have been passed during this administration, and an executive order, in fact. There was the Detainee Treatment Act, there was the Military Commissions Act, and then there was the President’s executive order interpreting Common Article 3.

So we feel like we have taken steps to address that issue. And I would also point out that we face a very different enemy today than America has ever faced before. We face an enemy that respects no borders, respects no uniforms, and certainly has no regard for civilians, especially innocent women and children and the elderly. So we take his position seriously, but we do think that we have the mechanisms in place to address the issue.

— exchange between reporter and press secretary Dana Perino at a White House press briefing; June 25.

I am shocked. I think all this is a provocation. If I get punished, I’ll quit training and do something else.

— Bulgarian weightlifter Ivan Stoitsov, who took two gold medals at last year’s world championships, after he and 10 teammates — seven men and three women — tested positive for the banned anabolic substance methandienon; Bulgaria withdrew its weightlifting team from the Olympics; June 27.

[W]e are making broad and dramatic progress against corporate fraud in America. We’re defending our free enterprise system against corruption and crime. And we’re beginning a new era of corporate integrity. Corporate responsibility is essential to America. It’s essential to shareholders. It is essential to investors.

— President Bush, unveiling a Corporate Fraud Task Force at the White House-sponsored Corporate Fraud Conference on Sept. 26, 2002.

That was a complete victory for the defendants. The judicial system has become more conservative and more sensitive to economic rights and business interests. This is one of many cases that has restricted the scope of investor recovery.

— Georgetown University law professor Donald C. Langevoort, commenting on the Supreme Court’s decision in Stoneridge Investment Partners v. Scientific-Atlanta that “strictly limited the ability of investors who lost money through corporate fraud to sue other businesses that may have helped facilitate the crime”; Jan. 16.

There isn’t a lot of latitude these days to indulge controversy or ideas in fashion, and so even Miuccia Prada in her strong collection seemed far less intent than usual on engaging in what Carlo Antonelli, the editor of Italian Rolling Stone, termed “the discourse about gender.” In other words, Prada ditched the peplums and other feminizing elements of her last, determinedly noncommercial collection and sent out a tightly organized presentation that combined elements of sports and formal wear and that eroticized men without rendering them drones.

— from a review of the Milan Fashion Week by Guy Trebay of The New York Times; June 26.

I have a million children.

— Kermit Love, the creator of many “Sesame Street” characters including Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch, who died this week at 91; June 26.

photo credits:

• George Carlin: HBO promotional photo via Associated Press
• Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack O’Bama at “unity” rally: Jim Bourg, Reuters

• Rep. Silvestre Reyes: Rep. Reyes’ Senate Web site
• male model at Milan Fashion Week: Matteo Bazzi, EPA

Quotabull is a weekly feature of Scholars & Rogues.

I know that I speak for all Americans. We’ll do everything necessary to try and rebuild their lives.

— Republican presidential candidate John McCain while inspecting flooding in Columbus Junction, Iowa, a town of 1,900 people; June 20; emphasis added.

The country stands with you. We’ll do all in our power to help you.

— President Bush, addressing residents of the Gulf Coast at the end of a Rose Garden press briefing on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina; Aug. 31, 2005; emphasis added.

Flood Fighter 2008, Iowa City, Iowa

— words on a T-shirt to be sold nationally by a Davenport, Iowa, business founder to aid his alma mater; VictoryStore.com, founded by University of Iowa alumnus Steve Grubbs, will donate 70 percent of gross proceeds from sales of two flood-themed T-shirts to the university’s flood relief fund; June 20.

That water’s going to come down that street and take a left turn. I don’t usually drink beer, but I’m going to sit on the porch and pop a top because I’m in for a tough road ahead. I don’t have the money to move it. I’m three months behind on my truck payments.

— Keith Abernathy of Winfield, Mo. (population about 900 people), unable to move his house trailer and facing an impending flood caused by a levee break; Malcolm Gay and Monica Davey of The New York Times reported that one of Winfield’s two levees burst, flooding 250 homes; June 20.

Pro-patient, pro-competition and pro-intellectual property.

— a description by David Reid, pharmaceutical giant Pfizer’s acting general counsel, of the agreement between Pfizer and Ranbaxy Laboratories, an Indian generic drug maker, that would delay Ranbaxy’s plan to market a generic version of Lipitor, the world’s best-selling medicine, until November 2011; Lipitor costs up to $3 a day, but a generic version could sell for less than a dollar, saving consumers money but eroding Pfizer’s sales ($12.7 billion in 2007) ; June 18.

We hope to see a bluer sky.

— Zhou Zhengyu, a spokesman for Beijing’s traffic committee, announcing temporary new rules that restrict owners of private cars to driving on alternate days and extend hours that public transportation operates to improve air quality for the Olympics; June 20.

Anchormen are leading men. If they made a movie about Peter Jennings, Carey Grant would have played him; Peter Falk would have played me. I’m more of a character actor who wanted the job of leading man.

— Aaron Brown, former CNN anchor ousted to make room for “rising star” Anderson Cooper, in an interview after his CNN no-compete contract restrictions expired; Mr. Brown has been teaching at Arizona State University and will join the PBS “Wide Angle” series; July 6, 2007.

And in the networks’ endless pursuit of controversy, we should ask: What is the end value — to enlighten or to profit? What is the end result — to inform or to confuse? How does the ongoing exploration for more action, more excitement, more drama serve our national search for internal peace and stability?

— former vice president Spiro T. Agnew, from his Nov. 13, 1969, speech on television news coverage in Des Moines, Iowa.

Perhaps no advancement in energy technology could mean more to America than the clean burning of coal and the capture and storage of carbon emissions.

— Republican presidential candidate John McCain, in a speech in Springfield, Mo., in which he also advocated for construction of 45 nuclear power plants in the United States by 2030; June 19.

One reason the State Department misread Vietnam so badly in the early 1960s is that the liberal experts on East Asia were purged under McCarthyism. I fear that a conversation about the sources of violence and terrorism run under the auspices of the Pentagon might be similarly misshapen.

— Hugh Gusterson, an anthropologist at George Mason University, expressing skepticism of a Pentagon effort to “recruit social scientists and direct the nation’s brainpower to combating security threats like the Chinese military, Iraq, terrorism and religious fundamentalism”; in a New York Times story by Patricia Cohen, Mr. Gusterson said the project was ““assigning the recruitment task to the agency that doesn’t know how to do this and ignoring the ones that do”; June 18.

I’d say the majority of the pictures I took for this project were early morning. No buses, no cabs, no noise. Sunrise. It was so quiet out in the morning, you could even hear birds on Michigan Avenue.

— Ray Bauzys, 51, a homeless Chicago man, was part of a 6-year-old photo project called “After Supper: Visions of My Life” in which participants were given disposable 35mm film cameras, according to a story by Chicago Sun-Times religion reporter Mike Thomas; Mr. Bauzys took the photo at left; June 20.

Whenever you get Israel and Iran within the same sentence, you have a price reaction.

— Jim Ritterbusch, president of energy consultancy Ritterbusch and Associates in Galena, Ill., in a story by John Wilen of the Associated Press reporting an oil price surge following reports that “a large scale Israeli military exercise in the eastern Mediterranean early this month could been a demonstration of Jerusalem’s ability to attack Iranian nuclear facilities”; June 20.

Q: Tony, I know you’ve been asked this at least once before this morning, but can you talk a little bit more now about that New York Times report on the Israel doing a dress rehearsal for —
MR. FRATTO: I don’t have anything on that.
Q: Can you say why you can’t comment?
MR. FRATTO: It’s an — on operational matters like that I just don’t have any comment.
Q: Is Defense commenting?
MR. FRATTO: Not that I’m aware of.

— exchange between reporters and deputy press secretary Tony Fratto aboard Air Force One; June 20.

If I was black and blue, it was Gene. And if it was Fred, I didn’t have a scratch.

— dancer Cyd Charisse, explaining how her husband knew whom she had been dancing with, Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire; Ms. Charisse, “the leggy beauty whose balletic grace made her a memorable partner for Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly in classic MGM musicals like ‘Singin’ in the Rain,’ ‘The Band Wagon’ and ‘Brigadoon,’” died this week; June 18.

Things are getting done in days and weeks that normally take months and years. But the bottom line is there’s 141,000 cars a day that have to go someplace else right now, and that’s hard on everyone.

— Kevin Gutknecht of the Minnesota Department of Transportation, on construction progress of a new Interstate 35W freeway bridge in Minneapolis; contractors Flatiron Constructors of Longmont, Colo., and Manson Construction of Seattle stand to make an additional $27 million on the $234 million if they finish the job early; June 19.

So this morning, I ask Democratic Congressional leaders to move forward with four steps to expand American oil and gasoline production. First, we should expand American oil production by increasing access to the Outer Continental Shelf, or OCS. Experts believe that the OCS could produce about 18 billion barrels of oil. That would be enough to match America’s current oil production for almost ten years. The problem is that Congress has restricted access to key parts of the OCS since the early 1980s. Since then, advances in technology have made it possible to conduct oil exploration in the OCS that is out of sight, protects coral reefs and habitats, and protects against oil spills. With these advances — and a dramatic increase in oil prices — congressional restrictions on OCS exploration have become outdated and counterproductive.

— from a transcript of President Bush’s remarks on energy independence; June 18.

We have a solemn responsibility to care for our seas and show concern for the plant and animal life that inhabit them. Oceans bring enjoyment and prosperity to countless people, from boating and fishing, to transporting goods, to traveling the waterways. By being good stewards of the oceans, we can ensure that future generations are able to enjoy the great blessings of our natural heritage. My Administration is committed to safeguarding the oceans and ensuring effective conservation.

— from a proclamation by President Bush declaring June as National Oceans Month; June 2.

It demonstrates that the private sector is beginning to get interested in Iraq, that it recognizes the tremendous potential for Iraq to become an even more major oil supplier. That’s really a good sign, and it will be a good sign if Iraq can increase its oil production, because of course the supply and demand of oil is a major concern to all of us.

— Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; Ernesto Londoño and Simone Baribeau of The Washington Post report that “Iraq is preparing to award contracts to several Western energy companies to help develop its vast oil resources, allowing them to consolidate their positions in a country that has seemed less threatening in recent months as security has improved”; June 20.

Wall Street has lost all confidence at this point. The senior managers have clearly lost confidence in the strategy and have lost confidence in Sue and Jerry, and that’s not a good thing.

— Ross Sandler, an analyst with RBC Capital Markets, discussing the increasing isolation of Yahoo’s leadership team of chief executive Jerry Yang and president Susan L. Decker; according to a New York Times story by Miguel Helft, “… after Yahoo’s announcement last week that merger talks with Microsoft had ended and that the company had instead chosen to sign a search advertising partnership with its No. 1 rival, Google, three executive vice presidents, two senior vice presidents and handful of other well-regarded employees have announced their intention to leave”; June 20.

I made it just in time. They stopped serving gas at the old prices just 20 minutes after I left.

— Zhang Li, a tour guide in Gansu Province, China, after filling up his Land Rover Freelander; China, which has subsidized fuel prices to stimulate economic growth, raised prices of fuels — 16.7 percent for gasoline and 18 percent for diesel; June 20.

A decade ago the thing to deplore was the stereotyping of black models by dressing them in African-inspired clothes (or the Asian girls in kimonos). This at least gave work to minority models, but it also encouraged a Western view of African culture of the many-bangles-many-beads variety.

O.K., so fashion ain’t deep. It looks into a mirror and sees … itself. The irony in fashion is that it loves change but it can’t actually change anything. It can only reflect a change in the air. But what changes fashion? What would finally move American designers to include more black models on their runways? That 30 percent of the country is nonwhite? That black women spend $20 billion a year on clothes? That an African-American is the presumptive presidential nominee of the Democratic Party?

— from a New York Times “Critic’s Notebook” piece by Cathy Horyn on the work of fashion photographer Steven Meisel; June 19.

photo credits:

• broken levee in Meyer, Ill.: Todd Heisler, The New York Times
• Chicago River: Ray Bauzys
• Cyd Charisse in “Silk Stockings” in 1957: Warner Bros. via Reuters
• Jack Ryan drill ship: BP
• Naomi Campbell: Steven Meisel for Italian Vogue

Quotabull is a weekly feature of Scholars & Rogues.

You want a dark, Goth version of Tweety Bird? Have at it.

— Lisa Gregorian, executive vice president for worldwide marketing at Warner Brothers Television, in a story about “[a]n unusually large number of classic characters for children … being freshened up and reintroduced — on store shelves, on the Internet and on television screens — as their corporate owners try to cater to parents’ nostalgia and children’s YouTube-era sensibilities”; June 11.

Your eminence, you’re looking good.

— President Bush, addressing Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican; June 13.

He should expect just like any other citizen to be stopped at a roadblock, which have been there for time immemorial, and they don’t amount to detention.

— Wayne Bvudzijena, spokesman for police in Zimbabwe, after reports that two top officials from the main opposition party were arrested; an opposition party statement said that Tendai Biti, the secretary general of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, was arrested at Harare Airport: “ten men in plain clothes whisked him away. His whereabouts are unknown,” the party said; June 13.

In the two decades that have passed since the honorary degree was awarded, Robert Mugabe has pursued policies and taken actions that are antithetical to the values and beliefs of the University of Massachusetts. I must recommend that we sever the connection that was formed when Robert Mugabe appeared to be a force for positive change in Africa. Today, that promise no longer exists.

— Jack M. Wilson, president of the University of Massachusetts, in recommending to the board of trustees that it strip Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s president, of the honorary doctorate awarded him in 1986; “The unprecedented move for the university, which faced pressure from state leaders, came a year after a similar step by the University of Edinburgh. It granted Mr. Mugabe a degree in 1984. A third institution, Michigan State University, is mulling whether to take back an honorary doctorate it bestowed in 1990. Earlier this month, Britain began reviewing Mr. Mugabe’s honorary knighthood”; June 13.

When times are tough, there seems to be a tendency to say there is too much freedom. Free speech matters because it works. The world didn’t suffer because too many people read ‘Mein Kampf.’ Sending Hitler on a speaking tour of the United States would have been quite a good idea.

— Harvey Silverglate, a civil liberties lawyer in Boston, disagreeing with the argument of former New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis, a liberal, that some of the most stringent First Amendment protections ought to be relaxed “in an age when words have inspired acts of mass murder and terrorism”; June 11.

I think it’s disgusting. People are going to worry when the ambulance comes out to their house whether they are there to care for them or to take their organs.

— Michael A. Grodin, director of bioethics at Boston University, on New York City’s plans to deploy “a special ambulance to collect the bodies of people who have died suddenly from heart attacks, accidents and other emergencies and try to preserve their organs”; May 24.

The Bush administration has spent years not only talking at very senior levels with one of the world’s worst tyrants, who is responsible for genocide, but also reportedly offered the regime major concessions in exchange for minor steps and rolled out the red carpet for some of its most reprehensible officials.

— Susan E. Rice, who handled Africa policy in the Clinton administration and is a top adviser to the presidential campaign of Sen. Barack Obama, on President Bush’s engagement with Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, whose government Mr. Bush has accused of “genocide”; May 27.

When you are dealing with people who have done really bad things, there are difficult moral and political issues that keep you awake at night. But if you see a way where you may be able to save lives and ameliorate humanitarian suffering, you test the opportunity.

— Richard S. Williamson, a special envoy of President Bush who “plans to meet with Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, whose government sheltered Osama bin Laden and pursued a scorched-earth policy in southern Sudan that resulted in more than 2 million deaths”; May 27.

Every 25 pounds we remove, we save $440,000 a year.

— Tim McGraw, Northwest’s director of corporate environmental and safety programs, on the airline’s attempts to save on fuel costs; “the nation’s airlines will collectively spend $61.2 billion this year on jet fuel — more than five times what they spent in 2002, when travel fell sharply after the September 2001 terrorist attacks”; June 11.

We [have] become a space mission company, not simply a seller of seats.

— Eric Anderson, the chief executive of Space Adventures, reporting that Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google, is likely to occupy one of the two available seats on Space Adventures’ 2011 flight; it has plans to buy a Soyuz flight all its own in 2011, with the option of buying more; June 11.

NEW ORLEANS, LA – On May 29, 2008, the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives (OFBCI) kicked off a two-day Gulf Coast Conference on Disaster Relief and Preparedness, exploring ways to strengthen disaster recovery efforts through expanded partnerships with America’s nonprofit sector. As part of National Hurricane Preparedness Week, the conference also emphasized the critical and increasing role of faith-based and community organizations (FBCOs), and their armies of volunteers, in response and rebuilding plans for future disasters.

— lede of a press release from the White House Office of Faith-based and Community Initiatives.

Upon review of our assets and our need to continue to store them, we determined that they were excess to FEMA’s needs; therefore, they are being excessed from FEMA’s inventory.

— James McIntyre, FEMA’s acting press secretary, explaining why the Federal Emergency Management Agency gave away to other federal and state agencies about $85 million in household goods meant for Hurricane Katrina victims, claiming storage costs exceeded $1 million annually; June 11.

I still can’t believe that we bought a billion dollars’ worth of product with a 25-line spec. There’s not much you can do in 25 lines to protect life safety. There’s over 20,000 parts in these homes.

— Joseph Hagerman, a Federation of American Scientists expert who is leading a $275 million effort to develop new emergency housing, on how the federal government, through FEMA, with just a single page of specifications, ordered nearly $2.7 billion worth of trailers and mobile homes to house Hurricane Katrina’s victims; “industry and government experts depict the rushed procurement and construction as key failures that may have triggered a public health catastrophe among the more than 300,000 people, many of them children, who lived in FEMA homes”; May 25.

The traffickers have a paradise here. Justice does not work. The police do not work. A place where criminals can do whatever they want is not a state. It is chaos.

— Constantino Correia, a top Justice Ministry official in Guinea-Bissau who is coordinating his government’s efforts against cocaine traffickers; “Officials said some of the world’s richest criminal gangs are exploiting barely functioning countries such as Guinea-Bissau, which has 63 federal police officers, no prison and a population that still lives largely in thatched-roof homes on dirt roads with no electricity or running water”; May 25.

Jerry Daggle, who has been an Exxon dealer for two decades after working his way up from pumping gas, said he has done well. But he still cannot fathom how the oil company can charge him different wholesale gasoline prices for each of the five Northern Virginia stations he owns. The stations all sell the same Exxon-branded gasoline, delivered from the same terminal in Newington, where it arrives via the same pipeline. Sometimes, Daggle said, it’s even dropped off by the same truck and driver hours apart on the same day.

— from a Washington Post story by Steven Mufson detailing how Exxon “uses franchise agreements to maintain tight control over stations that bear its brand. The company dictates everything from the number of pumps to hygiene practices to the placement of food on convenience store shelves”; emphasis added; May 25.

I find, therefore, that adherence to the general policy of contracting only with providers that do not knowingly employ unauthorized alien workers and that have agreed to utilize an electronic employment verification system designated by the Secretary of Homeland Security to confirm the employment eligibility of their workforce will promote economy and efficiency in Federal procurement.

— from an executive order by President Bush titled “Amending Executive Order 12989, as Amended”; emphasis added; June 9.

It is impossible for any white person in the United States, no matter how sympathetic and broad, to realize what life would mean to him if his incentive to effort were suddenly snatched away. To the lack of incentive to effort, which is the awful shadow under which we live, may be traced the wreck and ruin of score of colored youth. And surely nowhere in the world do oppression and persecution based solely on the color of the skin appear more hateful and hideous than in the capital of the United States, because the chasm between the principles upon which this Government was founded, in which it still professes to believe, and those which are daily practiced under the protection of the flag, yawn so wide and deep.

— from a speech titled “What It Means to be Colored in Capital of the U.S.” delivered by Mary Church Terrell to the United Women’s Club, Washington, D.C., on Oct. 10, 1906.

People have to be ‘record men’ again. They actually have to earn a living. You get a record out there, it sells 50,000 copies over the course of 18 months. You have to work it, because they don’t buy 50,000 the first week. It’s great to see people who actually love the music back in business in these smaller concerns. I’ve never seen people take more vacations than these big record company people.

— singer-songwriter John Hiatt on the emergence of smaller, independent record labels as major labels falter; June 11.

“The American people have reason to question the judgment of a candidate who has shown he will only make the right call when under pressure from the news media,” Tucker Bounds, a McCain spokesman, said …

Mr. Obama’s spokesman, Bill Burton snapped back a few minutes later in an e-mail message: “We don’t need any lectures from a campaign that waited 15 months to purge the lobbyists from their staff, and only did so because they said it was a ‘perception problem.’ ”

— dueling statements from the campaigns of presidential candidates Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain following the resignation of James A. Johnson, the consummate Washington insider whom Senator Barack Obama tapped to head his vice-presidential search effort, … to try to silence a growing furor over his business activities”; June 13.

Sadly for Oscar de la Renta, Cindy McCain, the wife of the presumptive Republican nominee for President, spent her afternoon “just looking” at “nothing in particular” at the designer’s Seventh Avenue showroom. De la Renta is the king of First Lady couture, having done inaugural gowns for the last two grandes dames of Pennsylvania Avenue, and duds for several others. (We’re still waiting for him to come out with a lady-sized “I’m With Stupid” t-shirt for those long nights on Air Force One.) And millionairess McCain, as we all know by now, has a taste for the smart suits and kicky colors that Oscar does so well. So why didn’t she buy? Is she waiting for a discount? Or, heaven forbid, an endorsement?

— from Alexandra Marshall in “The Moment,” a daily blog that “spans the T Magazine universe of fashion, design, food and travel”; June 12.

It’s also good for me. It inspires me to be spiritual and moral in turn. If I’m holding them to such high standards, you can be sure I won’t be cheating on their mother.

— Terry Lee, 54, an attendee at the ninth annual Father-Daughter Purity Ball in Colorado Springs with his youngest daughter, Rachel, 16; at the ball, fathers read aloud a covenant “before God to cover my daughter as her authority and protection in the area of purity”; May 19.

Our condemnation of cultural practices and beliefs in our own country that violate girls’ and young women’s dignity and most intimate personal boundaries should be no less total. For, when it comes to female chastity, much of what passes for “protection” is nothing less than sick.

— from a New York Times blog Domestic Disturbances by Judith Warner, author of “Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety”; June 12.

Men are telling us that being a good dad is important to them, and this notion of a detached guy separate from the family and who is either ignored or reviled, that’s not a message that’s going to resonate with the dads we talked to.

— John January, director of brand voice at Kansas City ad agency Sullivan Higdon & Sink and the father of three young children, on a survey of 300 men by his agency about their impressions of depictions of fathers in the media; June 12.

We’ve been saying that for 10 years. We’d like the fans to be able to go home with their teeth.

— New York Yankees pitcher Mike Mussina on a proposal for increased netting behind home plate to keep fans from being hit by shattered bats; June 13.

photo credits:

• FEMA trailer park in St. Bernard Parish, La.: Gerald Herbert, Associated Press
• Mary Church Terrell: Library of Congress
• John Hiatt: Mark Baumann, Rolling Stone
• Cindy McCain: Associated Press
• father Steve McAlpin reading pledge to daughter Courtney at Father-Daughter Purity Ball: Kevin Moloney, The New York Times

Quotabull is a weekly feature of Scholars & Rogues.

We were just having fun making posters. There was no time to think about what we were doing. It was a furious time, but I think most great art is created in a furious moment.

— Stanley Mouse, artistic partner of Alton Kelley; the pair created hundreds of classic psychedelic rock posters and threw “the world’s first psychedelic dance-concerts at Longshoreman’s Hall in September 1965, essentially starting the San Francisco scene”; Mr. Kelley died this week at age 67; June 3.

When it comes to issues like this, [corporations] don’t want to be anywhere near them and they will cave very, very quickly — anything to stop the pain, anything to stop the press from calling.

— Eric Dezenhall, the head of the crisis public relations firm Dezenhall Resources, on Dunkin’ Donuts’ decision to remove an ad from its Web site featuring celebrity chef Rachael Ray after conservative bloggers complained her scarf resembled a keffiyeh, labeling it “jihadi chic“; May 30.

Tell people the truth, and then they have an easier time adjusting to it. The city is out of control. There is no law. There is no consequence for people’s actions. The whole attitude of ‘Me first and to heck with my neighbor’ has become the status quo here, and it is a serious, serious problem.

— J. Stan McCauley, a former Hartford, Conn., mayoral candidate and cable access television personality, likening Hartford to an alcoholic in the wake of “a Thursday hit-and-run accident that was caught on tape left Angel Arce Torres, 78, paralyzed, lying in the middle of a street under full view of passing motorists and onlookers”; June 6.

You cannot say what people are gonna like or not gonna like. You have to stick it out there and find out! If they taste it, and they like the way it tastes, you can bet they’ll eat some of it!

— Bo Diddley, “a singer and guitarist who invented his own name, his own guitars, his own beat and, with a handful of other musical pioneers, rock ’n’ roll itself,” on facing audiences; Mr. Diddley died this week at 79; June 2.

We are a people in a quandary about the present. We are a people in search of our future. We are a people in search of a national community. We are a people trying not only to solve the problems of the present, unemployment, inflation, but we are attempting on a larger scale to fulfill the promise of America. We are attempting to fulfill our national purpose, to create and sustain a society in which all of us are equal.

— from the 1976 keynote address to the Democratic National Convention by Texas Rep. Barbara Jordan, who died in 1996.

We know questions are inevitable given the revelations in the sport. But that doesn’t trouble us for two reasons. One, there is a thing called conscience. Two, Usain doesn’t even want to take vitamin C. We know he is as clean as a whistle.

— Glen Mills, coach of 21-year-old sprinter Usain Bolt of Jamaica, after Mr. Bolt set a world record of 9.72 seconds at 100 meters in only his fifth professional race at that distance; June 2.

In all these crises that the Burmese face, there always is the teaser to take the pressure off the government. They seem like they are going to cooperate, and just as soon as comment dies down, anything that is going to be useful dies with it. Look back at the ‘saffron revolution,’ when they made all kinds of promises about what they were going to do and nothing happened.

— Josef Silverstein, an expert on Myanmar at Rutgers University, on attempts to provide aid to cyclone victims in Myanmar; the “saffron revolution” refers to “a peaceful uprising led by monks that was crushed in September”; June 2.

Cheers! Tears!! I’m here!

— a “tweet” from the the Phoenix Mars lander after touchdown to users of Twitter, a Web microblogging service; the tweets are written by Veronica McGregor, the news services manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.; according to a Times story, “In the past few years, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s media team has adopted many Web 2.0 technologies, producing podcasts, posting videos on YouTube, blogging and setting up a Facebook page”; May 31.

Politicians think in four-year blocks, so it’s O.K. as long as it doesn’t run out on their watch. People think about it, but they don’t really think about what happens tomorrow. They don’t worry until they turn on the tap and nothing flows.

— Raquel Montón, a climate specialist at Greenpeace in Madrid, reflecting on a growing water crisis in Spain; June 3.

As President Bush’s health chief, Tommy Thompson trumpeted millions of taxpayer dollars to help workers sickened by the Sept. 11 attacks at the World Trade Center, even amid complaints that his agency wasn’t doing enough.

Now, Thompson’s private company has won an $11 million contract to treat some of those same workers — the latest twist in a fitful government effort to determine how many people were made ill by the toxic debris — and to care for them.

— lede of a Washington Post story by Devlin Barrett reporting the award of a health-care contract to Logistics Health Inc., a La Crosse, Wis.-based company of which Mr. Thompson is president; June 4.

And the best way to [marginalize extremists] is to use our national resources to strengthen the institutions of freedom. Institutions, of course, include a democratic system of government, a vibrant free press, independent judiciary, a free enterprise system, places of worship where people are free to practice their faith. These institutions include an education system that provides citizens a link to the world, health infrastructure that combats plagues like HIV/AIDS and malaria, and women’s organizations that help societies take advantage of the skills and talents of half their population.

— from remarks by President Bush at the ceremonial groundbreaking of the United States Institute of Peace; June 5.

I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.

— President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, Europe, who planned D-Day on June 6, 1944.

I’ve been doing everything I can to kill him off for 30 years, but he seems to be coming back.

— Walter Williams, creator of Mr. Bill, who directed his Saturday Night Live character in a “Priceless” ad for MasterCard debit cards in which “Mr. Hands pours hot coffee on him (“coffee: $2”), a personal trainer launches him off a treadmill (“gym: $59/mo.”), and an opened briefcase flips him onto the windshield of a city bus (“briefcase: $120”); June 3.

I couldn’t believe it. I know they’re people too, but couldn’t they have gone on doing what they were doing without getting our community involved?

— Sofia Kamma, a resident of Tilos, a tiny island in the eastern Aegean Sea, after its mayor married two gay couples in defiance of “statements by a senior Greek prosecutor last week that such unions were illegal”; June 3.

Q: Dana, is the President disappointed in the South Korean President’s leadership now that he’s backed off his pledges to reopen the South Korean beef market entirely to U.S. beef?
MS. PERINO: Well, we are going to continue to try to work with and understand the South Koreans’ position, and work with our Congress and our industry as we try to move forward. Obviously the President’s position on the safety of American beef is well known. And so we’ll continue to work with the Koreans and monitor their process.

— exchange between reporter and press secretary Dana Perino at a White House press briefing; June 3.

The hype-to-reality ratio of that one is essentially infinity. Seeing an exponential change in the yield curve is unlikely.

— James E. Specht, a soybean genetics expert at the University of Nebraska, on the announcement by Monsanto, a leader in agricultural biotechnology, that it would “develop seeds that would double the yields of corn, soybeans and cotton by 2030 and would require 30 percent less water, land and energy to grow … [using] a new technique called marker-assisted selection”; June 4.

It’s going on big time. There is considerable interest in what we call ‘owning structure’ — like United States farmland, Argentine farmland, English farmland — wherever the profit picture is improving.

— Brad Cole, president of Cole Partners Asset Management in Chicago, which runs a fund of hedge funds focused on natural resources, on reports that “[h]uge investment funds have already poured hundreds of billions of dollars into booming financial markets for commodities like wheat, corn and soybeans … by buying farmland, fertilizer, grain elevators and shipping equipment”; June 5.

There are limits to which we can keep consumer prices unaffected by rising import prices. I know that the price increases we have had to announce today will not be popular, even though they are only modest. We remain dependent on imports. We are, therefore, vulnerable to global trends in oil prices.

— Manmohan Singh, prime minister of India, announcing “gasoline prices would rise by the equivalent of 55 cents per gallon, about 11 percent, and diesel by 32 cents, almost 10 percent”; India’s “state-run refiners and oil marketing companies … have been posting losses of about $1 billion a week”; June 5.

We’re at the edge of the cliff right now. It’s still at an embryonic stage, like where we were in 1973 or 1974, not as bad as things were in 1979. But it could move in that direction if the Fed isn’t aggressive.

— Scott Anderson, senior economist at Wells Fargo, reflecting economists’ view that “[p]rices have been soaring long enough and fast enough … that the nation is at risk of a self-reinforcing cycle of inflation like that experienced in the 1970s”; June 4.

I never wear a tie. Because I believe when a woman gets dressed for the evening, she should leave at least one thing to the imagination.

— Fran Lebowitz, a satirist and “fixture in the fashion scene since the era of Studio 54,” quoting Coco Chanel at the annual awards night for the Council of Fashion Designers of America; June 3.

We have a strict non-discrimination policy at the Seattle Mariners and at Safeco Field, and when we do enforce the code of conduct it is based on behavior, not on the identity of those involved.

— Rebecca Hale, spokeswoman for the Seattle Mariners baseball team, after reports that “a lesbian complained that an usher at Safeco Field asked her to stop kissing her date because it was making another fan uncomfortable”; June 5.

Take a snip of this then play a little riff, don’t be afraid to try

Don’t need no airplane to get off the ground there’s more than one way to fly

Have a little taste, Baby, don’t hesitate, every hit don`t have to be a song

Gonna take you to the cosmos, Baby, and boogie with you all night long

— from “Cocaine” by the Grateful Dead.

art, photo credits:

• Janis Joplin poster: Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelley
• Bo Diddley: Jeff Christensen, Reuters
• Mars lander photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona
• General Dwight D. Eisenhower: U.S. Army photograph, No. SC 194399
• poster for 1967 Grateful Dead concert: Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelley

Quotabull is a weekly feature of Scholars & Rogues.

[P]erhaps the most compelling evidence against the existence of a boys’ crisis is that men continue to outearn women in the workplace.

— from a report by the American Association of University Women, “whose 1992 report on how girls are shortchanged in the classroom caused a national debate over gender equity,” that debunks the notion of a “boys’ crisis,” saying, “Girls’ gains have not come at boys’ expense”; May 20.

I would say the president really has a choice here to show how much he values military service.

— Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., who has led the Senate’s efforts to expand education benefits for veterans, on President Bush’s threat “to veto a bill that would pay tuition and other expenses at a four-year public university for anyone who has served in the military for at least three years since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001″; May 22.

What’s this administration done? Nothing except to increase energy taxes.

— Sen. Don Nickles of Oklahoma, the assistant Republican leader, on March 12, 2000, as Senate Republicans blamed the Clinton-Gore administration for recent gasoline price increases; during the 2000 election season, reported The New York Times, “The average price of a gallon of regular unleaded gasoline, which was about $1.25 at Christmas, is now more than $1.35. This week, the Energy Department warned that the price would rise to an average of $1.80 and as high as $2 a gallon in some places by the time people go on summer vacations.”

The fact that the U.S. gasoline demand can be down and that the U.S. gasoline consumer is no longer driving world oil prices is a monumental event.

— Arjun N. Murti, an analyst at Goldman Sachs, who met disdain in the summer of 2006 when he predicted a “super spike” of oil prices at $100 a barrel from $40; he now predicts oil will hit $200 a barrel and remain above $100 until 2011; May 21.

We used to have a grain economy and a fuel economy. But now they’re beginning to fuse.

— Lester Brown, president of Earth Policy Institute, a Washington research group, in a Washington Post story reporting that “the grain required to fill a 25-gallon sport-utility vehicle tank with ethanol could feed one person for a year’”; about a quarter of the American corn harvest is diverted to ethanol; April 30.

We are seeing a flicker of light after long darkness. We never imagined coal would actually make a comeback.

— Michio Sakurai, the mayor of Bibai, on Japan’s northernmost island of Hokkaido, where coal mining has been revived as oil hit $135 a barrel; The New York Times reported that “fears of future energy shortages … have been an unanticipated boon to the coal producing regions of countries like Japan that had written off coal mining as a relic of the Industrial Revolution”; May 22.

They came at night, trying to kill us, with people pointing out, ‘this one is a foreigner and this one is not.’ It was a very cruel and ugly hatred.

— Charles Mannyike, 28, an immigrant from Mozambique to South Africa, describing what a news report called “a spasm of xenophobia, with poor South Africans taking out their rage on the poor foreigners living in their midst. At least 22 people had been killed by Monday in the unrelenting mayhem …”; May 21.

The campaign has put a very strict policy in place and every member of the campaign is expected to be compliant with it. There may be perfectly good people that have situations that are not reconcilable. They will not be compliant with the policy.

— Tucker Bounds, a spokesman for presidential candidate John McCain, on reports that Sen. McCain’s chief foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, lobbied on behalf of foreign governments over the past seven years and met several times with Sen. McCain to discuss his clients’ interests; May 21.

[I]n both parties, the very extreme elements control the nomination process. And a tiny number of people in a few states make these decisions, and we’re left with these options that are increasingly not attractive to the American people. If you had found the right candidate in 2000 or 2004, and you could have put that man or woman, given them ballot access in September of the election year, they could have won the election. There was broad dissatisfaction with the choices that the American people have.

— Hamilton Jordan, chief of staff for President Carter, in a May 31, 2006, PBS interview; Mr. Jordan died this week at age 63; May 20.

As I watch Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s continuing campaign for her party’s nomination, I see a self-focused politician who, despite the reality of the situation, continues to stubbornly pour money that the campaign doesn’t have into a battle that it can’t win. And over these last several years, I have learned that these are the specific qualities that I do not want in our nation’s next president.

— a letter to the editor of The New York Times by J. Maynard of New York City; May 22.

Although age is not a determining factor in whether or not we detain an individual under the law of armed conflict, we go to great lengths to attend to the special needs of juveniles while they are in detention.

— from a periodic report by the United States on its compliance with the Convention on the Rights of the Child that “as of April 2008, the United States held about 500 juveniles in Iraq”; May 21.

Administrator Johnson was presented with and reviewed a wide range of options and made his decisions based on the facts and the law. Distraction-oriented political tactics of the committee will not keep E.P.A. from moving forward, tackling tough issues and putting into place the most health-protective standards ever.

— Jonathan Shradar, Environmental Protection Agency spokesman, on a congressional report that the administrator, Stephen L. Johnson, had “initially supported giving California full or partial permission to limit tailpipe emissions, but reversed himself after hearing from the White House”; May 21.

To those who attacked them we say, you will not find a safe harbor. We will find you and justice will prevail. America will not stop standing guard for peace or freedom or stability in the Middle East and around the world.

— President Bill Clinton, speaking at an Oct. 18, 2000, memorial ceremony at Virginia’s Norfolk Naval Base, home port of the USS Cole; The Washington Post reports that “[a]lmost eight years after al-Qaeda nearly sank the USS Cole with an explosives-stuffed motorboat, killing 17 sailors, all the defendants convicted in the attack have escaped from prison or been freed by Yemeni officials”; May 4.

We’re already seeing a hurricane premium on gas of about five to 10 cents per gallon. Especially since Katrina, we’ve seen traders build that into prices.

— energy analyst Phil Flynn in a CNN story predicting that if “a Katrina-like hurricane were to hit in July, gas prices could go as high as $5 or even $6″; May 22.

Simply by chance, a pair of new cars fell into my hands last weekend that perfectly demonstrated the yin and yang of today’s auto industry. The Pontiac G8 was powerful, exciting, fun to drive — and as obsolete as the buggy whip. The Nissan Cube was homely, utilitarian and slow — and we all ought to get used to it, because that’s what most of us are going to be driving in the future.

— Alex Taylor III, senior editor of Fortune magazine, explaining that “an era of personal indulgence in automobiles — when prosperity and cheap gasoline made big and fast available to everyone — is rapidly being replaced by an age of limits“; May 20.

When the government attempts to intrude upon the personal and private lives of homosexuals, the government must advance an important governmental interest … and the intrusion must be necessary to further that interest.

— Judge Ronald M. Gould 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, writing for the majority in a decision that ruled the military cannot automatically discharge people because they’re gay; May 22.

There are few things that provide greater health benefits than quitting smoking. When considering the use of Chantix for their patients, health care providers should discuss the risks of smoking, the health benefits of quitting smoking, and the product’s efficacy and safety profile.

— from a statement issued by Francisco Gebauer, spokesman for Pfizer, maker of the anti-smoking drug Chantix (which had $883 million in sales last year), after the Federal Aviation Administration banned pilots and air traffic controllers from taking the drug — after the “Food and Drug Administration issued a public health advisory in February, saying that some Chantix users had developed a variety of serious psychiatric symptoms, and that some had committed suicide”; May 22.

I welcome your response to this letter, and hope it is one that reassures your broadcast network’s viewers that blatantly partisan talk show hosts like Christopher Matthews and Keith Olbermann at MSNBC don’t hold editorial sway over the NBC network news division.

— from a letter to NBC president Steve Capus from presidential counselor Ed Gillespie complaining about the editing of an NBC interview with President Bush; May 19; here are the edited and full interviews.

It is routine for them to write memos and scream and yell, it’s all part of the game. But when it goes public, it reflects a broader strategy to get something else done. Maybe it’s to put everyone on notice that we’re still here, or to put everyone on notice that you’d better be careful, we’ll embarrass you publicly if you get the story wrong. Or maybe it’s a political strategy to help McCain and help gin up the base. Or it could be all three. But it wasn’t a random act.

— Joe Lockhart, President Clinton’s press secretary, on the White House’s publicized complaint by Ed Gillespie, counselor to the president, accusing NBC of “deceitful editing” of an interview with the president; May 23.

Patrick J. Durkin, of Connecticut, to be a Member of the Board of Directors of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation for a term expiring December 17, 2009 …

— from a May 22 nomination announcement by President Bush; Patrick J. Durkin, a managing director of Credit Suisse First Boston, was a two-time Bush Pioneer fundraising “bundler” of at least $100,000; Patrick Durkin is listed as a “Trailblazer” (bundlers of at least $100,000) for presidential candidate John McCain.

Q: Farm bill — where are we with the farm bill?
MS. PERINO: You tell me — or the Democrats tell me.
Q: What did he veto?
MS. PERINO: He vetoed — the President vetoed the bill that the Democrats sent us. And, look, I understand there’s a technical error and we’ll have to see what the Congress decides to do, but maybe it gives them one more chance to take a look and think about how much they’re asking the taxpayers to spend at a time of record farm income. The Congress had an opportunity to put forward — I’m sorry — to implement reforms, much needed reforms, and they decided not to. And I think with this move it shows that they can even up screw up spending the taxpayers’ money unwisely.
Q: What was that —
MS. PERINO: Said they can — they’ve proved that they can even screw up spending the taxpayers’ money unwisely. (Laughter.) Laughter by reporters. (Laughter.)

— exchange between reporter and press secretary Dana Perino at a White House press briefing; May 22.

This younger generation, it’s not that they’re more relaxed about grooming — they still spend time at the salon — but the grooming rules are different.

— Kerry Diamond, a vice president for public relations at Lancôme, on a trend described by New York Times style writer Melena Ryzik as “Over the last few years — since the era of the skull print scarf, let’s say, or the (metaphorical) rise of the Olsen twins — having streaked, chipped or just plain grotty nail polish no longer suggests drug addiction, manual labor or pure laziness. Like untied high-tops, thread-worn jeans and bedhead, it’s now part of a deliberate look“; May 22; emphasis added.

photo credits:
corn and tractor: Michael Williamson, The Washington Post
Hamilton Jordan: Atlanta Journal-Constitution
forecast graphic: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency
chipped nails: Robert Stolarik, The New York Times

Quotabull is a weekly feature of Scholars & Rogues.

Hhaing The Yu, 29, in rain falling on the ruins of his home, in a township outside Yangon, Myanmar.

This is not about politics; it is about saving people’s lives. There is absolutely no more time to lose.

— United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, pressing the military junta in Myanmar to accept international assistance as hundreds of thousands of its citizens reel from the effects of a devastating cyclone earlier this month; May 14.

• Oppose those relying on external elements, acting as stooges, holding negative views
• Oppose those trying to jeopardize stability of the State and progress of the nation
• Oppose foreign nations interfering in internal affairs of the State
• Crush all internal and external destructive elements as the common enemy

— text under the page 2 headline “People’s Desire” in the May 13 edition of Myanmar’s state newspaper, The New Light of Myanmar.

So many of the loans made were irresponsible — for the borrowers and for the lenders. Lenders have an interest in painting themselves as responsible, even caring entities. They want to cast blame for the sub-prime meltdown as much as possible on their borrowers.

— Kurt Eggert, an expert on predatory lending at Chapman University Law School in Anaheim, Calif.; May 10.

This listing will not stop global climate change or prevent any sea ice from melting. At no time was there ever a suggestion that this was not my decision.

— Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne on the Bush administration’s decision to declare the polar bear a threatened species because of the decline in Arctic sea ice from global warming; an April 29 court order forced the Interior Department to act by May 15; May 14.

If all the members of the House would go out onto the steps and clap our hands three times and say, ‘Down prices, down prices,’ that would have as much impact as passing this bill.

— Rep. Joe L. Barton of Texas, the senior Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, on Congress’s vote to order the Bush administration to halt stockpiling 70,000 barrels of oil a day in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve; May 14.

It is not surprising, then, that many elected officials with input or voting power in the process of the appropriation of the Pentagon budget find themselves in the pocket of defense contractors. Neither is it surprising that these dubious relationships should serve as breeding grounds for the near legendary levels of waste, inefficiency, and corruption that surround the military-industrial-congressional complex.

Two major conclusions follow from this discussion. The first is that, as pointed out earlier, war and political instability in the Middle East are the major driving forces behind the soaring price of oil; and that, therefore, to contain or reverse the rising trend of energy prices requires bringing US troops home. The second conclusion is that achievement of this goal, the goal of ending US wars of aggression, is possible only if (a) money or profits are taken out of war, and (b) money is taken out of elections.

.
— from a Middle East Online commentary by Drake University economics professor Ismael Hossein-zadeh, author of “The Political Economy of US Militarism”; May 14.

What we see at the gasoline pump is increasingly driven by what is happening elsewhere in the global economy.

— Daniel Yergin, the chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, a consulting firm, in a New York Times story that reports gasoline “refiners are caught in a double bind. The price of their raw material, oil, is rising because of strong global demand. At the same time, consumption of gasoline in the United States is falling as a result of slower economic growth and consumer efforts to conserve”; May 14.

We regulate the trading of onions much more closely than the trading of oil.

— Mark Cooper, research director for the Consumer Federation of America, a nonprofit advocacy group, calling for regulation of oil speculation; May 15.

Dubbed the “California,” this concept Ferrari is a V8-powered two-seater intended to cope with ever-rising gas prices and environmental concerns. Among a laundry list of Ferrari firsts, the California features a retractable convertible hardtop and a newly designed, 7-speed, dual clutch gearbox. The slick new gearbox, when coupled with the California’s 460 hp, 4.3 liter engine makes for quicker shift times and acceleration from zero to 60 mph in about four seconds.

— lede to a BusinessWeek story headlined “Ferrari’s Smaller Prancing Pony”; emphasis added.

I propose that we begin a program in education to ensure every American child the fullest development of his mind and skills.

I propose that we begin a massive attack on crippling and killing diseases.

I propose that we launch a national effort to make the American city a better and a more stimulating place to live.

I propose that we increase the beauty of America and end the poisoning of our rivers and the air that we breathe.

I propose that we carry out a new program to develop regions of our country that are now suffering from distress and depression.

I propose that we make new efforts to control and prevent crime and delinquency.

I propose that we eliminate every remaining obstacle to the right and the opportunity to vote.

I propose that we honor and support the achievements of thought and the creations of art.

I propose that we make an all-out campaign against waste and inefficiency.

— President Lyndon B. Johnson, State of the Union address, Jan. 4, 1965.

I believe that we now have the opportunity to say to America that this is a farm bill that truly does assure that we continue to have the safest, most affordable, most abundant food supply in the world. We have addressed the needs of America’s farmers and ranchers.

— Rep. Robert W. Goodlatte of Virginia, the senior Republican on the Agriculture Committee, after the House approved a five-year, $307 billion farm bill that President Bush has adamantly said he would veto; May 15; emphasis added.

Where’s the beef? Where’s the real reform?

— Rep. Ron Kind, D-Wisc., “standing in the House floor next to a poster showing sharp increases in commodity prices — 126 percent for wheat, 57 percent for soybeans, 45 percent for corn” during debate on the farm bill; May 15.

In my zeal to oppose anti-Semitism and bigotry in all its ugly forms, I have often emphasized the darkest chapters in the history of Catholic and Protestant relations with the Jews. In the process, I may have contributed to the mistaken impression that the anti-Jewish violence of the Crusades and the Inquisition defines the Catholic Church. It does not.

— from a letter of apology by Rev. John C. Hagee, “whose anti-Catholic remarks created a controversy when Senator John McCain received his endorsement for the Republican presidential nomination with fanfare,” to William Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Civil and Religious Rights; Mr. Donohue’s response: “Well, miracles do happen. If I wasn’t a believer before, I sure am now”; May 14.

This is bullshit, this is malarkey. This is outrageous, for the president of the United States to go to a foreign country, to sit in the Knesset … and make this kind of ridiculous statement. … He has increased the number of terrorists in the world. It is his policies that have produced this vulnerability that the U.S. has. It’s his [own] intelligence community [that] has pointed this out, not me.

— Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., responding to President Bush’s address to the Israeli parliament in which Democrats believe he accused presidential candidate of spreading the “false comfort of appeasement”; May 15.

Juveniles and former child soldiers should be treated first and foremost as candidates for rehabilitation and reintegration into society, not subjected to further victimization.

— Jamil Dakwar, director of the ACLU’s human rights program, on reports that “[t]he United States has detained approximately 2,500 people younger than 18 as illegal enemy combatants in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay since 2002 …”; May 15.

BAGHDAD, May 14 — A youthful suicide bomber killed at least 23 people Wednesday in an attack against relatives of Col. Faisal Ismail al-Zobaie, a U.S.-backed police chief and former insurgent who has turned against his onetime comrades.

— lede of a Washington Post story detailing how a boy of about 12 slipped into a funeral and detonated his explosives; May 14.

Q: Any reaction to a poll that shows that Americans are more pessimistic about the economy than since —
MS. PERINO: This is the same question ABC asked me yesterday.
Q: I’m sorry, I wasn’t here yesterday.
MS. PERINO: And then I gave the answer and ABC didn’t use it. (Laughter.)
Q: I withdraw the question.

— exchange between reporter and press secretary Dana Perino at a White House press briefing; May 13.

The three panels of Francis Bacon’s “Triptych, 1976.”

Recession? What recession?

— Barbara Gladstone, a Chelsea dealer, after a “1976 triptych by Francis Bacon brought $86.3 million on Wednesday night at Sotheby’s, becoming the most expensive work of contemporary art ever sold at auction and a retort to doomsayers who had predicted that the art market would falter seriously this season because of broad economic anxieties”; May 15.

Cindy Crawford, Christie Brinkley, Stephanie Seymour; I really like the [classic] American supermodels. [But] how do you pick? There’s so many gorgeous girls.

— Marisa Miller, 29, who “landed the coveted Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue cover in February, [is] going into her seventh year as a Victoria’s Secret model, and now [is] the first to debut at No. 1 on the Maxim Hot 100 List”; May 13.

Because of her, I am somebody.

— Carlos Rodriguez, coach of Belgian tennis player Justine Henin, 25, who abruptly retired this week, holding seven Grand Slam titles and the world’s No. 1 ranking; May 14.

Oh my goodness, if we put a drilling rig out there, it may destroy our caribou. We heard the same thing back some years back, that if we put a pipeline through some of this area up north it was going to kill off the last 27 head of caribou. You know what happened? The pipeline went in, that oil is warm going through that pipeline, and what happened is it makes the caribou amorous. Now when caribou want to go on a date, they invite each other to go over to the pipeline.

— Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, speaking on the House floor against putting a drilling rig in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge; May 12; emphasis added.

photo credits:
Hhaing The Yu: Rapport, for The New York Times
polar bears: Alexander Kutskiy, Business Wire
gasoline pump readout: David J. Phillip, Associated Press
Ferrari California: BusinessWeek
President Johnson: Bob Daugherty, The Associated Press
Bacon’s “Triptych, 1976″: Sotheby’s via The Associated Press

Quotabull is a weekly feature of Scholars & Rogues.

If our profits are taxed, that means we’ll have less capital to invest in new production.

— John Hofmeister, president of Shell U.S., to CNNMoney.com; May 6.

These companies are spending a very small amount of their operating cash flow on exploration. They are spending the majority of their funds buying back stock.

— Amy Myers Jaffe, a fellow in energy studies at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy, discussing results of her just-finished a two-year study looking at oil companies and how they spend their money; May 6.

Q: [The] President is more excited, or you are more excited?
MRS. BUSH: We’re both really, really excited. We’re very thrilled, and of course Jenna is so happy and Henry is very happy. And that makes their mother and dad really happy.
Q: Why the wedding didn’t take place here at the White House?
MRS. BUSH: Well, she just wanted to get married at home. She just feels a lot more comfortable there. And it will be really beautiful. This is the time when the wild flowers are all blooming. And I think it will be a very, very lovely wedding, and it will be very like Jenna and Henry. And of course, that’s what we want. We want what she wants.

— exchange at a White House press conference in which first lady Laura Bush admonished the Burmese government “to issue a timely warning to citizens in the storm’s path” and “to meet its people’s basic needs” after a cyclone killed tens of thousands and left many thousands more missing; May 5.

Q: Dana, speaking of Mrs. Bush, what was the motivation behind having the First Lady speak out yesterday on Myanmar, instead of the President? Whose idea was it? And was there any concern at all that one part of that dual message, the criticism of the military junta, could be hindering the other part, which was the offer of U.S. aid?
MS. PERINO: No. Mrs. Bush — it is no surprise that Mrs. Bush feels very strongly about Burma, and she and the President have been working as partners on this issue for a long period of time. And we were very happy to have her here in the briefing room, and I think it sent a really good message, especially to the people of Burma — if they got a chance to hear her, hopefully, through some of the radio programs that they would be able to hear — that the United States cares; that we want them to live in freedom and democracy and justice — have justice for their citizens. And we’d be happy to have her in the briefing room any time she would like to come.

— exchange between reporter and press secretary Dana Perino at a White House press briefing; May 6.

We’ve taken tremendous risks by loosening these companies’ purse strings. They could cause an economywide meltdown if they got into real trouble and leave the public on the hook for billions.

— Sen. Mel Martinez, R-Fla., a former secretary of housing and urban development, on fears that two giant mortgage companies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which handled “more than 80 percent of all mortgages bought by investors in the first quarter of this year,” could fail; The New York Times reports that the companies, whose “combined cushion of $83 billion — the capital that their regulator requires them to hold — underpins a colossal $5 trillion in debt and other financial commitments,” suffered more than $9 billion in mortgage-related losses last year; May 6.

That story had legs primarily because you had him at a tableful of women and they’re all drinking and all talking dirty in a very public place. He was elected anyway in no small part because of her standing by her man. I think she thinks he owes her one.

— Erin Neff, Las Vegas Review-Journal political columnist, discussing Nevada Gov. Jim Gibbons, a first-term Republican, who filed for divorce from Dawn Gibbons, his wife of 22 years, in the “midst of a still-unresolved FBI public corruption investigation and at a time when his administration is struggling to cope with a $914 million tax revenue shortfall”; May 6.

If a gas tax holiday drives the price down by the full amount of the tax (18.4 cents), the average driver would save about $28 ($27.67) between June 1 and September 1. But we think the price would fall by only a small fraction of the 18.4 cents tax – so instead of $28, the average driver might save $5 to $10.

— from an analysis by Eric Toder of the Tax Policy Center on the idea of a “gas tax holiday” proposed by politicians; May 2.

By giving them a car, we take care of both.

— Martin Schwartz who runs Vehicles for Change, a non-profit group that provides donated used cars to carefully screened lower-income job applicants in Maryland and Virginia to help them with transportation and child care costs; May 5.

We monitor grease theft on a regular basis. Right now it’s a big issue. People who were not in the industry in 2006 are seeing this is a moneymaker. … So those people, if they can’t get the volume of grease they want, then they will just steal it.

— Christopher Griffin, director of legal affairs for Griffin Industries Inc. in Cold Spring, Ky.; according to the Christian Science Monitor, “the company collects raw grease in 20 states and boils and filters it into ‘yellow grease,’ which is what is used to make biodiesel”; “yellow grease” now trades on U.S. commodities markets for 32 cents per pound, up from a low of 12 cents in 2006, giving rise to widespread grease thefts; May 6.

A year ago, dead bodies lay on this street for days; no one dared to pick them up. But now we are getting lights and shops have opened back up. Last year, this was a ghost town, but now I feel we are alive again.

—Mahdi Jabbar Falah, a 40-year resident of al-Marifah Street of Saidiyah, a Baghdad neighborhood now surrounded by a 12-foot-high wall, who just moved himself and his family of nine back to their house; May 6.

We’re not dissidents. We’re just people who care about our homeland. What we’re saying is that if you want to have this project, you need to follow certain procedures: for example, a public hearing and independent environmental assessment. We want a fair and open process.

— Wen Di, an independent blogger and former journalist living in Chengdu, China, about a protest against a $5.5 billion ethylene plant under construction by PetroChina in Chengdu; May 6.

People say democracy is just slowing us down, and that we’d be better off if we were more like Dubai.

— Waleed al-Sager, 24, who is advising his father’s campaign for Parliament in Kuwait, contrasting Kuwait with the economies of Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Qatar, which have been booming under absolute monarchies; May 6.

Grand Theft Auto IV, the latest iteration of the hit video game franchise, racked up first-week sales of $500 million, Take-Two Interactive, the game’s publisher, plans to announce on Wednesday. … The company is expected to report it sold six million copies of the graphically violent game, 3.6 million of them on the first day.

– from a New York Times story; May 7.

World Wrestling Entertainment, the producer of the television show “Friday Night SmackDown,” said first-quarter profit rose 29 percent on increases in films and live events. Net income grew to $19.5 million, or 27 cents a share, from $15.1 million, or 21 cents a share, a year earlier, the company said Tuesday. Sales rose 51 percent, to $162.6 million.

— from a Bloomberg News report; May 7.

The United States is committed to the advance of freedom and democracy as the great alternatives to repression and radicalism. The most powerful weapon in the struggle against extremism is the universal appeal of freedom. Freedom is the best way to unleash the creativity and economic potential of a nation, the only ordering of a society that leads to justice, and the only way to achieve and permanently protect human rights.

— from the “Freedom Agenda” on the home page of WhiteHouse.gov.

Sometimes I think the best thing about Barack Obama is that little empty space on his lapel. It is where other politicians wear the American flag pin, a kitschy piece of empty symbolism that tells you nothing about that particular person except that he or she thinks like everyone else. Obama’s flag, invisible to the naked eye, is the Jolly Roger of a politician thinking for himself.

— lede of a Washington Post column by Richard Cohen; May 6.

[T]he county sheriff and two deputies, acting on an anonymous tip, burst into their bedroom and shined flashlights in their eyes. A threatening voice demanded, “Who is this woman you’re sleeping with?”

Mrs. Loving answered, “I’m his wife.”

Mr. Loving pointed to the couple’s marriage certificate hung on the bedroom wall. The sheriff responded, “That’s no good here.”

— from a New York Times obituary of Mildred Loving, “a black woman whose anger over being banished from Virginia for marrying a white man led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling overturning state miscegenation laws“; she was 68; May 6.

[F]ibs can reflect something close to the opposite of the frustration, insecurity and secretiveness that often fuel big lies. That may be why they can come so easily, add up so fast and for some people — especially around closing time — become indistinguishable from the truth.

— from a New York Times column by Benedict Carey discussing recent studies focusing on students who inflate their grade-point average; May 6.

With courage and grace the incomparable Barbara tells the true and riveting story of her turbulent life and her dazzling, hard-won television career

— text from a four-color consuming the back page of the front section of The New York Times extolling Barbara Walters’ book, “Audition: A memoir”; May 6.

Right after he died, people kept asking if I was in therapy, and I’d say, ‘No, but I have a blog.

— Stacey Kim, a 36-year-old book editor in Boston, who “curled up next to her husband and held him as he succumbed to a long battle with pancreatic cancer. The next morning, she went online to post about the experience“; May 7.

One day we’re going to look back on such events and hopefully say, ‘Wow, we’ve gone a long way.’ Future generations won’t have to start from zero.

— Lina al-Maeena, the founder and team captain of Jeddah United, a women’s basketball team in Saudi Arabia, “a Muslim country so conservative that the fledgling women’s sports teams that have begun to appear in recent years remain almost entirely underground, far from public scrutiny or religious clerics’ eyes”; May 8.

photo credit:
Gov. Jim Gibbons and his wife, Dawn Gibbons: By John Locher, Las Vegas Review-Journal

Quotabull is a weekly feature of Scholars & Rogues.

I think blogs are dedicated to cruelty, they’re dedicated to dishonesty, they’re dedicated to speed.

— Buzz Bissinger, author of “Friday Night Lights” and other bestsellers, castigating blogs on HBO’s “Costas Now”; May 1.

It’s one of the bigger Cadillacs. I’ve got a desk in it. It’s like an airplane. … I want them to feel that they are somebody and their congressman is somebody. And when they say, ‘This is nice,’ it feels good.

— Rep. Charles Rangell, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, describing the 17-foot-long, 300-horsepower, 2004 Cadillac DeVille he leases for for $777.54 a month; House rules permit members to lease any vehicle at taxpayer expense; May 1.

While serving as Administrator, Ms. Doan worked to strengthen GSA’s ability to respond effectively during times of emergency and make government buildings more energy efficient. The President is grateful for her service and wishes her and her family the best.

— statement from White House spokeswoman Emily A. Lawrimore about the resignation of embattled General Services Administration head Lurita Alexis Doan, criticized by Congress for mismanagement; May 1.

I have been asked by the White House to resign.

— from a voice-mail message left by GSA head Lurita Alexis Doan for a Washington Post reporter; May 1.

I’m betting we’re going to see regular under $2 a gallon again [but] what we have is volatility and the volatility may continue.

— Robert A. Lutz, vice chairman and product development chief of General Motors, explaining why GM, despite September 2005 sales of Chevy Tahoes and Suburbans and GMC Tahoes dropping 50 percent from August 2005, gas prices near or more than $3 a gallon and negative credit watches by the ratings agencies, predicts the big SUV market will perk up again soon; Oct. 4, 2005.

With rising fuel prices, a softening economy and a downward trend on current and future market demand for full-size trucks, a significant adjustment was needed to align our production with market realities.

— Troy Clarke, president of General Motors’ North American operations, after GM said that “it would slash production of big trucks and sport utility vehicles by nearly 140,000 units this year, a move that would eliminate assembly shifts at four plants and cause about 3,550 workers to be laid off”; April 29.

[Global warming is a] total crock of shit. I’m a skeptic, not a denier. Having said that, my opinion doesn’t matter. I’m motivated more by the desire to replace imported oil than by the CO2 [argument].

— Robert A. Lutz, General Motors’ vice chairman, describing his attitude toward climate change; Jan. 30.

A traffic jam in a suburb of New Delhi, India.

According to normal economic theory, and the history of oil, rising prices have two major effects. They reduce demand and they induce oil supplies. Not this time.

— Fatih Birol, the chief economist at the International Energy Agency in Paris, explaining why non-OPEC oil producers have not increased their output; April 29; emphasis added.

Deeply concerned about future energy supply, the market wants growth, growth and growth. Exxon Mobil does not offer that right now.

— Paul Sankey, an analyst with Deutsche Bank, after ExxonMobil posted its second-most profitable quarter in its history, $10.9 billion, but disappointed the market because production declined; May 1; emphasis added.

Blaming ethanol as the bad guy behind high gas and grocery bills and world food shortages could result in long-term damage. If the argument gains traction, it could impede the growth and development of other domestic alternative fuels like cellulosic ethanol that are needed to displace foreign petroleum and provide U.S. consumers with viable alternatives and an energy safety net.

— Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, waving an ear of corn and holding a box of Corn Flakes, defending corn-based ethanol, Iowa’s biggest industry, against criticism that it is responsible for food shortages and prices; Grassley is one of only two active farmers in the Senate; May 1.

A lot of lawmakers are wondering who the hell they woke up with.

— Scott Faber, vice president for federal affairs at the Grocery Manufacturers Association, comparing lawmakers to late-night revelers who are just beginning to understand the consequences of their actions, which in this case is their passage of the Renewable Fuels Standard (RFS), which requires that 36 billion gallons of ethanol be produced by 2022; of that, 15 billon gallons would come from corn, according to The Hill newspaper; May 1.

We do conduct ourselves ethically and adhere to our responsibilities under the rules of ethics.

— Justice Department lawyer Anthony J. Coppolino, addressing a federal judge in a court hearing regarding whether Justice officials have undertaken illegal surveillance of lawyers involved in terrorism cases; April 28.

The Fed has accurately diagnosed that this is a brain tumor and responded by prescribing an aspirin. In the industry, there is a fair amount of denial. They just don’t get it. There is a calamity within the industry, and they don’t have a new script yet, so they rely on the old script, which is that regulation will raise costs. What we now see is that the unintended consequences of deregulation are worse. Their line is that regulation will cut back access to credit. That’s been their line ever since the small loan laws were adopted in the early 1900s.

— Kathleen E. Keest, a former state regulator who is now a senior policy counsel at the Center for Responsible Lending, a group supporting home ownership, on attempts by the loan industry to weaken proposed new rules on mortgage lending; April 28; emphasis added.

The substantial easing of monetary policy to date, combined with ongoing measures to foster market liquidity, should help to promote moderate growth over time and to mitigate the risks to economic activity. The committee will continue to monitor economic and financial developments and will act as needed to promote sustainable economic growth and price stability.

— from a Federal Reserve statement this week announcing a cut in the federal funds rate; May 1.

We are all neighbors in a small and fragile world.

— The emir of Qatar to students at Xavier University, a $17.5 million beneficiary of the Qatar Katrina fund, on why he gave $100 million to the Gulf region after Hurricane Katrina; April 30.

No nation, no society, no community can hold its head high and claim to be part of the civilized world if it condones the practice of discriminating against one half of humanity represented by women.

— Manmohan Singh, prime minister of India, excoriating those who overtly or covertly support the widespread practice of aborting female fetuses, saying that a “patriarchal mind-set and preference for male children” has led to a “terrible onslaught on our civilization”; April 29.

Q: The New York Times has reported that over the last —

MS. PERINO: Definitely going to be a good question. (Laughter.)

Q: — over the last six years the Pentagon conducted a secret operation designed to sell the war in Iraq and the war on terror to the American people. It recruited more than 75 ex-military officers, many with financial ties to the defense industry, provided them with talking points and an extraordinary degree of access not available to ordinary members of the press, including meetings with the Secretary of Defense, and it got them higher supposedly independent military analysts by every U.S. television network. One of its participants described it —
MS. PERINO: Do you have a question?

Q: One of its participants described the program as “psyops on steroids” and others said that if they —

MS. PERINO: Is this your opinion?

Q: I’m describing the program.

MS. PERINO: What’s your question?

Q: Others said that if they departed from the Pentagon’s talking points, their access was cut off. And my question is, did the White House know about and approve of this operation?

MS. PERINO: Look, I didn’t know — look, I think that you guys should take a step back and look at this — look, DOD has made a decision, they’ve decided to stop this program. But I would say that one of the things that we try to do in the administration is get information out to a variety of people so that everybody else can call them and ask their opinion about something.

And I don’t think that that should be against the law. And I think that it’s absolutely appropriate to provide information to people who are seeking it and are going to be providing their opinions on it. It doesn’t necessarily mean that all of those military analysts ever agreed with the administration. I think you can go back and look and think that a lot of their analysis was pretty tough on the administration. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t talk to people.

Q: Thank you.

— exchange between Raw Story’s Eric Brewer and press secretary Dana Perino at a White House press briefing; April 30.

I believe in democracy, but I can’t stand for someone to criticize my country using biased ways. You are wearing Chinese clothes and you are using Chinese goods.

— Minna Jia, a Chinese graduate student in political science at the University of Southern California after another Chinese student was removed from a Tibetan monk’s lecture after challenging the monk’s view of China; April 29.

Annie Leibovitz photographing Miley Cyrus.

Before:
I think it’s really artsy. It wasn’t in a skanky way. Annie took, like, a beautiful shot, and I thought that was really cool. That’s what she wanted me to do, and you can’t say no to Annie. She’s so cute. She gets this puppy-dog look and you’re like, ‘OK.’

After:
I took part in a photo shoot that was supposed to be ‘artistic’ and now, seeing the photographs and reading the story, I feel so embarrassed. I never intended for any of this to happen, and I apologize to my fans who I care so deeply about.

— Disney pop star Miley Cyrus: before, in a Vanity Fair story accompanying her barebacked photo; after, in a statement issued by her publicist; April 27; emphasis added.

[Miley] Cyrus will not be attending Friday’s red carpet event at the [Orlando, Fla,.] resort as planned, Walt Disney World spokesman Gary Buchanan said Thursday. It would have been her first public event since Vanity Fair published photos this week that have thrown her status as a role model for young girls into question.

For weeks she’d been scheduled to appear at the media party, along with dozens of other Disney Channel stars in town to film the “Disney Channel Games,” a charity competition. Buchanan did not elaborate on why Cyrus is no longer expected.

— excerpt from an Associated Press story; May 2.

I kept wondering what more I could have done. I realize I didn’t found a company or discover a new insect. I feel like it’s coming to a point where you have to do something like that to get into schools like Princeton or Stanford.

— Sam Werner of Norwalk, Conn., who had perfect SATs and was ranked third in his high-school class, after rejections from Stanford and Princeton; April 29.

[S]ometimes some of these students will denounce world hunger but be unfriendly to the homeless. They will debate environmental policy but never offer to take out the trash. They will believe vehemently in many causes but roll their eyes when reminded to be humble, to be generous and to “do what is right.” It is these people, though, who often climb America’s ladder of success. They rise to the top, partly on their own merits yet also partly on the backs of equally deserving but “nicer” people who let them steal the spotlight. Before they, or we, know it, they are the politicians and corporate executives subverting the very moral positions they espouse. They are the (frighteningly) many figureheads who purport to be leaders even as they embarrass our country and mar our history books.

— Amelia Rawls, a graduate of Princeton University and a first-year student at Yale Law School, telling her younger sister, just accepted at an Ivy League school, what the students are like; May 1; emphasis added.

President Bush is well aware that the banner should have been much more specific and said ‘mission accomplished’ for these sailors who are on this ship on their mission. And we have certainly paid a price for not being more specific on that banner. And I recognize that the media is going to play this up again tomorrow, as they do every single year.

— White House press secretary Dana Perino on the impending fifth anniversary of the “Mission Accomplished” banner flown on the USS Abraham Lincoln; May 1.

photo credits:
Dana Perino: Chip Somodevilla, Getty Images
New Delhi traffic jam: Gurinder Osan, Associated Press
Annie Leibovitz and Miley Cyrus: Vanity Fair

Quotabull is a weekly feature of Scholars & Rogues.

You get used to listening to that Alvin and the Chipmunks voice.

— New York state Gov. David Paterson, who is legally blind, on the special tape recorder he uses to listen to long articles or books played “at speeds so fast, it is difficult for others to comprehend”; April 21.

We shouldn’t have to give employers complete control over our private life so they can save a few dollars on medical care.

— Lewis Maltby, president of the National Workrights Institute, which advocates for employee privacy, on a report that Whirlpool Inc. “suspended 39 workers who signed insurance paperwork claiming they don’t use tobacco and then were seen smoking or chewing tobacco on company property”; April 23.

A coal-fired power plant in Bergheim, Germany.

Building new coal-fired power plants is ill conceived. Given our knowledge about what needs to be done to stabilize climate, this plan is like barging into a war without having a plan for how it should be conducted, even though information is available. We need a moratorium on coal now.

— James E. Hansen, a leading climatologist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, on plans to build more coal-burning power plants in Europe; April 23.

Each conflict prompted debates over whether senior military officers were being too deferential or not deferential enough to civilians, and whether civilians in turn were either too receptive, or not receptive enough to military advice. Then, as now, the American people relied on the candor and credibility of military leaders in order to judge how well a campaign is going, and whether the effort should continue. … If as an officer you don’t tell blunt truths — or create an environment where candor is encouraged — then you’ve done yourself and the institution a disservice. [emphasis added]

— Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in an address to 4,000 cadets at West Point; April 22.

The services continue to ensure that numerical recruiting missions are met with above-average young men and women from across America. Low unemployment, a protracted war on terror, a decline in propensity to serve and a growing disinclination of influencers to recommend military service make the current environment a challenging one for recruiters.

— Lt. Col. Patrick Ryder, a Defense Department spokesman, on felony waivers for enlistees; The New York Times reported: “The number of waivers issued to active-duty Army recruits with felony convictions jumped to 511 in 2007, from 249 in 2006. Marine recruits with felony convictions rose to 350 from 208,” about 1 percent of all enlistees; April 22.

I feel way too young to be giving life advice, but this is a great platform to have. This reaches outside racing. This is about finding something you love to do, and following through with it.

— Indy car driver Danica Patrick after winning her first race in 50 starts; April 21.

I was very against pink and purple when I was young, because they were girls’ colors. But that was only because I didn’t want people to write me off for what I can do. When I got into my 20s, I decided that was stupid. God gave me gifts. Some of them have to do with beauty, some of them have to do with talent.

— Danica Patrick in an interview at a TriBeCa party celebrating the 2008 Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue in which she appeared; March 23.

We use the 8-year-old rule. If an 8-year-old is in the room, would it be appropriate for them to watch?

— Charles Humbard, founder and president of ad-supported Gospel Music Channel, on how his cable channel defines “family-friendly” programming; March 10.

It’s about introducing kids to the outdoors. It’s about getting PlayStations out of kids’ hands and getting them outdoors. We’re trying to get them excited about the outdoors.

— Michelle Scheuermann, director of communications for The Sportsman Channel; according to the Web site of host Haley Heath, “Family Traditions with Haley Heath is a newly created outdoor televesion [sic] program designed to showcase families enjoying the sport of hunting together”; March 10.

The message is that the Marine Corps offers a unique opportunity to earn that title and be shoulder to shoulder with your male counterparts. That’s an important aspect for the young women seeking that challenge, women seeking an opportunity for a great and selfless endeavor.

— Marshall Lauck, JWT lead executive on the advertising account for the Marine Corps, which has begun “marketing itself to women in a concerted way for the first time. It is running ads in magazines like Shape, Self and Fitness, which appeal mainly to female readers, as well as through more mainstream outlets like ‘American Idol,’ where the message is a unisex one of patriotism rather than macho swagger”; April 21.

This is a story about smoking, blood pressure and obesity.

— Majid Ezzati of the Harvard Initiative for Global Health, a co-author of a research paper that argues life expectancy for women is declining in the certain parts of the United States for the first time since the Spanish influenza of 1918; April 22.

I want to thank the U.S. Chamber for hosting this reception in honor of the North American Leaders’ Summit between Canada, the United States and Mexico. And for all of you here from Canada and Mexico, welcome to New Orleans, one of America’s greatest cities.

— President Bush, addressing a United States Chamber of Commerce reception during the North American Leaders’ Summit; April 21.

The coverage that you’ll see over the next couple of days for the city of New Orleans and for this event that you’re going down to is really strong among the business community, among civic activists. They are willing to tell their story, they’re anxious to tell their story about how they’re driving change, driving reform, and are the engines beyond the recovery effort. This is both the elected community, elected officials, but most importantly, are non-profit leaders and the business leaders.

— Paul Conway, chief of staff to the president’s Gulf Coast coordinator, addressing a White House press briefing before President Bush’s trip to New Orleans; April 21.

Q: How often does [the president] actually talk to the Pope?
MS. PERINO: Not very often. Obviously he was there last year when he saw him in June. I can’t even remember if there’s been a phone call, so it’s not very often.
Q: Is there ever a regular — is there ever a phone call? I mean, would he ever be in the rotation of world leaders?
MS. PERINO: Let me check for you.

— exchange between reporter and White House press secretary Dana Perino prior to the president’s meeting with the pope during his recent visit; April 15.

In my closet I have the neatly folded American flag that came off my father’s casket. As a young corporal he served on the front lines in France in World War I. During World War II (and in my lifetime) he was an air-raid warden.

During that war — and Korea and Vietnam — he never wore a flag pin in his lapel. After he opened a car dealership in 1948, he never flew an American flag in his sales lot (not to mention dozens of them). Should I now assume that he wasn’t sufficiently patriotic?

To this day I am offended by salesmanship pretending to be patriotism.

— a letter to the editor of The New York Times by William Tuohy of Berkeley, Calif.; April 20.

Oil prices are at an extraordinary high level today. I have been repeatedly stating my strong sense of crisis that the global economy would suffer a setback if these conditions are left as they are.

— Japan’s economy minister, Akira Amari, expressing alarm at high energy costs; April 22.

OPEC has put the maximum supply on the market. This is not a problem of supply, it’s a problem that is very connected to the financial problems in the U.S. economy.

— Venezuela’s oil minister, Rafael Ramírez, on rising energy costs; April 22.

There may be [a fair price] but it would be difficult to get consumers and producers to ever agree on it. Ideally, if there was a more competitive market, we might find out. But it’s not the world we’re living in today.

— Guy F. Caruso, administrator of the Energy Department’s Energy Information Administration; April 11; emphasis added.

This really is a test of wills, a test to see if the United States is willing to stand up for American soldiers and others killed and wounded in attacks or for the oil companies and their profits.

— Thomas Fortune Fay, who represents 37 American military service members injured in the bombing of a Berlin disco in 1986, discussing, said The New York Times, “The Libyan government, once a pariah, and the American oil industry have hired high-profile lobbyists, buttonholed lawmakers and enlisted help from the Bush administration, all in an effort to win an exemption from a law that Congress passed in January that is intended to ensure that victims of terrorist attacks are compensated”; April 22.

October 2006
Interview with Mortgage Banking magazine:

“You know, this is a record-setting housing market that we’re in.”

“If we can pass the FHA mortgage reform that we’re trying to pass, I think that would be extremely helpful — what we call it is the FHA Modernization Act. What that does is give us a great amount of flexibility. One of the problems that has occurred with FHA is all of the regulations have really hampered us, and we have lost a large portion of the market.”

June 2007
Speech on housing crisis at the National Press Club:

“There is no reason to believe we can’t reignite the housing market. I’m convinced this spring we will see the market again begin to soar.”

March 27, 2008
Speech to the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals:

“Now, the boom is over. We meet this time in a more sobering environment, a time of distress, worry and much concern. . . . We saw some of the coming danger in 2005. That is why we tried to get FHA modernization through, then and now. We could have possibly saved hundreds of thousands of people from going through foreclosure.”

— varying assessments of the housing market by Alphonso Jackson, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development, who left office this month as investigators sought to determine whether his agency directed housing contracts to friends and political allies; April 10.

One in three women will encounter violence in some way, shape or form against them in their lifetime. That’s an extraordinary statistic. Yet do we ever hear it?

— Nicole Kidman at a news conference at United Nations headquarters in New York City; April 23.

photo credits:
coal-fired power plant: Ralph Orlowski, Getty Images
Danica Patrick: Chicago Tribune
Danica Patrick: Ben Watts, Sports Illustrated
Haley Heath: http://haleyheath.com
Nicole Kidman: Michael Nagle, Getty Images

Quotabull is a weekly feature of Scholars & Rogues.

In a garbage dump in Haiti, people scavenge for food.

They look at me and say, ‘Papa, I’m hungry,’ and I have to look away. It’s humiliating and it makes you angry.

— Saint Louis Meriska of Port-Au-Prince, Haiti, whose “children ate two spoonfuls of rice apiece as their only meal recently and then went without any food the following day”; food prices in Haiti have spiked 45 percent since 2006; April 18.

904
Million pieces of direct mail sent out by credit card companies in October 2007

688.8
Million pieces sent out in February 2008

— illustration with New York Times brief about credit-card companies scaling back on direct-mail offers; April 14.

Sleep well tonight. Your National Guard is at work.

Since 1836, the National Guard has played an important role protecting our country’s freedom so American can rest easy in their homes and at work, every hour of the night and day. The Guard is vigilant and ever-alert to potential threats in every time zone across our country and around the world.

At home, the Guard stands ready to respond to earthquakes, fires, floods, blizzards, tornadoes and hurricanes, and potential terrorist attacks. Around the world, the National Guard is a force multiplier in the Global War on Terror. At the same time, the Guard is playing a key role in peace-keeping operations in places like the Sinai, Bosnia and Kosovo, while strengthening our international alliances around the globe, providing critical support for national security objectives, world peace and freedom.

Day or night, in peace and at war, your National Guard is at work — saving lives, preserving order and easing human suffering. When it comes to keeping our homeland secure, your Guard remains always ready, always there.

— from an ad for the National Guard in the April 16 New York Times; some emphasis added.

This free trade agreement is in our national interests, yet that bill is dead unless the speaker schedules a definite vote. And it’s not in our country’s interest that we stiff an ally like Colombia and that we don’t encourage our goods and services to be sold overseas. [emphasis added]

— President Bush, complaining about delays engineered by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on a vote for a trade deal with Colombia; April 14.

For seven long years, the president’s failed economic plan has stiffed the American people. [emphasis added]

— House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s reply to President Bush’s complaint; April 14.

That’s a huge issue for so many of my friends who are freshly out of graduate school. … My friends are making decisions based on the income level they need to service their debt.

— Chelsea Clinton, daughter of presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, on the level of debt students incur to attend college; Jan. 5.

We are no longer satisfied with insights only into particles, or fields of force, or geometry, or even space and time. Today we demand of physics some understanding of existence itself. [emphasis added]

— a 1981 statement by physicist Dr. John A. Wheeler, who coined the term “black hole”; Dr. Wheeler died of pneumonia this week at 96.

One of the things that you’ve got to understand is that we’ve got to develop a continuity in order to relate to exacerbate those whose curiosity has not been defended, yet the information given can no longer be used as allegoric because the defendant does not use the evidence which can be substantiated by … What was the question?

— a definition of the meaning of life by 93-year-old Professor Irwin Corey, who has been on the comedy circuit for eight decades, billed as “The World’s Foremost Authority”; April 14.

I have yet to meet a teacher who thinks excluding the arts is a good idea. If you just memorize facts and figures and numbers, you’re not contributing to society. You’re a maker of widgets. [The arts] can be a divine spark that grows.

— Emil de Cou, the associate conductor for the National Symphony Orchestra, which played in a Washington, D.C., concert hall packed with 2,500 fourth-graders as part of a partnership with the Kennedy Center; April 18.

He’s a really nice guy who’s talking about really important issues and I am aware that he is African-American. But there is this fascination, mostly in the press, with certain elements of race issues that, for whatever reason, only get raised with high-profile African-Americans. Have you asked any non-African-American politicians why they are supporting Senator Obama, and if they are getting flak from their constituents for supporting Senator Obama?

— Michael A. Nutter, the mayor of Philadelphia, who is black and supports presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who is white; April 14.

They don’t really exist now. They’re just names. There has been so little activity from so many of them. SCLC rose from the dead, but we’re not so certain life has been blown into it yet. And the NAACP is vital, but they’re not doing what I’d expect.

— the Rev. C.T. Vivian, a former interim director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, on the apparent decline of the influence of decades-old civil rights organizations; April 5.

A federal district judge sentenced Samuel Israel III, co-founder of a hedge fund, the Bayou Group, now defunct, to 20 years in prison on Monday for his role in a scheme that cheated investors of more than $400 million. … She also ordered that he pay $300 million in restitution.

— from a Reuters story about “[t]he demise of Bayou, a Connecticut-based firm, [that] shook many in the hedge fund industry and led to calls for more oversight”; April 14.

Days before the collapse of Bear Stearns, the bank’s chairman, James E. Cayne, paid $25 million for a 14th-floor condo at the Plaza Hotel.

— excerpt from a New York Times story headlined “Despite Tough Times, Ultrarich Keep Spending”; April 14.

There is nothing wrong with it — it’s not illegal. But it’s ugly.

— William H. Gross, chief investment officer of the bond fund Pimco, on reports that hedge fund managers James H. Simons and George Soros each earned almost $3 billion last year; April 16. [emphasis added]

Airlines are going to add as many fees as humanly possible. They don’t need the market to approve fees like they do with fare increases. This is an easier way to get revenue … and they can be extremely lucrative.

— Michael Miller, an airline industry analyst, on the dramatic increase of fees and surcharges levied by airlines; April 9; airlines have piled on a host of new fees.

We were really motivated to try keeping up with what was going up on the fuel side. We don’t like having to do this. [emphasis added]

— Lee Macenczak, an executive vice president at Delta, on the airline’s imposition of fuel surcharges and fees; April 9.

It is not justified because they are delivering less and less service. I think it’s gratuitous. They deliver less and less value, but they are charging you more in an indirect way. You feel completely powerless.

— Sarah Cannova, 32, a District of Columbia resident with two daughters, on the airlines’ imposition of fees and surcharges; April 9.

The whole issue of opening ceremonies is a nonissue. I think it is a way of dodging what really needs to happen. … I think, unfortunately, a lot of countries say, ‘Well, if we say that we are not going to the opening ceremonies, we’ve checked the box on Tibet.’ That’s a cop out.

— Stephen J. Hadley, President Bush’s national security adviser, on reports that some foreign leaders plan to skip the opening ceremony of the Olympics in Beijing, China; April 14.

It reminds me of the bound-foot grandmothers who performed ‘loyalty dances.’ Although the contents are different, the root cause and logic are the same.

— Dissident author Wang Lixiong, who, along with his wife, Tibetan essayist Tsering Woeser, has been under house arrest in Beijing since before the riot in Lhasa last month, on the parallels between on the Chinese government’s training of hundreds of thousands of “official cheerleaders” and events of the Cultural Revolution; April 6.

The picture of a fully clothed model which appeared in a number of U.K. tabloid newspapers can hardly be deemed to be offensive when many of those same newspapers carry pictures of topless models and adverts for sex lines, etc.

— a statement by Ryanair, a European low-cost airline historically known for provocative advertising, after the British Advertising Standards Authority, which monitors ads for taste and accuracy, complained about a “schoolgirl” ad image; April 14.

I don’t think he’s planning to do much this year. I talked to him about the bats yesterday and he said: ‘Leave them there. I don’t know if I’ll need them.’

— Sam Holman, founder of the Original Maple Bat Corp., after setting aside “12 pieces of the lightest-density wood he had” for the baseball bats he makes for former Giants slugger Barry Bonds, baseball’s career home run leader who has not yet signed to play this season; April 17.

Anna Sui delivered sweet candy stripes and sexy short-shorts this season, in her usual playful yet of-the-moment manner. With colorful punk wigs and pops of fuchsia, the collection was bright and wearable, with many Sui signature motifs: graphic prints, florals, neons, thick stripes, and layered fabrics were playful and feminine. Extravagance was in the details-mesh, sequins, bows, feathers and jewels. Puffed sleeves and high waists continued for spring, and a wide-leg white pinstripe pantsuit was elegant and sophisticated, a surprisingly tailored look for Sui. The Anna Sui girl knows how to have fun- part hipster, part fashion, she knows who she is and isn’t afraid to dress to impress.

— from the description of an Anna Sui design in Fashion Week Daily.

photo credits:

garbage dump in Haiti: Tyler Hicks, The New York Times
Irwin Corey: The Professor Irwin Corey Web site
Ryanair ad: The Sydney Morning Herald
Chelsea Clinton: Katherine Frey, The Washington Post
Anna Sui fashion model: FirstView

Quotabull is a weekly feature of Scholars & Rogues.