Say What? June 28, 2011 Edition [Reader Post]

Liberals:

President Barack Obama: “We’ve created 2 million jobs over the past 15 months.”

President Obama: “Of course, there’s been a real debate about where to invest and where to cut, and I’m committed to working with members of both parties to cut our deficits and debt.  But we can’t simply cut our way to prosperity,”

President Obama on Debbie Wasserman Schultz: “If you’re in the foxhole, you want Debbie alongside you, because not only is she charming and has that dazzling smile, but she’s tough as nails. And that’s what’s needed during challenging times.”

Obama on Schultz again: “We are so thrilled to have her. You want Debbie on your side. She’s a mom, she’s got that cute smile and all that, but she is tough. Don’t mess with Debbie. We are so glad of her leadership.”

Former Representative Cynthia McKinney: “We were all stunned when we heard the allegations, because you see, in the United States we do not have free health care. We do not have free education. So the politics in the US right now is around health care issues. It is around education issues.  People inside the United States are losing their homes, and the government of Libya is building homes for people. So when we came here, we saw a society, an economy, a country on the rise, and setting the appropriate leadership model. Libyans were not content to just rise by themselves. They were bringing an entire continent along with them. In so doing, they were bringing all of us, from the Americas, from Europe, all of us Africans – they were bringing us along with them.”

Chicago Police Chief Garry McCarthy: “So here’s what I want to tell you. See, let’s see if we can make a connection here. Slavery. Segregation. Black codes. Jim Crow. What, what did they all have in common? Anybody getting’ scared? Government sponsored racism.  Now I want you to connect one more dot on that chain of the African American history in this country, and tell me if I’m crazy. Federal gun laws that facilitate the flow of illegal firearms, into our urban centers across this country, that are killing our black and brown children.  The NRA does not like me, and I’m okay with that. We’ve got to get the gun debate back to center, and it’s got to come with the recognition of who’s paying the price for the gun manufacturers being rich and living in gated communities.”  There is fairly strict gun-control in Chicago.

Former census bureau spokesman, Sonny Le, tweets: “Let’s revoke Michelle #Malkin’s, another Filipino, citizenship & give it to #JoseAntonioVargas, who has done more 4 America & Journalism”   Jose Antonio Vargas is the journalist who revealed that he is an illegal immigrant.

Union lawyer Thomas Geoghegan, in the Wall Street Journal” “Why is Boeing, one of our few real global champions in beefing up exports, moving work on the Dreamliner from a high-skill work force ($28 an hour on average) to a much lower-wage work force ($14 an hour starting wage)? Nothing could be a bigger threat to the economic security of this country. .We should be aghast that Boeing is sending a big fat market signal that it wants a less-skilled, lower-quality work force.”

Attorney General Eric Holder:  “[the courts are the nation’s] most effective terror-fighting weapon.”

Al Gore: “One of the things we could do about it is to change the technologies, to put out less of this pollution, to stabilize the population, and one of the principle ways of doing that is to empower and educate girls and women…You have to have ubiquitous availability of fertility management so women can choose how many children have, the spacing of the children…You have to lift child survival rates so that parents feel comfortable having small families and most important – you have to educate girls and empower women.  And that’s the most powerful leveraging factor, and when that happens, then the population begins to stabilize and societies begin to make better choices and more balanced choices.”

Van Jones (to Glenn Beck and FoxNews): “We see the effects of your cynicism and your disrespect and your hate-mongering and it’s not just immoral, it’s un-American to abuse the airwaves and to abuse the ears of our children with your lies and your filth and we’re tired of it….You’re not America.”

Minister Louis Farrakhan: “We voted for our brother Barack, a beautiful human being with a sweet heart, and now he’s an assassin. They turned him into them.”

Former New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin in his recently released book, during the Katrina debacle, he thought: ” `I’m a dead man! I have just publicly denounced the governor, U.S. Senators, FEMA and the president of the United States.  I started wondering if during the night I would be visited by specially trained CIA agents. Could they secretly shoot me with a miniature, slow-acting poison dart?”

NAACP’s Rev. Amos Brown spoke about airline personnel who required a young African American boy to pull up his pants: “The NAACP, in no uncertain terms, contends that this young man was profiled.  He’s been a victim of racial injustice, and US Air owes to him and his mother an apology.”

Alan Colmes to Cal Thomas: “You keep presuming the media is supporting this guy [Obama] and they’re not”

Ted Turner: “[climate change is] probably the most serious–and, in all fairness, the most complex–problem that humanity has ever faced.  It is really easy to understand how some people don’t get it, because it’s so complex and complicated.”

Former Democratic Sen. Tim Wirth of Colorado, now the president of the UN Foundation: “[the flooding and forest fires in the United States this year are evidence of] the kind of dramatic climate impact [climate change models have predicted and we must] undertake an aggressive program to go after those who are among the deniers, who are putting out these mistruths, and really call them for what they’re doing and make a battle out of it. They’ve had pretty much of a free ride so far, and that time has got to stop.”

Bill Maher: “You know, I understand we’re on our way to being a third-world country, could we just stop at second-world before we get there?  Why doesn’t he point to this and say this is all because of climate change. He doesn’t seem to use what he has to make a case. I don’t hear the Democratic case being made. That’s my point.”

Bill Maher, apparently talking about Chris Christie policies in New Jersey: “I take it very personally that this is where New Jersey is going; you know, it’s okay if this ___ happens in Kansas and Alabama, but don’t ___ with the smart states.”

Bill Maher: “It’s one thing to argue with the company that sold you a refrigerator that you don’t like, it’s another thing to argue with an insurance company.  How can you defend the status quo? It’s like defending slavery.”

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., on why Air America failed: “So much of the media’s really dependent on corporate money, so you’re not going to see, like Air America failed not because it wasn’t popular. In every jurisdiction where it was operating it was beating out right-wing radio. There was a huge appetite for it. The problem was, it couldn’t get advertising because the corporations, the oil companies, the biggest advertisers, the pharmaceutical companies, which is now 70 percent of the, of the revenue for, for, news shows on TV, is pharmaceutical companies. And so it’s very hard to criticize them on the news. Automobile companies, which is the other big player, and many other, these companies won’t, wouldn’t advertise, they all boycotted Air America.”

Comedienne Janeane Garofalo: “If it was a white Democrat, you couldn’t get so many Tea Party people so upset whatever it is they’re upset about – showing up armed to town hall meetings.  By the way, if a black person showed up armed at a town hall meeting where a white politician was speaking, it would be on lockdown martial law and we’d never hear the end of it.”  One of the iconic photographs was of a TEA party member who showed up armed to a TEA party gathering; which photograph was carefully cropped by the news, so that no one could tell this was an African American TEA party member who was armed and dangerous.
http://theblogprof.blogspot.com/2009/08/video-msnbc-edits-clip-of-man-with-gun.html

Janeane Garofalo: “[I]t is absurd to me… there is no liberal media bias. There’s never been a liberal president. There’s never been a liberal machine in power, per se. And you’re quite right – anything that the right-wingers are doing, you will know what they are doing by what they accuse their opponent of doing.”

Jon Stewart to newsman Chris Wallace: “Being a comedian is harder than what you do.”

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker: “I think Israel is the greatest terrorist in that part of the world. And I think in general, the United States and Israel are great terrorist organizations themselves.”

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, speaking at an international conference on terrorism in Tehran: “If the black box of the 9/11 incident and Holocaust were opened, then some of the truth would be exposed, but the United States does not allow this.  There are those who believe that the goal of 9/11 was to revive the Zionist regime, reinforce stability in the region, divert US public opinion from the poor economic state. In terms of reference and benefits, 9/11 is very similar to the Holocaust.”

Again, I include nutballs like Ahmadinejad here simply because, next to African-Americans, Muslims are the most reliable voting block for Democrats.

Hatem Bazian, at the University of California at Berkeley: “Islamaphobia is just present across the spectrum; it is present in Congress with the King’s hearing…it’s present in all districts across the country where Islamaphobia is being mobilized; it is present in the press; you just open the TV and you have 24/7.”

Dr. Kamal Al-Helbawy, former Muslim Brotherhood spokesman in the West: “The Muslim Brotherhood is organized in 80 countries, and they and the Islamists have a right to establish a global movement, much like global socialism or Zionism… Why Shouldn`t We Have A Country Called ‘The United States Of Islam’…I Propose That the Arab Peoples…Take To the Streets With the Slogan `The Arab People Wants To Remove the Borders [Between Its Countries].’ You may recall that, earlier this year, the NY Times (among many others) made fun of Glenn Beck for suggesting that the Muslim Brotherhood was closely involved in the revolutions throughout the Middle East, and that their goal is a Caliphate (a united Muslim country made up of many smaller Muslim countries).

Lebanon’s highest Sunni Muslim authority Dar al-Fatwa on a law against domestic violence and marital rape: “Islam is very aware of and concerned with . . . resolving problems of poor treatment . . . but this should not happen by cloning Western laws that encourage the breakdown of the family and do not suit our society…[a bill that criminalises marital rape] will have a negative impact on Muslim children. who will see their mother threatening their father with prison, in defiance of patriarchal authority, which will in turn undermine the moral authority…We must continue to follow sharia (Islamic law) as concerns the Muslim family.”

Liberals from the past:

The very cute Debbie Wasserman Schultz: “[Republicans] want to literally drag us all the way back to Jim Crow laws.”

Liberal Newsmen (and women):

New York Times columnist David Carr: “If it’s Kansas, Missouri, no big deal. You know, that’s the dance of the low-sloping foreheads. The middle places, right? [pause] Did I just say that aloud?”

CBS White House correspondent Norah O’donnell: “There’s an argument that can be made, and there are numbers that support that Obama has more aggressively prosecuted the quote unquote War on Terror – if you like that phrase, some don’t – than Bush did.”

NPR host John Hockenberry: “The Taliban has never been an enemy of the United States. They don’t love us in Afghanistan, but they’re not sending planes over to New York or to the Pentagon and it seems to me much more broadly that the debate needs to happen is what is the sort of multi-state strategy for dealing with rogue nations of all kinds. Yemen is about to fall apart. You’ve got Somalia problems. The idea that terrorists just go to Afghanistan and launch weapons at the United States it seems in 2011 is an absurdity.”

Washington Post’s Colby King: “But, when you get right down to it, he [Jon Huntsman], and, and, and, and Mitt Romney are the, are the two Ken dolls in the, in the, in the Republican race. You got Michele Bachmann who is Barbie with fangs.  [Laughter]  I mean, it’s, the, the, the field itself is just sort of a, like a caricature. There’s no substance.”

Liberals being civil:

Jon Stewart, mocking Herman Cain: “If I am president, treaties will have to fit on the back of a cereal box. From now on the state of the union address will be delivered in the form of a fortune cookie. I am Herman Cain, and I do not like to read.”

Rev. Al Sharpton: “[for Gingrich to attempt to court the black vote as a Republican candidate, is] an insult [intended to] cover up the fact that his campaign is falling apart…[This] is something that insults us.”  A Republican talking to Black voters to make his case?  That’s just wrong.

Bill Maher on Bristol Palin: “The ____ doesn’t fall far from the bat”

Liberals making sense:

William Daley, the new chief of staff for President Obama about the economy and the budget: “This is a real crisis.”

Moderates:

NY Times newsman Motokoa Rich: “Two years into the official recovery, the economy is still behaving like a plane taxiing indefinitely on the runway. Few economists are predicting an out-and-out return to recession, but the risk has increased, with the health of the American economy.”   I do not know Rich’s political leanings.

Although PBS’s David Brooks is identified over and over again as a conservative (the lone conservative on NPR, where there are 17 or 18 liberal regulars), he recently said: “Tom Coburn is completely right, and Grover Norquist is completely wrong [Norquist says no new tax hikes or any kind].   If you’re going to have a deal, there’s going to have to be revenue as part of it. It doesn’t mean you have to raise rates, but it does mean you have to raise revenue by closing loopholes. And the loopholes that they’re now talking about as part of the budget deal are technical things about closing loopholes on corporate taxes for a plane and things like that.”

Megan McCain (in her blog to Republican presidential candidates): “You are not cooler than President Obama. No, you are not. No, seriously, you are not, not even you, Sarah Palin-no matter how many motorcycles you jump on in a sexy leather jacket.”

Crosstalk:

Jon Stewart to Chris Wallace: “All the polls showed that Fox News viewers were the most misinformed TV viewers in the nation.”

The Washington Post’s Politifact team : “The way Stewart phrased the comment, it’s not enough to show a sliver of evidence that Fox News’ audience is ill-informed. The evidence needs to support the view that the data shows they are consistently misinformed – a term he used not once but three times. It’s simply not true that every poll shows that result. So we rate his claim False.”

The study which claims that FoxNews viewers were the least informed (or most misinformed) was done by World Public Opinion, and it was a George Soros funded study.

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Bill Maher: “How are you doing? You didn’t think you’d be following the President of the United States, did you?”

Alexandria Pelosi [daughter of Nancy Pelosi]: “Well, I came to the show because after you spent the first half dissing America, I came to tell you how the American dream has people in every other country all over the world still wanting to come here to live here.”

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Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mike Mullen: “The most significant threat to our national security is our debt.”

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates: “We can’t have a strong military if we have a weak economy.”

Barack Obama in 2006: “increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally.”

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Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke: “Part of the slowdown is temporary and part of it may be longer-lasting. We do believe that growth is going to pick up going into 2012 but at a somewhat slower pace from what we had anticipated in April. We don’t have a precise read on why this slower pace of growth is persisting. One way to think about it is that maybe some of the headwinds that have been concerning us – like weakness in the financial sector, problems in the housing sector, balance sheets and deleveraging issues – some of these headwinds may be stronger, more persistent than we thought. I think it is an appropriate balance to attribute the slowdown partly to these identifiable temporary factors but to acknowledge the possibility that some of the slowdown is due to factors which are longer-lived and which will be still operative by next year.”

Glenn Beck: “Ben, if you don’t know what’s wrong with the economy, if you’re just like, [voice] ‘You know, I don’t really know, maybe it’s some headwinds or somethin’?’  Step away from the engine, Ben.  Step away from the economy.”

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First Lady Michelle Obama: “When it comes to the campaign we’re ready to work hard. We did it before and we’ll do it again, so we’re rolling up our sleeves and getting on with it.”

CNN reporter: “How’s the family ready for this [the election]? It’s going to be quite vicious, isn’t it? How do you prepare for that?”

First Lady Michelle Obama: “You know, it’s . we’re ready, you know. Our children, you know, could care less about what we’re doing. We work hard to do that. Fortunately, we have help from the media. I have to say this: I’m very grateful for the support and kindness that we’ve gotten. People have respected their privacy and in that way, I think, you know, no matter what people may feel about my husband’s policies or what have you, they care about children and that’s been good to see.”

Conservatives:

Rep. Kevin McCarthy: “[President Obama has] got to get off the golf course and he’s got to get engaged [in the budget/debt ceiling talks].  He has a responsibility as a leader.”

John Boehner: “Tax hikes are off the table.”

Senator Jim DeMint on raising the debt ceiling: “Based on what I can see around the country, not only are those individuals gone [who vote to raise the debt ceiling], but I would suspect the Republican Party would be set back many years.  It would be the most toxic vote.  I can tell you if you look at the polls, Democrats, Republicans, Independents, they do not think we should increase the debt limit.”

Paul Gigot on Obama inheriting an economic mess: “The question is, did you make it better or did you make it worse?”

Sarah Palin on MSNBC‘s accusation that her bus tour violated US Flag Code by using a flag to advertize: “What a goof! …What a joke! [The MSNBC reporter] has no clues what the laws are.”

Rick Perry, on his website promoting a national day of prayer: “America is in crisis.   We have been besieged by financial debt terrorism, and a multitude of natural disasters.”

Glenn Beck: “We’re the country that invented the light bulb; we are also the country to ban it.” [quoted from memory]

Karl Rove to Juan Williams: “How can an obscure United States senator from Illinois who had done diddly squat in the senate become the nominee of the Democratic Party and the President of the United States?”

Rush Limbaugh: “Obama plans to release 30 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Well, that must mean that increasing supply is pretty important, so why not drill for it here? Why not raise the drilling moratorium? Oh, we can’t do that!”

Rush Limbaugh: “There is news out there from the Labor Department: Jobless benefits are up ‘more than expected’ again, and the so-called experts are surprised.”

Rush: “Profit does the most social good. There’s no question about it.”

Rush: “It has been a political calculation from the beginning not to present a budget because at some point these people have known that their president and their policies are destroying the nation’s economy.”

From Conservative Review #184 (HTML)  (PDF)