Lingua publica

The good and the bad...

web posted May 23, 2005

"Should people be paid according to what they 'need' instead of according to what their work is worth? Should they decide how big a family they want and then put the cost of paying to support that family on somebody else? If their work is not worth enough to pay for what they want, is it up to others to make up the difference, rather than up to them to upgrade their skills in order to earn what they want?" -- Thomas Sowell

"Janice Rogers Brown is no extremist. She's tough, smart, principled, and conservative. She's the embodiment of everything that challenges the worldview of liberal elites." -- Peter Kirsanow

"Democrats have not had a very good run recently in the popularly elected branches. Since choosing the wrong side of the counterculture wars of the 1960s, they have won only three of the last 10 presidential elections. A decade ago they lost control of the House for the first time in 40 years, and now have lost all the elected branches. They are in a panic that they will lose their one remaining ability to legislate -- through the courts." -- Charles Krauthammer

"[Democrats], arguing on [the] basis that the Senate can provide advice and consent without voting, even at the committee level, is a rather 'strict' interpretation of the Constitution -- one that might even be called 'extreme.' How, one wonders, do these hyper-strict literalists find a constitutional right to abortion?" -- Brandon Crocker

"It's no secret why [Mexican President Vincente] Fox goes so far as to provide illegals with tips on how best to avoid detection by our Border Patrol. At my local post office, most of the people in line with me are Latinos mailing postal orders to their relatives. I'm not suggesting that all those people are here illegally, but if only 10 million of them mail only 20 dollars a week back home, it amounts to $10 billion a year. That's a...lot of pesos. Is it any wonder that Mr. Fox is in no rush to turn off the golden faucet?" -- Burt Prelutsky

"Clearly there were mistakes here. It was in good faith, they were honest mistakes, and we are trying to be transparent about it." -- Dan Klaidman, Newsweek's Washington bureau chief on the false story of Koran desecration at Guantanamo that provoked riots and deaths in the Muslim world

"Get better tactics. Don't wuss around. And quit saying, 'They're so mean and vicious.' They only do it because it works." -- Bill Clinton advising fellow Democrats on how to beat the Republicans

"The thought of American toilet superiority being vanquished by Cuba's weighed heavily on my mind. So, I conducted an experiment. I took a magazine. For the purposes of my experiment I chose a Newsweek magazine. I then tried to flush the Newsweek magazine down my American-made toilet. That was a mistake!" -- Frank Salvato

"As with most things governmental, failure does not mean having to try something else. It means spending more money on even more expensive equipment." -- Cal Thomas

"Will the last Democrat with an idea please stand up? It doesn't even have to be a good one. Just pick an idea: a chicken in every pot, an intern under every desk, whatever. But please, Democrats, do something soon to indicate some minimal brain activity before a Florida judge shows up and pulls your feeding tube." -- Michael Graham

"In a Nov. 9, 2003, news article, The New York Times raised the prospect that 'democracy in the Middle East might empower the very forces that the United States opposes, like Islamic fundamentalists in Saudi Arabia and Egypt.' Democracy in the U.S. might have put John Kerry in the White House, too, but you'll notice we didn't abandon the idea." -- Ann Coulter

"The U.S. Capitol sounded the evacuation alarm due to the Cessna over-flight, prompting lawmakers to stop whatever they were doing and flee the building. The nation is so relieved. Any day that Congress can't do business is a day that saves us money." -- Argus Hamilton

"We are not electing Mr. Congeniality. We do not need Mr. Milquetoast in the United Nations. We're not electing Mr. Peepers to go there and just be really happy and drinking tea with their pinkies up." -- Sen. George Allen, Virginia Republican, supporting the nomination of John Bolton as ambassador to the UN

"These mass murders -- this desecration and dismemberment of real Muslims by other Muslims -- have not prompted a single protest march anywhere in the Muslim world. And I have not read of a single fatwa issued by any Muslim cleric outside Iraq condemning these indiscriminate mass murders of Iraqi Shiites and Kurds by these jihadist suicide bombers.... The Muslim world's silence about the real desecration of Iraqis, coupled with its outrage over the alleged desecration of a Qu'ran, highlights what we are up against in trying to stabilize Iraq -- as well as the only workable strategy going forward." -- Thomas Friedman

web posted May 16, 2005

"Nothing more separates Judeo-Christian values from secular values than the question of whether morality -- what is good or evil -- is absolute or relative. In other words, is there an objective right or wrong, or is right or wrong a matter of personal opinion?" -- Dennis Prager

"Liberal students are being let down by their professors, by the world. ...[T]hey're buffeted along by a liberal media. They have liberal public school teachers. ... They have liberal professors. They don't know how to argue. They can't put together a logical thought, whereas you could put a college Republican on TV right now and he can debate you...and do a credible job. But liberals, they throw food, they curse." -- Ann Coulter

"All the world over, politicians and pundits are applauding Sharon's coming retreat. Yet a simple [Palestinian] lettuce-packer...seems to grasp what so many of them cannot: The lives of Gaza's Arabs will not be improved by expelling Gaza's Jews." -- Jeff Jacoby

"Why are Senate Democrats so afraid of conservative judicial nominees who are African Americans, Hispanics, Catholics, and women? Because these...nominees threaten to split the Democrat base by aligning conservative Republicans with conservative voices in the minority community and appealing to suburban women." -- Steven Calabresi

"[T]he federal government is not the only government in the land that misgoverns or that that uses its powers to oppress the people. That, unfortunately, is true at every level, federal, state, local, which means that citizens must be constantly prepared to guard their liberty or they will lose it." -- Lyn Nofziger

"Let me get this straight. The President comes to town, tries to implement what he ran on, gets re-elected rather easily, implements more of the agenda he ran on. You can't beat him on ideas, so you descend into name calling. And then you criticize him for creating the atmosphere of name calling by not abandoning what he won two elections on? And you really expect people to take you seriously?" -- Duane Patterson

"North Korea finished preparations for the detonation of its first atomic bomb Friday by building a reviewing stand to watch the blast. Are they insane? Baby Boomers don't have the sense God gave a goose and even we knew to get under the desk." -- Argus Hamilton

"Well, North Korea is a Stalinist dictatorship, almost a parody of one, complete with a state religion that worships a demented dwarf in platform shoes." -- Tucker Carlson

"A day after Senator 'Uriah' Reid brands the president a 'loser' and then apologizes, a week after Senator Ken Salazar labels Focus on the Family as the anti-Christ and then apologizes, and a month after Senator Robert Byrd brands the Senate GOP as Hitler's heirs, Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) appeals to President Bush to bring moderation to the Republican side of the debate on the filibusters. Now that is rich. Wildly amusing and ineffective, but rich." -- Hugh Hewitt

"On Monday, President Bush attended Russia's celebration commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Allied Forces' victory over Nazi Germany. Bush and his host Vladimir Putin reportedly got along quite well during the event, except when at the end of the parade of Russian military troops and vehicles, George said 'Is that all you got?' and busted out laughing." -- Dennis Miller

"The rhetoric of class warfare is as old as dirt. Even Pharaoh kept the slaves fighting among themselves to extend their captivity. But there is nothing classy about stirring people's jealousy and envy, making people feel as if the world owes them something, or bashing people who take risks to create jobs and help drive our economy. It is classless exploitation to appeal to a person's weakness of understanding instead of their strength of character." -- Herman Cain

"To complain both that Bolton tried to get bureaucrats fired and that he failed to get them fired seems like a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose proposition. Or is the Democrats' position that no bureaucrat should ever be fired for any reason?" -- James Taranto

web posted May 9, 2005

"What the Minutemen proved to the American people was this: The federal government can do something about illegal immigration other than to raise a white flag and surrender to the invasion on our southern border." -- Rep. J.D. Hayworth

"Anyone who was shocked by the most recent revelations of sexual misconduct by United Nations staff has never set foot in a UN-sponsored refugee camp. Sex crimes are only one especially disturbing symptom of a culture of abuse that exists in the United Nations precisely because the United Nations and its staff lack accountability." -- Peter Dennis

"[F]or all the big-hearted Texan backslapping, the Bush-Blair chumminess has always been overstated. Dubya and [Blair] agree on the war on terror, and that's about it. On everything else -- the UN, Kyoto, the International Criminal Court, Iran's nuclear program -- Blair is all but indistinguishable from Jacques Chirac." -- Mark Steyn

"To show you how radical I am, I want carjackers dead. I want rapists dead. I want burglars dead. I want child molesters dead. I want the bad guys dead. No court case. No parole. No early release. I want 'em dead. Get a gun and when they attack you, shoot 'em." -- Ted Nugent, while holding up so-called "assault weapons" in each hand, before NRA members earlier this month

"If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand." -- Milton Friedman

"Even those who write editorials about how we need Mexicans to do work that Americans will not do would not be willing to write editorials for a fraction of what they are being paid. If Mexican editorial writers were coming across the border illegally and taking their jobs, maybe the issue would become clearer." -- Thomas Sowell

"We are at one of those phases in our national affairs where, if George W. Bush sauntered outside and commented on the blueness of the sky, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid would call a press conference and score the president's appalling sense of color. As if any idiot couldn't tell the sky was light purple!" -- Bill Murchison

"Do the Democrats get it? Do they get that they lost the November elections -- indeed, that regardless of past blame the voters said directly or indirectly they want up-or-down votes on nominees to the federal courts now? That, in the words of the Constitution, the voters want the Senate to fulfill its advise-and-consent role? Or do the Democrats get it too well? Do they understand that with congressional division still fairly close, their most effective weapons are party solidarity and threatening filibusters -- and the promise to close the Senate to any other business?" -- Ross Mackenzie

"I am sublimely confident that normal Americans will not be shocked to learn that a Republican Senate plans to confirm the judicial nominees of a Republican president -- despite the objections of radical elements of a party that is the minority in the Senate, the minority in the House, the loser in the last two presidential races, the minority in state governorships, and the minority in all but a tiny number of very small but densely populated enclaves in this country that need to tax Rush Limbaugh, even though he lives in another state, just to keep all their little socialist programs afloat." -- Ann Coulter

"Pope Benedict the Sixteenth said that he prayed that he would not get elected but then he did get elected. Today Hillary Clinton called the pope and said 'Hey can you pray for me in 2008?'" -- Jay Leno

web posted May 2, 2005

"When I was a leader in the Senate, a judicial filibuster was not part of my procedural playbook. Asking a senator to filibuster a judicial nomination was considered an abrogation of some 200 years of Senate tradition." -- Bob Dole

"This is not about two people being nominated to be federal judges. It is about the whole role of judges in a self-governing republic. Judges who decide cases on the basis of the plain meaning of the words in the laws -- like Justices Brown and Owen -- are anathema to liberals. The courts are the last hope for enacting the liberal agenda because liberals cannot get enough votes to control Congress or most state legislatures. Unelected judges can cut the voters out of the loop and decree liberal dogma as the law of the land. Liberals don't want that stopped." -- Thomas Sowell

"[International law] doesn't show what the Constitution originally meant, and it doesn't show what is fundamentally important to Americans today. It shows what's fundamentally important to somebody else today." -- U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia

"One should not invest excessive hope in any secretary-general. The UN Charter describes the secretary-general as the UN's 'chief administrative officer.' He is not the president of the world. He is not a diplomat for all seasons. He is not Mr. Friend of the Earth. And most definitely of all, he is not commander in chief of the World Federalist Army. He is the chief administrative officer. Nothing less than that, to be sure, but, with even greater certainty, nothing more." -- John Bolton

"It seems fair to conclude...that most liberal Democrats...are pro-UN only when it suits their purposes -- and that their purposes are the opposite of Bolton's. That is, for the Democrat left, the UN is useful and worthy of respect only insofar as it acts as an obstacle to American leadership and an opponent of American interests." -- James Taranto

"[W]hatever became of the Republican Party? ... Too many Republicans in the House and Senate are afflicted with one or both of two problems. Either they don't believe in much of anything or they are afraid to fight for what they do believe in." -- Lyn Nofziger

"More than 40 years ago, Ronald Reagan delivered a televised address called 'A Time for Choosing' about the ideological choices Americans faced in the 1964 presidential election between Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater. ... Republicans and the nation are now faced with another time for choosing in the matter of confirming judges to the federal bench. ... If Republicans squander this unique opportunity to repair our broken legal system, they no longer deserve to be in charge of government." -- Cal Thomas

We ask how and why illegal aliens continue to pour into our country, and the answer lies in every Border Patrol increase we do not fund, every agent we do not hire and every illegal alien we release due to lack of detention space." -- Sen. Robert Byrd

"First and foremost, it is worth acknowledging that the demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century." -- Russian President Vladimir Putin

"I had no strong views about the new pope one way or another, but I'd have voted for him just for the pleasure of seeing him drive the U.S. media bananas. Apparently, The New York Times was stunned that their short list of Cardinal Gloria Steinem, Cardinal Rupert Everett and Cardinal Rosie O'Donnell were defeated at the last moment by some guy who came out of left field and isn't even gay or female but instead belongs to the discredited 'Catholic' faction of the Catholic Church." -- Mark Steyn

"I'm well aware, from personal experience, that getting Republicans to head in the same direction is a lot like herding cats, but Mr. Bush has to try, even if he has to bring a cattle prod back from his Crawford ranch." -- Oliver North

"In liberal land, the thinking goes like this: If a majority of Americans seek a change in direction they must be denied by the courts for their own good. But when a tiny sliver of the minority seeks change it must be granted them by a handful of judges for the nation's good. This phenomenon used to be referred to as the 'tyranny of the minority', but is now simply known as the New York Times editorial policy." -- Lisa Fabrizio

"I was reading some interesting facts about the new Pope, Pope Benedict XVI. According to The New York Post, did you know the new Pope has never had a driver's license? Hey, he should come to California, he's an immigrant. We'll give him one for free." -- Jay Leno

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