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Lingua publica

The good and the bad...presented with permission from The Patriot E-Journal

web posted October 25, 2010

"ObamaCare is an unmitigated disaster-in-the-making. If people can be forced to buy health insurance and states can be forced to blow gigantic, federally-mandated holes in their budgets, this country will never recover. Our wannabe socialists in Congress and the White House are already, as Margaret Thatcher put it, 'out of other people's money.' The election in November may do much to blunt their odious ambitions, but they will never give up trying to turn America into a socialist nation." --columnist Arnold Ahlert

"The question here is in one crucial sense about health care, but it is in fact about much more than that. It concerns the federal government's claimed entitlement to instruct us concerning the decisions we make about caring for our health. It is possible, no doubt, to claim that ObamaCare, as enacted last spring by Congress, is so wonderful a thing no one should miss out on it. It is another matter entirely to suggest that the end here justifies the means. That's to say because ObamaCare is wonderful/marvelous/you name it, you and you and you should be made to buy into it. That kind of assertion gives off the odor of tyranny -- a prospect worse, I hope we can agree, than gaps in health insurance coverage." --columnist William Murchison

"A nirvana 'Star Trek' world without money, without sickness, and without envy ignores reality. Yet not only do the Left pretend this is possible, but they sell the idea by using envy and government checks like candy from their pocket. They sell this idea to those in need, taking power in exchange for promises they cannot possibly keep. They have merely shifted the burden, first to 'the rich,' and then always expanding according to ever-increasing needs to the entire producing half of the country. This is not fairness. This is lust for power. This is the face of tyranny in disguise. This, then, is the liberal Democrat message of Hope and Change." --columnist Richard Pecore

"The problem is, and always has been, that once government programs and agencies are created, they quickly become sacrosanct and virtually impossible to destroy. As Ronald Reagan said, 'Government programs, once launched, never disappear ... a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on this earth!' So it doesn't matter that the Department of Education doesn't educate, or that the Department of Energy doesn't produce energy. It's government and, thus, by definition good in the minds of the Washington establishment." --columnist Cal Thomas

"All indications coming out of the White House suggest that if Democrats suffer major losses, the president and his top aides will resolutely refuse to reconsider the policies -- national health care, stimulus, runaway spending -- that led to their defeat. Instead, they will point fingers in virtually every direction other than their own. Come November, it's likely the D-for-Democrat that the president refers to so often will actually stand for denial.'" --Washington Examiner political correspondent Byron York

"One of [Barack] Obama's greatest political weaknesses has been his stubborn -- and unrequited -- love for bipartisanship. ... The expected Republican gains in the coming mid-term elections may solve one of Obama's problems: his misplaced faith in logic, persuasion and cooperation in the national interest." --Atlanta Journal-Constitution editorial page editor Cynthia Tucker

"Unlike Ronald Reagan, whose poll ratings were slightly lower than Obama's just before the 1982 mid-term elections, Obama didn't take every possible opportunity to pin the economic mess on his predecessor." --Cynthia Tucker, missing the fact that Obama takes every opportunity -- and then some -- to blame Bush

"Nancy Pelosi is considered one of the most effective speakers in congressional history. But now she's faced with the fact that Democrats could lose the House in November. You get indignant when you hear that." --CBS's Rita Braver to Pelosi, who responded, "I don't get indignant. I just don't believe it."

"Where is the celebration over what has been done and accomplished [by Barack Obama] in the face of all this anger and vitriol in Washington?" --MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski

"Why are we letting the top 2 percent of the population win over the other 98?" --MSNBC's Ed Schultz on taxes

"[The Tea Party's philosophy is] every man for himself. ... No more taxes, no more government, no more everything. No more safety net. You know these people, if they were every man for himself down in that mine [in Chile], they wouldn't have gotten out. ... They would have been killing each other after about two days." --MSNBC host Chris Matthews

"It may be that regardless of what happens after this election, [Republicans] feel more responsible, either because they didn't do as well as they anticipated, and so the strategy of just saying no to everything and sitting on the sidelines and throwing bombs didn't work for them, or they did reasonably well, in which case the American people are going to be looking to them to offer serious proposals and work with me in a serious way." --Barack Obama

"The single best decision I have made was selecting Joe Biden as my running mate." --Barack Obama

"I think families, as well as the federal government, have understood that you can't just operate on the basis of debt." --Barack Obama

"We have lost millions of jobs to outsourcing under President Bush. We don't intend to repeat that policy -- no matter how much money the Chamber of Commerce dumps into our elections." --House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) getting in all her talking points

"When Barack Obama was elected president, he found himself in a hole so deep that he couldn't see the outside world. It was like the Chilean miners, but he, being the man that he is, rolled up his sleeves and said, 'I'm gonna get us out of this hole.'" --Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV)

"In the course of this year we will have created more jobs this year, 2010, than in the entire Bush administration of eight years." --Nancy Pelosi, who also once infamously claimed, "Every month that we do not have an economic recovery package, 500 million Americans lose their jobs."

"We got this man in office. I think we're all proud of Barack and his accomplishments. Everybody I know in our communities are praying for us, every day. It means all the world to us to know that there are prayer circles out there and people who are keeping the spirits clean around us." --Michelle Obama

"There's no question it is a tough and challenging political environment. Come election night, I think we will retain control of the House and Senate." --White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, reversing his earlier position that the House was likely lost

"I don't think we should be making the case right now. Elections are not the time to educate people. You win the election, then you educate people afterwards. But the president's doing what he should be doing. This is a bare-knuckle fight. It's between the far right, which has taken over the Republican Party, and the rest of us." --former DNC chief Howard Dean

"I think we miscalculated. We had the idea that, particularly in a time of national crisis, there would be more of an inclination to work together." --White House adviser David Axelrod, who did his part to push policy as far left as possible and then cry when conservatives objected

"In interviews, job summits and press conferences, it was shovel-ready this, shovel-ready that. Search the White House website for the term 'shovel-ready' and you'll drown in press releases about all the shovels ready to shove shovel-ready projects into the 21st century, where no shovel is left behind. Only now it turns out that the president was shoveling something all right when he was talking about shovel-ready jobs -- a whole pile of steaming something." --columnist Jonah Goldberg

"I may not know everything about politics but I know this: With two weeks to go it's better for the other guys to be desperate, dispirited, and crumbling." --political analyst Rich Galen

"Hillary Clinton announced Wednesday she will travel to Australia, New Zealand, Vietnam and New Guinea in late October. She won't be in America on Election Day. She'll be holed up ten thousand miles away in New Guinea's capital city of Itole Jouso." --comedian Argus Hamilton

"Vice President Joe Biden told The New York Times that President Obama has asked him to run again in 2012. The bad news? Nobody is asking Obama yet." --comedian Jay Leno

"The beauty of our system isn't that we have the right to vote. After all, Russians got to vote for Joseph Stalin and Iraqis got to vote for Saddam Hussein. No, the nice thing is that people who are too dumb or lazy or uninformed to bother casting a ballot aren't compelled to vote. And no apologies are required. In fact, in my opinion, thanks are in order. Far too many people are voting, as it is." --columnist Burt Prelutsky

web posted October 18, 2010

"The big question for the election next month is whether the voters keep their eye on the ball and judge candidates by what policies they advocate or whether they can be thrown off the track by red herrings. We have already seen in 2008 what can happen when voters fail to pay attention to a presidential candidate's track record, and let themselves be dazzled by rhetoric, symbolism and media hype." --economist Thomas Sowell

"When a coalition of health care groups recently urged Congress to withhold money from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services under Obamacare, we were painfully reminded of Obama's corrupt recess appointment of Dr. Donald Berwick to head the centers. The health care groups are trying to pressure Berwick to answer basic questions about his health policy views. Berwick has advocated rationing and insists that health care funding must be used as a vehicle to redistribute wealth. Obama appointed Berwick not unaware of these ideas, but because of them." --columnist David Limbaugh

"The woman in charge of our immigration enforcement [Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano] said she 'doesn't know' what to do about the country's celebrity illegal alien, Nicky Diaz, former housekeeper for California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman. Hang on -- it gets ditzier. Secretary Napolitano ... [said] that 'obviously this is ultimately a matter for California voters to decide.' I'm guessing the Arizona folks have a question for her: 'Madam Secretary, if it's 'ultimately a matter for California voters to decide' what to do about an illegal immigrant, why can't we? By the way, Gov. Jan Brewer loves your answer.'" --columnist Jan LaRue

"Here is a quick summary of President Obama's recent debate with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Chamber of Commerce: The Democrats' economic policies have failed. Obama: Look out! Foreigners!" --columnist Jacob Sullum

"There's an irony to occupying the Oval Office. When presidents think they're bigger than the job they hold, they shrink in office. When they think they're smaller than the honor they've been temporarily bestowed, they grow into it. Obama has done nothing but shrink." --columnist Jonah Goldberg

"The campaign by itself didn't deliver the change that we need. It just gave us the chance to make the change happen. We've got a lot at stake right now. On Nov. 2nd, I'm going to need you just as fired up as you were in 2008. I hope you're ready to fight. ... Don't make me look bad, now." --Barack Obama

"We want to reward people who manufacture things in the United States, in Wisconsin, not to take them overseas to China and to other countries! [pause] You're the dullest audience I've ever spoken to. Do you realize how many jobs Wisconsin lost? It's staggering!" --Joe Biden

"[I]t's just too hard to explain [our policies]. It sort of a branding, I mean you know they kind of want the branding more at the front end." --Biden on why Democrats aren't polling well

"We're not losing. ... I feel that we will be in the majority and that I will be speaker of the House. But it's not about me, it's about the middle class." --Nancy Pelosi (D-nial)

"If we have a Republican Party that actually takes the White House, actually has control of Congress, but contains a large wing of these people, it's going to be incapable of making real choices. These are people who are as irrational as they seem in these ads. ... There are some seriously strange people running, thanks to the Tea Party. ... It's not just suspicion of government. We have people out there believing that this basically centrist moderate president we have is a socialist bringing Sharia law to America. None of that is rational." --New York Times columnist Paul Krugman

"I think that the Tea Party -- I think that that piece of the Republican Party is vapid. It has no ideas. It will lead us down a dangerous road. ... I think the reason they need to sort of run on the vapid claims about less government equals more freedom is because, at its root, what they are going back to is a Herbert Hoover vision of government -- pre-FDR -- saying, we want to take away the very pieces of government that created the middle class." --CNN's new host Eliot Spitzer, ignoring the fact that Hoover laid the foundation for government interference that FDR ran with later

"We have so many different voices. We're not trying to push Democratic talking points, as some people accuse us of." --MSNBC President Phil Griffin

"With the exception of core Obama administration loyalists, most politically engaged elites have reached the same conclusions: the White House is in over its head, isolated, insular, arrogant and clueless about how to get along with or persuade members of Congress, the media, the business community or working-class voters." --Time's Mark Halperin

"Obama has a considerable ego." --New Yorker columnist David Remnick

"The New York Times looked into the Chamber [of Commerce] specifically and said the Chamber really isn't putting foreign money into the campaign. ... But this part about foreign money, that appears to be peanuts, Mr. Axelrod, I mean, do you have any evidence that it's anything other than peanuts? ... If the only charge, three weeks into the election that the Democrats can make is that there's somehow this may or may not be foreign money coming into the campaign, is that the best you can do?" --CBS's Bob Schieffer to David Axelrod

"The fact is that the Chamber [of Commerce] ... won't release any information about where their campaign money is coming from. And that's at the core of the problem here. What we've seen in part because of a loophole that the Supreme Court allowed earlier this year, we now see tens of millions of dollars being spent by the Chamber and a number of organizations some of which just cropped up. ... So I guess, my question ... is why not simply disclose where this money is coming from? And then all of these questions will be answered." --White House adviser David Axelrod

"What they've done is essentially created a monster [with the Tea Party]. Their rhetoric has been so uncompromising, so inaccurate, so ludicrous, that ... they've given permission for this wing of the Republican Party ... this is a Tea Party group, to say outrageous things. For the mainstream voter, it is frightening to see that." --former DNC Chief Howard Dean

"These are the small-town enemies of everybody. They just dislike everyone. They couldn't come out and say: 'We don't want a black president' -- we've finally got past that roadblock. So what they did was set out to slaughter the opposition party, the Democrats." --author Gore Vidal on the Tea Party

"The White House admitted ... that ninety thousand stimulus checks were sent out to dead people last year. It's worse than that. The dead are late in reporting whether they spent their stimulus money to install solar panels or to retain teachers." --comedian Argus Hamilton

"In Rolling Stone magazine, Obama berated members of his base for their lethargy and 'sitting on their hands complaining.' One leftist remarked, 'I've never seen a politician run an election with the message 'Don't be stupid, quit your bitching and vote for me.'" --columnist David Limbaugh

"The week ended with 36 attendees at an Obama rally in Maryland collapsing in apparent illness. As one wag said it seems like just yesterday Obama crowds were swooning; now they are simply sickened." --columnist Clarice Feldman

"There are rumors of an Obama-Hillary ticket for 2012, though some insiders say Obama doesn't feel he needs Hillary on the ticket. At this point, I don't think Hillary feels that she needs Obama on the ticket." --comedian Jay Leno

"We have a lousy Supreme Court decision that has opened up the floodgates, and so we have to deal within the realm of constitutionality. And a lot of the campaign finance bills that we have passed have been declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. I think the Constitution is wrong. [emphasis added] I don't think that money is the same thing as human beings. I don't think money equals free speech. I don't think corporations should have the same equality as a regular voter in this district." --Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA) on campaign-finance regulation and the January U.S. Supreme Court decision in Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission

"There's no such thing as shovel-ready projects." --Barack Obama

web posted October 11, 2010

"The conservative voices of America, they are holding you down. They don't believe in your freedom. They want the concentration of wealth. They've shipped your job overseas. ... They suppress your vote. ... They talk about the Constitution, but they don't want to live by it. They talk about our forefathers, but they want discrimination." --radio talk-show host Ed Schultz at the "One Nation" rally in DC

"I think [the Tea Party is] more about believing in this preposterous fantasy that white people are some kind of oppressed minority in the age of Obama." --MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell

"This morning, is the Tea Party losing traction? Our new poll says the answer may be yes.... [I]t seems like the more exposure the Tea Party is getting, the less popular it's becoming." --ABC's George Stephanopoulos

"It sounds like we're listening to the Cro-Magnon political party sometimes. They don't believe in evolution, they believe guns should be used against congressmen and congresswomen if you don't like the way they voted and we should reconsider the best thing Congress has done in 100 years -- civil rights. So what do you make of your political party and the candidates that the Tea Partiers have shoved forward?" --MSNBC's Chris Matthews

"I looked through [Obama's] statement, and, you know, when he says things like 'Jesus died for my sins. I'm saved by God's salvation' -- that's about as definitive as you can get. At this point, if jackasses out there question his faith, they're just haters." --MSNBC's token "conservative," Joe Scarborough

"If I hear one more Republican tell me about balancing the budget, I am going to strangle them." --Joe Biden, who quickly added, "To the press, that's a figure of speech."

"Their number one economic priority is giving $700 billion in tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires." --Barack Obama, who doesn't want small business owners to keep their own money

"[Y]ou have to go by the three C's: the Constitution, your conscience and your constituents when you make a vote. What your caucus, Democratic or Republican, thinks is very, very secondary to what I just described." --House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who routinely ignores the Constitution

"It seems to me that Tea Party activists, increasingly influential in the Republican Party, do not seem to much like America the way we are." --Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH)

"[T]he Republicans have said 'no, no, no.' ... They have been the party of 'no' and obstructionism. ... [T]hey do not want America to succeed. They're into politics." --Sen. Bernie Sander, self-proclaimed socialist from Vermont

"Ours is a complex message. The Tea Party message is pretty easy and simple. We just don't have it in our make-up, in our DNA, to mislead the public." --Democrat Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell

"Perhaps the greatest threat of all is the undermining of our Constitution, at the vanguard of this insidious attack is the Tea Party." --actor Harry Belafonte getting it backwards

"If the Democrats can make this a choice, not a referendum, they can win. If it's a referendum on anger, apathy, laced with amnesia, they're going to have a problem." --Bill Clinton

"Maybe after the election is over -- I don't think the Democrats are going to have a very good success in a couple of weeks -- but after that's over, he'll still be president for two years, and I think he'll have a much more forceful presentation now than he's got, you know, a clearer picture of what the situation will be, and I believe he'll be successful." --Jimmy Carter on Barack Obama

"It's an old charge in politics that somebody flip-flops. It's a little unusual to have somebody flip-flop and then flap-flip. Seriously. You know what I'm talking about." --Al Gore

"What [Harry] Reid and his counterpart in the House, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, are hoping is that Democrats who lose their seats in the election will be willing to pass legislation in a lame duck session that they know the voting public doesn't support. In Reid's logic, they will be free to vote their liberal ideology. And it won't matter because they will have already lost their jobs. But it is precisely this kind of arrogance that has Democrats in such poor shape heading into the mid-term elections." --columnist Linda Chavez

"American presidents have advanced redistributionist policies before, but none has used Marxist class-war rhetoric as routinely as Barack Obama. Obama has used the words 'millionaire' and 'billionaire' in just about every political speech he has made since August -- and although Obama himself is a millionaire, he never uses those words except pejoratively. 'Millionaires and billionaires' in Obama's lexicon are people who should be taxed more and held up as objects for public antipathy." --columnist Terrence Jeffrey

"What about the politician who tells us that he's not going to raise taxes on the middle class; instead, he's going to raise corporate income taxes as means to get rich corporations to pay their rightful share of government? If a tax is levied on a corporation, and if it is to survive, it will have one of three responses, or some combination thereof. One response is to raise the price of its product, so who bears the burden? Another response is to lower dividends; again, who bears the burden? Yet another response is to lay off workers. In each case, it is people, not some legal fiction called a corporation, who bear the burden of the tax." --economist Walter E. Williams

"The Obama administration has fewer people with real world experience in the private sector than any other administration in years. Maybe if they had more people with practical experience in the economy, we wouldn't be in the mess that politicians created." --economist Thomas Sowell

"If more politicians were faithful to the Constitution, the government would be restrained. And restraining government is 'weird,' 'wacky' and 'dangerous' to so many liberals today." --columnist Jonah Goldberg

"It is a lawyers' adage: If you have the law on your side, argue the law; if you have the facts, argue the facts; if you have neither, pound the table. Forgive the Democrats for their current table-pounding. They cannot run on their record." --columnist George Will

"[CNN anchor] Rick Sanchez was fired after saying that Jews control the media on a satellite radio show. If he had said that on his show on CNN, he wouldn't have gotten in trouble because no one would have heard it." --comedian Jay Leno

"It's raining! I don't like it! Why hasn't Congress passed the Good Weather Act and the Everybody Happy Act? Sound dumb? Why is it any dumber than a law called the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which promised to cover more for less money?" --columnist John Stossel

"Barack Obama did away with the 'War on Terror' and changed it to something like 'Foosball on Terror' with the promise that it would cause the bad guys to want to come over for some Shawarma and hummus and talk about how the Afghanistan national soccer team would be a real force in the 2014 World Cup." --political analyst Rich Galen

"Organizers of Saturday's 'One Nation Working Together' rally at the Lincoln Memorial are proud of their diversity. Before the event, they predicted it would be the 'most diverse march in history.' It turned out they were right. Looking around the rally, there were Teamsters Local 311, Service Employees International Union Local 1199, Communications Workers of America Local 2336, American Federation of Teachers Local 1, United Auto Workers Amalgamated Local 171, Transport Workers Union Local 100, and representatives of many, many other unions. That's a lot of diversity." --columnist Rich Lowry

web posted October 4, 2010

"People need to shake off this lethargy. People need to buck up. ... If people now want to take their ball and go home, that tells me folks weren't serious in the first place. ... It is inexcusable for any Democrat or progressive right now to stand on the sidelines in this midterm election. ... The idea that we've got a lack of enthusiasm in the Democratic base, that people are sitting on their hands complaining, is just irresponsible." --Barack Obama hammering his own base in an interview with Rolling Stone

"And so those who don't get -- didn't get everything they wanted, it's time to just buck up here, understand that we can make things better, continue to move forward and -- but not yield the playing field to those folks who are against everything that we stand for in terms of the initiatives we put forward." --Joe Biden

"We have an electorate that doesn't always pay that much attention to what's going on so people are influenced by a simple slogan rather than the facts or the truth or what's happening." --Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), another snotty elitist lecturing voters

"Progressives want to raise taxes on individuals who make more than $200,000 a year because they say it's wrong for the rich to be 'given' more money. Sunday's New York Times carries a cartoon showing Uncle Sam handing money to a fat cat. They just don't get it. As I've said before, a tax cut is not a handout. It simply means government steals less. What progressives want to do is take money from some -- by force -- and spend it on others. It sounds less noble when plainly stated." --columnist John Stossel

"Americans are learning once again that campaign rhetoric is no substitute for sound economics. And any American President who promises to make your life better by vilifying your fellow countryman, is a very dangerous character indeed." --columnist Austin Hill

"What optimistic Americans used to call a rising tide that lifts all boats is now once again derided as trickle-down economics. In other words, a newly peasant-minded America is willing to become collectively poorer so that some will not become wealthier." --historian Victor Davis Hanson

Point: "Obama and his cronies keep referring to 'the last decade' in their sorry attempt to blame the Republicans for the present state of the nation. The truth, however, is that the GOP only ran things for the first six of those 10 years. Once the liberals took control of Congress in 2006, it was Dodd, Frank and Obama, along with their good friends at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, who brought about the housing meltdown and the ensuing financial collapse. Since 2008, it's been the Obama administration that has sent the national deficit soaring through the stratosphere." --columnist Burt Prelutsky

Counterpoint: "In the 'Pledge to America' they unveiled last week, House Republicans promise they will 'launch a sustained effort to stem the relentless growth in government that has occurred over the past decade.' Who better for the job than the folks who ran the government for most of that time?" --columnist Jacob Sullum

"[The tea party movement] is about electing people who are going to get the Federal government to stop pressing the handle that has been flushing America's wealth, ingenuity, and capacity for hard work down the toilet bowl of history by promising more and more to people who have produced less and less until no one has anything." --political analyst Rich Galen

"People don't appreciate some of the amazing legislative agenda that [Barack Obama has] accomplished. Is this a failure of leadership? Has he allowed the opposition to define him?" --ABC's Christiane Amanpour

"Former President Clinton said he doesn't think the Democrats, and you included, have been rigorous enough in pushing back against some of the Republican attacks. Over these next five weeks [before the November election], Mr. President, do you intend to change your tone or your emotion in terms of your pushing back?" --NBC's Matt Lauer to Obama

"You think business can sit on those billions and trillions of dollars for two more years after they screw Obama this time? Are they going to keep sitting on their money so they don't invest and help the economy for two long years to get Mr. Excitement Mitt Romney elected president? Will they do that to the country?" --MSNBC's Chris Matthews

"Joe Miller, the Palin-blessed Republican nominee for Senate in Alaska, suggests that Social Security is unconstitutional because it wasn't in the Constitution. The Constitution is a dazzling document, but do these originalists really think things haven't changed since then? If James Madison beamed down now, he would no doubt be stunned at the idea that America had evolved so far but was hemming itself in by the strictest interpretation of his handiwork. He might even tweet about it." --New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd

"If you love deficits, you will love the Republican plan." --White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer, who must have missed the deficit quadrupling under Democrat control

"People have a right to be angry. They have a right to be disappointed. But they still have to be make a choice. An election is not a referendum on their anger. It's a choice between two candidates." --Bill Clinton

"[T]here's a little Homer Simpson in all of us. Sometimes we have self-control problems, sometimes we're impulsive and that in these circumstances, both private and public institutions, without coercing, can make our lives a lot better. Once we know that people are human and have some Homer Simpson in them, then there's a lot that can be done to manipulate them." --Obama regulatory czar Cass Sunstein, on helping us make "right choices"

"President Obama's old sloganeering has worn thin. It's time for a new motto for the most powerful man in the world. And he's up to the challenge. Obama's new slogan: 'It's not me, it's you.'" --columnist Ben Shapiro

"On the political gimmickry scale, the GOP's new 'Pledge to America' is worse than some, better than others. Let's say it falls somewhere between the Federalist Papers and a Harry Reid press release -- which, admittedly, pins it down as much as saying you lost a cufflink somewhere between Burkina Faso and Cleveland." --columnist Jonah Goldberg

"This week, all we've heard about is how [Christine] O'Donnell once said she went on a date with a guy in high school who claimed to be a witch. (So what? Bill Clinton married one!)" --columnist Ann Coulter

"President Obama signaled a change in U.S. policy toward the Third World Thursday in a U.N. speech. He said he intends to promote commerce and free trade with poor nations rather than just give them money. If it works there, he's going to try it here." --comedian Argus Hamilton

"I've got some problems with evolution myself. ... I look around at, say, Democrats, and I say, 'That's evolved?'" --columnist P.J. O'Rourke

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