Clever turns of phrase, special splashes of wit, provocative insight — all in a sentence or two.
“In the last 25 years, there have been a total of 41 first round leaders including ties. One won the Masters. One. More first round leaders over the last quarter century have finished in 21st place than first. Only 17 of the 41 first round leaders even finished in the Top 10.”
“THIRTY TWO DIFFERENT MEN have won major championships in the last 14 years.” (That would be 56 events.)
“‘How do you juggle it all?’ people constantly ask me, with an accusatory look in their eyes. ‘You’re screwing it all up, aren’t you?’ their eyes say. My standard answer is that I have the same struggles as any working parent but with the good fortune to be working at my dream job. Or sometimes I just hand them a juicy red apple I’ve poisoned in my working-mother witch cauldron and fly away.”
“FUN GAME: Instead of filing your tax return, inform the IRS that you are having budget problems and have shut down.”
“Paul Ryan, the Republican Party’s latest entrant in the seemingly endless series of young, prickish, over-coiffed, anal-retentive deficit Robespierres they’ve sent to the political center stage in the last decade or so, has come out with his new budget plan. All of these smug little jerks look alike to me – from Ralph Reed to Eric Cantor to Jeb Hensarling to Rand Paul and now to Ryan, they all look like overgrown kids who got nipple-twisted in the halls in high school, worked as Applebee’s shift managers in college, and are now taking revenge on the world as grownups by defunding hospice care and student loans and Sesame Street. They all look like they sleep with their ties on, and keep their feet in dress socks when doing their bi-monthly duty with their wives.”
Jeffey Toobin reminds us of what happened the last time the Federal Government shutdown.
P.S. It has Monica and thong underwear in it.
“SAN FRANCISCO—Saying that ‘you never know,’ juror Jesse Ferguson has worn his baseball glove to the Barry Bonds perjury trial every day, telling reporters Tuesday that his seat on the jury is in a perfect spot should Bonds really connect on one. . . .”
“This isn’t a serious proposal; it’s a strange combination of cruelty and insanely wishful thinking.”
“Liberty University, the evangelical private Christian school founded by dead apartheid-supporting bigot Jerry Falwell, received $445 million in federal financial aid last year. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, by the way, received $420 million from the federal government.”
From an earlier Salon story:
“Apparently Americans want to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting because they think 5 percent of the federal budget goes to NPR and PBS. That was the median guess in a CNN poll released Friday.”
The correct figure is .00014 percent.
“We were in shock. We were in row 16 and my husband and I could see blue sky … the wiring, the cabling. It actually was terrifying.”
Southwest passenger Debbie Downey to CNN Saturday as reported by The Consumerist.
Southwest is grounding 79 737s for inspection. The hole in the fuselage on the Phoenix to Sacramento flight was 3-to-4 feet.
Hey, it could have been worse. It could have been raining.
“Final Four goes on even though there are no number one seeds in it. Same goes for GOP primaries.”
“Venerating a superior being and blindly following its will is a natural human impulse, as it frees one of the heavy burden of decision-making and moral and intellectual judgment, and it also creates a feeling of safety and protection (hence the cross-cultural and sustained strength of religion, as well as the potent appeal of both political authoritarianism and personality cults).”
“I often argue that the concept of ‘atheism’ is unnecessary and misleading. Nearly everyone rejects Zeus, Thor, Isis, along with the countless other dead gods of antiquity, and yet no one feels the need to name this condition of unbelief.”
Penn Jillette says it best: “I believe that there is no God. I’m beyond atheism.”
“Looked at that way, players who are compensated beyond what the NCAA thinks is correct are simply finding a way to get paid for their work. This should surprise nobody. Time and again, the ‘amateur’ concept – a foul vestige of the British class system — has failed in this country because it is unsustainable in a nation that believes, even today, and even in Wisconsin, that hard work should return a fair wage. It was unsustainable in golf and in tennis. It was even unsustainable in the Olympics. It is unsustainable in college mega-sport as well. The only question is when the collapse will come, and how thorough the damage will be.”
Go read Pierce’s last paragraph, as good an assessment as you’ll read of college sports.
“It might not be illegal to arm the Libyan rebels at this stage, but it would be wrong, unnecessary, impractical, and self-defeating.”
Steve Coll in conclusion. His essay explains his case.
“Of course, the truth is often more nuanced, but this is about as nuanced as it ever gets: Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn’t, we peaceful Muslims cannot be held responsible for what our less peaceful brothers and sisters do. When they burn your embassies or kidnap and slaughter your journalists, know that we will hold you primarily responsible and will spend the bulk of our energies criticizing you for ‘racism’ and ‘Islamophobia.’ ”
Sam Harris, repeating remarks he made regarding the Danish cartoonists in light of the current issue over the burning of the Koran.
“There’s a joke making the rounds and it goes like this: Big Business, a Tea Partier and Organized Labor are sitting around a table. A dozen cookies arrive on a plate. Big Business takes 11 of them and says to the Tea Partier, ‘Pssst! That union guy is trying to steal your cookie!’ ”
“[Parents] drop their kids off at soccer and they know they’re going to run around like maniacs for an hour. When they watch baseball practice, they often see them standing around in the outfield while the coach throws batting practice.”
John Mitchell, a former college baseball coach from Alabama, quoted by the Wall Street Journal.
“A recent poll shows that Americans dislike the Tea Party as much as they dislike the other two parties, which proves that Americans know a good party when they see one. And they’re still waiting to see one.”
“There are probably only about 10 guys in America who are cheerfully unconcerned about the influence of multimillionaires on elections. One of them is Charles Koch. David Koch is another, as is Karl Rove. Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and the guy with the top hat on the board of the Monopoly game are two more. Luckily for them, the other five guys currently sit on the U.S. Supreme Court.”
“There’s too much internet.”
“Experts say the snake that escaped from the Bronx Zoo may be seeking its natural habitat and is heading for Wall St.”
It’s a cobra.
“Pro Tip: Do not pay full price for a Kansas 2011 NCAA National Champions t-shirt.”
“To see on the scoreboard that we were up and it was possible for us to beat them, I think it gave my teammates and me a lot of motivation.”
Arizona player Lamont Jones
The reason this is a best line is because I have never before heard a college basketball player use “me” in a sentence correctly. (Usually it would be, “Me and my teammates had a lot of motivation.”)
“They were phenomenal in the second half. We couldn’t stop ‘em. We just couldn’t stop ‘em.”
Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski
“On #Libya, Palin says we should be ‘in it to win it’ – a change from her usual ‘in it to quit halfway through’ policy.”