“Can you even imagine the ruckus if Democrats did that?” Juanita asks. “Hell, the Republicans would have already started impeachment proceedings and made some signs with misspelled words on them.”
Category: Best Line of the Day
Clever turns of phrase, special splashes of wit, provocative insight — all in a sentence or two.
Best line of the day
“That’s in the First Amendment?”
Best line of the day
“I scanned my environment to see what tools, mechanisms, or explosive devices I could fashion to win my freedom. I had paper towels and soap. I also had a mirror that I could shatter if I needed shards. I had a wallet with some credit cards in my back pocket and an iPhone in my front pocket. In other words, I had nothing that could signal the outside world.”
Scott Adams in an amusing post about being locked in the men’s room, “My Chilean Miner Moment.”
Best line of the day
“Or to put it another way, the administration has never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”
Nice line for the day
“When the news came that the miners were arguing about who would wait to go last, it was hard not to come undone.”
Amy Davidson in a fine blog item for The New Yorker
UPDATE: The Big Picture has photos. The first one is worth a click by itself.
Best new line of the day
“And there’s also Verdelia, who is so old that when God said let there be light, she personally hit the switch.”
Juanita Jean’s | A New Wrinkle for Sarah Palin
Go read the whole post. I swear you will thank me.
Best redux line of the day
“Okay, so you’re going to tell me that professional baseball is no longer pure — that players make too much money, owners rip off the fans, and there’s drug use. Yeah, well, the same is true for Congress, but I still vote.”
First posted here six years ago today.
Best damn line of the day
[T]he Central District of California …
PERMANENTLY ENJOINS Defendants United States of America and the Secretary of Defense, their agents, servants, officers, employees, and attorneys, and all persons acting in participation or concert with them or under their direction or command, from enforcing or applying the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” Act and implementing regulations, against any person under their jurisdiction or command;
Best line of the day
“I don’t think there was a guy in here who could swallow.”
Atlanta Braves outfielder Matt Diaz on Manager Bobby Cox’s farewell in the locker room as reported by The Daily Fix – WSJ.
I’d never heard choking up described just that way.
Best line of the day
As my career with Dilbert took off, reporters asked me if I ever imagined I would reach this level of success. The question embarrasses me because the truth is that I imagined a far greater level of success. That’s my process. I imagine big.
I’ve never admitted this before, but my favorite imaginary scenario involves being elected President of the United States. I choose that job as the target of my imagination because I am spectacularly unqualified to hold public office. If I can successfully imagine being a great president, I won’t have trouble imagining I can succeed at lesser tasks.
I’ve always thought you owed it to your prospective employers to have your résumé show the things you aspired to and fantasized about as well as your actual accomplishments.
Best line of the day
“Chilean officials brought in advisers from NASA, created a special rescue capsule and even fed the trapped miners cylindrical pies specially baked to fit down a narrow hole.”
I know, nothing special about the line, but somehow just the concept of figuring out cylindrical pies to send the miners made me feel good.
Best line of the day
Raese is a very rich guy. (“I made money the old-fashioned way. I inherited it,” he told an interviewer.) His $2.9 million, 7,000-square-foot crash pad has made numerous appearances in Democratic campaign literature, which always notes that the driveway is paved in pink marble. Raese rejoined that it is “peach-colored tile” that he didn’t even pick himself, leading a West Virginia union leader to say that the coal miners felt “great sympathy and understanding for multimillionaires who were steered in a wrong direction by their interior designers.”
From Gail Collins’s column today , a second on the most awful state in the current election cycle. It’s a must read.
Best line of the day, so far
“We are no longer the nation that used to amaze the world with its visionary projects. We have become, instead, a nation whose politicians seem to compete over who can show the least vision, the least concern about the future and the greatest willingness to pander to short-term, narrow-minded selfishness.”
Even less surprising line than cyclist doping lines
“For years, Lou Dobbs made millions of dollars a year sputtering in rage every night on CNN against illegal immigrants — and the employers who hired them. But then he nimbly flipped around and spent some of that cash paying undocumented workers to take care of his mansions and prize horses.”
Salon.com has the story — which actually was broken by The Nation.
Best baseball line of the day, so far
“And still, major league hitters come up, they swing at his cutter, the ball breaks in two inches more than they expected, they break their bat. In Las Vegas, I’ve seen David Copperfield make a car appear out of thin air, and I’ve seen Lance Burton duel someone in a costume who turns out to be Lance Burton. I’m sure I could watch those tricks 50 times and never figure out how they are done. I’m sure I could watch those tricks 100 times and never figure out how they’re done.
“But Mariano Rivera has pitched 1,150 innings in the big leagues. He has pitched another 135 or so postseason innings. He has faced almost 900 different big league hitters. And this same trick, precisely this same trick, works almost every time.”
Which sport has more action line of the day
“The total 14 minutes of action [for Major League Baseball] was about three minutes more action than one might see in a football game… .”
You can fool some of the people all of the time
“A rising number of Americans — nearly one-in-five — incorrectly believe Barack Obama is a Muslim.”
“Fully 31% [of Republicans] say Obama is Muslim, up 14 points from March 2009. An additional 39% of Republicans say they do not know Obama’s religion, up 11 points from March 2009.” [That’s 70% of Republicans.]
“Most Americans (60%) who claim Obama is a Muslim say they learned about his religion via the media.”
Best line of this and every other day we’re at war
“And then there was the saddest lesson, to be learned again and again in the coming weeks as they fought across Sicily, and in the coming months as they fought their way back toward a world at peace: that war is corrupting, that it corrodes the soul and tarnishes the spirit, that even the excellent and superior can be defiled, and that no heart would remain unstained.”
— Rick Atkinson in The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944
Best line of the day. Also scariest.
“Krugman thinks that the new financial regulation is potentially pretty good, but that there’s too much discretion given to regulators. This could work fine under current administration, he said, but won’t work at all when President Palin appoints Ron Paul as Treasury Secretary.”
Best line of the day
Which state is having the most appalling campaign season?
Wow, so much competition.
There’s Arizona, where Jan Brewer, the immigrant-bashing governor, stomped away from her horrible debate performance while reporters yelled: “Governor, please answer the question about the headless bodies!” Always hard to beat a state with a headless-bodies controversy.
She goes on to name a few other states, but first adds this about Arizona:
Arizona got additional awfulness points when Brewer announced that she was not participating in any future debates since she only needed to do just that one to get public campaign funds. Still more when she said she would probably change her mind if her poll numbers dropped. Even more for the fact that they haven’t.
Best Groucho lines of the day, so far
Julius Henry “Groucho” Marx was born 120 years ago today.
“I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.”
“I never forget a face, but in your case I’ll be glad to make an exception.”
“I have had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn’t it.”
“I don’t care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members.”
“Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.”
“Room service? Send up a larger room.”
“I intend to live forever, or die trying.”
“Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them — well, I have others.”
“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.”
Best line of the day, so far
“Certain things were put upon this earth for our enjoyment, and it’s wasteful and wicked to condemn them.”
Quoting from the book in a review of Endangered Pleasures: In Defense of Naps, Bacon, Martinis, Profanity, and Other Indulgences.
Best line of the day
As a former film major, I can understand why someone would look at that photo of me and Juliet from 2001 and imagine a Pretty in Pink backstory: a teenage boy hopelessly in love with his best friend, but never able to tell her. When you’re interpreting art, you’re supposed to take cues from limited information and make assumptions about what exists outside of the frame. But real people and real relationships are never as simple as characters in movies and books. Even I don’t remember exactly what I was thinking when I put my arm around Juliet for that photograph at a summer camp reunion. I can only guess that it was something similar to what ran through my mind all the other times I’ve put my arm around friends for photos: cheese.
Jeff Deutchman from a series mostly by Juliet at Slate on platonic friendships. I haven’t been reading the series, but this caught my attention.
Best line of the day
“Even as voters rage and candidates put up ads against government bailouts, the reviled mother of them all — the $700 billion lifeline to banks, insurance and auto companies — will expire after Sunday at a fraction of that cost, and could conceivably earn taxpayers a profit.”
Best line of the day
“I’m not good at buying gifts. I start worrying about Christmas in April, and by the time October rolls around I’m in full panic mode. Call me spontaneous, but I prefer when my failures surprise me, not when they are scheduled for December 25th every year. By this time of year I feel as if I’m tied to the railroad tracks, I hear a whistle in the distance, and it probably isn’t Santa.”