“The debate also touched on Iraq, Iran, the Middle East, taxes, the economy, guns and affirmative action.”
Also. Touched. On.
H/T to Glenn Greenwald for the idea.
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, so far
Yesterday Smokey, the apartment maintenance man next door, helped me haul a dead washing machine to the city dump. I asked him what he thought about the Obama thing.
“Huh?” he said.
He spoke for millions.
Bageant also tell us: “And I wouldn’t vote for any of the three even if they knocked on my door bearing a bucket of smoked pork ribs and a bottle of Jack Daniels.”
Good Pope lines
“You know, President Bush actually met the Pope at the airport? And that wasn’t easy because, you know, they don’t let you stop at the curb anymore. So, Bush had to keep circling, the Pope runs out and Bush is driving by. The Pope is trying to get him. Oh, it was a huge, huge, big deal.”
“President Bush also told the Pope that he has prayed every single day since he became president. Hey, since Bush became president, we’ve all prayed every single day.”
— Jay Leno
“But when he was getting on his flight in Rome, he was almost not allowed on the aircraft because he tried to bring on more than three ounces of holy water.”
— David Letterman
“This morning, Pope Benedict arrived in the United States. More than 10,000 people are on the waiting list to get into the Pope’s mass at Yankee Stadium on Sunday. That’s Hannah Montana big.”
— Jimmy Kimmel
What have the Romans ever done for us?
From Rustbelt Intellectual via Brad DeLong, some thoughts for tax day.
NewMexiKen is reminded of the woman who wrote my office at the National Archives asking us to do research for her. We could make the records available I wrote her back, but we couldn’t actually do the research. Back came an irate letter culminating with the assertion that I was denying her “the only government service” she’d “ever requested.”
I wanted to write back and say then how the hell did I get your letters. (But I didn’t.)
Best line of the afternoon, so far
“New controversy arises as it is revealed the Barack Obama’s wife’s college roommate wanted segregated dorms. Also, Obama’s uncle’s neighbor’s grandchild’s classmate’s cousin’s sister has cooties”
Good line
“It’s possible that Clinton hammering Obama with a concerted ad campaign over his remarks about economically depressed small towns will hurt him. But it’s also possible all that hammering with just give Clinton a swollen thumb.”
Best line of the day, so far
“Has your candidate said anything about torture today?”
Best line of the day, so far
“[I]f I had to carry the banner for eight years of George Bush’s failures, I’d be looking for something else to talk about too.”
Barack Obama referring to McCain and quoted by CNN.
Best whole paragraph of the day, so far
Bitter? You ain’t seen nothing yet. And as much as people like Russert, Carville, Matalin, Schrum, and Murphy want to divert our attention from what’s really happening; as much as HRC and McCain seek to make political hay out of choices of words that can be spun cynically by the mindless spinners of the old politics; as much as demagogues on the right and left continue to try to channel the cumulative frustrations of Americans into a politics of resentment – all these attempts will, I hope, prove futile. Eighty percent of Americans know the nation is on the wrong track. The old politics, and the old media that feeds it, are irrelevant now.
Reich wrote seven paragraphs in all when he posted this yesterday. Go read the other six.
Best most of a paragraph of the day, so far
I was away from the Intertubes for several days and, therefore, I am just now catching up to the whole “Bittergate” controversy. (I actually heard a TV drone say that.) I also am just now catching up with the fact that the president of the United States is proud to have hosted meetings in which specific techniques of torture were discussed in the presidential mansion. Forgive me if I am not yet up to speed on the two stories, but having a candidate for the presidency say something that virually anyone who’s spent any time in the region in question knows to be true — which, I will admit, leaves out almost all of the people covering national politics these days — seems to me rather less of a story than the fact that a giggling unemployable spent time pretending to be Henry VIII down the hall from a gathering of bloodsoaked, pathetic wannabe tough guys.
Pierce also reminds us that Charlton Heston did march with Dr. King back in 1963, when it wasn’t a safe play.
Best line of the day, so far
“TIME magazine points out that no matter how flawed Obama is, Hillary still couldn’t win a national election against Hitler’s dog”
Woof.
Best line to keep in mind on Jefferson’s birthday
“There is no longer the shadow of a doubt that the torture of prisoners was planned at the highest levels of the US government with the explicit knowledge and approval of the president. How do we know this? Bush himself admitted it.”
Worst. President. Ever.
They may be taking our jobs, but . . .
“A survey of more than 1,000 men in India has concluded that condoms made according to international sizes are too large for a majority of Indian men.”
Headline of the night
“Physicists say Europe’s $8-billion atom-smasher, to be activated within months, almost certainly won’t create a black hole that swallows Earth.”
Almost. Certainly.
Pretty good line of the day
“If you have a few hundred followers, and you let some of them molest children, they call you a cult leader. If have a billion, they call you ‘Pope.'”
Bill Maher via Crooks and Liars.
Best line of the day
. . . But then Vonnegut starts coughing, clearing his throat of phlegm, grasping for a half-smoked pack of Pall Malls lying on a coffee table. He quickly lights up. His wheezing ceases. I ask him whether he worries that cigarettes are killing him. “Oh, yes,” he answers, in what is clearly a set-piece gag. “I’ve been smoking Pall Mall unfiltered cigarettes since I was twelve or fourteen. So I’m going to sue the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company, who manufactured them. And do you know why?”
“Lung cancer?” I offer.
“No. No. Because I’m eighty-three years old. The lying bastards! On the package Brown & Williamson promised to kill me. Instead, their cigarettes didn’t work. Now I’m forced to suffer leaders with names like Bush and Dick and, up until recently, ‘Colon.'”. . . .
From an article in the August 2006 Rolling Stone.
Best line of the morning, so far
“ABC: Bush admits he authorized torture. Believe it or not, it gets worse from there”
Here’s the worse from ABC News:
The high-level discussions about these “enhanced interrogation techniques” were so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed — down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.
These top advisers signed off on how the CIA would interrogate top al Qaeda suspects — whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding, sources told ABC news.
The advisers were members of the National Security Council’s Principals Committee, a select group of senior officials who met frequently to advise President Bush on issues of national security policy.
At the time, the Principals Committee included Vice President Dick Cheney, former National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft.
Worst. President. Ever.
Most important line of the day, so far
“And by the way, liberals and independents wouldn’t impute to McCain a liberalness that isn’t there if the press stopped partying with the man long enough to report on him honestly.”
All kinds of people NewMexiKen knows and likes and respects tell me that McCain at least is better than Bush because he’s OK on the environment or stem cells or the homeless.
But McCain would continue the war, keep the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy and appoint 17th century thinkers to the courts. Keep your eye on the important things. He’s a crotchety old warrior.
Best line of the day, so far
“An investigation conducted by senators has been compared to a court run by kangaroos, and the analogy is not unfair, except possibly to the kangaroos.”
Louis Menand, who continues:
“The normal rules of evidence do not apply in congressional hearings: badgering is appreciated; the verdict has frequently been arrived at in advance. Perry Mason, swatting away objections like flies as he sweated the truth out of guilty witnesses, faced more stringent procedural constraints.”
Best line of the day, so far
“One historian indicated that his reason for rating Bush as worst is that the current president combines traits of some of his failed predecessors: ‘the paranoia of Nixon, the ethics of Harding and the good sense of Herbert Hoover. . .’ ”
History News Network report on historians’ poll.
I like this one too:
“‘Bush does only two things well,’ said one of the most distinguished historians. ‘He knows how to make the very rich very much richer, and he has an amazing talent for f**king up everything else he even approaches. His administration has been the most reckless, dangerous, irresponsible, mendacious, arrogant, self-righteous, incompetent, and deeply corrupt one in all of American history.'”
And that’s the bright side.
Best line of the night, so far
“Poll of historians shows 60% of them think Bush is the worst president ever, 98% think he is a ‘failure’. Poll results show he did keep one campaign promise: he is a uniter, not a divider”
Here’s the background on the poll from History News Network.
Best astronomy line of the day
“A crescent moon of perilous beauty is about to appear in the evening sky.”
The item continues: “The best night to look is Tuesday, April 8th, when the moon joins the Pleiades star cluster for a must-see conjunction.”
Best line last night
“The other night, Barbara Walters had a special called ‘Live to be 150.’ And she showed people who are over 100 years old, leading active lives: jogging, hiking; one guy even running for president in the Republican Party.”
Jay Leno
Meanwhile, Letterman’s McCain is old joke of the night:
“And John McCain has one of those 3:00 a.m. campaign commercials. In this one, it is 3 a.m. and he just gets up to go to the bathroom.”
Best line of the day, so far
“While the media obsess over bowling scores, the ability to understand and explain basic concepts of domestic and foreign policy is not up for question in the narrow political debate.”
Best bracket lines of the day, so far
Courtesy of Sideline Chatter (where my “sports movies” got mentioned, too):
• Memphis coach John Calipari, to FSN, on star freshman Derrick Rose and the lure of the NBA: “If he wants to do what’s right for him and his family, he’ll go pro … If he wants to do what’s right for me and my family, he’ll stay.”
• Larry Stewart of the Los Angeles Times, on why TV Land executives are pulling for a North Carolina-West Virginia title game: “Andy Griffith’s alma mater versus Don Knotts’ alma mater.”
• Jeff Schultz of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, on predicting Georgetown would be in the Final Four: “Like I said: North Carolina-Memphis-UCLA-Davidson.”