“A friend will help you move. A good friend will help you move a body.”
— From the sidebar at all this is that, which also has a cool ad for Democrats.
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
Many frantic Republican lawmakers are also running against themselves, either reneging on their support for the war they started, or railing against Washington, the town they absolutely control, claiming that the capital has forgotten their values, or making ads denouncing the Democrats’ “homosexual agenda,” even though Republicans are now the party of gay scandal.
It’s a hilarious spectacle of a whole party re-enacting the classic scene in Mel Brooks’s “Blazing Saddles,” in which the sheriff holds the gun to his own head to take himself hostage.
Best line for today from two years ago, so far
“I’ve been deeply disappointed. They’re fundamentally decent human beings, but you couldn’t tell it by their campaigns.”
Albuquerque Tribune editor Kate Nelson commenting on the negative campaigning for Congress in NewMexiKen’s district, as quoted by Joe Monahan.
That was 2004. It’s worse this time.
Runner-up, also first posted two years ago:
“These are not arguments. They are rhetorical drive-by shootings.”
— Harvard Law Professor Laurence H. Tribe writing in a review of The People Themselves.
Best line of the day, so far
“I don’t know about you, but I need a break from political scandals. So let’s talk about private-sector scandals instead…”
— Paul Krugman beginning a column about stock options.
Best line of the day, so far
“And yet Hillary always struck me as the sort of buttoned-up and driven woman who would be really fun if you could get her out for a night of dulces de leche in Cuba, as Marlon Brando did Jean Simmons in ‘Guys and Dolls.'”
— Maureen Dowd in a column primarily about Senator McCain’s prevarication.
Best line of the day, so far
“PUBLIC SPLIT ON WHETHER BUSH IS A DIVIDER”
— CNN scrolling banner via Altercation, first posted at NewMexiKen two years ago today.
Best line of the day, so far
“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.”
— Juanita (Susan DuQuesnay).
Best line of the day, so far
“DAMN, something just occured to me. I can move the money I spend from the Ipod Music budget over to the Dairy Queen Blizzard budget i had previous decimated to fill my Ipod. ! I really miss Heath and Reese Cup Blizzards, thank you Gootube !!!… ”
— Billionaire Mark Cuban in a post describing, fancifully, how he gets his music from YouTube videos rather than iTunes.
This and That
“No, seriously, fans are always asking me, what’s it really like to be the Boss? I could try offer some fake humility bul**hit, but the real answer is: fabulous beyond your wildest dreams…”
— Bruce Springsteen, Nassau Coliseum, (as reported by JJ Goldberg) via Altercation
Pretty much as NewMexiKen has always feared.
Genesis Chapter 1, Verse 16: “And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.”
NewMexiKen guesses the Bible’s authors needed to get out more. Half the time, the lesser light, the moon, is in the daytime sky.
Best line of the day, so far
“Liberals feign outrage over Mark Foley’s courtship of underage Congressional pages, but millions of them laughed uproariously when Captain Oveur in Airplane!, played by Peter Graves, asked little Joey if he liked to watch movies about gladiators!”
— Le Blog Bérubé making fun of New York Times columnist David Brooks who actually made a similar statement, only Brooks was serious.
Just Time for a Few Best Lines Today
Brad DeLong isn’t too impressed with the report on September new jobs in The Washington Post. He concludes:
One possible explanation is that both Henderson nor Baker are sufficiently lazy and stupid that they have managed to proceed through life writing about economics and politics while remaining completely ignorant of the difference between increases in nominal wages and real wages, and they have done so in a newsroom in which getting the story right is simply not a priority.
Other alternative explanations are more discreditable.
NewMexiKen wonders if it is possible that much of the news media was always this bad, and we just didn’t have the resources to know. Or has the news media just gone downhill that fast — especially The Washington Post?
On the other hand, TPM Muckraker finds some journalists to admire, those at the San Diego Union-Tribune. It seems former Rep. Duke Cunningham has written the paper a self-serving, you’re the cause of all my travail letter from prison. (Follow link to read some of the letter.)
I imagine the letter was difficult for the reporters to read — blinded, as they were, by the light glancing off the Pulitzer prizes they won by helping land Duke in jail.
Meanwhile Digby has this revelation:
I know this will come as a great shock to everyone, but it appears that Hastert may have lied about what he knew and when he knew it.
Best line of the day, so far
“If you invested $100,000 in the stock market in early 2000, it would now be worth $100,004.”
— Functional Ambivalent putting the new stock market record into perspective. He goes on to say, “Adding inflation to the calculation, you would have lost over $14,000.”
Tom hit that rare best line daily double today.
Best line of the day, so far
“Maybe if Foley had been hitting on a fetus, these folks would get it.”
Best line of the day, so far
“Future Fox News commentator Rick Santorum”
Another best line of the day
“The actual journalistic accomplishment in ‘State of Denial’ is less than grand. It took him three books to arrive at a conclusion thousands of basement-bound bloggers suggested years ago: that the Bush administration is composed of people who like war, don’t seem to be very good at it and have been known to turn the guns on each other. Such an epiphany doesn’t seem to reflect a reporter who had rarefied access.”
— David Carr in The New York Times
Best line of the day, so far, on a day with an increasing number of best lines
“It’s like my grandfather used to say: A mule will work for you twenty years just for the chance to kick you once. It looks like Tenet aimed straight for Condi’s head.”
— Billmon, taking a hiatus from his hiatus.
Best line of the day, so far
“Talk about being in a state of denial: praising Woodward for his very-late-to-the-party Iraq pile-on is like a music critic writing a rave of ‘Let It Be’ and getting credit for discovering The Beatles.”
Yeah, When Hell Froze Over
“Hastert expressed relief that Foley had resigned. ‘If he had not,’ Hastert said, ‘I would have demanded his expulsion.'”
Best line of the day, so far
“The secretary of state said it was ‘incomprehensible’ that she could have ignored dire terrorist threats two months before 9/11.”
— The New York Times web page sub-head.
I think we’d all agree with her, incomprehensible.
Update Monday Evening: News Item — “A review of White House records has determined that George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, did brief Condoleezza Rice and other top officials on July 10, 2001, about the looming threat from Al Qaeda, a State Department spokesman said Monday.”
Incomprehensible.
Best line of the day, so far
“If God did choose George Bush, it wasn’t to lead us. It was to test us.”
— Comment in May 2004 at Eschaton and posted here two years ago today.
Best line of the day, so far
“[T]he Bush administration has Photoshopped the Constitution…”
— Maureen Dowd in Wednesday’s op-ed column.
Best line of the day, so far
“And just when you thought there were no depths of sycophancy and general fluffitude to which she could not dive, Couric suits up, climbs into the bathysphere, and descends into the realm of sightless fish on her new blog. They should just leave this stuff off the Internets and let Katie scrawl it on the cover of her History notebook during study hall.”
Best line of the day, so far
“Tester, Burns said, ‘doesn’t understand this enemy’ and would weaken the Patriot Act. ‘Let me be clear,’ Tester shot back sharply. ‘I don’t want to weaken the Patriot Act. I want to repeal it.'”
— Jon Tester, candidate for U.S. Senator from Montana, in debate with incumbent Conrad Burns as reported by New West Network.
Best line of the day, so far
“The simple fact is that every time Krauss opens her mouth to sing, angels stop what they’re doing and take notes.”
— Rick Anderson in a review of Alison Krauss at All Music. He adds:
“There may be no musical pleasure quite as pure and sweet as listening to Krauss sing ‘Baby, Now That I’ve Found You’ or ‘When You Say Nothing at All.’ And when she starts in on the impossibly beautiful gospel tune ‘Down to the River to Pray,’ the effect is almost disturbingly moving.”
Best line of the day, so far
“Our generation has inherited an incredibly beautiful world from our parents and they from their parents. It is in our hands whether our children and their children inherit the same world. We must not be the generation responsible for irreversibly damaging the environment.
— Sir Richard Branson, announcing that all future profits from his transportation companies (an estimated $3 billion) would be donated to developing energy sources that do not contribute to global warming.