Say What? March 26,2012 [Reader Post]

Liberals:

President Barack Obama: “But my main message is to the parents of Trayvon Martin. You know, if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”

President Obama: “If I put an oil rig on the South Lawn [of the White House], if we put one next to the Washington Monument, we would still have to buy the rest of our needs from somewhere else.”

President Obama: “Unfortunately, Congress decided they wanted their own timeline. Not the company, not the experts, but members of Congress who decided this might be a fun political issue decided to try to intervene and make it impossible for us to make an informed decision.”

President Barack Obama, who cannot let go of a “good line”: “These folks dismiss the promise of solar power and wind power and fuel-efficient cars. They make jokes about it. One member of Congress who shall remain unnamed called these jobs `phony.’ If these people were around when Columbus set sail, they would’ve been founding members of the Flat Earth Society.”

President Obama’s weekly speech: “Under my Administration, we’re producing more oil than at any other time in the last eight years. We’ve quadrupled the number of operating oil rigs to a record high. And we’ve added enough oil and gas pipeline to circle the entire Earth and then some. Those are the facts. But as I’ve been saying all week, even though America uses around 20 percent of the world’s oil, we only have around 2 percent of the world’s known oil reserves. So even if we drilled everywhere, we’d still be relying on other countries for oil.”  Prove oil reserves is a very technical term; most people think that the President is saying that we have about 2% of the world’s oil, and that is false.

President Obama: “If you hear anybody on TV saying that somehow we are against drilling for oil, then you will know that they either don’t know what they are talking about or they are not telling you the truth. We are drilling all over the place. That’s the reason we have been able to reduce our dependence on foreign oil every year since I took office.”

Michelle Obama: “For us, it’s the values. The thing that we try to do is make sure – the residence is on the second and the third floor of the White House. And what we want to have happen is when they get off that elevator and walk in to our residence that it feels like the south side of Chicago, the same values, the same rules, the same sense of responsibility.”

David Axelrod: “Well, let me say that the Republicans are very good at fanning the flames of discontent. Their whole campaign is predicated on fanning flames of discontent, so it’s not surprising that they do that here.” The Democrats own NBC, CBS, ABC, the Washington Post, the NY Times, MSNBC, CNN; and yet, the Republicans are masters at getting out their message.

President Obama when welcoming Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny to the White House: “You will notice that even though technically it is not St. Patrick’s Day, we like to prolong the party around here.”

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney: “The president is not concerned about who gets the blame, the president is concerned about making sure that we have the right policies to deal with this challenge for the long-term.”

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney on Paul Ryan‘s budget, which cuts many green programs: “You have to be aggressively and deliberately ignorant of the world economy not to know and understand that clean energy technologies are going to play a huge role in the 21st century. You have to have severely diminished capacity to understand what drives economic growth in industrialized countries in this century if you do not understand that education is the key that unlocks the door to prosperity.”

Daniel Weiss, director of climate strategy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund: “You don’t have to be James Carville to figure out that talking about people’s health and the health of their children is going to make a difference to the average voter.” Seems like the words “global warming” and “climate change” are temporarily shelved.

Joe Biden on Obana giving the okay to take out Osama: “You can go back 500 years. You cannot find a more audacious plan. Never knowing for certain. We never had more than a 48 percent probability that he was there…Do any one of you have a doubt that if that raid failed that this guy would be a one-term president? …This guy is willing to do the right thing and risk losing.”  So, Obama’s great risk is, for doing the right thing, he could have ended up being a one-term president.  The SEALS risked their lives on this mission; Obama risked reelection.  White House press laughed when Carney is asked about Biden calling the Bin Laden Raid the most “audacious” plan in 500 years.

Jay Carney about celebrating the 2 year anniversary of Obamacare: “I don’t anticipate a presidential marking of an anniversary that only those who toil inside the Beltway focus on. What this President is focused on and what his administration is focused on with regards to the Affordable Care Act is the implementation of the Affordable Care Act.”

House Minority leader Nancy Pelosi: “This is what our founders had in mind – ever expanding opportunity for people. You want to be a photographer or a writer or a musician, whatever – an artist, you want to be self-employed, if you want to start a business, you want to change jobs, you no longer are prohibited from doing that because you can’t have access to health care, especially because you do not want to put your family at risk.”  A middle class family of 4 might be paying $20,000/year for Obamacare; and those with slightly higher incomes will be paying for their version of Obamacare and for about 1-1.5 policies of those who cannot afford it.

Nancy Pelosi: “We knew that what we were doing when we passed this bill was iron-clad constitutionally.”

David Axelrod email: “Hell yeah, I’m for Obamacare”

Senior White House advisor David Pouffe: “I am convinced that at the end of this decade, Republicans are going to regret turning this into `ObamaCare.'”

Debbie Wasserman-Schultz: “They [businesses] have more opportunities for coverage and employees – small businesses in particular will have an opportunity to get a 50-percent premium tax credit which they don’t have available to them now. So this is actually a boon to small businesses.”

Obama: “[Solyndra] was not our program, per se. Congress – Democrats and Republicans – put together a loan guarantee program because they understood historically that when you get new industries, it’s easy to raise money for startups, but if you want to take them to scale, oftentimes there’s a lot of risk involved, and what the loan guarantee program was designed to do was to help start up companies get to scale.”

California governor Jerry Brown: “Solyndra thought the market was one price, and the price was lower; Hallelujah! California installed 500 megawatts of solar last year and we’ll do more this year.” He forgot to add, “and besides, this is only government money.”

Rep. Jackie Speier: “American women have been second-class citizens when it comes to health care. In fact, women pay a billion dollars more per year for health care than do men. But with the passage of the Affordable Health Care Act, starting in 2014, no longer will women be second-class citizens.”

Michelle Obama: “[Barack] watched his own grandmother – a woman with a high school education – watched her work her way up to become the vice president at a little, bitty community bank. And she worked hard, and she was good at what she did, but like so many women, she hit that glass ceiling and watched men no more qualified than she was – men she had actually trained – climb up the corporate ladder ahead of her.” Obama’s grandmother was the first female VP at the bank where she worked.  Obama has distorted the background of his grandmother on several occasions.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi: “A healthier life, the liberty to pursue happiness, free of the constraints that lack of healthcare might provide to a family,” she said. “If you want to be photographer, a writer, an artist, a musician, you can do so. If you what to start a business, if you want to change jobs, under the Affordable Care Act, you have that liberty to pursue your happiness. And so that is why I’m so pleased that this week we can celebrate the two-year anniversary of the Affordable Care Act.”

Sandra Fluke: “There should be a litmus test that they be pro-women so our votes have to include that requirement at least, and it should be a litmus test that applies to male candidates as well. Numerous American women have actually written to me in the last few weeks saying that I should run for office, and maybe someday I will.”

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of the highway funding bill: “[The House members] are so disorganized, in such a state of disrepair, the House of Representatives, that they can’t even extend the highway bill. I don’t know what’s in their minds. Over in the big dark hole we now refer to as the Tea Party-dominated House of Representatives, we couldn’t do it. Republicans in the House are talking as if it’s some socialist program that was developed at Harvard or some other radically liberal place. I can’t imagine what their mindset is.” Reid did not discuss the 30 job’s bills and the budgets which are not being discussed or voted on in the Senate.

Obama dinner winner: “Suddenly we heard the President talking to the staff of the restaurant-he was in the building! I think we all stopped breathing.”

British Prime Minister David Cameron: “Barack went to the back of the plane and explained to my private secretary and the team `don’t worry, the British Prime Minister is fine I have just tucked him up in bed’. I don’t think that has happened before.”

Petition from Feminist writer Gloria Steinem and the anti war activist group Code Pink for First Lady Michelle Obama and others: “We, American women and our allies, join with Iranian, Israeli and Palestinian women to oppose the inflammatory rhetoric of war and the recently publicized plan of the Israeli government to attack Iran.”

Liberal radio talker Thom Hartmann: “Well, actually crime was going up during the Reagan administration and I would submit to you that it was going up because he had destroyed the economy. And, and, you know, a lot of people felt that that was the only option that they had was, you know, to steal something or whatever the crime may be.”

Radical activist Frances Fox Piven: “There is room for all of us. Religious leftists, people who think peace is the answer, those who think that wholesome food is what we really need, ecologists and old-fashioned Democrats, Democratic Socialists, Socialists and Communists.”

It’s the War on Women:

Rep. Diana DeGette: “The Republican majority that has now won the House are again and again proposing extreme and divisive legislation targeted at women’s health. The level of these attacks on women’s health that we’ve seen make a lot of us wonder whether we’re in the dark ages or in fact whether we’re in the 21st Century”

Rep. Gwen Moore about Ryan‘s plans to repeal elements of the health law: “is a political thing on the part of the Republicans, but it has real consequences for real people, whether you’re a senior, whether you’re a child, whether you’re a woman, whether you’re a small business, where small businesses can get tax credits toward providing health care. There are consequences.”

Nancy Pelosi email: “It all comes down to this. March 31st is the first quarterly Federal Election Commission (FEC) deadline of 2012 and the first since the Republicans’ unprecedented assault on women’s rights. The national media and our opponents will use our grassroots fundraising totals to measure the strength of our opposition to the Republicans’ War on Women. If we are able to show overwhelming support for this cause, then we will be able to send a clear message that we will not tolerate or stand by while Republicans wage war on women’s rights.”

David Axelrod: “The difference here is that Rush Limbaugh singled out this – first of all, I’ll condemn anyone who uses that kind of language or depictions of people who are vulnerable or anybody who doesn’t deserve that and they’re words that don’t belong and characterizations that just don’t belong. I’m happy to say that. I will say it about anyone no matter what side of the political debate they’re on. The Limbaugh case was a particularly egregious incident because he took this young woman, who was expressing herself and depicted her in the worst possible way. And in a very coarse and perverse way. And really, what was disappointing was how few leaders of the Republican party were willing to say that was wrong. And I think that was a test of leadership.”

It’s all about race:

MSNBC’s Karen Finney: “People, in Trayvon Martin‘s case, a teenager walking home from the store, are dehumanized into some form of other, unworthy of respect and it’s justified as a way to make people some kind of separate and unequal status. So, when Newt Gingrich, presidential candidate Newt Gingrich says that, quote, “really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works. They have no habit of I do this and you give me cash, unless it’s illegal,” or Rick Santorum says, “I don’t want to make black people’s lives easier,” or Rush Limbaugh calls a presidential candidate, Senator Barack Obama a magic negro, or Mitt Romney says nothing at all, the effect is dangerous, because they reinforce and validate old stereotypes that associate the poor and welfare as criminal behavior with African-Americans and people of color, calling us lazy, undeserving recipients of public assistance. In the case of Trayvon, those festering stereotypes had lethal consequences.”

Civil rights activist Jesse Jackson: “There was this feeling that we were kind of beyond racism. That’s not true. His victory [Obama’s election win] has triggered tremendous backlash.” Jackson said this in light of the killing of Trayvon Martin, along with young Black children being saddled with student loan debt.

Al Sharpton: “Don’t talk to us like we stupid; don’t talk to us like we ignut.” I couldn’t help it.

The Compliant Obama Press Corps:

Chicago Tribune‘s front page, above the fold, headline: “Pricey gas seen as good, in a way.”

Same story on the Los Angeles Times‘s Web site, with the title: “Gas prices’ jump attests to upbeat economy.”

New York Times front page: “Obama Seizes Chance to Score As an Everyman.”

In the same NY Times: “It goes without saying that Target is not the kind of store one might envision, say, Ann Romney pulling up to in one of the Cadillacs that her husband says she drives.”

NY Times Stanley Fish on the Limbaugh/Maher controversy: “Two Cheers for Double Standards…Rather than relaxing or soft-pedaling your convictions about what is right and wrong, stay with them, and treat people you see as morally different differently. Condemn Limbaugh and say that Schultz and Maher may have gone a bit too far but that they’re basically O.K. If you do that you will not be displaying a double standard; you will be affirming a single standard, and moreover it will be a moral one because you will be going with what you think is good rather than what you think is fair. ”

CNN commentator Dean Obeidallah: “Political comedians must be afforded the unfettered right to satirize our politicians – even if their jokes include crude words such as the ones that Maher and C.K. used about Sarah Palin. When you’re attacking a public figure, someone in politics, someone like Sarah Palin who would run to be a heartbeat away from the leader of the free world, you know what? It comes with the territory.”

CNN legal expert Jeffrey Toobin expects possibly an 8-1 decision in favor of Obamacare by the Supreme Court: “Well that’s certainly a possibility, and certainly the four Democratic appointees will vote to uphold the law. I actually think that Chief Justice Roberts and perhaps even Justice Scalia and Justice Alito might join Justice Kennedy in upholding the law. In striking this law down, it would really be a big change in Constitutional law, and I’m not sure this court is ready to do it.”

Nation sports editor Dave Zirin on MSNBC on Tim Tebow being traded to the New York Jets: “There are a lot of LGBT people that live in New York City who are also football fans and they might want to know why the new, possibly, starting quarterback for the New York Jets wants them to move backwards 30 or 40 years.”

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MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough: “If the city manager will not fire this police officer and hire one who will arrest this man that gunned down a seventeen year old boy, then the attorney general of the state of Florida and the governor of the state of Florida need to step in. This is an embarrassment to my home state.”

Mika Brzezinski: “I’d go further. I’d go further. Because if this unfolds the way it appears it’s unfolding, you know, in a country where its leader can talk about a radio host calling someone a name, we ought to be looking at ourselves and this situation really closely from the top down. And, quite frankly, it is, they’re looking at audio tapes right now of the cell phone, and there might have been a racial epithet.” Somehow, in someway, this shooting is related to Rush Limbaugh calling Sandra Fluke a name.

Liberal Celebrities:

George Clooney: “I would be selling all of the, you know, you saved the auto industry and you got Osama bin Laden and you passed a health care bill that nobody could pass – if that was a Republican issue. I would be able to sell his presidency as a very successful one. But Democrats are bad at that. We like to pick each other apart.” Republicans are excellent at messaging.

Actor Robert De Niro: “Callista Gingrich. Karen Santorum. Ann Romney. Now do you really think our country is ready for a white first lady?”

Eva Longoria: “Mitt Romney is probably the one on the wrong side of every issue pertaining to Latinos, education, the economy, healthcare access. He’s campaigning with — he’s calling the anti-immigration law from Arizona a model law for the rest of this- the country. He’s campaigning with the author of it. That is polarizing to Latinos. He wants to veto the D.R.E.A.M. Act if he was in office. That is dangerous for our community. And Obama for me is the only one that understands that the success of the future of America is intricately tied to the success of the Hispanic community.” Eva Longoria is now the national co-chair for Obama’s reelection campaign so we will be seeing more of her.

Susan Sarandon: “Limbaugh will just say anything to get his ratings up. He doesn’t care who he endangers or what it means. Are the Republicans suggesting that they take care of all the children that are born when you don’t have birth control available to you when you’re a poor woman? Do these guys not understand what it takes to raise a child, financially and timewise? They sound like complete idiots! Does Rush Limbaugh have children? I mean he certainly isn’t against drugs!”

Michael Moore: “Thank God for the anarchists.”

Liberals from the past:

According to journalist David Corn‘s new book, “Showdown, The Inside Story of How Obama Fought Back Against Boehner, Cantor, and the Tea Party,” Obama said something to the effect that: “Fed by Fox News, they hear Obama is a Muslim 24/7, and it begins to seep in. The Republicans have been at this for 40 years. They have new resources, but the strategy is old.”  I watch several hours of FoxNews a day.  I have yet to hear a single person say anything along the lines of, “I really think that Obama is a secret Muslim.”  This topic has been discussed, because it is a media story, but I don’t recall a single FoxNews host say anything like this.

Barack Obama, 1995: “In an environment of scarcity, where the cost of living is rising, folks begin to get angry and bitter and look for scapegoats. Historically, instead of looking at the top 5% of this country that controls all the wealth, we turn towards each other, and the Republicans have added to the fire.”

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Here is a bunch that I missed, from Climate Change enthusiasts:

Richard Glover, The Sydney Morning Herald: “Surely it’s time for climate-change deniers to have their opinions forcibly tattooed on their bodies.”

Jill Singer in the Herald Sun: “I’m prepared to keep an open mind and propose another stunt for climate sceptics: put your strong views to the test by exposing yourselves to high concentrations of either carbon dioxide or some other colourless, odourless gas say, carbon monoxide.”

James Hansen, the chief scientist for NASA in the US, testifying to the Iowa Utilities Board: “If we cannot stop the building of more coal-fired power plants, those coal trains will be death trains, no less gruesome than if they were boxcars headed to crematoria, loaded with uncountable irreplaceable species.”

Liberal civility:

Music group Detente: “Kill Rush.”

MSNBC host Ed Schultz blames former Gov. Jeb Bush, R-Fla., for the death of Trayvon Martin: “Jeb Bush helped pave the way for this senseless tragedy and remains silent. What a political tragedy.”

Debbie Wasserman Schultz: “The Romney-Ryan budget would be devastating to seniors and older Americans. It is a Republican path to poverty that would pass like a tornado through America’s nursing homes where millions of America’s seniors receive long-term and end-of-life care.” What is particularly sad here is, Debbie is signing Romney onto this plan even before he signs onto it.

The Ryan Budget versus the Obama Budget

MSNBC’s Karen Finney, linking the Koch brothers to the killing of the Trayvon: “How do we go from one state to 30? Who was the Typhoid Mary for this horrible outbreak? Try not to be surprised. It’s the usual suspects: the Koch brothers, the NRA, the American Legislative Exchange Council, and Clinton vets, remember the Scaife family? Oh, yeah. These are the same people who stymied gun regulation at every point who funded and ghost write these laws and others that have become a core of the conservative agenda that is being implemented across our country. It’s the same group that also wrote the voter I.D. laws which threaten to disenfranchise some 5 million american voters, many of them African-American.”

Van Jones: “I was there [in the Obama administration] for 6 months. Best 6 months of my life, followed by the worst two weeks…I saw some of the most beautiful people, some of the most well intentioned people, some of the smartest people ever to serve in our government, be stopped in their tracks, stopped in their tracks, by people who mean us no good. People who claim to be patriots but seem to hate everybody in America.”

From the DailyKos:

brooklynbadboy: “The GOP is so demented and racist…[Republicans have] become a party of paranoid conspiracy freaks, religious kooks, bigots, the marginally insane, and amateur grifters like Joe the Plumber. If Palin were running in the primary election for president, there is no doubt that she would be winning it, probably handily…This is a party unhinged from reality. This is the party of Palin…”

MrTrueLiberal: “…that Hitler would have felt at home…Overtly bigoted and racist speak doesn’t play well in…most places in America. Hitler didn’t know from codespeak or dog whistles. He didn’t understand that to reach into the hearts and minds of religious America, you have to invoke the names of God and Jesus Christ. He wouldn’t have understood that Republican men and a few Republican women see the female species as a threat to be subdued and controlled. But although he was fixated on Jews, he would have grasped immediately the right wing hatred and fear of Hispanics and Muslims. And a black President of the United States. Those he could have worked with…Maybe the spirit of Hitler exists in his full Nazi brown-shirted glory and [is] providing consulting services to right wing media and their political candidates…”

Beetwasher: “Republicans are about to engage in terrorism…There have been diaries on the subject of stochastic terrorism and I can’t help but think of the Repubs odd behavior without putting it in this context. The leaders by actions that are seemingly bizarre and illogical and suicidal [are] sending a signal. Now is the time to go all in. And we have their leader seemingly under siege. (Limbaugh)…We have the bizarre double down crazy all in Ryan budget. Reality is closing in around some very sick people, their world view is being challenged, they are about to be trounced and repudiated in a big way come Nov. The tide of history is against them. You cannot. Stop. Progress. On some level they must know or suspect this. They are desperate, and sick and crazy…”

Michael Alton Gottlieb: “[H]omegrown terror of the Patriot movement kind is considered the biggest threat to the Government. And with a trillion guns and most of their brains eaten away with fear and loathing, I don’t doubt the veracity of the threat. But why? Are they really patriots concerned about loss of liberty, abrogation of the Constitution, encroaching militarism and creeping totalitarianism? Or are they just Rush Limbaugh clones who await their marching orders from fascist clowns without a thought in their heads?”

From Newsbusters.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney, has recently undergone heart transplant surgery. As is not surprising, hate has been pouring out from the left. Most of these posts would require too much cleaning up for me to post, so check them out if you want. Expect to find the f-word more often than the word “the.”

Muslims:

The brother of the al-Qaeda member who murdered seven people including three kids: “I am very proud of my brother. I regret nothing for him and approve of what he did.”

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Interviewer: “Is it permissible to kill `Alawites – their women and their children – in retaliation for their actions?”

Muhammad Badi’ Moussa: “Yes, my brother. We have issued a communiqué to the `Alawites, in which we gave them a strong warning, which may be the last. Our brothers in the Free Syrian Army sent queries to scholars in exile, asking whether they were allowed to raid `Alawite villages, like the Zahra, Eqrima, and Nuzha suburbs of Homs. Our brothers in the Free Syrian Army asked several sheiks and scholars for a fatwa on whether they are allowed to kill [‘Alawite] women and children, just as they are killing our women and children. The snipers are coming from the `Alawite suburbs, and the free Muslim women who were raped and kidnapped are being held in `Alawite suburbs. All the scholars said: Have a little patience. They must be warned first. We don’t want a civil, sectarian war to rage in Syria. [The ‘Alawites] know that they are a minority in our country, and that all the sects hate them and want to get rid of them. It is not in their best interest to follow the regime.”

Liberals making sense:

Bill Maher: “Let’s have an amnesty – from the left and the right – on every made-up, fake, totally insincere, playacted hurt, insult, slight and affront. Let’s make this Sunday the National Day of No Outrage. One day a year when you will not find some tiny thing someone did or said and pretend you can barely continue functioning until they apologize. When did we get it in our heads that we have the right to never hear anything we don’t like?” he wrote, adding that “If you see or hear something you don’t like in the media, just go on with your life. Turn the page or flip the dial.” I agree with Maher; but wouldn’t it be nice if such a big deal was not made out of what Rush said? Seems like we never discuss anything like this unless it is said by someone on the right. Now that Maher and Obama and Carney are being hit by questions, now is the time to say, “Stop feigning outrage.”

Penny Lee and Kirsten Powers in response: “We’re both women who have worked in Democratic politics and the media for decades and find Bill Maher‘s misogynist treatment of women candidates deeply disturbing. Coincidentally we both hail from Alaska – where women are treated as equals – so perhaps our threshold for this kind of behavior is less than here in the Lower 48. Mr. Maher has implicitly attempted to tie his own demeaning attacks on women to the unrelated issue of partisan-motivated fake outrage, which we agree is tiring. While others have been held to account for their sexism, Mr. Maher remains unrepentant for his attacks on women in public life. How can we expect women to run for office when they are essentially told to “lighten up about” and accept misogynist attacks? The Women’s Media Center has found that such attacks on women candidates have a measurable negative effect on how voters view them.”

Interestingly enough, the NY Times, which printed Maher’s column, has not yet mentioned to its readers what Bill Maher actually said about Sarah Palin.  And what discussion took place in the Obama Media Complex after Maher made any of his remakrs?  There was none.

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CNN’s Fareed Zakaria: “For those who despair at the role of money in politics, the simplest way to get the corruption out of Washington is to remove the prize that members of Congress give away – preferential tax treatment. A flatter tax code with almost no exemptions does that. The simplest fix to our tax code would be would be to lower the income tax dramatically, lower the corporate tax, and instead raise revenues through a national sales tax, or a value-added tax (VAT). The U.S. is the only rich country in the world without a national sales tax. Germany has one at 19%, Britain at 20%, Korea at 10%. What’s the appeal of a consumption tax? First, it is efficient. Most studies, including one by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), suggest that the federal government loses several hundred billion dollars a year to tax fraud. This is much tougher to pull off with a consumption tax. Second, it provides the government with a more stable form of revenue than income taxes. Income taxes fluctuate greatly between boom and bust years. Third, American’s consume too much, often using credit and leverage to do so. A consumption tax would moderate this behavior. Government will always get less of a behavior it taxes and more of what it subsidies.” Have I just stepped into a parallel universe?

Moderates/Affiliation Unknown:

Charane Odho, a 37-year-old grandma, of the Occupy Miami crowd who have moved into her semi-occupied building: “It’s like we live in a huge crack house now! They poop on the walls, they poop in the back of the building and wipe themselves with socks. Who are these people? We don’t know who the hell they are.”

George Carlin from I don’t know when: “Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”

Crosstalk:

A young female college student to Mitt Romney: “You’re all for like ‘yay freedom and all this stuff and yay pursuit of happiness. You know what would make me happy? Free birth control.”

Mitt Romney: “Let me tell you something, if you’re looking for free stuff that you don’t have to pay for, vote for the other guy. That’s what he’s all about. Politicians get up and promise you all kinds of free stuff, more and more stuff that you won’t have to pay for and you know what? We get elected that way, in many cases, politicians do, that’s not something I subscribe to.”

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Mark Shields, PBS: “It is in fact ten trillion dollars in tax cuts for the next ten years. We extend the Bush tax cuts in perpetuity under Paul Ryan. The reality is there are no spelled out eliminations of tax expenditures. That is the bold. That would be courageous. Are you going to do home mortgage? Are you going to do charitable deductions? Are you going to do state and local taxes? Because that’s where the money is when I see some vertebrae. And make one thing absolutely clear about Simpson-Bowles that Charles referenced and that is it had at its guiding principle that it would not increase poverty, and it would not increase the income disparity. And it does.”

Charles Krauthammer: “Talk about absence of spine, your guys haven’t introduced a budget at all on anything, haven’t done anything on Medicare, on Social Security or anything on tax reform. Zero. That is the definition of an absence of spine.”

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Former New York Times Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse: “…mainstream journalism has learned to navigate those challenges, choosing evolution over “intelligent design,” for example, and treating climate change naysayers as cranks…Court cases are trickier. It’s one thing to engage in prediction that flows from analysis: which side is most likely to win? It’s quite another to let readers in on the fact that one side’s argument is so manifestly weak that it doesn’t deserve to win. Journalistic accounts of court cases, at least in advance of a definitive ruling, understandably tend to take the safe course and treat the arguments on both sides with equal dignity. So it’s perhaps not surprising that just about half the public apparently believes that the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate is unconstitutional. Free of convention, and fresh from reading the main briefs in the case to be argued before the Supreme Court next week, I’m here to tell you: that belief is simply wrong. The constitutional challenge to the law’s requirement for people to buy health insurance — specifically, the argument that the mandate exceeds Congress’s power under the Commerce Clause — is rhetorically powerful but analytically so weak that it dissolves on close inspection. There’s just no there there.”

James Taranto commented on her column as “a liberal legal legend’s ludicrous ObamaCare defense” and added that her opinion on Obama-care is “shallow, disingenuous and silly.”

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FoxNews Ed Henry: “Two other quick things. On Ben’s question about health care — it’s supposed to be the President’s signature domestic achievement, so the idea that he may not speak about this on the anniversary seems odd. And I wonder, with the polling data — I think ABC News has a poll out today — when you add it up, 67 percent of the public either wants to throw out the whole bill or just throw out the mandate, not the whole bill. The White House has been talking for two years about educating the public, talking about the benefits of this. Doesn’t this polling data suggest that people are not buying it?”

Jay Carney: “Well, the polling data suggest in part the hundreds of millions of dollars that was spent attacking it. And what we’re focusing on is implementing it so that more and more Americans see the benefits that it brings.”

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Economist Paul Krugman: “First, the lie: No, President Obama did not say, as many Republicans now claim, that he wanted higher gasoline prices. He did once say that a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions would cause electricity prices to “skyrocket” — an unfortunate word choice. But saying that such a system would raise energy prices was just a factual statement, not a declaration of intent to punish American consumers. The claim that Mr. Obama wanted higher prices is a lie, pure and simple.”

Candidate Obama said in 2007-2008: “I think it is important for us to send some price signals, to change behavior” and that “it’s not going to be painless….a lot of us who can afford are going to have to pay more per unit of electricity” to cover the higher cost of green energy production.

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Darrell Issa: Now, let me just ask one basic question, in an earlier hearing, you gave yourself an A-minus. In weatherization, do you give yourself an A-minus?

Energy Secretary Stephen Chu: Actually, I do.

Issa: In controlling the cost of gasoline at the pump, do you give yourself an A-minus?

Chu: Well, the tools we have at our disposal are limited, but I would say, I would give myself a little higher in that since I became secretary of Energy, I’ve been doing everything I can to get long-term solutions.

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Joe Scarborough: “Steve Rattner, what’s the president doing on energy here?”

Obama Car Czar Steve Rattner: “Well, first of all, what you just referred to really doesn’t have a lot to do honestly with what this president did or previous presidents. We effectively have no energy policy. This is really the market at work. This is higher prices bringing out more supply, higher prices causing people to drive less-the resession having a huge impact on energy demand in this country. The president is saying like every president, we need to do something. And he is saying that what we need to do should be a mix of everything, that we need to drill, that we need to have solar, we need alternatives, we need conservation. He is trying to go down the middle and say we should have every piece of the energy puzzle. But the fact is, we haven’t done anything at a government level to develop any of those things.”

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Rep. Trey Gowdy: “If this were the last debt ceiling request you could ask for . the final one and you had to make it large enough for all current and future obligations, what would the request need to be?”

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner: “I don’t know how to answer that question…I’d have to get to you in writing, I can’t do it in my head though.”

Gowdy: “How about a round number?”

Geithner: “No idea..

Gowdy: “$20 trillion?”

Geithner: “I just can’t do it in my head.”

Gowdy: “$50 trillion?”

Geithner: “I don’t know”

Gowdy: “A lot? Can we agree it would be a lot?”

Tim Geithner: “It would be a lot. It would make you uncomfortable.”

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Sandra Fluke at an event in Washington D.C., condemned “conservative commentators” for trying to silence women by using “sexist rhetoric,” adding that “that kind of treatment of women will not be tolerated.”

After speaking, CNSNews.com asked: “You said we shouldn’t tolerate demeaning language for women. Should we tolerate Bill Maher for calling Sarah Palin some of the stuff he’s said?”

Sandra Fluke: “I’m not going to speak about particular labels that have been applied to particular women. But no matter who is demeaning women, it’s always unacceptable.”

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CONGRESSMAN KEITH ELLISON (D-MINNESOTA): No, they [Iran] don’t have a weapon. They have not made a decision to do one. The inspections.

BILL O’REILLY, HOST: How would you know they have not made a decision to do one? How would you know that?

ELLISON: Because. I’m glad you asked. Because we have satellite technology. We have technology that can detect.

O’REILLY: They’re underground. The satellites can’t penetrate the earth. They’re underground.

ELLISON: We have inspections that have gone on.

O’REILLY: They won’t let the inspectors in as I’ve said three times.

ELLISON: Yes they have. There have been a number of inspections.

O’REILLY. No there haven’t. They went two weeks ago and they wouldn’t let them go in.

ELLISON: Well, Bill, I’m sorry, but I’m not going to back a war based on a maybe. 4,409 Americans are dead because somebody-

O’REILLY: Congressman, the reason we like you as a guest is because you’re an honest man, But I will point to history. I will point to history. The same mindset was taken when dealing with Nazi Germany. We’re not going to go in aggressive action. We don’t believe they’re going to do this. We don’t believe they’re going to do that. And they absolutely did everything. So I think you’ve got to learn from history.

ELLISON: Let me tell you in World War II, in World War II they attacked Pearl Harbor. That would be enough.

O’REILLY: No, this is the German theater not the Japanese.

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Debbie Wasserman Schultz on June 5th, 2011: “Now you have the Republicans, who want to literally drag us all the way back to Jim Crow laws…”

March 21st, 2012:

MRC Reporter: “You said that the GOP’s trying to turn back to the days of Jim Crow – about the voter ID laws?”

Wasserman-Schultz: “I didn’t, that’s not what I said.”

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Narrator Tom Hanks: “He knew from experience the cost of waiting [on health care reform].”

President Obama : “When my mom got cancer, she wasn’t a wealthy woman and it pretty much drained all her resources”

Michelle Obama: “She developed ovarian cancer, never really had good, consistent insurance. That’s a tough thing to deal with, watching your mother die of something that could have been prevented. I don’t think he wants to see anyone go through that.”

Hanks: “And he remembered the millions of families like of his who feel the pressure of rising costs and the fear of being denied or dropped from coverage.”

Turns out that this scenario might not be accurate. Reporting by left-leaning WaPo.

Conservatives:

Ben Stein: “We are staring default in the face. We need to have a brave man who will stand up” [quoted from memory]

Paula Priesse: “Trust in the media has hit an all time low. Some friendly advice: 1) Cover innocent victims of gang violence with as much passion as a teen killed by someone you now label as a “White Hispanic” 2) Honor the lives of fallen soldiers as you would dead celebrities 3) Start viewing us as Americans, rather than as Women, Blacks, Whites, Hispanics, Asians, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Gays or whatever 4) Stop assuming any criticism of minority politicians is inherently “racist” 5) End your cynical attempts to drive up “ratings” by trying to tear us apart & 6) Promote time-tested American values that might, just might, bring us closer together That is all. P”

Romney‘s communications director Eric Fehrnstromon: “Well, I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch-A-Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all of over again. But I will say, if you look at the exit polling data in Illinois, you’ll see that Mitt Romney is broadly acceptable to most of the factions in the party. You have to do that in order to become the nominee.”

[to be fair, the question he was asked was from CNN”s John Fugelsang: “Is there a concern that [Rick] Santorum and [Newt] Gingrich might force the governor to tack so far to the right it would hurt him with moderate voters in the general election?”]

Jodi Miller: “White House spokesman Jay Carney said, that most of President Obama’s time is not spent campaigning, and he’s right. Most of the president’s time is spent playing golf, vacationing, apologizing to our enemies, and running our economy into the ground.”

Jodi Miller: “The head of Lubbock, Texas’ Planned Parenthood was just arrested for indecent exposure. See, Planned Parenthood does provide services besides abortion.”

Rep. Allen West: “Until we, as a nation, are able to correctly and openly identify our enemy, we will continue to put our men and women on the ground in harm’s way without a clear mission for success. On this 21st Century Battlefield we are not fighting against a single organization, a single leader, or a single nation. We are fighting against Islamic fundamentalism, which knows no country, recognizes no borders, and wears no uniform…[Islam is a] theocratic-political totalitarian ideology no different from Nazism, Fascism, and Communism which threatens the free world.”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell: “The bottom line is this: This health care law is a mess.”

Mike Huckabee: “As he jets around on Air Force One, he isn’t using algae.” [quoted from memory]

Rush Limbaugh: “The daily assault on conservatism in the media is actually nothing more than a bunch of daily lies about the strength of the economy and how great Obama’s doing.”

Rush Limbaugh: “So we’ve gone from a jobless recovery to a recovery-less job growth. Neither one make any sense. But the efforts that the media are going to find any shred of bad news and turn it into good news is happening. They’re taking every opportunity to do it, and it’s designed to dispirit you and to keep Obama’s base enthused.”

Rush Limbaugh: “If producing more domestic oil cannot impact world prices, then guess what? Conserving can’t, either.”

Rush Limbaugh: “If by some miracle Obama did see the light and he did try to lower the price of gasoline, he would be undoing everything he and the Democrats have worked so hard to accomplish over the last three years. They want high gasoline prices so that you’ll eventually go buy a Chevy Volt. They want high gasoline prices so you’ll go buy a hybrid or an electric car, or you’ll take mass transit. They want you out of your internal combustion engine machine. They’ve made no secret about it.”

Rush Limbaugh: “It’s a little too late for the media to go back and actually do their jobs in the right way because they’ve blown the trust. They’ve squandered the trust that they maybe used to have with their customers, i.e., the American citizens.”

Rush Limbaugh: “From the Associated Press: ‘Unhappy Public Not Sure Who to Blame for Gas Prices.’ Really? Well, this unhappy public has been told for three-and-a-half years that every problem they have can be solved by Barack Obama and his caring cabinet and czars, and every other Democrat who has a big heart and compassion.”

Rush Limbaugh: “The guy who steadfastly opposes drilling for oil and has not issued any permits to speak of, particularly since it’s Gulf oil drilling moratorium — the guy who has made his name opposing the Keystone pipeline — is now out taking credit for it. And he’s trying to make people believe in this country that the entire Keystone pipeline, today, has just been authorized, and oil is going to be flowing through it.”

Rush Limbaugh: “I’m almost speechless here with the absolute brazenness of this. I wouldn’t be surprised if Obama says, ‘I’ve laid more pipe than any president except Bill Clinton.’ That’s where we’re headed with this.”

Rush Limbaugh: “Without the media, Barack Obama would be a national joke. But he has the media. He has the largest propaganda arm that a president has ever had.”

Rush Limbaugh: “If I were you, I would regard every AP story, particularly this year, as nothing more than a propaganda piece for the reelection of Barack Obama.”

Rush Limbaugh: “I have a sense of you things in this country. I believe there’s a great silent majority. The silent majority is made up of people who are not represented by the Democrat Party or the mainstream media. The silent majority are the people who get up and go to work, try to play by the rules, try to do everything right according to their morality and sense of ethics and their right and wrong.”

Rush Limbaugh: “What is discriminatory about producing a photo ID to vote and not discriminatory about producing a photo ID to get on an airplane or to get married? Why is one discriminatory and the other is not? Well, we all know the answer to this. The answer is vote fraud. The answer is the Democrats want to cheat, and a photo ID goes a long way towards stopping voter fraud.”

Rush Limbaugh: “The idea that having to have a photo ID is discriminatory and intimidating should mean that it’s discriminatory and intimidating everywhere you have to display one. The Democrats never say that. It’s only when you vote.”

Rush Limbaugh: “Can you think of anything you do in your life where you do not need a photo ID? You need a photo ID to cash a check. You need a photo ID to get on an airplane. You need a photo ID for everything. For the most mundane things in life, you need a photo ID. But yet, Eric Holder and his gang tell us that to require a photo ID when one votes is intimidation, and it is discrimination.”

Rush Limbaugh: “Dana Milbank in the Washington Post is out today with his review of the Ryan budget, and as predictable as the sun coming up, Milbank and the Washington Post compare Ryan’s budgeting to a Dickens novel where the poor get everything they have taken away from them. Ryan’s gonna starve the poor, take away all their programs, take away all their money. That’s how Ryan’s budget’s being reported.”

Rush Limbaugh: “Anything good for America, they don’t like. That’s the position the Democrat Party is in. I wouldn’t want to be in that position. Anything that happens that’s good for America they have to oppose. Anything bad for America, they support. That’s Obama’s base.”

The Conservative Press:

FoxNews’s Kimberly Guilfoyle on the Supreme Court possibly ruling the Obamacare mandate unconstitutional: “For all you campers out there: tent, pole, collapse.”