Liberals:

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg: “All the president has to do – and I’m not trying to hold him more responsible, but he is the chief executive, he was elected to lead this country – all he’s got to do is stand up and say, `I will veto any extension of any of the Bush-era tax cuts.’  Everybody. Not just the rich, but everybody.”

Barack Obama to Reverend Al Sharpton: “Look, there’s no doubt that I’m disappointed that not just Congress generally, but the Republicans in particular, are not willing to put serious revenue on the table as part of a balanced plan. . . So the position they’re taking is short-sighted. Uh, but, uh, you know, I, uh, it, it, it must be my, uh, religious faith, reverend, cause, uh, hope springs eternal and I continue to believe that at some point common sense will prevail and we’ll be able to work something out…we’ve got to have a balanced plan that’s fair, which everybody is sacrificing for the greater good.”

Senate leader Harry Reid:  “The American people are tired of their elected leaders listening to the extreme voices in their party instead of the voices of reason. I am disappointed that Republicans never found the courage to ignore Tea Party extremists and millionaire lobbyists such as Grover Norquist, and listen instead to the millions of Americans – including the vast majority of Republicans – who want a balanced approach to deficit reduction.  For the good of our country, Democrats were prepared to strike a grand bargain that would make painful cuts while asking millionaires to pay their fair share, and we put our willingness on paper. But Republicans never came close to meeting us halfway.”

Occupy WalMart sign: “DON’T BE A CONSUMER WHORE.  STEP FEEDING THE BEAST.”

Jennifer, at Occupy Macy’s NYC: “We’re here to let people know about corporate greed, and Macy’s is a major corporate place.”

Older demonstrator in Occupy Oakland: “The SDS is back by popular demand.”  He was not an actual member of SDS, but of MOBE (?) which came later (I don’t know who they are either).  “We want to make sure that we’re not seen as scary to the 99%.”

Note from Occupier handed to Barack Obama: “Mr. President: Over 4000 peaceful protesters have been arrested. While bankers continue to destroy the American economy. You must stop the assault on our 1st amendment rights. Your silence sends a message that police brutality is acceptable. Banks got bailed out. We got sold out. ”

Natasha Lennard, explaining why she has left the main stream media: “Journalism must break the chains of objectivity and report truth — and the Occupy movement led me to do just that”

The Reverend Al Sharpton speaking of what he was thankful for this Thanksgiving: “Last year we had just come out of the midterm elections where the Republicans gained 61 seats and we were under siege by the tea party.  This year, Occupy Wall Street, whatever its shortcomings, it changed the conversation to where we are now talking about economic inequality – 1 percent versus 99. I am grateful for that.”

President Barack Obama’s Thanksgiving message: “We’re also grateful for the Americans who are taking time out of their holiday to serve in soup kitchens and shelters, making sure their neighbors have a hot meal and a place to stay. This sense of mutual responsibility – the idea that I am my brother’s keeper; that I am my sister’s keeper – has always been a part of what makes our country special. And it’s one of the reasons the Thanksgiving tradition has endured.  I know that for many of you, this Thanksgiving is more difficult than most. But no matter how tough things are right now, we still give thanks for that most American of blessings, the chance to determine our own destiny. The problems we face didn’t develop overnight, and we won’t solve them overnight. But we will solve them. All it takes is for each of us to do our part.”

Democrat Dennis Kucinich on the occupy movement: “What we’re looking at here is a burgeoning social and economic movement that is a sharp protest to the maldistribution of wealth, to the practices of Wall Street that have helped collapse this economy. It’s an authentic expression of the concern that the American people have about the direction that the country is going in. We need to listen to that, rather than just denigrate it.”

Planned Parenthood holiday message: “The holidays are upon us! Going home or getting together with relatives for the holidays is always a stressful time, but if your family members are the type who regularly protest outside the local Planned Parenthood, you know that this holiday is going to be a doozy.  Luckily, we have some tips for surviving those awkward conversations. So read on, and bring some diplomacy and understanding to the table along with that pumpkin pie.”  And then PP gives tips on how to score points for abortion without seeming to be too confrontational.  Just correct all the errors in the thinking of your conservative family members.

President Cecile Richards of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund: “We know that the challenges ahead are real, and that the work of protecting access to reproductive health care will be difficult. We will need you with us, and I can’t tell you how much it means to me and to everyone at Planned Parenthood to know that we have you with us.”

Comedienne and actress Janeane Garofalo on the TEA party types: “It always works on a certain segment of the population. If you are trying to appeal to the worst in us. Quite literally, the worst in us and you’re trying to go to the limbic brain of anxiety, fear, intolerance, hatred, bitterness, ignorance, you have to just use these very simple, as they say, dog whistle words…But they [TEA party types] do love a black man like Herman Cain, and Michael Steele, and is it Ron Christie? Any of these pundits who pretend we’re in a post-racial society. They like that kind of black person.”

Film maker Michael Moore: “The images of this [the UC Davis Pepper Spray Incident] have resonated around the world in the same way that the lone young man standing in front of the tanks at Tiananmen Square.”

Minister Louis Farrakhan said that the failure of a bi-partisan economic commission: “The confusion is the sign of the end…And as you are witnessing partisan politics is killing democracy and killing the United States of America as a world power.”

The Compliant Obama Press Corps:

CNN Hostette to John Kerry: “Senator Kerry, just yesterday on Meet the Press you said there were things you agreed to that you didn’t want to talk about public, which sounded very sexy I might add. People want to know, what were the concessions? And would it have been enough to strike a deal here?”

CNN analyst Roland Martin: “If there is one institution that has made a point of desperately trying to keep women in their place, it’s organized religion.”

Piers Morgan to Jon Huntsman: “Are you frustrated that you are still lagging in the polls when the credentials that you seem to offer at this very challenging time for America, particularly in the international stage, seem so much more impressive than many of your rivals?” In case you are unaware, liberals first choice for Republican candidate is Jon Huntsman and their 2nd choice is Mitt Romney.

Piers Morgan: “When I hear you talk, Jon Huntsman, about foreign affairs in particular, it’s always very impressive. You’re smart about it. You’re articulate. I even spoke to you once and you talked to me in Mandarin from your time in China.”

Piers Morgan: “Herman Cain…stumbled about Libya – well he didn’t appear to know what Libya was, let alone where it is.”
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MSNBC contributor Melissa Harris-Perry: “I’ve been thinking a lot about Thanksgiving and the moment that we’re in because, you know, our economic crisis right now is highly tied to the European economic crisis and so I was thinking about kind of what is that first Thanksgiving when these illegal immigrants from Europe come over and are fed by the people of the actual Americas, the Native and indigenous people, you know, here on this land, that they are trying to escape religious prosecution and persecution in Europe and then you have the Europeans basically calling them dirty, no good, worthless, basically 99 percenters, right? And all of that is now playing out in a different way as we see the 99 percent pushing back against this idea that the elites are the only one that deserve to have a Thanksgiving dinner. All of that.”

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews: “I think it is this audience – I think he knows who he is playing.  He’s very commercial, Rush is. But let me ask you about this. I don’t think it was a dog whistle. I think it was a bugle call. Let’s narrow this down to the politics, get away from the ethnicity. Working-class whites and the way they call it in the polling is `non-college whites.’ He’s going to have a problem with them, because in hard times – you know how prejudice rises during hard times – it’s clear that he sees those people as angry and workable, Rush Limbaugh.”
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Piers Morgan of Sarah Palin not contacting Mark Kelly about the shooting of Gabby Giffords, perpetuating the myth that Palin targeting certain voting districts led to the shooting of Ms. Giffords: `In her haste to take no responsibility, [she—Sarah Palin] didn’t even bother to pick the phone up, to write, to do anything.  I find that extraordinary.”

Mark Kelly, Gifford’s husband: “Yeah, I was surprised too. You know, certainly the targets that she put over Gabby’s and other people’s districts, in our opinion, was not the right thing to do. She is not the first person to do that. And it hasn’t always been Republicans that have done that.”  It does not matter to liberals whether some has been clearly shown to be false; they will perpetuate unreality as fact nevertheless.  This is why we continue to vilify Joe McCarthy for finding communists under every bed and celebrate FDR as bringing us out of the Great Depression.

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MSNBC’s Chris Matthews: “The national media, which leans a little to the left, I could argue, could smash him [Mitt Romney].”

Liberals from the past:

Joy Behar: Isn’t it a little racist to call it Black Friday?

Whoopie Goldberg: Well, I would have called it African American Friday, but I feel that’s taking something away from it.

Behar: But there’s a negative connotation to it? Or does it mean something else?

Goldberg: No, it’s like when you make all the money. You’re in the black.

Behar: So it’s positive?

Goldberg: Yeah. It’s in the black, so it’s a huge, great thing.

Behar: A lot of times, like blackmail is negative, black sheep.

Goldberg: Black people.
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Vice President Joe Biden: “One of the early discussions we [Obama and Biden] had, in Chicago, in preparation for  the administration, our transition team out there, we got together, I think it was 30, 35 economists, all left, right center, and what did we talk about?  …back then…we were on the phone calling Jon Corzine, literally.  I literally picked up the phone and called Jon Corzine. And said, ‘Jon, what do you think we should do?’  The reason that we called Jon is, we knew that he knew about the economy, about world markets, about how we had to respond, almost unlike anyone else that we knew…and we trusted his judgement…and what we heard from Jon is what we needed to do, and what we needed to do was a serious economic recovery plan.”  That very expensive economic recovery plan is believed to have worked by about 6% of the voting population.  Jon Corzine recently resigned from MF Global, a huge company that went bankrupt, where there is anywhere from $600,000 to $1.2 billion of investor money unaccounted for.

Liberal civility (spreading Thanksgiving and holiday cheer throughout the world):

MSNBC’s Martin Bashir: “But if anyone’s dirty, it’s Newt Gingrich — a man whose personal morality has been drawn from the sewer, a man who pontificates about his Catholic faith and morality but repeatedly commits adultery.”

Mohammad Malik, CAIR member and Occupy Miami organizer, led chants saying: “Nuke Israel” and “Go back to the oven”

26-year-old Nathan Shafer to Gov. Nikki Haley on Facebook, after he heard about the arrests of 19 Occupy Columbia members outside the State House: “I hope someone murders you before I do.  How’s that for freedom of speech?”

Crazy Muslims:

Several speakers at an anti-Israel rally in Cairo: “one day we shall kill all the Jews”  According to the article I read, this is a quote from the Koran.

CAIR National Legislative Director Corey Saylor: “Last night, Rick Santorum casually tossed aside every American’s constitutional right to equal protection under the law in favor of discriminatory profiling of Muslims.  Mr. Santorum’s obvious lack of appreciation for the Constitution and for the rejection of profiling by top law enforcement experts raises reasonable questions about his ability to lead our multi-faith nation…We remind Mr. Santorum that the Prophet Jesus (peace be upon him), a man of Middle Eastern heritage, would fit his `profile.’”

Liberals making sense:

ACORN founder Wade Rathke:, “…in no way has it [the Occupy movement] had the political impact that the tea party movement has.”

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta: “If Congress fails to act over the next year, the Department of Defense will face devastating, automatic, across-the-board cuts that will tear a seam in the nation’s defense…The half-trillion in additional cuts demanded by sequester would lead to a hollow force incapable of sustaining the missions it is assigned.”

Moderates/Affiliation Unknown:

An unnamed longtime Washington editor, about “reporter” Ezra Klein briefing top Democrats: “I have never heard of a reporter briefing staffers. It’s supposed to be the other way around. This arrangement seems highly unusual.”

Crosstalk:

Michael Gerson, Washington Post: It’s a serious point. The budget process that was designed in 1974 was designed for presidential leadership. The Congress reacts to the president’s priorities. If you look at past budget deals, whether Reagan or Bush One or Clinton, these were active presidents. You had to have an energetic executive to get a budget deal. And we’ve really had a power outage here, a president that alternates between indifference and being out of the country.

Cokie Roberts: Well, some of it was out of the country, to be fair, was dealing with foreign leaders and preset meetings.

Gerson: But he was not engaged in this process, and most Democrats on the Hill would tell you that as well.

Sam Donaldson: You’ve accurately, I believe, described what’s happened in the past when budget deals were made between a president and another party on the Hill. This was different. This committee was set up by Congress, and expressly – you won’t find it in the legislation – all of them said, “We want the President to butt out, we’re going to take this. Don’t have him come down here and try to tell us what to do.”
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Christiane Amanpour, Host: What about this tone in the country right now? It’s still very divisive. It’s still very sort of brash, some say poisonous. I mean, you can barely get anything done on Capitol Hill, just behind me there. What needs to be done, to actually improve the tone and the ability of people to work together?

Former Secretary of State, Colin Powell: The tone is not — is not good right now, and our political system here in Washington, particularly up on The Hill — Congress — has become very, very tense in that two sides, Republicans and Democrats, are focusing more and more on their extreme left and extreme right. And we have to come back toward the center in order to compromise…

Amanpour: I get your point about heat and light, but what about the fact that, in fact, it is one of the political parties, although — or rather the big political influence, which is the Tea Party, which quotes left and right the Founding Fathers? They say compromise is a dirty word, and they try to point to the Founding Fathers and the Constitution.

Powell: They compromised — the Founding Fathers compromised on slavery. They had to in order to create a country. They compromised on the composition of the Senate, of the House, of the Supreme Court, of a president — what are the president’s powers? Can you imagine more difficult compromises today?  Compromise is how this country was founded, and unless two people in disagreement with each other don’t find a way to reach out to one another and make compromises, you don’t get a consensus that allows you to move forward.  But the Tea Party point of view of no compromise whatsoever is not a point of view that will eventually produce a presidential candidate who will win.

Amanpour: General Powell, thank you very much indeed.

Powell: Thank you, dear.

In the entire interview, there was no discussion of the Occupy movement, of Democratic support for that movement, or of Obama’s continued attempt to pit the poor and middle class against the rich, time after time after time.  I have not seen the entire interview yet, but was there any discussion of what the Republicans brought to the table and what the Democrats brought to the table in the Supercommittee talks?
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Paul Krugman: We have a long term deficit problem. And part of the problem is this got framed in terms of short-term austerity. And so actually, I’m celebrating the fact that this committee has not reached a agreement.

George Will: The Bowles-Simpson commission that the president called into existence and then ignored recommended a package that had 30 percent deficit reduction through new revenues and 70 percent straight cuts.  The Toomey proposal was 24 percent through revenue and 76 percent through cats very similar to Bowles-Simpson and the Democrats ignored it.

Conservatives:

Republican candidate Newt Gingrich: “I already said that if he wants to use a teleprompter, then it would be fine with me. It has to be fair. If you [were] to defend ObamaCare, wouldn’t you want a teleprompter?  Now, just for a second I’m going to go in the detour and I’ll try to explain why I’ve been and he’ll say yes. There are two reasons. The first, is ego. Can you imagine him looking in the mirror? Graduate from Columbia, Harvard Law, editor of the Law Review journal. [Against] the greatest articulator in a Democratic book?  How is he going to say that he’s afraid to be on the same podium as a West Georgia College student?”

George Will, on gridlock in Washington: “This is a transaction cost of democracy. It’s untidy, of course it is. That’s supposed to be that way. The congress far from being dysfunctional is functioning as a representative institute representing a country that is of two minds about its government. ”

Presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich: “I am for deporting all recent unattached illegals.  I am for a local citizen panel to consider certification of those who have been here 25 years and have family and community and have been law-abiding and tax-paying.”

Gingrich: “I am prepared to take the heat for saying, let’s be humane in enforcing the law.”

FoxNews contributor Rich Karlgaard: “Anything come out of the NLRB [the National Labor Relations Board] hurts jobs by definition.”

FoxNews contributor Valerie Barret: “We need jobs in this country, not unions.”

Matthew Vadum, a conservative investigative reporter, on the TEA party movement versus the occupy movement: “The only point upon which both agree is their hate of bailouts.  But that’s it. Zuccotti Park is a small park. The tea party attracted thousands and tens of thousands to their rallies; OWS attracts tens and maybe hundreds. When the tea party rally was over, the tea party left. OWS refuses to leave.”


Sign put up by Bill Looman, Georgia businessman: “New Company Policy: We are not hiring until Obama is gone.”

Rush Limbaugh: “Ladies and gentlemen, it’s not often that we have guests on this program here at the EIB Network.  But today, as it can often happen, we have an exception.  And I am proud and I am honored and I want to introduce to the microphones of this program the first lady of the United States, Michelle Moochelle Obama.”  The song “I Like Big Butts” by Sir Mix-a-Lot is then played, as a “theme” song.

Rush Limbaugh: “Every second- and third-tier Republican candidate gets an anal exam, a media anal exam. We know about their marriages. We know about their friends. We know about their enemies. We learn about their barmaids and their floozies. We know everything about their kids. We know about their grades. You name it, we’re told everything that we want to know or don’t want to know and more about every Republican.”

Rush Limbaugh: “Is it any wonder that parents get a little worried when they send the little tykes off to school, because I’ll tell you, folks, what’s happening, especially in these blue states, what’s happening in these public schools, the last thing going on is what we’ve all thought of as traditional education.”

Rush Limbaugh: “The Obama strategy is to exacerbate the problem and then get together with the media and blame the Republicans for it.”

Rush Limbaugh: “We can’t go on this way. We cannot go on with half the country being paid by the other half of the country lifetime pensions, lifetime health care, when the people doing the paying don’t have any of that themselves. It can’t sustain itself, and it won’t.”

Rush Limbaugh: “Obama’s killing factory jobs. He’s killing every kind of job this country has. He’s killing energy jobs. He’s killing jobs for Boeing. He’s killing retail jobs. He’s investing in phony industries that do not create any jobs, slush funds, Solyndra.”

Rush Limbaugh: “You compare Michele Bachmann’s life experiences to Obama and how can it be said that she is not up to the job, after the job he has done wrecking this country? How can it be said that she or Herman Cain or any one of our candidates is not up to the job when the alternative is a one-man wrecking crew named Barack Obama?”

Rush Limbaugh: “The reason nobody’s talking about spending cuts is because there aren’t any.”

Rush Limbaugh: “Folks, budgets don’t get whacked in Washington. We actually need for some budgets to get whacked. That’s what doesn’t happen! There really never are genuine spending cuts. There are only reductions in the rate of growth or spending amounts that are less than projected, which then equals a cut from what was expected to be spent.”

Rush Limbaugh: “Now, I’m telling you, when you have a bunch of people who study for three years and conclude that water does not solve dehydration, and then prevent water companies from advertising that water promotes a healthy hydrated lifestyle, I’m sorry. These are liberals. They’re insane, they’re stupid, they’re crazy, whatever else you want to say, but it is important and it matters to understand and accept the ideology that makes these people do and believe this kind of absolutely insane thing.”

Conservatives from the Past:

Milton Friedman: “In the long run government will spend whatever the tax system will raise, plus as much more as it can get away with.”

Conservatives not making any sense:

Former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson, considering a run as a third-party candidate: “I feel abandoned by the Republican Party.”

Mitt Romney: “This may sound a little overconfident, but I honestly believe I’m the only guy on the stage who has a real good chance of defeating President Obama.”

From Conservative Review #205 (HTML)  (PDF)

Liberals:

President Obama: “Long before America was even an idea, this land of plenty was home to many peoples. The British and French, the Dutch and Spanish, to Mexicans, to countless Indian tribes. We all shared the same land.”  Spain originally conquered and colonized New Spain in 1521, and Mexicans gained their independence in 1821, almost 50 years after American became an sovereign nation.

Newsweek’s Howard Fineman said, “Barack Obama probably should have joined a church here…some things in politics you have to do at least for the symbolism.”

Bill Clinton: “The people that are funding this Tea Party are trying to weaken the government. so that they can have unaccountable private power.”  On another occasion, he said, “The wealthy are funding these TEA parties so that the big companies can run American life.” [the second quote is form memory].

Rep. Loretta Sanchez speaking in Spanish to a Spanish speaking audience: “The Vietnamese and the Republicans are, with an intensity, trying to take away this seat, this seat that we have done so much for our community; take away this seat from us and give it to this Van Tran, who’s very anti-immigrant and very anti-Latino.”  Tran is an immigrant from Vietnam.  Sanchez has since apologized for these remarks.  She said that she “used a poor choice of words that some people have taken as offensive.”

John Kerry: “We have an electorate that doesn’t always pay that much attention to what’s going on so people are influenced by a simple slogan rather than the facts or the truth or what’s happening.”

Ed Schultz: “What we are seeing from this governor out of New Jersey is just, go to the money, cut whoever you have to cut, there is no ramification for any of this, because he’s a cold-hearted fat slob anyway.”

Radio Host Mike Malloy : “Back to Cheney, whose father is responsible for every single death in Iraq, since the invasion and occupation that he championed in 2003…he is responsible for the deaths in Afghanistan…he is responsible for the death in New York City [and] the Pentagon and the plane crash in Pennsylvania.  Dick Cheney is one of the bloodiest sons of bitches ever to have held power…in this government…you oughtta be out there planning your father’s funeral, Liz…do at least one thing in your useless life that will have some meaning; go plan his funeral.”

Speaking of incendiary remarks, Chris Redfern said, in reference to those TEA party members who opposed healthcare, said: “If your kids are going to graduate from college, now he or she gets health care, your heath care, while he or she looks for a new job.  It’s in the very base terms we win these arguments. Every time one of these f**** says, excuse my language…”  [I don’t have the rest of the quote]  He later sent an email to supporters with the heading, No Apologies.  Part of the email reads “These [TEA party] tactics have no place in our politics, and I will NEVER apologize for speaking out forcefully against them.”

Adrianna Huffington [about people who support Christine O’Donnell]: “We have a lot of surveys that show people are making decisions from their lizard brains, and when people operate from their lizard brains which means they’re operating from anger, from fear, from panic.  They’re not operating from rationality.  Who knows what they will decide?  I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

Liberal talk show host Bill Press: “I tell you the other thing, Ed, the fact that Glenn Beck likes Chris Christie? Of course he does. He’s a bully too. You’ve got people every night on this show that disagree with you, and you have a good dialogue. Have ever heard anybody or seen anybody who disagrees on Glenn Beck or Bill O’Reilly or Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity? No. They’re all bullies, they’re all cowards, they’re all alike. That’s why they like Christie.”

Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane [about his desire to have rough sex with Delaware Republican Senate nominee Christine O'Donnell]: “I would, I would wreck that chick.”  [The idiom comes from a Family Guy episode].

Maureen Dowd: “Evolution is no myth, but we may be evolving backward. Christine O’Donnell had better hope they don’t bring back witch burning.”

Nancy Pelosi, Democratic Speaker of the House: “The momentum is with us. We are out there to dispel many of the misrepresentations that have been going out there for nearly two years by the Republicans and the special interests, the oil industry, the health insurance industry, the banks and their allies.  We’re out there. Our members are great articulate spokespersons for their point of view into their districts. And district by district we feel very confident about the election.  And we believe that six weeks from today, six weeks from Wednesday of this week we will have no regrets but instead we will have a great Democratic victory.”

Senator Harry Reid calls New York state’s junior senator, Kirsten Gillibrand, “the hottest member” of the U.S. Senate.

Jon Stewart on his gathering: “We will gather on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. A million moderate march, where we take to the streets to send a message to our leaders and our national media that says, ‘We are here! We’re here, though, until six, because we have a sitter!’ ”

Colin Powell: “[Illegal aliens are] all over my house, doing things whenever I call for repairs, and I’m sure you’ve seen them at your house.”  He has since walked these remarks back by clarifying them.

Liberals making sense:

Chris Matthews: “I have one small tweak to make to what the president said today – he should stop saying that giving people tax cuts is giving people money. It`s their money! A tax cut is when the government doesn’t take our money. It`s an important distinction.  He talked today, for example, about people getting a check from the government in the form of a tax cut. That`s not the way it works. If tax rates are kept lower, it`s a matter of the check going to the government being smaller.”

Question for Obama from a supporter: “I’m one of your middle class Americans. And quite frankly, I’m exhausted. Exhausted of defending you, defending your administration, defending the mantle of change that I voted for.  My husband and I have joked for years that we thought we were well beyond the hot dogs and beans era of our lives, but, quite frankly, it’s starting to knock on our door and ring true that that might be where we’re headed again, and, quite frankly, Mr. President, I need you to answer this honestly. Is this my new reality?”

Steve Colbert: “We’ve ignored this issue [or exploited aliens] for way too long.  It’s time to roll up our sleeves and face this issue mano to – whatever the Spanish word for `mano’ is.”

Gavin Newoms: “That is not something that I’m proud to say as a Democrat, it’s not something I want to say, but it’s true…It’s not wrong to criticize parts of that stimulus as disproportionately saving jobs in the public sector and not stimulating private sector economic growth.”

Now, perhaps there are more liberals sounding intelligent right about this time because it is a month away from the elections?

Crosstalk:

Paul Volcker on Obama: “He is not a wild-eyed leftist radical. It’s ridiculous. Since he has been in office he has been a defender of open markets.”

Neil on Forbes on Fox: “[Obama] is not so much anti-business as economically clueless.”

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Leslie Stall: “With everything that President Obama’s going through, almost the worst insult that people say is that ‘My God, he could be worse than Jimmy Carter.’”

Jimmy Carter: “I can’t control what people say about comparing me with Obama. But I hope that Obama will have as successful a term as I had in dealing with our nation’s domestic and international affairs. And if he does, I’ll be very proud of him, as I happen to be proud of myself, having had a successful administration when I was in office.”

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Charles Krauthammer on the effectiveness of Obama’s stimulus bill: “These guys have had a year and a half and people are not happy with the results.  $1 trillion of stimulus it disappeared and there is nothing to show.”

Washington Post’s Colby King “They had 3 million jobs to show for it.”

Krauthammer: “Yeah, saved, saved, how do you measure a saved job?”

Conservatives:

Jim DeMint: “I don’t want the [Republican] majority back if we don’t believe anything.  When I came in to the Senate, we had 55 Senators, a large majority in the House and a Republican in the White house.  We didn’t do what we said we were going to do.”

Christine O’Donnell: “When the people fear the government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.”

While the round table fretted about the so-called Civil War within the Republican Party, George Will (as usual) brings some sanity and clear thinking to the table: “At the beginning of the year, the question was, will the Tea Party people play nicely with others and will they obey the rules of politics?  Who’s sort of not playing nicely?  Mr. Crist starts losing the primary to a Tea Party favorite Rubio. He suddenly discovers that he’s an independent and changes all his views overnight.  Mrs. Murkowski loses a primary and suddenly discovers that she has a property right in her Senate seat and she’s going to run as a write-in. Senator Bennett thought of that in Utah, Senator Castle in Delaware is thinking of a write-in candidate. Who are the extremists?”

Noel Sheppard writes: “As [George] Will accurately stated, the media have been ‘writing this story for eight months about what a problem the Tea Party is for the Republican Party.’ The liberal press are always trying to figure out a narrative that paints the GOP in the most negative light.  First we were told the Tea Party represented an inconsequential fringe of racists and homophobes that will have no impact on elections.  Now that its candidates have produced shocking results across the fruited plain, and have reinvigorated conservative voters like nothing we’ve seen in many years, the movement is going to produce a Civil War within the Republican Party that will either hurt it in November or make it impossible for it to govern if its successful at the polls.  This is clearly why you could see Will either shaking his head or seemingly laughing to himself as his colleagues waxed philosophically about some as yet unrealized though oft-predicted calamity associated with this movement.  Less than two years after Barack Obama and the Democrat Party won a landslide victory that had the potential of being a political realignment shifting the balance of power in this country to the left for many years nay decades, the Republicans are on the precipice of shocking the world by taking back the Congress.  Is it any wonder the media are doing their darnedest to figure out a way to undermine it or that Will is getting such a kick out of watching them try?”

Chris Christie: “I had an Irish father and I had, before she passed away 6 years ago, a Sicilian mother.   Now, for those of you who have been exposed to the combination of Irish and Sicilian—it has made me not unfamiliar with conflict.  In my house, my parents left nothing unsaid; we heard most of it, and most of it was at a pretty high volume.”

Ben Stein (tongue-in-cheek): “Aces to Oliver Stone for standing up for Hitler.”

Mike Murphy: “Jerry Brown is a time machine back to failure.” (Quoted from memory)

Charles Krauthammer: “The president has delivered more for liberalism in a year and a half than any president in 50 years.  He’s given them national health care. He’s given them heavy regulation on finance. He gave them $1 trillion to spend on every wish list that liberals have had for the last 20 years.  He has given them two appointments for the Supreme Court, each of which will yield a quarter-century of liberal opinions. He bailed out unions in the auto takeover. He bailed out the teachers’ unions just this week by supporting state and local governments. He has given them everything he could possibly do – and they’re [liberals are] whining about him? It’s unbelievable.”

Michael Eden (on Obama’s recent townhall meeting): “It was billed as Investing In America…But it sounded like a therapy session for disillusioned Obama supporters.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of “The Black Swan”: “Obama did exactly the opposite of what should have been done.  He surrounded himself with people who exacerbated the problem. You have a person who has cancer and instead of removing the cancer, you give him tranquilizers. When you give tranquilizers to a cancer patient, they feel better but the cancer gets worse.”

Noel Sheppard: “If James Madison were alive today, he’d be a Tea Partier.”

Mitt Romney: “We have serious enemies and growing threats throughout the world.  Unfortunately, we have an administration whose idea of a rogue state is Arizona.”

Taken from

Conservative Review #145

(HTML version)   (PDF version)

Unemployment is at 9.6%. Jobs are scarce.

Colin Powell took a swan dive into ignominy when he admitted that he hires illegal aliens to work on his house:

WASHINGTON — Former Secretary of State Colin Powell says illegal immigrants do essential work in the U.S. and he has firsthand knowledge of that — because they fix his house.

Powell, a moderate Republican, urged his party Sunday to support immigration generally because it is “what’s keeping this country’s lifeblood moving forward.”

This actually qualifies Powell to be a Democrat along the lines of Dianne Feinstein. A hypocrite.

In an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press,” he said a path to legal status should be offered to illegal immigrants because they “are doing things we need done in this country.”

Like taking American jobs.

In lamenting the party’s rightward drift Sunday, he said Republicans must not become anti-immigration and spoke in support of legislation that would give certain children of illegal immigrants a way to become citizens if they pursue a college education or military service.

Ah, there it is again. The conflation of legal immigration and illegal immigration. As though they were one issue.

And he said the tea party may not become an enduring force unless it moves beyond slogans and promotes an agenda that people “can see, touch and actually believe in.” It’s not enough, he said, to call for goals that most Americans support, such as controlled federal spending and adherence to the Constitution.

Golly, controlled federal spending and adherence to the Constitution is pretty darned good. And it is a departure from what we have now.

The former secretary of state said he still sees Obama as a transformational figure, if one who has lost some of his ability to connect with people.

I have to agree with the General here. Obama did say he meant to fundamentally transform the United States, a democratic republic, into something else.

This is all kind of irritating in light of Linda Chavez being disqualified in 2001 from serving as Labor Secretary under George W. Bush because she provided haven for an illegal alien.

Last weekend in Rutland Vermont I saw a young man carrying a sign that said “I am desperate. Will do anything for cash.”

I bet he’d like to fix Powell’s house. Even for what Powell was paying those illegals.

Extra credit question: Does Powell pay them minimum wage?

The WaPo writes a dismissive article today on the new book written by Douglas Feith:

In the first insider account of Pentagon decision-making on Iraq, one of the key architects of the war blasts former secretary of state Colin Powell, the CIA, retired Gen. Tommy R. Franks and former Iraq occupation chief L. Paul Bremer for mishandling the run-up to the invasion and the subsequent occupation of the country.

Douglas J. Feith, in a massive score-settling work, portrays an intelligence community and a State Department that repeatedly undermined plans he developed as undersecretary of defense for policy and conspired to undercut President Bush’s policies.

Among the disclosures made by Feith in “War and Decision,” scheduled for release next month by HarperCollins, is Bush’s declaration, at a Dec. 18, 2002, National Security Council meeting, that “war is inevitable.” The statement came weeks before U.N. weapons inspectors reported their initial findings on Iraq and months before Bush delivered an ultimatum to Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Feith, who says he took notes at the meeting, registered it as a “momentous comment.”

Although he acknowledges “serious errors” in intelligence, policy and operational plans surrounding the invasion, Feith blames them on others outside the Pentagon and notes that “even the best planning” cannot avoid all problems in wartime. While he says the decision to invade was correct, he judges that the task of creating a viable and stable Iraqi government was poorly executed and remains “grimly incomplete.”

A majority of the blame, Feith writes, can be laid at the feet of Bremer and the State Department/CIA which jives completely with Kenneth Timmerman’s book Shadow Warriors: The Untold Story of Traitors, Saboteurs, and the Party of Surrender. One example is the Chalabi issue. In one segment Timmerman writes about a May 2004 meeting between the President and his principal advisors where Ambassador Robert Blackwill made a plea to sideline Ahmad Chalabi, who at the time was a member of the Governing Council and was being talked about to be a candidate for PM.

Blackwill argued that Chalabi was on the take and then through out a charge that he was meeting with Iranians in Kurdistan.

While Cheney had been critical of the CIA for leaking derogatory information on Chalabi to the press, he agreed that the information on these latest alleged meetings between Chalabi’s people and the Iranians was troubling. But so was the meeting hosted by the Brits ten days earlier in Basra with a top Iranian Foreign Ministry official, to which Bremer sent his foreign affairs advisor, State Department diplomat Ron Neumann. Certainly no decision was made by this group to talk directly to the Iranians, he pointed out. Did that make Jerry Bremer an Iranian agent?

Undaunted, Blackwill urged the principals as a precauction to terminate the intelligence-collection program with the Iraqi National Congress (a Chalabi organization). Even though DIA director Admiral Lowell Jacoby wanted to continue the program and U.S. Field commanders had testified publicly that INC information had saved the lives of U.S. soldiers, the CIA was trying to place the blame on the INC for its own mistakes in analysing Saddam’s WMD programs. “The CIA was pissed with us because we kept coming up with stuff they didn’t have,” said Chalabi aide Zaab Sethna.

Chalabi later alleged in U.S. court filings that King Abdullah II of Jordan “traveled to the United States and personally delivered to President George Bush a file containing the false accusation that Chalabi had informed the Iranian government that the United States had broken its encryption code and thus could intercept its secret communications.”

Timmerman writes about the fact that, at the time, Bremer was the sole person who named Iraqi judges and those judges reported to him. On May 20, 2004, one of those judges issued a arrest warrant for Chalabi and his house and office was raided. He even authorized the use of coalition forces to help out on the raid.

The raid turned up nothing of value. Instead they took

“a family Koran, a set of prayer beads, and documents relating to the INC’s investigation of the UN oil-for-food scandal. (The INC was instrumental in exposing the massive bribery scheme, and had compiled documents seized in former government ministries that identified hundreds of United Nations and foreign government officials who had taken kickbacks from Saddam Hussein.)

Back in Washington, former Pentagon official Michael Rubin was livid. “This is a huge blow to America’s prestige. The message we’ve just sent is that we do not stand by our allies, that the United States can’t be trusted. We’ve just told Arab liberals and democrats that it’s just plain crazy to work with America.”

Rubin, who had recently returned from a job with the CPA, spoke by phone with Sunni clerics, Shiite professionals, and independent Kurdish businessmen in Iraq in the hours immediately after the Baghdad raid. “Everyone in Iraq believes that because of U.S. actions, we are now heading for civil war,” he said. “We have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Basically, Bremer had gone mad,” he told me.

Bremer and the CPA later claimed they had seized counterfeit Iraqi money. Only problem was that they seized “several specimen counterfeit bills, stamped “COUNTERFEIT” in large letters by the Iraqi Central Bank.”

Timmerman writes about the “leaks” by senior U.S. officials to the MSM which alleged dozens of nefarious deeds by Chalabi.

To anyone who didn’t know Chalabi and hadn’t experienced the deep, personal animosity the CIA continued to harbor toward him, the allegations were stunning.

Time reported that the FBI had opened a counterintelligence investigation into Chalabi’s relationship with the Iranians. Newsweek added that the gumshoes were seeking to determine “who in the U.S. government might have leaked such information to Chalabi or the INC.” News of the FBI involvement, and the opening of a U.S. based investigation, amounted to two additional leaks of highly sensitive classified information. All came from “senior” administration officials and were prima facie violations of the Espionage Act.

As the days wore on the alleged misdeeds by Chalabi grew more and more incredible, including a story that Chalabi had learned about the US breaking the Iranian code from a drunk soldier and then he passed it on to the Iranians. The Iranian station chief then sent word of this news back to Tehran, USING THE BROKEN CODE!

It was so ridiculous that no serious person could possible fall for it, said Michael Ledeen, a prominent neo-con author and longtime Chalabi supporter. “Basically it assumes, A, that Chalabi is an idiot. And, B, that the Iranian station chief in Baghdad is an idiot. And the one thing we know for sure in all of this is that the Iranian intelligence service is very good, and they don’t have idiots as station chiefs in places like Baghdad.”

Ledeen was right. The story was laughably absurd. Although the Chalabi “scandal” was front-page news all across America, the president managed to put enough distance between himself and Chalabi that his misfortunes did not translate into a significant loss of public confidence in the president or in the war.

But it was just the beginning. The shadow warriors were playing for keeps.

It appears Feith’s new book will go into the shadow warriors a bit along with others inside the administration who put roadblocks in the way of Iraqi success. But to come to this conclusion you have to wade through the dismissive tone of this WaPo piece written by Thomas E. Ricks and Karen DeYoung.

In his book, Feith defends the intelligence activities on grounds that the CIA was “politicizing” intelligence by ignoring evidence in its own reports of ties between Hussein and international terrorists.

Powell and his deputy, Richard L. Armitage, are described as repeatedly working behind the scenes to undercut sound proposals by Feith and other Pentagon officials and to undermine decisions Bush had made. Feith criticizes Powell’s failure to persuade France and Germany to support U.S. war policy at the United Nations, and to gain Turkey’s approval for U.S. troop movements in its territory, as failures of effort and commitment. Feith also asks what would have happened if Powell had argued with Bush against overthrowing Hussein. Powell might have persuaded the president, Feith writes, or, if not, could have resigned.

In an introduction to the manuscript, Feith writes that he has tried to avoid polemic and seeks only to contribute to the historical record. He argues, as have other Iraq hawks such as Richard Perle — a former Reagan administration Pentagon official and outside Rumsfeld adviser — that the administration’s careful approach to Iraq, including a swift transition to Iraqi control, was prevented from succeeding by ill-informed or disloyal subordinates.

The idea to which Feith appears most attached, and to which he repeatedly returns in the book, is the formation of an Iraqi Interim Authority. Feith’s office drew up a plan for the body — to be made up of U.S.-appointed Iraqis who would share some decision-making with U.S. occupation forces — in the months before the invasion. But while he says that Bush approved it, he charges that Bremer refused to implement it.

The key mistake that the United States made in Iraq, Feith asserts, was “the mishandling of the political transition.” The good that Bremer did, he concludes, “was outweighed by the harm caused by the fact of occupation.”

Others have criticized Feith’s plan as relying too heavily on Iraqi exile politicians, including Ahmed Chalabi. Feith says that he considered Chalabi one of the most astute and democratically minded Iraqis but that he had no special brief for him. Instead, he charges that the State Department, the CIA and the military’s Central Command were pathologically opposed to the exiles and to Chalabi in particular.

Feith continually denounces the CIA, accusing it of producing poor intelligence, intruding on the formulation of policy, and then using leaks to the media to defend itself and attack its bureaucratic opponents. Most notably, he charges that intelligence officials ignored and refused to investigate possible links between al-Qaeda and Hussein’s government.

In summarizing his view of what went wrong in Iraq, Feith writes that it was a mistake for the administration to rely so heavily on intelligence reports of Hussein’s alleged stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons and a nuclear weapons program, not only because they turned out to be wrong but also because secret information was not necessary to understand the threat Hussein posed.

Hussein’s history of aggression and disregard of U.N. resolutions, his past use of weapons of mass destruction and the fact that he was “a bloodthirsty megalomaniac” were enough, Feith maintains.

Couldn’t of said it better myself.