“This morning, in a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court overturned Washington, DC’s ban on handguns! Wooo! Finally, the residents of Washington, DC have the right to defend themselves. From each other, one assumes.

Writing for the majority, Justice Antonin Scalia said, ‘It is not the role of this court to pronounce the Second Amendment extinct.’

He is right. Killing the Constitution is the president’s job. The court’s job is to overturn elections.”

–Stephen Colbert

[Quote:]

President Bush still clings to his claim that the economy is doing well. “It’s a good time to buy a house.” Yeah, and an airline. And Circuit City.

[Quote:]

”Let us rid ourselves of the fiction that low oil prices are somehow good for the United States,”

– Dick Cheney, October 1986.

“Speaking of Barack Obama, yesterday, Barack Obama said, if he becomes president, he will replace the White House bowling alleys because it’s something he would never use. That’s what he said, yeah. Yeah, apparently, this is the same reason President Bush got rid of the White House library.”

–Conan O’Brien

“Barack Obama surprised a bunch of students in Chicago yesterday when he showed up unannounced at an eighth grade graduation. Gave a speech at the eighth grade graduation, pretty cool. Now, don’t confuse that with President Bush’s appearance last year at an eighth grade graduation. He was just there getting a diploma.”

–Jay Leno

[Quote:]

“There are miserable creatures like you in every administration who don’t have the guts to speak up or quit if there are disagreements with the boss or colleagues,” Dole wrote in the personal e-mail. “No, your type soaks up the benefits of power, revels in the limelight for years, then quits, and spurred on by greed, cashes in with a scathing critique.”

[..]

“When the money starts rolling in you should donate it to a worthy cause, something like, ‘Biting The Hand That Fed Me,’” he wrote. “Another thought is to weasel your way back into the White House if a Democrat is elected. That would provide a good set up for a second book deal in a few years.”

– Bob Dole, the former Senate Majority Leader and 1996 Republican presidential nominee, who also made clear he has no plans to read the book.

[Quote:]

Victory means exit strategy, and it’s important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is.

* George W. Bush, on Kosovo, Houston Chronicle (April 9, 1999)

[Quote:]

People that are really very weird can get into sensitive positions and have a tremendous impact on history.

Dan Quayle (1947 - )

“President Bush was in Saudi Arabia to mark 75 years of official relations with the royal family. And 40 years of officially being screwed royally by that family. Did you see the present the royal family gave President Bush? You see what it was? … A Schwinn. A brand new Schwinn, yeah. That pretty much says it all, doesn’t it? He goes over there looking for solutions to the energy crisis, they give him a bicycle.”

–Jay Leno

[Quote:]

As anyone who has tried to quit smoking knows, dependence is hardest to overcome during difficult or stressful times. That must be why, when the government helps drug abusers quit, they arrest them and take away their job, possessions, and children.

[Quote:]

The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.

“No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this.”

[..]

For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people.

“As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups, although they are better protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything ‘chosen’ about them.”

So here is what happened on Tuesday. Hillary Clinton barely won my home state of Indiana. And she lost in the State of North Carolina. But here is the good news. She has a substantial lead in the state of denial.

– Letterman

[SAMI AL-HAJ: [translated]:]

I’m very happy to be in Sudan, but I’m very sad because of the situation of our brothers who remain in Guantanamo. Conditions in Guantanamo are very, very bad, and they get worse by the day. Our human condition, our human dignity was violated, and the American administration went beyond all human values, all moral values, all religious values. In Guantanamo, you have animals that are called iguanas, rats that are treated with more humanity. But we have people from more than fifty countries that are completely deprived of all rights and privileges, and they will not give them the rights that they give to animals.

For more than seven years, I did not get a chance to be brought before a civil court. To defend their just case and to get the freedom that we’re deprived of, they ignored every kind of law, every kind of religion. But thank God. I was lucky, because God allowed that I be released. Although I’m happy, there is part of me that is not, because my brothers remain behind, and they are in the hands of people that claim to be champions of peace and protectors of rights and freedoms.

But the true just peace does not come through military force or threats to use smart or stupid bombs or to threaten with economic sanctions. Justice comes from lifting oppression and guaranteeing rights and freedoms and respecting the will of the people and not to interfere with a country’s internal politics.

[Quote:]

ACT I SCENE 2. A road, morning. Enter JULES and VINCENT, murderers.

V: And know’st thou what the French name cottage pie?
J: Say they not cottage pie, in their own tongue?
V: But nay, their tongues, for speech and taste alike
Are strange to ours, with their own history:
Gaul knoweth not a cottage from a house.
J: What say they then, pray?
V: Hachis Parmentier.
J: Hachis Parmentier! What name they cream?
V: Cream is but cream, only they say la crème.
J: What do they name black pudding?
V: I know not;
I visited no inn it could be bought.

“Life in Lubbock, Texas, taught me two things: One is that God loves you and you’re going to burn in hell. The other is that sex is the most awful, filthy thing on earth and you should save it for someone you love.”

—Butch Hancock

Have the courage to be ignorant of a great number of things, in order to avoid the calamity of being ignorant of everything.

Sydney Smith (1771 - 1845)

“Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.”

– Dr Seuss (thanks, dré)

Chris Matthews: At any time in this campaign did you have a chuckle that you just couldn’t get rid of…something weird that happened that was so crazy that you just went to bed laughin’ about it?

Barack Obama: Oh, that happens once a day.  But then I stopped watching cable news.

—Hardball

[Quote:]

The other thing we evolutionary biologists don’t do enough of, and this stems from the previous point, is make an emotional and moral case for the study of evolution. Last night, I concluded my talk with a quote from Dover, PA creationist school board member William Cunningham, who declared, “Two thousand years ago someone died on a cross. Can’t someone take a stand for him?”

My response was, “In the last two minutes, someone died from a bacterial infection. We take a stand for him.”

[Quote:]

You ever get the feeling that Microsoft is holding you down, has you by the wrists, and is flailing your own hands against your forehead and saying “stop hitting yourself; stop hitting yourself; why are you hitting yourself; stop hitting yourself;…” Yea, me too.

via

“It says he made us all to be just like him. So if we’re dumb, then god is dumb, and maybe even a little ugly on the side.”

— Frank Zappa