This Week in Quotes

I would like to apologize to those tramps that have slept with my husband. Maybe she could have said that. — Joy Behar on the women Bill Clinton raped and sexually assaulted.

If Trump were president, Republicans and conservatives would be forever tainted by every irresponsible, cruel, or stupid thing he said or did. Besides, if we’re going to have liberalism for another four years, let it wear the proper Democrat label. It’s pathetic to see people calling upon this contemptible fraud, bully, and egotist to withdraw for the sake of his party and his country. If he gave a whit for either, he would have been gone long ago. — Mona Charen

You can call us wrong, but don’t call us weasels. We are not weasels. — James Comey

If you do not believe in climate change, you do not believe in facts or in science or empirical truths and therefore, in my humble opinion, should not be allowed to hold public office. — Leonardo DiCaprio

LBJ liked to say, “Let’s not step on our d**ks” on this or that issue. Trump is like one of those Italian barefoot peasant women who make wine by stomping on grapes all day, except instead of grapes it’s d**ks as far as the eye can see and Trump is wearing very expensive shoes. — Jonah Goldberg

I don’t go to church as much as I should, and I hate the Catholic church I was raised in because of what they did and how corrupt they became. — Sean Hannity

Whenever a politician says he searched his conscience, you can assume it was a very quick search of a very small space. — Charles Krauthammer

In 1998, Dr. James Dobson was stunned by the public’s ability to “rationalize” Bill Clinton’s behavior. In a public letter, he lamented the fact that as long as Clinton did a good job in office, many Americans felt that “it’s nobody’s business what he does with his personal life.”

Today Dobson, like many high-profile Evangelical leaders, supports Donald Trump for president. The key question here is whether character should matter—or whether a lack of character should be a deal breaker. And it sounds like Trump’s apologists have answered with a resounding “No.”

The fact that somebody can dot the I’s and cross the T’s on a foreign leader or geographic location then allows them to put our military in harm’s way. — Gary Johnson

In this regard, Bill Clinton’s defenders have won the culture war; even Christian leaders agree that being on the right “team” is what counts most. — Matt Lewis

Ferguson, Mo., is emblematic of how the Ferguson effect is hitting cities with large black populations: It has produced the largest homicide increase in nearly a half-century. That crime increase will only end if the false narrative about policing promulgated by the Black Lives Matter movement and embraced by President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton is finally put to rest. — Heather Mac Donald

How did the Ferguson effect affect Ferguson, Mo., last year? Precisely as you would expect. The little city of 21,059 already had a disproportionately high crime rate, as anyone observing the behavior of Michael Brown before he was fatally shot by Ferguson officer Darren Wilson in August 2014 would have guessed. In 2014, Ferguson’s violent-crime rate was 545 violent crimes per 100,000 residents, considerably above the 2014 national average of 362. But in 2015, the number of violent crimes in Ferguson surged 65 percent, from 115 to 190. Ferguson’s violent-crime rate in 2015 was 790 per 100,000 residents, over two times the national average of 373 in 2015. By comparison, the FBI estimates that the absolute number of the nation’s violent crimes rose nearly 4 percent in 2015, and the nation’s violent-crime rate rose 3 percent. — Heather Mac Donald

As Smaldino and McElreath explain in their study, this rush for the printing presses leads to sloppy science and declining standards of rigor. So, by extension, the more money the government throws at some field with an initially limited number of practitioners (think global warming) the worse the science will become.
What constitutes “bad science”? It’s the epidemic of positive results, in which a researcher reports that the data support his or her prior hypothesis. Stanford’s Daniele Fanelli has shown a distressing increase of positive results in recent decades, something that can’t be true in the real world. Think about it — we are not suddenly becoming more intelligent and getting everything right. What’s happening is that scientists are responding to incentives.

Usually, hypotheses are put forward in some grant proposal. Financial backers don’t like negative findings, because negative findings don’t support the work that they’ve funded. Supervisors lose face and researchers can lose their funding. — Patrick Michaels

ObamaCare exchange buyers will have only one option in nearly a third of American counties, according to an August report from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. That’s a 300% increase in single-option counties from last year. Twenty-five states and the District of Columbia have approved rates leading to average premium increases next year of over 26%. — Andrew Ogles and Luke Hilgemann

If the Germans don’t think defending Germany is worth German money and lives, why is it worth American money and lives? — Kurt Schlichter

We expect more of our leaders, not less. Because if nothing is expected of our leaders, they will lead us astray in the name of the principles we supposedly believe. — Ben Shapiro

But what would worry me if I were Trump is that the race isn’t that close if everyone turns out — and I have the worse turnout operation. — Nate Silver

In 1960, before this expansion of the welfare state, 22 percent of black children were raised with only one parent. By 1985, 67 percent of black children were raised with either one parent or no parent. — Thomas Sowell

“I say today, and I will continue to say, that I believe Monica Lewinsky is alive today because of choices I made and action I took. That may sound melodramatic to your listeners. I can only say that from my perspective, I believe that she and I at the time were in danger, because nothing stands in the way of these people achieving their political ends.” — Linda Tripp

Election years often thin sports ratings, but the NFL has never seen a drop as dramatic as this year’s, Nielsen data shows. In 2008, for example, ratings over the course of the year declined 2 percent, and in 2000 they declined 10 percent. During the first five weeks of this year, ratings have declined 15 percent compared with the entirety of last year. — The Washington Post

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