This Week In Quotes Double Edition (Oct 11 — Oct 24)

So I guess I have to join my more radical/Tea Partyish commenters in asking the Old Guard, “If you’re so vital to the movement, and your thinking is so clear and smart, how come you’ve pretty much gotten your asses kicked up and down the block since Iran-Contra?” — Ace

That’s why compromise is so hard between the two camps. One side, the “small government” adherents, don’t want new ways to do the old things, they want the government to be doing fewer things period. The other side says, it’s not possible to shrink government so we’ll just manage it better and not make it as big as the Democrats want (at least at first).

It’s the old story of the guy who says, “I want to kill all of your kids”. A parent isn’t going to compromise and say, “well, how about just half of them and maybe wound one other?”. The natural position is going to be, “We’ll not be hurting any of my kids and I’m going to kill you for suggesting otherwise”. There won’t be an acceptable compromise here. — Ace

I’m not a card-carrying member (of the Tea Party) – I don’t think there is a card – but I have respect for what the people are doing. These are Americans. They’re loyal, they’re patriotic, they’re taxpayers. And they’re fed up with what they see happening in Washington. I think it’s a normal, healthy reaction, and the fact that the party is having to adjust to it is positive. — Dick Cheney

Really, you got to think – we take an oath to support the country against all enemies, foreign and domestic. These are the domestic enemies. — Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.)

Liberals will fight until they get their way – and, as soon as they do, they announce their one victory is “settled law.” — Ann Coulter

You can be in the country illegally, you can have an extensive criminal history, you can have multiple criminal convictions for serious offenses, and there is nothing that we can do to touch you. – Chris Crane, president of the ICE Council, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents’ union

Where this went off track is when it came to the Senate and Senate Republicans didn’t stand united alongside House Republicans. Senate Republicans, instead, divided in half and began going on television, going on radio, going everywhere and blasting the House Republicans saying ‘we cannot win’, ‘this will fail’, ‘theres no way to win’ and when you’ve got half the Senate Republican caucus firing their cannons at the House Republicans, it sabotages the effort. — Ted Cruz

And so, I understand you want to draw me into the back and forth with other Republican senators and that’s fun to cover. I’m not interested in playing that game. Do you know what many of the elected officials in Washington are most upset about is that their constituents were calling and holding them accountable. I can’t tell you how many of my colleagues have expressed outrage to me that my constituents are calling me. Dana, we work for our constituents. That’s our job. — Ted Cruz

I don’t work for the party bosses in Washington. I work for the people of Texas. And I fight for them. — Ted Cruz

I don’t know where the Republicans lost their will to fight … You’ve got to just stand your ground to fight. No retreat, no surrender. They surrendered before they even got started. I was very proud of the House passing that continuing resolution with defunding Obamacare on it. But if you’re going to fight this fight, you’ve got to fight it to win and that’s frankly what Obama did. — Tom DeLay

I’ve gotta tell you, man, I’m starting to think these tea party activists are freaking retarded. — Ryan Ellis, The Tax Policy Director for Americans for Tax Reform

Mitch McConnell has spent two months telling us the GOP was powerless to do anything against the Democrats, but Mike Lee and Ted Cruz were somehow powerful enough to shut down the government and McConnell was singlehandedly powerful enough to get a several billion dollar kickback for Kentucky in the deal to reopen the government. — Erick Erickson

This bipartisan betrayal is the TARP Wall Street bailout all over again. The line separating the Democrats and the Republican establishment is fading- it might have disappeared today. This is about Washington insiders versus the rest of America now. — Freedomworks

I want to commend the House of Representatives, they have taken a bold stance listening to the American people, but unfortunately the United States Senate has refused to do likewise. The United States Senate has stayed with the traditional approach of the Washington establishment of maintaining the status quo and doing nothing to respond through the sufferings Obamacare is causing millions of Americans. This is unfortunate, but nobody should be surprised.

But amidst all the focus on Speaker John Boehner and House Republicans, we cannot lose focus on Mitch McConnell and the GOP Conference in the Senate. McConnell and his henchmen sabotaged House Republicans at the two most critical points.

Headed into October 1, the House was the only body that had the ability to pass a funding bill. Republicans had enough votes to block Harry Reid from reinserting funding for Obamacare. Instead, McConnell and the gang acted in solidarity with fellow Senate Democrats instead of House Republicans. That dynamic was only accentuated as the showdown dragged on.

Aside for Senators Mike Lee and Ted Cruz, nobody else paid more than lip service to fighting Obamacare. Worse, the overwhelming majority of Republicans in the Senate sabotaged the effort. One after another, they would go on TV and trash House Republicans and echo Harry Reid’s talking points. Reid and Obama just sat back and let Senate Republicans blow up their colleagues. Then in the eleventh hour, instead of at least demanding delay of the individual mandate (which McConnell touted months ago as the alternative to defund), McConnell gave Harry Reid everything he wanted. — Daniel Horowitz

Microsoft, IBM, Archer Daniels — they do not have an ideology. They will give money to people who hurt 80 per cent of what they care about if it helps their bottom line. — Darrell Issa

In February, the BLS released a “databook” on the status of women in the labor force as of 2011. It revealed that married women (57.1 percent) were more likely to be employed than unmarried women (49.8 percent). Similarly, married men (70.5 percent) were more likely to be employed than unmarried men (56.4 percent). Overall, 63.7 percent of married Americans were employed compared to 52.9 percent of unmarried Americans.

Married women with children under 18 were also more likely to be employed (65.1 percent) than unmarried women with children under 18 (63.6 percent). While married women (70.7 percent) and unmarried women (70.8 percent) with children between 6 and 17 were almost equally likely to be employed, married women with children under 6 (58.3 percent) and under 3 (55.9 percent) were more likely to be employed than unmarried women with children under 6 (54.5 percent) and under 3 (49.7 percent). — Terry Jeffrey

They’re saying if you are in need of healthcare, you have two choices: you can wait for them to get the site fixed or you can enroll in medical school, graduate, and then just take care of yourself which would probably be faster. — Jimmy Kimmel

Given the ruthless and vindictive way the shutdown has been handled, I now believe that this president would willfully act to destroy the full faith and credit of the United States unless the Congress acquiesces to all of his demands, at least as long as he sees political advantage in doing so,” McClintock said in a speech on the floor of the House of Representatives. “If the Republicans acquiesce, immediate crisis will quickly vanish, credit markets will calm and public life will return to other matters. But a fundamental element of our Constitution will have been destroyed. The power of the purse will have shifted from the representatives of the people to the executive. The executive bureaucracies will be freed to churn out ever more outlandish regulations with no effective congressional review or check through the purse. A perilous era will have begun in which the president sets spending levels and vetoes any bill falling short of his demands. Whenever a deadline approaches, one house can simply refuse to negotiate with the other until Congress is faced with the Hobson’s choice of a shutdown or a default. The nation’s spending will again dangerously accelerate. The deficit will rapidly widen. And the economic prosperity of the nation will continue to slowly bleed away. — Tom McClintock

SEXUAL ASSAULT PREVENTION ADVICE FROM EMILY YOFFE: College Women: Stop Getting Drunk: It’s closely associated with sexual assault. And yet we’re reluctant to tell women to stop doing it. Of course, the men are often drunk, too. But when a drunk woman couples with a drunk man, the drunk man is somehow still responsible, while the woman is a victim, because she’s drunk. “Educating students about rape, teaching them that by definition a very drunk woman can’t consent to sex, is crucial.” Double standard much?
Glenn Reynolds

As Niall Ferguson notes, while politicians crow that the deficit has dropped — from super-enormous to merely really, really gigantic — every year that we’re in deficit adds to the debt. And the long-term trends are bad: “A very striking feature of the latest Congressional Budget Office report is how much worse it is than last year’s. A year ago, the CBO’s extended baseline series for the federal debt in public hands projected a figure of 52% of GDP by 2038. That figure has very nearly doubled to 100%. A year ago the debt was supposed to glide down to zero by the 2070s. This year’s long-run projection for 2076 is above 200%. In this devastating reassessment, a crucial role is played here by the more realistic growth assumptions used this year.” — Glenn Reynolds

The data is going to indicate sadly that when the Obama administration is over, black people will have lost ground in every single leading economic indicator category. On that regard, the president ought to be held responsible. — Tavis Smiley

Republicans spent a lot of time whining that, if Obama was prepared to negotiate with the Iranians, the Syrians, and the Russians, why wouldn’t he negotiate with the GOP? Well, the obvious answer is Rouhani, Assad, and Putin don’t curl up in a fetal position at the first tut-tut from Bob Schieffer or Diane Sawyer. — Mark Steyn

The “law of the land” means machinations and procedural legerdemain culminating in a show vote on unread omnibus fill-in-the-blanks pseudo-legislation to be decided after the fact by the regulatory bureaucracy. — Mark Steyn

My friends on the American right fret that if we’re not careful we’ll end up like Europe. But we’re already worse than many parts of Europe, and certainly than the non-European West – by any measure you care to use. According to the IMF, the Danish government’s net debt is 10.3 percent of GDP, Australia’s is 12.7 percent, New Zealand’s 28.8 percent, the Netherlands’ 35.5 percent, Canada’s 35.9 percent, Germany’s 56.2 percent, France’s 86.5 percent – and the United States’ 89 percent. If you take America’s total indebtedness, it averages out to three-quarters of a million dollars per family: We are on course to becoming the first nation of negative-millionaires. — Mark Steyn

In Australia, each citizen’s share of the debt is $12,000; in New Zealand, it’s $15,000 per person; in Canada and Spain, $18,000; in the United Kingdom, $28,000; in Germany and France, $38,000; Italy, $44,000. And in the United States it’s $54,000 per person – twice as much as Britain, thrice as much as Canada, closing in on five times as much as Oz. On this trajectory, America is exiting the First World. — Mark Steyn

What would you think of a person who earned $24,000 a year but spent $35,000? Suppose on top of that, he was already $170,000 in debt. You’d tell him to get his act together — stop spending so much or he’d destroy his family, impoverish his kids and wreck their future. Of course, no individual could live so irresponsibly for long. But tack on eight more zeroes to that budget and you have the checkbook for our out-of-control, big-spending federal government. — John Stossel

For most of the history of America, federal spending never took up more than 5 percent of the economy. Spending increased during wars, but after World Wars I and II, spending dropped back to prewar levels. Then came Presidents Johnson and Nixon and the “great society.” From then on, spending rose even in peacetime. Now, if you include local government, government spending makes up more than 40 percent of the economy. — John Stossel

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