This Week In Quotes: March 16 – March 22

23 Mar, 2012 by John Hawkins

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Callista Gingrich. Karen Santorum. Ann Romney. Now do you really think our country is ready for a white first lady? Too soon, right? — Robert De Niro

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 over again. — Senior Romney aide Eric Fehrnstrom

I tell people (Romney’s) like a 4-foot-8 guy who wants to play center and his only technique is to shrink the others, which I think bodes very badly for a general election. — Newt Gingrich

I do want to say one thing, both on behalf of my wife and on behalf of Karen Santorum and on behalf of Ann Romney, I think that Robert De Niro’s wrong. I think the country is ready for a new first lady and he doesn’t have to describe it in racial terms. — Newt Gingrich

Liberals are (they’ll claim) morally superior by virtue of their very belief in their own political identities – which identity is tied to an ideology that, manifested politically, privileges governmental theft, sanctioned inequality as a function of tribal identity, and a giant foundational question beg: namely, that moral superiority comes from being on the left, so therefore being on the left means you can really do no fundamental moral wrong. — Jeff Goldstein

Sometimes I wonder if Obama knows he is going to be defeated and is embarking on a “scorched earth” policy to weaken our nation and to hogtie us through international agreements before he leaves office, thus fulfilling the fondest desires of his friends like supposed former terrorist Bill Ayers. — Dick Morris

Obviously, we wish Solyndra hadn’t gone bankrupt. Part of the reason they did was because the Chinese were subsidizing their solar industry and flooding the market in ways that Solyndra couldn’t compete. But understand, this was not our program per se. — Barack Obama

The wonderful fact of American life is that most American civil liberties and civil rights organizations have little reason for their continued existence. The NAACP, therefore, has to justify its existence. Which it does by manufacturing crises (and hopefully garnering media attention). Without major eruptions of racism, its raison d’etre disappears — along with its funding. — Dennis Prager

If you’re looking for free stuff you don’t have to pay for, vote for the other guy. That’s what he’s all about, okay? That’s not, that’s not what I’m about. — Mitt Romney

You win by giving people a choice. You win by giving people the opportunity to see a different vision for our country, not someone who’s just going to be a little different than the person in there. If you’re going to be a little different, we might as well stay with what we have instead of taking a risk with what may be the Etch A Sketch candidate of the future. — Rick Santorum

A Manhattan Institute study last year by Edward Glaeser and Jacob Vigdor showed that, while the residential segregation of blacks has generally been declining from the middle of the 20th century to the present, it was rising during the first half of the 20th century. The net result is that blacks in 2010 were almost as residentially unsegregated as they were back in 1890. — Thomas Sowell

Not only was unemployment among blacks in general lower before the liberal welfare state policies expanded in the 1960s, rates of imprisonment of blacks were also lower then, and most black children were raised in two-parent families. At one time, a higher percentage of blacks than whites were married and working. None of these facts fits liberal social dogmas. — Thomas Sowell

But that’s a long road to travel. About 9 percent of the energy used by Americans comes from “renewables.” The rest comes from burning stuff or splitting atoms. But of that 9 percent, the vast majority comes from hydroelectric power and ethanol. Hydroelectric power has little room for growth since there aren’t any new dams going in, and ethanol doesn’t qualify as a green energy source since it requires so much energy to make itself.

Of the currently viable sources acceptable to environmentalists, many billions of dollars of subsidies have produced very little yield. Solar power provides one tenth of one percent of our energy. Wind delivers 1 percent.

When Obama takes credit for having “doubled the use of clean energy,” he has the advantage of working in a very narrow mathematical space. Solar produces 184 times less energy than coal does today. — Chris Stirewalt

Ryan’s Medicare and Medicaid reforms are both slow, workable, conservative solutions to the fiscal imbalances of those programs. The American middle class may not accept Medicare reform willingly, but it is something close to a mathematical certainty that it ultimately will accept it in some form: One possible form is that the checks stop coming as the nation becomes insolvent, another is that the government pays benefits nominally to the penny but radically devalues the dollar to do so. I suspect that the Ryan plan, or something like it, will be enacted long before that happens. We’re stupid, but we’re not that stupid. — Kevin Williamson