April 5, 2011
"A plan dedicated almost entirely to slashing social spending in a country that’s already the stingiest spender in the developed world, while simultaneously cutting taxes on the rich in a country with the lowest tax rates in the developed world — well, what could be more serious than that?"

— Kevin Drum

March 25, 2011
"[T]o point out that [it just happens] that some people are destitute while others are prosperous is rather like claiming that the world contains both detectives and criminals. So it does; but this obscures the truth that there are detectives because there are criminals…"

— Terry Eagleton

March 13, 2011
"Everything about [theatre] shouldn’t work. It’s ludicrous, stupid. It’s pretend….It’s a complete house of cards, for God’s sake. It only works because the audience wants it to. It’s bizarre, our need to have people tell us a story. And beautiful. I’m in too deep to stop now."

— Enda Walsh

March 8, 2011
"Where free unions and collective bargaining are forbidden, freedom is lost."

— St. Ronald of Reagan

March 2, 2011
"… [T]he people who should be leading the charge to identify governmental inefficiency are the people whose main interest is making the government work better. My impression of Coburn is that his main interest is making the government smaller, which is different."

— Ezra Klein

March 2, 2011
"A unionized public employee, a member of the Tea Party and a Big Corp CEO are sitting at a table. In the middle of the table there is a plate with a dozen cookies on it. The CEO reaches across and takes 11 cookies, looks at the tea partier and says, ‘Look out for that union guy, he wants a piece of your cookie.’"

February 14, 2011
"

The situation is thoroughly depressing. Washington seems to have finally gotten itself in the mood to cut deficits. Unfortunately, the cuts that result are likely to be unhelpful, or possibly counterproductive, as leaders slash useful programmes to the bone because they’re too scared to talk about reining in health care spending, or cutting wasteful defence programmes, or raising taxes.

It’s hard to imagine something worse than a bruising political battle that threatens to shut down the government or throw it into default. But a bruising political battle that threatens to shut down the government or throw it into default without doing a thing about the long-run budget problem would probably do it.

"

— Ryan Avent (in The Economist)

January 17, 2011
"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom."

— Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

January 6, 2011
"Yes, the Constitution is binding. No, it’s not clear which interpretation of the Constitution the Supreme Court will declare binding at any given moment. And no, reading the document on the floor of the House will not make the country more like you want it to be, unless your problem with the country is that you thought the Constitution should be read aloud on the floor of the House more frequently."

— Ezra Klein

December 26, 2010
"Perhaps it will need to be the note of anger in Our Lord’s voice that we hear, and proclaim, in the coming year as we raise legitimate Christian protest on behalf of those losing their jobs, seeing their public services undermined, their hopes for higher education jeopardised, or their fears realised through the creation of what increasingly seems like a less caring, more brutalised society, and where vast bonuses form the contemptuous retort to any mention of restraint, and the black economy of the super-tax dodger is seen as a legitimate moral code."

— The Rt Rev Nicholas Reade, Bishop of Blackburn