Notable Quotables - 02/05/1990
Deficit Solutions and Causes
"Without a surplus
to mask the deficit, the White House and Congress would have to confront it
more honestly-raise taxes or gouge the Pentagon."
- Reporter Dale Russakoff on the Moynihan Social Security tax cut plan,
January 18 Washington Post.
"Ah yes. The
dreaded federal deficit, created, for the most part, by the most massive
peacetime military buildup in America's history."
- Reporter Jim Wooten on ABC's Nightline, January 29.
Soviet Military Threat
"CIA's Webster sees
upgrade in Soviet's nuclear menace"
- Washington Times, January 24
"CIA chief sees
diminished Soviet threat"
- Boston Globe, same day
There Ted Goes Again
"Gorbachev has
probably moved more quickly than any person in the history of the world.
Moving faster than Jesus Christ did. America is always lagging six months
behind...I think we can get by easily with a $75 billion military budget.
Those bombers and all of this stuff is an absolute waste of money and a
joke."
- Ted Turner, "TV chieftain with an outspoken conscience,"
celebrated in the January 22 Time.
Nicaraguan Election Behavior
"U.S. Accused of
Overstating Managua Election Offenses"
- Washington Post, January 25
Sandinistas' political
foes bear brunt of violence, group reports"
- Washington Times, next day
Nicaragua's Free Speech
"At the flick of a
dial or at a corner newsstand, Nicaraguans can obtain an extraordinary range
of political opinion, from far right to far left, with greater ease than in
most countries, including the US."
- Managua-based freelance journalist Mark Cook writing in Fairness &
Accuracy in Reporting's Extra! newsletter.
Won't A Couple Of Us Be OK?
"If nothing is done
to reverse ozone damage, scientists predict hundreds of millions of skin
cancer cases in the U.S. alone, not to mention increased global warming that
would turn much of the planet into a desert."
- Reporter Mark Phillips on the January 16 CBS Evening News.
The 1980's as the 1960's
"If the
Mondale-Dukakis mind was wired permanently through the institutions of
government, then the Reagan mind ran a solipsistic loop back to self.
Reaganite economics are the hedonism of the sixties drug culture, transferred
to the economic realm."
- Christian Science Monitor correspondent Jonathan Rowe in the
January Washington Monthly.
No News is Good News
Peter Jennings: "To
lead off our economic news this evening, the job market in 1989. It was a good
year. The unemployment rate for the whole year was 5.3 percent and that is the
lowest it has been since 1973. Some economists, however, are not quite ready
to break out the champagne. Here's our Economics Editor, Stephen Aug."
Stephen Aug: "The
U.S. economy created 142,000 new jobs last month, the smallest gain in two and
a half years."
- From the January 5 World News Tonight.
"We operate in an
atmosphere in which we set up repeatedly...for governments and other
institutions, a sort of no-win atmosphere in which nothing works and no news
is good news. Look at the economy: we are really living in, relatively
speaking, very good times economically, but you wouldn't know it if you read
the papers or watch the TV news."
- ABC White House Correspondent Brit Hume on PBS' LateNight America,
January 27.
Peter's Credibility Problems
"In Washington,
President Bush brushed off the communique from the Medellin Cartel, saying the
drug lords have something of a credibility problem. Well, there's a lot people
in South America these days who have some credibility problems with the
President."
- Peter Jennings on World News Tonight, January 17.
So Why Is Everybody Leaving?
"They love their
country. The German Democratic Republic, not the Federal Republic of the West.
They believe in socialism. Not the socialism of their disgraced and
discredited leaders but the socialism they have been taught as an ideal for 40
years. Now the attainment of that socialism may be possible, they said. The
tyrants are gone....We in the U.S. are tempted to see the triumph of democracy
in Eastern Europe wholly through an American prism: as a triumph of American
values as opposed to human values."
- Carl Bernstein's first article for Time, January 22.
"You Always Know When It's CBS News"
"When inflation is
taken into account, it adds up to a cut in defense spending, and that's the
first time in a long time that has happened."
- Bob Schieffer on the January 27 CBS Evening News.
"It's easily
overlooked, but the fact is, that in real terms, the defense budget has been
going down every year since 1985. "
- CBS News Pentagon correspondent David Martin on Nightwatch,
January 31.
Due Process in Action
"We've been trying
to talk with President Cristiani about the nine men who, of course, went in
and killed the Jesuit priests and get his response. There have been some men
that have been taken into custody, we're trying to get his response this
morning on the possibilities of getting a conviction and a fair trial for
those men."
- Joan Lunden on Good Morning America, January 16.
Those Killer Grazing Cows
"Modern man has
reached the point where his demands for space are ravaging the planet, and
wiping out other life forms in the process. Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich is
back with more of his series 'Assignment Earth,' and this morning he begins
with a report on how man is destroying the entire ecological system with
something that appears to be completely harmless."
- Deborah Norville introducing Paul Ehrlich's report on cows, January 9 Today.
- L. Brent Bozell III;
Publisher
- Brent H. Baker, Tim Graham; Editors
- Jim Heiser, Gerard Scimeca, Stewart Verdery, Dorothy Warner; Media Analysts
- Kristin Kelly; Administrative Assistant
