Notable Quotables - 07/03/1995

 

Bob Franken, Meet Bob Franken

"One quick point is the use of the word `cut.' He should know that it's not a word that I use. I use, in fact, `a cutback in projected spending.' That's usually the term I use."
- CNN reporter Bob Franken responding to a conservative caller on C-SPAN's Sunday Journal, June 11

vs.

"Skeptics say that's the sound of Republicans trying to sugarcoat the inevitable cuts in Medicare spending."
- Franken on CNN's Inside Politics, May 1.

"Democrats are well aware that Republicans face a furious assault from angry senior citizens, that they're trying to distract from the inevitability of Medicare cuts - stalling."
- Franken on Inside Politics, May 2.

"The House Republican budget bloodletting will infuriate lots of people. Besides the Medicare cuts, Medicaid, the government health plan for the poor, loses $184 billion....Domenici's proposal scales back Medicare to the tune of $256 billion, details to come later. His plan chops $175 billion from Medicaid."
- Franken on Inside Politics, May 9.

 

Recession Reactions

Greenspan: Little risk of recession
- USA Today, June 21

Greenspan hints US may be sliding into recession
- Boston Globe, same day

 

Clarence Thomas: One Bizarre Uncle Tom?

"These days Washington seems to be filled with white men who make black people uneasy, like Newt the slasher, Bill the waffler, and Jesse the crank - Helms, that is, not Jackson. But the scariest of all the hobgoblins may well be a fellow African American, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. In the four years since George Bush chose him to fill the `black seat' vacated by Thurgood Marshall, Thomas has emerged as the high court's most aggressive advocate of rolling back the gains Marshall fought so hard for. The maddening irony is that Thomas owes his seat to precisely the kind of racial preference he goes to such lengths to excoriate."
- Time National Correspondent Jack E. White in a June 26 column titled "Uncle Tom Justice."

"Last month, he issued a separate opinion suggesting the court took a `wrong turn' in 1937 when it upheld President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal and gave the Democratic Congress the power to set minimum wages and regulate the economy. To modern ears, his view sounds quaint, even bizarre."
- Los Angeles Times reporter David G. Savage, June 19.

The Keys to Health: More Regulation and Spending

"The laws that protect America's water, both its rivers and what we drink, are under assault by lawmakers who think federal regulations are too tough on industry. But today's findings suggest that millions of Americans are drinking unsafe water, if anything, because regulations may not be tough enough."
- ABC's Michelle Norris concluding story on GOP attempts to reform water regulations, June 1 World News Tonight.

"There are those who hit balls, sing songs, shoot pucks in New Jersey, and tell jokes that bring joy, even inspire us. But we can confuse celebrity with real achievement. By the way, the Republicans plan to cut exactly the sort of basic research relied on once by a young doctor named - Jonas Salk."
- Chicago Tribune Washington Bureau Chief James Warren on CNN's Capital Gang Sunday, June 25.

It's Okay to Do It, But Gruesome to Show It

"It's against the rules of the Senate to bring stage props and photos onto the floor without consent. Did Senator Bob Smith care? Naah. He wanted to do some gruesome grandstanding against abortion during the Henry Foster debate. So he brought bloody pictures of dead fetuses and a plastic fetus doll for his little show-and-tell. Next time, Senator, bring a dunce cap. You'll need it, at least in my Hall of Shame."
- Newsweek Washington reporter Howard Fineman on CNN's Capital Gang Sunday, June 25.

No Need for Guns

"I don't really get it sometimes because what the Second Amendment really was talking about was a civilian army and that's not the issue anymore. We don't really need to raise up a civilian army and given the trouble that guns are creating in our society, particularly in cities with the drug trades and the whole bit, I don't understand why we really are fighting so much about people having the need to carry guns. It just doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense to me."
- Los Angeles Times reporter Sam Fulwood III on C-SPAN's Washington Journal, June 16.

Christian Coalition: Insular, Not Uneducated

"Indeed, the group was nothing like the Coalition members uncharitably described by the Washington Post in February 1993 as `poor, uneducated, and easy to command.'"
- Time Washington Bureau writer Jeffrey Birnbaum, May 15 issue.

"Despite its increasing sophistication and secularization, the movement remains insular, distrustful, and eager to impose what it sees as a Bible-backed morality on the public at large."
- Birnbaum, 16 lines later in same story.

 

Clinton's Brilliant Budget

"Aides said it would be silly to submit another budget now. Let the Republicans stew in the harshness of their proposals. But Clinton did and it's widely regarded as the most reasonable balanced budget so far."
- Newsweek Senior Editor and CBS News consultant Joe Klein in an Evening News commentary, June 18.

 

PBS: Refuge from Revolting Capitalism

"Isn't it a touch inconsistent for right-wingers to be launching an attack on commercial entertainment? Shouldn't those friends of capitalism be giving out little statues of Adam Smith to the purveyors of gangsta rap, steamy movies, and television blowups for their dedication to satisfying consumers, however revolting their tastes? After all, these entrepreneurs are not trying to edify audiences, like the elitist do-gooders of public broad-casting, which the right is naturally out to destroy."
- New York Times television critic Walter Goodman, June 12.

 

Makes You Miss John Chancellor

"Here in the West, the scientific method has fallen faster than the Berlin Wall, as dead as the Great Society, defunct as the counterculture, as deceased as a non-essential program. It's been replaced by the Contract with America. Ironically, for all their vaunted hatred of the '60s and their self-styled can-do pragmatism, our new Republicans are acting like a bunch of hippies: ready to believe any damn thing that pops into their head as long as it helps further the revolution....If Newt and his crowd can blankly accuse newspaper editors of being socialists, and anyone who grew up in the '60s as perpetrators of a failed social experiment, I believe I'm safe in calling them neo-Stalinists. Just a word, after all. If I thought over much what words mean, that would make me an elitist."
- Commentator Ian Shoales on ABC's overnight news program World News Now, June 14.

 

- L. Brent Bozell III, Publisher;
-Brent H. Baker, Tim Graham; Editors
- James Forbes, Andrew Gabron, Mark Honig, Steve Kaminski, Gesele Rey, Clay Waters; Media Analysts
- Kathleen Ruff, Circulation Manager;
-Eugene Eliason, Melissa Gordon; Interns