"Free" Health Care: Only $1,000 A Year?
"Would you be
willing to pay more taxes, up to $1,000 a year, if the federal government paid
for free health care for everyone?"
- Connie Chung posing a question on the CBS polling program America on
the Line after the State of the Union address, January 28.
Still Complimenting Clinton
"Bill Clinton
always has been a young man in a hurry. Beneath the charm is a shrewd, highly
polished politician whose every move is carefully calibrated...In eleven years
as Governor, he has offered innovative programs to remake a state which ranked
almost last in everything. The result: slow but steady progress on education,
better than average economic growth."
- NBC reporter Lisa Myers, January 23 Nightly News.
Tax Cuts Hurt America
"I'll tell you
who's not going to benefit from all this [tax cut talk] and that's the United
States of America. If the President and the Democrats get in a bidding war
over who can cut taxes more, the result is going to be to make even worse the
federal budget deficit, which is the overriding problem that this country
has."
- Time Editor-at-Large Strobe Talbott on Inside Washington,
January 18.
"There's been a lot
of talk lately about a tax cut to jump-start the economy. But it's a fraud. A
tax cut may make people feel a little better for a year, but it is almost sure
to do the economy more harm than good."
- Newsweek Washington Bureau Chief Evan Thomas writing a proposed
State of the Union speech for President Bush, January 13.
Unlabeled Feminists, Labeled Conservatives
"Also coming up in
this hour - the Clarence Thomas hearings focused our attention on sexual
harassment in the workplace, but has anything really changed? Just ahead we're
going to ask noted law professor Catherine McKinnon and conservative
spokeswoman Phyllis Schlafly to talk about that."
- CBS This Morning co-host Harry Smith, January 21.
Gloria Steinem Fan Club
"When Steinem, now
57, pours a second cup of coffee and writes like she talks, there is no one
more fascinating. The only comparable figure is Ralph Nader."
- Time Deputy Washington Bureau Chief Margaret Carlson on Steinem's
new book, Revolution from Within, January 20.
"Her career has
been a thousand times more inspirational than the poems and aphorisms, the
canned benevolence, she offers here. In a world run by men, Steinem towers by
virtue of her commitment, her ideals, and her tough thinking; with no office
and no pulpit, she is a genuine leader."
- Newsweek General Editor Laura Shapiro on Steinem's book, January
13.
Repressive Pro-Lifers
"Like its 19th
century precursor, the 1980s anti-abortion campaign would exhibit signs of
punitive excess, as once again the achievement of modest reproductive
liberties for women was greeted with an outpouring of repressive
outrage."
- Wall Street Journal reporter Susan Faludi in her book Backlash:
The Undeclared War Against American Women.
Railing Against Reaganomics
Sam Donaldson: "If
we still had President Reagan here, if the 22nd Amendment were not there, I
suppose Reaganism would still live. Now, the national debt was tripled in
eight years...To say that a man stands on principle, you know where he stands,
if those principles are carrying us across a cliff, doesn't make any
sense."
George Will:
"Carried you through 93 consecutive months of economic growth, not
chopped liver."
Donaldson: "At what
price? At the price of the savings and loans disaster, at the price of bank
failures...at the price of things we'll be paying for in this country into the
next century. Boy, we had a great time for eight years and we are going to pay
for it for sixteen or more."
- Exchange on This Week with David Brinkley, January 26.
"The boom years
following World War II saw the U.S. economy take off, giving rise to the
growth of the great American middle class. The rising standard of living meant
homes, cars, TVs, college for the kids - all in all, a piece of the American
dream. But in the Reagan years, economic erosion set in, so much so that the
middle class now finds itself in ever-deepening trouble."
- Bryant Gumbel on Today, January 22.
More Eighties Hate
Reporter Bob Faw:
"As America grieved through assassinations, watched its cities burn and
stockpiled bodybags from some place called Vietnam, there was [Mohammed] Ali,
symbolizing his era much as another heavyweight, Mike Tyson, would symbolize
the '80s."
Thomas Hauser,
biographer: "You think of Mike Tyson and you think of greed, you think of
violence, you think of self-indulgence. Those were never things you associated
with Ali."
- CBS Evening News, Jan. 17.
"Few people
personify the greedy, me-first attitude of the Reagan years more than Donald
Trump, the businessman who viewed deal-making as an art."
- Today co-host Bryant Gumbel, January 15.
"We are seeing a
public recoil from formal politics, from the active, reasoned exercise of
citizenship. It comes because we don't trust anyone. It is part of the cafard
the '80s induced: Wall Street robbery, the savings and loan scandal, the
wholesale plunder of the economy, an orgy released by Reaganomics that went on
for years with hardly a peep from Congress - events whose numbers were so
huge as to be beyond the comprehension of most people."
- Time art critic Robert Hughes in his cover essay "The Fraying
of America," February 3.
Censorious Conservatives
"Meanwhile [in the
1980s], a considerable and very well- subsidized industry arose, hunting the
lefty academic or artist in his or her retreat. Republican attack politics
turned on culture, and suddenly both academe and the arts were full of
potential Willie Hortons. The lowbrow form of this was the ire of figures like
Senator Helms and the Rev. Donald Wildmon directed against National Endowment
subventions for art shows they thought blasphemous and obscene, or the
trumpetings of folk like David Horowitz about how PBS should be demolished
because it's a pinko-liberal-anti-Israel bureaucracy."
- Hughes, same essay, February 3.
Codify Legal Abortion
"I think it is time
for Congress to make a law like Roe v. Wade that fully protects abortion
rights, but legislates the kind of community help, like sex education, that
would diminish the practice."
- Former U.S. News & World Report Editor Roger Rosenblatt in The
New York Times Magazine, January 19.
Mount Mikhail?
"By American
presidential standards, Mikhail Gorbachev accomplished enough in his
seven-year term to qualify for a bust on Mount Rushmore."
- NBC reporter Jim Maceda, December 25 Nightly News.
- L. Brent Bozell III;
Publisher
- Brent H. Baker, Tim Graham; Editors
- Brant Clifton, Nicholas Damask, Steve Kaminski, Marian Kelley, Tim Lamer;
Media Analysts
- Jennifer Hardebeck; Circulation Manager