New Orleans Sometime the daily papers are mined with shiny nuggets. Today in the Times was too rich a vein not to share.
“I dare you to distinguish between a prostitute and a naked society woman.” From Heri Leclerc, lawyer for Strauss-Kahn on rich men’s prostitute scandal at Hotel Carlton de Lille.
“Creating legislative reform is expensive, particularly on an issue like this where the resistance we’d get from special interest groups would be tremendous. Educating the public an organizing voters,” he said, “requires resources, and that requires money, and there’s no shame in that.” Sean Eldridge speaking truth to power about public financing reform in New York State and bizarrely identified as “Mr. Hughes’s fiancé, who runs an investment fund” by the Times. Chris Hughes is a founder of Facebook.
“One division-level care with a state publishing outfit in Beijing described a buzz of excitement in the conference room on Tuesday afternoon. ‘We were not surprised, but we were very excited….It’s a big political event. A lot of us think, well, this is better than having to sing red songs and read red books, like Bo Xilai had people doing in Chongqing.” Cadre would not give his name as he discussed internal push-out of key Chinese leader and investigation of his wife and son (now at Harvard) for the murder of a British businessman.
“Everyone wants to punish him because he’s a crappy human being,” Ms. Sloan said. “But in America we prosecute conduct, not character.” Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility on Ethics on why her group had filed a motion supporting John Edwards in his upcoming trial for alleged campaign spending violations.
“I know, or at least I sense, that he’s personally proud of it,” Mr. Patrick said, pointing out that Mr. Romney’s official portrait in the State House depicts him sitting at a desk with a document stamped with a medical symbol, meant to represent health care legislation.” Deval Patrick, Governor of Massachusetts on 6th anniversary of passage of RomneyCare in that state on George Romney.
“’TARP wasn’t supposed to be just a bank bailout,” said Christy L. Romero, the special inspector general for TARP…”It was specifically designed with the goal of helping homeowners, an our concern is that the goal may not be met.” Huge understatement that the Treasury Department’s Hardest Hit Fund had only spent 3% of allocation ($217.4 million on a $7.6 billion budget) to help 30,640 homeowners in the most massive failure of the Obama Administration.
I could go on like this, but these are just random samples of the wild quotes which are the bright lights that await our mornings.