On the Performance That Bombed...
"Mr. Sprinkle, who prefers to be known by his stage name, Subculture Joe, drove a battered truck onto a pedestrian mall in the heart of downtown Seattle Monday, let the air out of the tires and skedaddled. In the back of the old half-ton truck sat a huge gourd-shaped metal container; on a fender was painted the word "bomb." It was not until after nine city blocks had been evacuated for hours, and a bomb squad had set off a small bomb of its own in an effort to disable any explosives, that the police discovered that the steel gourd was empty. And it was not until Subculture Joe surrendered to the authorities that is was discovered that the steel gourd was not a gourd at all, but rather Mr. Sprinkle's clumsy approximation of a giant steel heart. According to Mr. Sprinkle, he had "installed" the heart as a work of performance art. The philistines in the King County Prosecutor's office just didn't get it and locked up Subculture Joe on felony bomb-hoax charges."
--From an editorial in the July, 22, 1996 Washington Times. One can only wonder
if he was subsidized by the National Endowment for the Arts.
On Today's Relationships...
" ...I am a twenty-three-year-old liberated woman who has been on the pill for two years. It's getting expensive and I think my boyfriend should share half the cost, but I don't know him well enough to discuss money with him."
--Letter from Dear Abby received via e-mail on July 29, 1996.
On Guessing Who Made This Statement...
"These are reckless charges made. Reckless accusations that impugn people's integrity. No evidence. No facts. No foundation. Just basically a smear and innuendo. The kind of thing we rejected in this country a long time ago."
--White House Chief of Staff, Leon Panetta, in 1994 in rebuttal to Newt
Gingrich's concerns about White House passes and drug use. The Wall Street
Journal noted that on Friday, "a group of Republican Congressmen wrote Mr.
Panetta asking whether he'd like to revise those remarks" in light of the
recent Filegate revelations. Washington Times, July 23, 1996, page A6.
Sorry to those that guessed the statements were in relation to Travelgate.
On the Attitude That Will Give Us Four More Years of Clinton...
"The notion that running for President gives you the right to speak at the Convention is nowhere written down. There is no reason we have to put Pat Buchanan... or anyone else on the platform unless it suits the interests of the candidate and the party, and if Buchanan wants to lead a walkout we can deal with it."
--Vin Weber, Dole Campaign Chairman, in the August 5, 1996 issue of The New
Yorker. From C-NEWS, July 25, 1996.
On Who's Teaching Our Kids...
"It's hard to see how the Democratic National Convention in August could be any more exciting for Bill Clinton than the annual convention of the National Education Association held over the Fourth of July weekend. The NEA Convention had three times as many delegates as the Democratic Convention will have, and 91 percent of the NEA delegates voted to endorse Clinton for reelection as President. That's a higher approval rating than he enjoys in the Democratic Party."
--Phyllis Schlafly, in an Eagle Forum column distributed via C-NEWS on
July 25, 1996. The column went on to detail resolutions made endorsing
gay & lesbian groups, school based clinics, and continuing to admit illegal
aliens into tax-supported public schools.
On the New Definition of "Volunteer"...
"Recently President Clinton proposed that all schools should require community service. Clinton says he believes in the volunteer ethic, but his AmeriCorps pays people to volunteer, and the school program he supports is oxymoronic -- mandatory volunteerism... What gives school administrators the right to tell students what they must do outside of school?"
--Debra J. Saunders, in an article in the July 19th San Francisco Chronicle,
page A17. The article concerned the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth
Circuit upholding a lower court ruling that allowed the Chapel Hill/Carrboro
City Board of Education in North Carolina to require students to perform 50
hours of "community service" as a condition for high school graduation.
From C-NEWS, July 27, 1996.
On Describing Liberals...
"Of all tyrannies a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience ... To be 'cured' against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level with those who have not yet reached the age of reason... You start being 'kind' to people before you have considered their rights, and then force upon them supposed kindnesses which they in fact had a right to refuse, and finally kindnesses which no one but you will recognize as kindnesses and which the recipient will feel as abominable cruelties."
--C.S. Lewis. From Stamper's News Nuggets #47, as received from C-NEWS
on July 20, 1996.
On Being Civilized...
"Deep thinkers who look everywhere for the mysterious causes of poverty, ignorance, crime and war need look no further than their own mirrors. We are all born into this world poor and ignorant, and with thoroughly selfish and barbaric impulses. Those of us who turn out any other way do so largely through the efforts of others, who civilized us before we got big enough to do too much damage to the world or ourselves."
--Thomas Sowell. From Stamper's News Nuggets #47, as received from C-NEWS
on July 20, 1996.
On Stoking the Fire...
"Civility is fragile under the best of circumstances and can unravel overnight. Civility is in an even more precarious state in multi-ethnic, multi-racial, and multi-religious societies. One doesn't have to turn to history's ample evidence of that fact; he need only look at todays Rwanda, Bosnia and Ireland for confirmation. Americans are stacking piles of combustible societal kindling - in the form of quotas, false reporting and implicit sanctioning of interracial crimes, waiting to be set ablaze by racial arsonists. We'd better do something about it while we can."
---Walter Williams on the racist arson hysteria. From Stamper's News
Nuggets #47, as received from C-NEWS on July 20, 1996.
On Why We Have the Second Amendment...
"The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subjected people to carry arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subjected peoples to carry arms have prepared their own fall."
--Adolf Hitler, Edict of March 18, 1938. From an e-mail received July 17,
of information posted to the dc.politics newsgroup.