Saturday, January 07, 2006
QUOTES OF 2005 - SEPTEMBER
* “I have no idea.”—Margo Kingston, asked how she planned to earn a living from her website
* “How ironic that the world’s No 1 polluter is now reaping the ‘rewards’ that so many have warned would flow.”—British newsreader Jon Snow on Hurricane Katrina
* “A large part of me still believes that many of these W-worshipping numbskulls deserve to suffer and to die. They brought it on themselves. Let them look to Jayzuss for aid: It’s time they stopped leeching off the more productive blue staters.”—compassionate Californian Joseph Cannon
* “How are you going to get any people in that thing?”—a bystander to Sean Penn, noting that the actor’s New Orleans rescue boat was loaded with a several-member star-licking entourage
* “If the majority of the hardest hit victims of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans were white people, they would not have gone for days without food and water, forcing many to steal for mere survival.”—CBS commentator Nancy Giles
* “Americans have seen where small government leads.”—The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland believes bigger government would have prevented Katrina’s aftermath
* ”Katrina exposes the catastrophic failure of privatisation.”—letters-page headline in The Age
* “Katrina sends us the most chilling message of all; the storm makes it clear that everyone on this planet is at risk from climate change.”—Dr Michael Molitor, consultant to enviro-doom movie The Day After Tomorrow
* “I think David Penberthy is not fit to be Editor, for many reasons.”—Margo Kingston slams the newly-appointed Daily Telegraph chief
* "We were pulling drowning people out of the water, it’s the ultimate distress and human suffering.”—Sean Penn, superhero
* “He was only a cadet at f2, the online network. I think he wrote a few book reviews for us, but he was never on staff at the SMH. Even f2 eventually had to let him go.”—a Sydney Morning Herald staffer illuminates Antony Loewenstein’s CV
* "Has Katrina saved the US media?”—BBC reporter Matt Wells
* ”There is much to be said and done about the manmade annihilation of New Orleans, caused NOT by a hurricane but by the very specific decisions made by the Bush administration in the past four and a half years.”—Michael Moore
* “I’ve just been writing a column about the way in which Fallujah and New Orleans are looking to be twin towns in effect. They’re both been worked over by the Bush Administration.”—Washington-based UPI editor Martin Walker
* ”Nobody has any power in this world other than George Bush. Nobody has any responsibility. George Bush is now the navel of the world for his enemies. If a butterfly flaps its wings in Central Park, it’s George Bush’s fault. And the butterfly is racist. And it was blown there by Global Warming.”—Mac Johnson
* “The people who have come out to Camp Casey to help coordinate the press and events with me are not putting words in my mouth, they are taking words out of my mouth.”—Mother Sheehan
* ”It’s safe to say that if George Bush was in his first term, he would now be heading for defeat.”—The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland revels in the safety of saying something that can’t be disproved
* “Get angry.”—a CNN producer to a Los Angeles Times staffer appearing on the network to discuss Katrina
* “The numerous snakes, freaks, arseholes and sewer rats in the caucus have had their say—off the record, of course. It’s only fair I set the record straight. A lot of people will be unhappy about the truth, but quite frankly I couldn’t give a rat’s arse about them.”—Mark Latham in a letter to a Labor buddy
* “Much of Gaza is a great mass of apartment blocks - flung up to house the exploding population.”—unintended accuracy from the BBC
* ”I wouldn’t make him the toilet cleaner in Parliament House, let alone the leader of the Opposition.”—Mark Latham on Kim Beazley
* “I think the thing the community will latch onto is that this is a sick man ... It’s what’s going on inside his head. He’s a sick man.”—Labor pollster Rod Cameron on Latham
* “Latham is behaving like a crazy man.”—The Age’s Michelle Grattan
* “I’ve always liked Mark, and I’ve always liked the fact that he was a thinker, a dreamer.”—Margo Kingston
* ”I detest war and the meatheads who volunteer to kill other human beings. The US alliance is a funnel that draws us into unnecessary wars; first Vietnam and then Iraq.”—an extract from Mark Latham’s diaries.
* “We feel that we have actually been advancing rather than going backwards.”—Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe
* “As Cindy Sheehan was gathering public sympathy as the Gold Star mom against the killing in Iraq, the Republican party decided to import an easier target to pummel. So they brought over the ‘I-salute-your-courage, Saddam’ religious fundamentalist crack-pot who can’t tell us where the money went.”—Greg Palast blames a GOP plot for the ascent of George Galloway
* “The only things he got right were mine and the restaurant’s names. I’m amazed he could recall that, given he drank two bottles of red wine.”—NSW Labor secretary Mark Arbib reviews his mention in The Latham Diaries
* “Parts of the book which has been released in dribs and drabs over the last week in the Daily Telegraph has named certain senior ALP members like current party Kim Beasley and french bencher Kevin Rudd.”—an unnamed columnist in the Fiji Times
* “‘Somebody is coming to get you on Tuesday, somebody is coming to get you on Wednesday, somebody is coming to get you on Thursday, somebody is coming to get you on Friday.’ And she drowned, on Friday night, she drowned on Friday night. Nobody is comin to get us, nobody is coming to get us. The secretary has promised, everybody has promised. They’ve had press conferences, I’m sick of the press conferences. For Godsakes, shut up and send us somebody.”—Jefferson Parish president Aaron Broussard in an interview broadcast on NBC and Australia’s ABC. The woman actually died on the Monday following Katrina, not Friday, due to her nursing home rejecting pleas that residents be evacuated
* “It’s been one of television news’ finest moments. They were willing to speak truth to power.”—Dan Rather
* “Well root my boot. I wished I had known she was bisexual when I married her. She said that this little fact went back to her days in nursing but she was too embarrassed to tell me. A very weird person, I can tell you .. And my attitude once the surprise had abated? If she could chase other women, then so could I. Effectively our marriage ended at that point. When I had more success with women than her, she went savage and psycho on me.”—Mark Latham discusses his first marriage
* “Stop Dick Cheney’s Nuclear 9-11!”—poster at a Mother Sheehan rally
* “Many New Yorkers said yesterday that Ms. Sheehan gave them back hope that was lost when war was declared on Iraq.”—the New York Times
* “I believe I can steal Fairfax’s reputation in six months. It is an empty edifice. It has collapsed.”—Margo Kingston
* “A nice white man gave me a motel room for three days. Just walked up and said, ‘Here.’”—homeless Texan Eddie McKinney as Hurricane Rita approached
* “The child then asks: ‘When did that paper wasting stop?’ And Dad goes: ‘Well, there was this woman journalist, and she started the first newspaper without using paper in Australia. And soon every person who had a computer got the summary of the articles on their PC every morning in their newsreader program, while the sales of printed newspapers kept going down and down until all the big fat companies around the world went broke. Remember the little photo you can click on to read all the news on your school palmtop? That’s the picture of the woman who started all this. She was called Margo Kingston.’”—Jack Smit gazes fifty years into the future
* ”NO THAPPY, GLORXON-9.”—the future is here
* “My guess is that in the end it was not the politicians and the media but ordinary people who destroyed Mark Latham’s faith. He’d spent his adult life trying to save people who no longer want to be saved.”—the Sydney Morning Herald’s Michael Duffy
* “Aren’t you and your entourage getting in the way?”—NBC’s David Gregory to George W. Bush in advance of Hurricane Rita. Gregory had earlier condemned the President for not getting in the way in New Orleans
* ”Science is about hypotheses, not truths, and no one can absolutely know the future.”—environmental doom-sayer Tim Flannery
* “My son wouldn’t want his face here.”—Charlotte Smette objecting to her son Keith’s appearance in a Camp Cindy poster showing the first 1000 Americans to die in Iraq
* “Six.”—Louisiana National Guard Col. Thomas Beron gives the actual total of dead inside the New Orleans Superdome. Earlier reports claimed 200 dead
* ”In my eyes Margo has a huge and generous heart and her words and ideas are aimed designed to build a inclusive and magnificent cathedral.”—Jozef Imrich
* “When he evacuated his home in New Orleans earlier in the week, he left his cats and his maid behind in the flood zone.”—Matt Taibbi on caring historian Douglas Brinkley
* “Do you think that was an appropriate place to leave a young child?”—a 20/20 interviewer to Alan Alda after the actor told of being left in a dancing girls’ change room when three years old
* “The only way to teach France to behave is jihad and the Islamic martyr. France is our enemy No 1, the enemy of our religion, the enemy of our community.”—Abu Mossab Abdelwadoud, leader of Algeria’s Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat