"He's a good boy... I raised him good, and so I'm not too worried about other things that's happened."
-- Joe Jackson, father of Michael Jackson.

"I was just looking for a warm meal somewhere."
-- George W. Bush

"I love Thanksgiving turkey...it's the only time in Los Angeles that you see natural breasts."
-- Arnold Schwarzenegger

"Consider the Americans who have rained nothing but glory on our nation. Think about the magnificent works of Walt Whitman, James Baldwin and Hart Crane. They're just a handful of writers who shaped the American vision and yet could not achieve full citizenship because they were homosexual. How many wedding parties have walked down the aisle to the music of Virgil Thompson, Stephen Sondheim, Jerry Herman or Aaron Copland? Yes, we get to provide the music, but we are not allowed to get married ourselves. The next time you stand, hand on your heart, and sing "America the Beautiful," remind yourself that we owe those towering words to Katharine Lee Bates, a lesbian.

Remind yourself, too, of the Rev. Mychal F. Judge, the fire department chaplain who was killed on September 11. There was hardly a religious leader in our city who did not glorify his name and hold him up as someone to emulate. But remind them that he was a proud and openly gay man and those same moralists will turn their backs in denial.

The unhappy tradition continues today. The Bush administration spends billions spreading freedom abroad while at home it devises legislation to deny equal rights to gays and lesbians. What is it with you people, anyway? Are you so insecure about the way you handle marriage that you're scared gay folk will show you up? Trust me, we will make as much of a mess out of matrimony as you do. Just give us a chance."
-- Harvey Fierstein in The New York Times.

“If 10 percent of men are gay, then it’s a reasonable assumption that 10 percent of priests and 10 percent of bishops are gay, but it is what you do about it. If they are living a celibate life, then God bless the men.”
-- Cardinal Keith O’Brien, archbishop of Glasgow, Scotland, on homosexuality in the Times of London, Oct. 1)

"As Matt Dillon's underwear."
-- Boy George, when asked by US Weekly what he would like to become if he were reincarnated.

''Lies run sprints, but the truth runs marathons."
-- Michael Jackson

"Of all the post-Sept. 11 denials of civil liberties, the enemy combatant doctrine is among the worst. It gives the president untrammeled authority to lock up Americans merely by asserting that they are part of a terrorist plot. In its argument to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit this week, the government insisted that military-style rules like the enemy combatant doctrine now apply to American citizens, even on American soil, because Al Qaeda has "made the battlefield the United States."

Governments are always tempted to detain perceived enemies without charges, hold them incommunicado and deny them counsel. But the framers of the Constitution knew that if the government was allowed to act on those impulses, the result would be tyranny. That is why they built into this nation's founding document the very rights the Bush administration is intent on taking away."
-- Editorial, 'Enemy Combatant' Sham, The New York Times

"My only hope is that we never lose sight
of one thing, that it was all started by a mouse."
-- Walt Disney, (Today is Mickey's 75th Birthday)

"I belong in the theater... I have to work off the instant reactions of the audience."
-- Dorothy Loudon, 1933-2003, as quoted in The New York Times.

"I'm proud and grateful I was Blondie... She was dumb and shrewish sometimes. But she was real and sympathetic and warm, a real woman, a human being. And that's how I tried to play her."
-- Penny Singleton, 1908-2003, quoted in a 1973 book titled Saturday Afternoon at the Bijou, and quoted by the Associated Press in their obituary for her.

"I may not be better than other people, but at least I'm different."
-- Jean Jacques Rousseau

"You Simonize your car, so why not your face?"
-- Joan Rivers as quoted by the New York Post

"Hello, Ralpie Boy!!!"
-- Art Carney, 1918-2003.

"President Bush often emphasizes his commitment to veterans, saying in 2001, "My administration understands America's obligations not only go to those who wear the uniform today, but to those who wore the uniform in the past: to our veterans.

But the 200,000 veterans waiting six months or more for their first appointment at a VA facility would be denied access to VA health care under Bush's plan. Others would be charged $250 annual enrollment fees, doubled prescription costs and increased co-payments."
-- The Daily Mislead, MoveOn.org

''They have taken us much farther down the road toward an intrusive, 'big brother'-style government - toward the dangers prophesied by George Orwell in his book '1984' - than anyone ever thought would be possible in the United States of America.''
-- Al Gore, in a speech for Moveon.org

"The Bush crowd hurtled into Baghdad on the law of Disney: Wishing can make it so. Now they're ensnared in the law of the jungle: the rules of engagement don't apply with this scary cocktail of Saddam loyalists, foreign fighters and terrorists, who hold nothing sacrosanct, not human rights organizations, humanitarian groups or Iraqi civilians.

The gangsters are getting ever bolder about picking off our soldiers on land and out of the sky. With three Army helicopters hit in the last two weeks, killing 22 Americans, soldiers are reduced to flying low and fast, as they scan for the glint of sunlight coming off the rockets of the invisible guerrillas. It's an eerie flashback to the 10-year war of attrition Afghans waged against the mighty Soviets, when worn-down Soviet soldiers complained that the Afghan fighters were "ghosts" who would shoot down their helicopters with American Stinger surface-to-air missiles and fade back into the mountains."
-- Maureen Dowd, The Chicago Way, The New York Times.

"The lingering question, as it is so often with Mr. Bush, is how quickly and fully the rhetoric will translate into action. The president's "Marshall Plan" for Afghanistan never materialized; his ambitious "road map" for an Israeli-Palestinian peace didn't get past the first stop sign. A policy to promote democracy in the Middle East, even if defined as the work of decades, will require not just soaring speeches but far-reaching changes in U.S. practices and substantial costs. Though the administration has already been talking about the new strategy for many months, there has been no substantial follow-up so far -- other than a start on a new democratic political system for Iraq."
-- Editorial, The Wasington Post

"Those deaths brought to 382 the number of American soldiers who have died in Iraq or Kuwait since the United States invaded Iraq on March 19."
-- The New York Times, today.

"If he gets more explicit, or allows the flag-draped coffins of fallen heroes to be photographed coming home, it will just remind people that the administration said this would be easy, and it's teeth-grindingly hard. And that the administration vowed to get Osama and Saddam and W.M.D., and hasn't. And that the Bush team that hyped the presence of Al Qaeda in Iraq has now created an Al Qaeda presence in Iraq. And that there was no decent plan for the occupation or for financing one, no plan for rotating or supporting troops stretched too thin to guard ammunition caches or police a fractious society, and no plan for getting out."
-- Maureen Dowd, The New York Times

"It's clearly a tragic day for America. In a long, hard war, we're going to have tragic days. But they're necessary. They're part of a war that's difficult and complicated."
-- Donald H. Rumsfeld, the US secretary of defense, after guerrillas shot down an American helicopter in Iraq, killing 16 soldiers in The New York Times yesterday.

“If 10 percent of men are gay, then it’s a reasonable assumption that 10 percent of priests and 10 percent of bishops are gay, but it is what you do about it. If they are living a celibate life, then God bless the men.”
-- Cardinal Keith O’Brien, archbishop of Glasgow, Scotland, on homosexuality as reported by the Times of London, Oct. 1 and quoted by the New York Blade.

“Jeers to Barbara Walters. Interviewing Macaulay Culkin, who plays a gay, drug-abusing murderer and mutilator in his latest movie [‘Party Monster’], Walters asked, ‘Are you concerned that people may think you’re gay?’ No word on whether Mac is worried about the murder and mutilation part.”
-- Cheers and Jeers, column in TV Guide, Oct. 4, as quoted by the New York Blade.

"Work hard. Play hard. Stay hard."
-- Unknown