“A memorandum is written not to inform the reader but to protect the writer”.
-- Dean Acheson

“A memorandum is written not to inform the reader but to protect the writer”.
-- Dean Acheson

"It would have been a pleasure to be able to congratulate President Bush on his openness in agreeing to sit down today with the independent commission on the 9/11 attacks and answer questions. Unfortunately, Mr. Bush conditioned his cooperation on stipulations that range from the questionable to the ridiculous... The strangest of the president's conditions is that he will testify only in concert with Vice President Dick Cheney. The White House has given no sensible reason for why Mr. Bush is unwilling to appear alone. (When asked at his recent press conference, the president gave one of his patented nonresponses: "Because it's a good chance for both of us to answer questions that the 9/11 commission is looking forward to asking us, and I'm looking forward to answering them.")... Given the White House's concern for portraying Mr. Bush as a strong leader, it's remarkable that this critical appearance is being structured in a way that is certain to provide fodder for late-night comedians, who enjoy depicting him as the docile puppet of his vice president."
-- Editorial, The New York Times, yesterday.

"Communing with the Higher Father and the Almighty, President Bush has either stumbled into a Holy War or swaggered into one... In their new book, 'The Bushes,' Peter and Rochelle Schweizer, who interviewed many Bushes, including the president's father and his brother Jeb, quote one unnamed relative as saying that W. sees the war on terror 'as a religious war': 'He doesn't have a P.C. view of this war. His view of this is that they are trying to kill the Christians. And we the Christians will strike back with more force and more ferocity than they will ever know.'... Bush strategists seem to believe that the worse Mr. Bush makes things, the better off he is, because nervous Americans will cling to the obstinate president they know over the vacillating challenger they don't know."
-- Maureen Dowd, The New York Times

"It behooves all adventurers to treat their good luck with reverence, neither bothering nor upsetting it."
-- François Rabelais, as quoted by Free Will Astrology.

"I don't care if the whole world is against you or teasing you or saying you're not gonna make it. Believe in yourself. No matter what. They laughed at the Wright brothers. They laughed at Thomas Edison. They laughed at Disney. . . . Study the greats and become greater."
-- Michael Jackson, Interview magazine.

“Make a point of connecting with someone new every day. And re-acquaint yourself with anyone you have not spoken to for some time by going through your address book”.
-- Roy Sheppard, Your Personal Survival Guide To The 21st Century

“When a man has once broken through the paper walls of everyday circumstance, those unsubstantial walls that hold so many of us securely prisoned from the cradle to the grave, he has made a discovery. If the world does not please you, you can change it. Determine to alter it at any price, and you can change it altogether. You may change it into something sinister and angry, to something appalling, but it may be you will change it to something brighter, more agreeable, and at the worst something much more interesting".
-- H.G. Wells, The History Of Mr. Polly

“Enthusiastic people are the ones who actually get things done in this world. Enthusiasm is what turns any idea into reality. And enthusiasm is linked closely with happiness”.
-- Roy Sheppard, Your Personal Survival Guide To The 21st Century

"I should confess that I always felt a little sorry for people who didn't work for newspapers."
-- Mary McGrory, 1918-2004

"Take the mayor. Please. Talk about dreary! Don't smoke, don't get fat, don't breathe, don't curse, don't dance on tables, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't. Who the hell would want to come here for a good time - John Ashcroft?"
-- Linda Stasi, New York Post.

"This president not only misleads America about my record, he misleads his own administration. He misleads his security adviser. He misleads his secretary of state about his own planning for a war..."
-- Senator John Kerry on Face the Nation on Sunday.

"It may well be that we need a new president, a breath of fresh air, to re-establish credibility with the rest of the world, so that we can have a believable administration as to how we proceed."
-- Senator John Kerry on Face the Nation, yesterday.

"I love my life. I regret my life. After a while the lines blur and all it is is my life."
-- Stephen Belber, words spoken by Frank Langella as Tobi in the comic drama Match on Broadway.

"With campaigning you can't be particular about hours. I just missed two doctors' appointments. And there's not much rest. I like to sleep, but often I can be up all night because there's so much to catch up on and I have to prep. To decompress I do crosswords, games or I'll pray or meditate. TV isn't calming for me. If it's bad, I get angry. If good, I'm caught up in it and get no sleep. I prefer what I can control."
-- Teresa Heinz Kerry, as told to Cindy Adams, New York Post

“Two men look out through the same bars; One sees the mud and one sees the stars”.
-- Frederick Langbridge

"George Bush is giving sons of Presidents a bad name."
-- Chip Carter, son of President Jimmy Carter, as quoted by Page Six.

"I can almost bend steel with my mind. I can bend anything if I try hard enough. I can make myself do almost anything. But you can get too strong like that, so you have to be careful. You have to temper your strength."
-- Martha Stewart

"In his Saturday radio address, George Bush described Iraqi insurgents as a 'small faction.' Meanwhile, people actually on the scene described a rebellion with widespread support... Isn't it amazing? A year after the occupation of Iraq began, Mr. Bush and his inner circle seem more divorced from reality than ever... Events should have cured the Bush team of its illusions. After all, before the invasion Tim Russert asked Dick Cheney about the possibility that we would be seen as conquerors, not liberators, and would be faced with 'a long, costly and bloody battle.' Mr. Cheney replied, 'Well, I don't think it's likely to unfold that way, Tim, because I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators.' Uh-huh... Again and again, administration officials have insisted that some particular evildoer is causing all our problems. Last July they confidently predicted an end to the insurgency after Saddam's sons were killed. In December, they predicted an end to the insurgency after capturing Saddam himself. Six weeks ago,­ was it only six weeks? ­ Al Qaeda was orchestrating the insurgency, and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was the root of all evil. The obvious point that we're facing widespread religious and nationalist resentment in Iraq, which is exploited but not caused by the bad guy du jour, never seems to sink in... And now we have a new villain. Yesterday Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez declared that 'the mission of the U.S. forces is to kill or capture Moktada al-Sadr.' If and when they do, we'll hear once again that we've turned the corner. Does anyone believe it?... When will we learn that we're not going to end the mess in Iraq by getting bad guys? There are always new bad guys to take their place. And let's can the rhetoric about staying the course. In fact, we desperately need a change in course."
-- Paul Krugman, Snares and Delusions, op-ed, The New York Times

"The screeching chatter in the spring and summer of 2001 — 'There will be attacks in the near future' — did not yank Mr. Bush and his team from their Iraq fixation. 'But they don't tell us when,' Ms. Rice protested. 'They don't tell us where, they don't tell us who, and they don't tell us how.' Paging Nancy Drew... Inconclusive intelligence did not bother the Bush team when it wanted to be "actionable" on Iraq, or engage in 'tit for tat' with Saddam... The Aug. 6, 2001, presidential daily briefing — remarkably headlined 'Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States' — mentioned Al Qaeda's wanting to hijack planes and the 70 F.B.I. field investigations into suspected Al Qaeda sleeper cells in the U.S... The briefing had three-month-old information that Al Qaeda was trying to sneak into the country for an explosives attack. No wonder the C.I.A. chief and counterterrorism czar were running around with their hair on fire... What should have made Condi hysterical, she deemed 'historical'... W. kept fishing and denouncing Saddam, while Condi sat for a glam Vogue photo shoot and interview."
-- Maureen Dowd, Our New No-Can-Do Nation, op-ed, The New York Times.

"Easter is not a passport to another world; it is a quality of perception for this one."
-- W. P. Lemon

"President Bush was told more than a month before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that supporters of Osama bin Laden planned an attack within the United States with explosives and wanted to hijack airplanes, a government official said Friday... The warning came in a secret briefing that Mr. Bush received at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., on Aug. 6, 2001. A report by a joint Congressional committee last year alluded to a "closely held intelligence report" that month about the threat of an attack by Al Qaeda, and the official confirmed an account by The Associated Press on Friday saying that the report was in fact part of the president's briefing in Crawford... The disclosure appears to contradict the White House's repeated assertions that the briefing the president received about the Qaeda threat was 'historical' in nature and that the White House had little reason to suspect a Qaeda attack within American borders."
-- Eric Lichtblau and David E. Sanger, Bush Was Warned of Possible Attack in U.S., Official Says, The New York Times.

"Ms. Rice was at her weakest in her testimony before the independent commission investigating the 9/11 attacks when she attempted to portray Mr. Bush himself as a hands-on administrator with a particular concern about terror threats. Her description of the president as tired of "swatting flies" and spoiling for a real fight with Osama bin Laden was especially poorly chosen. "Can you tell me one example where the president swatted a fly when it came to Al Qaeda prior to 9/11?" asked former Senator Bob Kerrey... If Ms. Rice were not set on burnishing the commander in chief's image as the hero of 9/11, she might have been able to admit that Mr. Bush is a hierarchical manager who expects his immediate underlings to run things, and who guessed wrong about what deserved the administration's most immediate and intense attention... The real challenge came after the Afghan invasion, when Mr. Bush had to decide what to do next ? rethink the outdated world view his advisers had brought into office, or snap back into old reflexes and go after Iraq, the enemy of the last generation. It was then that he chose the wrong path."
-- Editorial, The Rice Version, The New York Times

"Jewish activists are trying to unseat an anti-Semitic site that has taken top placement on Google during the eight days of Passover. Type 'Jew' into the search engine, and the first result is 'Jew Watch,' a newsletter that promotes conspiracy theories and Holocaust deniers... After Google refused to remove the listing, Daniel Sieradski, who runs a blog called Jewschool, started a campaign to replace the top entry with an encyclopedia entry defining 'Jew.' ... Jewish activists are trying to unseat an anti-Semitic site that has taken top placement on Google during the eight days of Passover. '... The company said it wasn't going to excise sites based on their content... So instead, Sieradski is encouraging blogs and other sites to link [the word Jew] to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.... Since the campaign started, his chosen site has jumped to the second spot on Google's ranking. He was confident Jew Watch will drop in the rankings. "There's tons of anti-Semitic [junk] on the Internet," Sieradski said. They're ranked so high, 'because they all link to each other and need to support each others' delusions.'"
-- Stephen Lynch, Group says Google's not Kosher. New York Post, today.

"It's a little bit obnoxious, a little bit in your face, but it's something you can never forget. It's a crazy, manic version of a town square... This is an opportunity to celebrate Times Square's unique role in shaping and reflecting modern America."
-- Tim Tompkins, head of the Times Square Alliance, regarding the 100th birthday of Times Square tomorrow.

"How can anyone legislate who you can love?"
-- Barbra Streisand, on the the concept of a Constitutional Ammendment to ban gay marriage.

"Case in point, it’s hard to pin down exactly what constitutes the neighborhood’s boundaries. According to the New York City government, Clinton (as Hell’s Kitchen is officially designated) is the area from 34th Street to 59th Street and Eighth Avenue to the Hudson River... Hell’s Kitchen has long existed in the collective psyche of New Yorkers as both a microcosm of the city’s ills and a breeding ground for the unlawful. It has captured the imaginations of artists and writers, and has been the backdrop for many hard-edged films, including “State of Grace,” “Sleepers,” and the recent critically acclaimed “In America.”... Considering its history, that brutal reputation is well deserved... Although originally a district of streams and meadows, the area’s fortunes changed in the mid-1800s with the construction of slaughterhouses and factories. Immigrant workers soon flooded the area to take advantage of the newly created jobs and row after row of low-rent tenement houses were built to house them... Unpleasant working and living conditions contributed to an atmosphere conducive to riots and the formation of neighborhood gangs. Rough times there continued as Hell’s Kitchen became a favorite stomping ground for the City’s most notorious criminals and a refuge for the homeless in the days of the Great Depression... More recently, the area was known as a haunt for drug deals and prostitution. The infamous Westie’s, an Irish-American gang, terrorized the neighborhood well into the 1960s...
Efforts in the 1990s to clean up the area have been largely successful. Today, Hell’s Kitchen bears little resemblance to its infernal moniker... With the change in the neighborhood’s fortunes has also come a new willingness to live there..."
-- Ettore Toppi, Hotter than … Chelsea?: How Hell’s Kitchen went from gangland to the city’s ‘gay ghetto’
Friday, January 30, 2004, New York Blade

"By holding back documents, officials, information, images and the sight of returning military coffins, by twisting and exaggerating facts to fit story lines, by demonizing anyone who disagrees with its version of reality, this administration strives to create an optical delusion."
-- Maureen Dowd, Mired in a Mirage, The New York Times.

“When everyone agrees, someone is not thinking”.
-- General George S. Patton

"Quickly, I discovered that men exaggerating their penis size on the Internet have nothing on real-estate agents advertising the size of their units. The term '800 square feet' had as much meaning as 'nine inches'.”
-- Steve Weinstein, The great search: Forget a lover. Finding a decent-sized, affordable apartment in New York is the real challenge! New York Blade.

"I have had much enjoyment in doing these talks and hope that some of it has passed over to the listeners, to all of whom I now say thank you for your loyalty and goodbye."
-- Allistair Cooke, 1908-2004