Contemptible quotes from insufferable assholes

[JackRiddler]

“I read stuff about me and I say, ‘God, I’m a terrible guy,’ ” he said. “And then I come here and everybody treats me like I’m a wonderful fellow, and I say, ‘Well, maybe I’m not so bad after all.’ ”

"Here" in this case is an institute at MIT that researches David Koch's particular kind of cancer (prostate), and which bears his name because he financed it to the tune of xxx million dollars.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/05/us/05 ... nted=print

On top of this -- this is too good:

“The National Institutes of Health, and the National Cancer Institute in particular, are facing serious cutbacks in their funding due to the massive deficits the federal government is incurring,” he said in his speech, in a tent outside the seven-story building. “If the cutbacks happen, it will significantly diminish the level of research that can be carried on at the Koch Institute. I earnestly ask you to do all you can to help maintain the superb research at the Koch Institute at its maximum level.”

Mr. Koch explained that he was following the same strategy he once used when he placed a bet on the winner of the Kentucky Derby. “I bought a ticket on every horse in the race,” he said.

[AhabsOtherLeg]

Speaker of the House of Commons - John Bercow


The Duke of York should be sacked as a UK trade ambassador because of his links to Colonel Gaddafi's son, a senior Labour MP has said.

www.bbc.co.uk

It turns out that the Grand Old Duke of York also spent a lot of time at the various mansions of the billionaire convicted sex-offender Jeffrey Epstein, who was sent down for soliciting underage prostitutes. It's almost like there's some kind of tangential connection between back-door arms dealing, international finance, travelling royalty, and the modern sex/slave trade.


EDIT for topic: Maggie Thatcher famously once claimed that there was ,"no such thing as society," despite the fact that she'd been born and raised in a society, and that almost all her ideas and actions were the direct result of the society she was born and raised in, and that without a pre-existing civil society of the type hard-won by generations of commoners before her she would have got no further than the field or the mine or her father's shopfront regardless of her hard work (and her work might not have existed, in the absence of society). But she knows that. All the clever ones do. They just don't want anybody getting what they got.

They actually take competitiveness seriously, and believe it is an asset in itself. Also, they are poopieheads.

[barracuda]

[Jeff]

New York Federal Reserve President William Dudley on Friday tried to calm people's nerves about rising food prices by reminding them that other products -- like iPads -- are getting cheaper.

"Today you can buy an iPad 2 that costs the same as an iPad 1 that is twice as powerful," Dudley said in Queens, Reuters reports. "You have to look at the price of all things."

But better iPads don't put food on the table, audience members reminded him.

"When was the last time, sir, that you went grocery shopping?" one person asked.

And, perhaps most succinctly, another told him, "I can't eat an iPad."

http://tpmlivewire.talkingpointsmemo.co ... hp?ref=fpb

[Laodicean]

There is a growing body of evidence that radiation in excess of what the government says are the minimum amounts we should be exposed to are actually good for you and reduce cases of cancer.

- Ann Coulter on The O'Reilly Factor

[Jeff]

From the text from a speech made by Stephen Harper, then vice-president of the National Citizens Coalition, to a June 1997 Montreal meeting of the Council for National Policy, a right-wing U.S. think tank, and taken from the council's website:

Canada is a Northern European welfare state in the worst sense of the term, and very proud of it.... In terms of the unemployed, of which we have over a million-and-a-half, don't feel particularly bad for many of these people. They don't feel bad about it themselves, as long as they're receiving generous social assistance and unemployment insurance.

...

[T]he NDP is kind of proof that the Devil lives and interferes in the affairs of men.

This party believes not just in large government and in massive redistributive programs, it's explicitly socialist. On social value issues, it believes the opposite on just about everything that anybody in this room believes. I think that's a pretty safe bet on all social-value kinds of questions.

Some people point out that there is a small element of clergy in the NDP. Yes, this is true. But these are clergy who, while very committed to the church, believe that it made a historic error in adopting Christian theology.

http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/SpecialEvent7 ... xt_051214/

[Stephen Morgan]

From here.

[Canadian_watcher]

From the text from a speech made by Stephen Harper, then vice-president of the National Citizens Coalition, to a June 1997 Montreal meeting of the Council for National Policy, a right-wing U.S. think tank, and taken from the council's website:

Canada is a Northern European welfare state in the worst sense of the term, and very proud of it.... In terms of the unemployed, of which we have over a million-and-a-half, don't feel particularly bad for many of these people. They don't feel bad about it themselves, as long as they're receiving generous social assistance and unemployment insurance.

...

[T]he NDP is kind of proof that the Devil lives and interferes in the affairs of men.

This party believes not just in large government and in massive redistributive programs, it's explicitly socialist. On social value issues, it believes the opposite on just about everything that anybody in this room believes. I think that's a pretty safe bet on all social-value kinds of questions.

Some people point out that there is a small element of clergy in the NDP. Yes, this is true. But these are clergy who, while very committed to the church, believe that it made a historic error in adopting Christian theology.

http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/SpecialEvent7 ... xt_051214/

Oh. my. god. I didn't need anything else .. I think Harper is evil enough as it is.. but wow. I didn't know the last part of that quote.

[AhabsOtherLeg]

Jack recently posted about Paul LePage, Tea Party-affiliated Governor of Maine, on the Winsconsin Protests thread, but the man is in the process of composing his own unironic dunciad, and deserves a place here.





He recently ordered a mural depicting the history of the state's workers to be removed from the Department of Labour because it, "hurt our pro-business goals."

Here's the fax that supposedly prompted him to remove the mural, likely written and sent to his offices by either himself or one of his staff, complete with dumb Reagan paraphrase:



Might be old news now, but still.

----

Stephen, that Jon Haworth phonecall is chilling. It seems likely Haworth would've been one of the people who were sending death threats to Lenny Harper as well, which you'd normally expect the police to take a heavy interest in - death threats against a senior policeman are usually taken pretty seriously. Was anybody ever caught or punished over that? I mean, at all?

Everything about the Jersey case needs to be re-investigated, especially the original investigation.

[JackRiddler]

.

"I felt for a moment like I was in communist North Korea where they use these murals to brainwash the masses."

In North Korea, they also make schoolchildren stand up and salute a piece of brightly colored cloth while they recite a "Pledge of Allegiance" originally written by a Socialist!

.

[AhabsOtherLeg]

.
In North Korea, they also make schoolchildren stand up and salute a piece of brightly colored cloth while they recite a "Pledge of Allegiance" originally written by a Socialist!
.

See? So why can't you all just be friends?

I wonder if LePage noticed that the Reagan paraphrase puts him in the role of Gorbachev, former Antichrist, rather than the role of Reagan, American Messiah. Or if he'd care. Probably not. Gorbachev's ancient history now as far as these guys are concerned, whereas Reagan's the future all over again. However that works.

[Stephen Morgan]

Stephen, that Jon Haworth phonecall is chilling. It seems likely Haworth would've been one of the people who were sending death threats to Lenny Harper as well, which you'd normally expect the police to take a heavy interest in - death threats against a senior policeman are usually taken pretty seriously. Was anybody ever caught or punished over that? I mean, at all?

Everything about the Jersey case needs to be re-investigated, especially the original investigation.

I'm going to start a Jersey thread, I think. I'll just have to get some information together.

[Gouda]

"People are saying they want high integrity ingredients, things their grandmother would have used, that don't look like they came out of a chemistry lab. But they're also saying I've got a family to feed and can only afford to spend about $4 on my lunch, and I've only got about a minute or two to eat it."

-- Wendy's CMO Ken Calwell, explaining why Wendy's new "Natural Cut Fries w/ Sea Salt" can't be "all natural" and why this is the natural order of things.



Not pictured: sodium acid pyrophosphate, dextrose, 2 rounds of frying oil, and dimethylpolysiloxane, a silicone-based chemical that helps keep the vegetable oil from getting foamy after countless rounds of frying. Also not pictured: obscene political economy, declining wages, numerous other indignities, Wendy's role, and this family of 4's projected medical cost burden.

"But the new fries do succeed in taste tests..."

[AhabsOtherLeg]

Most single moms are very poor, uneducated, can't get a job, and if it weren't for government assistance, their kids would be starving to death and never have health care.

- Presidential material Mike Huckabee, March 2nd, 2011

And then he argues in favour of a drastic reduction in government assistance, and the audience applaud. Sorry, I'm a bit slow. Only just got the import of this. The Natalie Portman bit threw me off, either by accident or design.

Gouda, even though I've never seen a Wendy's, that story depresses and scares me. I don't know anybody who has access to affordable real food, and never have done. There is a deeper class distinction now in terms of diet than there was when the Norman conquerors ate veal and the peasantry chewed beef. At least, back then, they were both eating meat from the same kind of animal.

[Nordic]

There is a deeper class distinction now in terms of diet than there was when the Norman conquerors ate veal and the peasantry chewed beef. At least, back then, they were both eating meat from the same kind of animal.

Yeah, no kidding, just walk through the latest Whole Foods store at Lincoln and Rose near the hippest neighborhood in Los Angeles right now (Abbot Kinney), and look at the prices. Then look at what those women have in their carts. Then look at the cars they drive away in.

They're eating GREAT, let me tell you.

The rest of us? Not so much.