Quotes of the Morning

“One quick follow up to yesterday’s comments on last weekend’s little anti-judicial hate fest..”
-Skippy

“Michael Schwartz must have thought I was just another attendee of the ‘Confronting the Judicial War on Faith’ conference. I approached the chief of staff of Oklahoma's GOP Senator Tom Coburn outside the conference in downtown Washington last Thursday afternoon after he spoke there. Before I could introduce myself, he turned to me and another observer with a crooked smile and exclaimed, ‘I'm a radical! I'm a real extremist. I don't want to impeach judges. I want to impale them!’"
-Max Blumenthal, The Nation, April 11, 2005

“And I think we all agree that that is what Jesus would do..”
-Skippy

“The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them."
-Mark Twain

"When you are right you cannot be too radical; when you are wrong, you cannot be too conservative."
-Martin Luther King Jr

“Somehow I don’t think that Dr. King would think of Sen. Coburn as ‘right’.”
-Skippy

"As witnesses not of our intentions but of our conduct, we can be true or false, and the hypocrite's crime is that he bears false witness against himself. What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core."
-Hannah Arendt, 1963

“And now for some happier news.”
-Skippy

“Arthur J. Finkelstein, a prominent Republican consultant who has directed a series of hard-edged political campaigns to elect conservatives in the United States and Israel over the last 25 years, said Friday that he had married his male partner in a civil ceremony at his home in Massachusetts.
Mr. Finkelstein, 59, who has made a practice of defeating Democrats by trying to demonize them as liberal, said in a brief interview that he had married his partner of 40 years to ensure that the couple had the same benefits available to married heterosexual couples.
‘I believe that visitation rights, health care benefits and other human relationship contracts that are taken for granted by all married people should be available to partners,’ he said.
He declined further comment on the wedding, which was in December.
Some of Mr. Finkelstein's associates said they were startled to learn that this prominent American conservative had married a man, given his history with the party, especially at a time when many Republican leaders, including President Bush, have campaigned against same-sex marriage and proposed amending the Constitution to ban it. Mr. Finkelstein has been allied over the years with Republicans who have fiercely opposed gay rights measures, including former Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, and has been the subject of attacks by gay rights activists who have accused him of hypocrisy. He was identified as gay in a Boston Magazine article in 1996.”
-New York Times, April 9, 2005

“Those of us at the Quotes of the Morning (ok.. that’s just me) would like to congratulate Mr. Finkelstein and his husband on their nuptials and wish them a long and happy life together (actually they’ve been together since he was 19, so it has already been a long life together.. which is really, really cool). Now stop helping the conservative movement discriminate against gay people a**hole.”
-Skippy

“In other matters.. Quotes of the Morning will be taking a brief hiatus until next Wednesday. Mrs. Skippy is going in for some minor (not dangerous) surgery and I will be spending some time bringing her bon bons while she recovers in her boudoir.”
-Skippy