Quotes of the Morning: Irony is Undead

“Because the question is if people know year after year after year a natural disaster occurs in a particular place and people continue to build there and want to live there, should they bear the responsibility of buying insurance or should everyone else bear the responsibility? Good question.”
-Senator Jon Kyl, August 31, 2005

“U.S. Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) today hailed the decision by President Bush to declare the Aspen fire near Mt. Lemmon a disaster area, making the area eligible for federal disaster assistance. Senator Kyl also today contacted the Secretaries of Agriculture and the Interior to urge them to exempt from time-consuming federal regulations forest treatment projects on more than 15,000 acres of Arizona forests to deter similar catastrophic wildfires.
‘I’m very pleased that federal disaster assistance will be made available to help Mt. Lemmon area residents recover from this horrific fire,’ said Kyl. ‘To help prevent similar catastrophes in the future, an unnecessary legal hurdle should be immediately removed so that the Forest Service can begin immediate treatments on other areas of our state that are at severe risk of fire.’”
-Press Release by Senator John Kyl, July 11, 2003

“Well, unless people don’t realize that forests tend to burn in the dry Arizona environment occasionally, I think that I’ll have to call Senator Kyl a terrible hypocrite. Amazing how help is only expected when the disaster happens in your own backyard.”
-Skippy

"You have people who don't heed those warnings and then put people at risk as a result of not heeding those warnings. There may be a need to look at tougher penalties on those who decide to ride it out and understand that there are consequences to not leaving."
-Senator Rick Santorum, September 5, 2005

“Bigger consequences than losing everything you’ve spent your entire life working for? What, you want to hit them in the forehead with a hammer too? Can’t think of much else other than physically harming them that you could do. The poor people of New Orleans trusted the government to take care of them if they couldn’t get out (20% of the households of NO had no cars, twice the national average, and the poverty rate in the region is high). You’re right.. Trusting the government to take care of its citizens was a problem, and now they have to deal with the consequences. We can’t just go wasting money on people who insist on staying in flood zones.”
-Skippy

"The $10 million we have secured is critical to ensure that the people of northeastern Pennsylvania will never lose their homes again due to devastating floods. The floods in 1996 and Hurricane Agnes in 1972 have forced the people of the Wyoming Valley to rebuild their lives, homes and families not once but twice. The funding to build new levees and floodwalls, modify closure structures and relocate utilities offers reassurance to the people of the Wyoming Valley that they will never again have to endure the hardship of flood devastation."
-Senator Rick Santorum, Press Release, July 17, 2003

“Meanwhile, in Washington D.C., the Pentagon is spending a little dough this weekend on a short hike and country music concert that they’d like to tell you about..”
-Skippy

“The march, sponsored by the Department of Defense, will wend its way from the Pentagon to the Mall along a route that has not been specified but will be lined with four-foot-high snow fencing to keep it closed and ‘sterile,’ said Allison Barber, deputy assistant secretary of defense. The U.S. Park Police will have its entire Washington force of several hundred on duty and along the route, on foot, horseback and motorcycles and monitoring from above by helicopter. Officers are prepared to arrest anyone who joins the march or concert without a credential and refuses to leave, said Park Police Chief Dwight E. Pettiford. What's unusual for an event on the Mall is the combination of fences, required preregistration and the threat of arrest.
[…]
One restricted group will be the media, whose members will not be allowed to walk along the march route. Reporters and cameras are restricted to three enclosed areas along the route but are not permitted to walk alongside participants walking from the Pentagon, across the Memorial Bridge to the Mall.
-Washington Post, September 9, 2005

“And what is the name of this march you might ask? Why, the Freedom Walk of course! I occasionally get the feeling that Karl Rove is using 1984 as a guidebook.”
-Skippy

"The age of irony is dead. "
-Graydon Carter, after 9/11

“Perhaps, but if so its corpse has risen from the dead with an unquenchable hunger for brains and is currently terrorizing the village down the street.”
-Skippy