Quotes From Around Yon Blogosphere

If money is the mother's milk of politics, lies are what comes out the other end of the digestive system.

-- PROFESSOR BAINBRIDGE

The growing world food crisis looks like a montage in a disaster movie--crowd scenes of hungry rioters in Haiti, Egypt and Africa's Ivory Coast; close-ups of emaciated mothers holding out starving children to anyone who will feed them; well-fed gray men in paneled rooms clucking impotently.

-- ROBERT STEIN

President Bush is in the twilight of his presidency and his approval ratings are scraping bottom. So what did the Senate do last week? It confirmed yet another of Bush’s controversial judicial nominees. And Senators are sending signs that they might cave on yet more nominees in the near future.

-- DOWN WITH TYRANNY

For over the past 25 years former president Jimmy Carter has used the prestige of his office to stay in the news, winning a peace prize in the process. Is Carter truly motivated by the quest for peace, or is there something else making him get involved in nearly every major foreign policy issue of the last 17 years?

-- SCOTT KERWIN

Twice-divorced former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani took Communion at a Mass celebrated by Pope Benedict on Saturday, breaching rules that bar those who remarry outside the Church from doing so.

-- REUTERS

In the past week, a parade of Bush administration officials have offered a new threat and new justification for prolonging America's errant war in Iraq: containing Iran. The ironic aspect of this is that Iran not only enjoys intimate relations with the Shiite government in Baghdad, but that its objectives in Iraq largely coincide with those of the United States.

-- RAY TAKEYH

The Pentagon has cultivated "military analysts" in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the Bush administration’s wartime performance.

-- DAVID BARSTOW

Allow me to channel Salvadore Dali: "The difference between Barack Obama and Shaun Mullen is that Shaun is not Barack Obama." Shaun is not running for president. Shaun does not get up in front of 35,000 people and say he is better than every other politician out there because by jing, he’s for a "new" kind of politics while they aren’t. Shaun does not lie through his teeth about the nature and extent of his past associations.

-- RICK MORAN

The airlines have been treating us like cattle for quite a while now or when we're lucky, like dogs, but so far the cattle prods and shock collars have remained the tools of the Federal government.

-- CAPT. FOGG

The Rules Change for Obama. Now he's being treated like a candidate, not a prodigy. He's not pleased with the shift.

-- MICHAEL BARONE

I willingly concede that should we have a national crisis in which the President is faced with the threat of hundreds of reporters questioning his/her use of lapel pins, then Hillary is who I want to confront that problem. For every other crisis, I choose Obama. Hillary is turning into a Saturday Night Live routine.

-- JOHN COLE

Sometimes I feel sorry for folks like John Derbyshire, having to defend Darwin and evolution from the fundie naysayers of the extreme Right. It's not only a thankless and endless task but it must be downright embarassing to realise one shares a political party with such neo-Luddite nutters.

-- CERNIG

Since MoveOn endorsed Hillary Clinton's opponent, it's hardly surprising that Clinton has not-so-nice things to say about MoveOn. But the bad dynamic between Clinton and MoveOn is a reminder of one of the fundamental problems with her candidacy. The Clintons, and many of their key supporters, come out of a school of political analysis which holds that the problem with the Democratic Party in the United States is that progressive institutions are too strong. Only by curbing the influence of these institutions, the theory goes, can Democratic Party politicians engage in the tactical repositioning necessary to win elections.

-- MATTHEW YGLESIAS

[There] are a lot of scary things about the possibility of a President McCain, but the fact that he could make Bush look like a model statesman has to be right at the tippy-top of the list.

-- MELISSA McEWAN

Americans belatedly learned the hard way that the brush-clearing cowboy of the Crawford "ranch" (it's a country house, not a working ranch) was in reality an entitled Andover-Yale-Harvard oil brat whose arrogance has left us where we are now. Voters don’t want a rerun from a Wellesley-Yale alumna who served on the board of Wal-Mart.

-- FRANK RICH

Cartoon by Pat Oliphant/Universal Press Syndicate