"This truly is the conference to nowhere."
University of Alaska researcher Rick Steiner, reacting Republican state legislators' plans for a conference for global warming deniers. They determined the conclusion and are looking for scientists to fit it. Steiner keeps asking the state government for the research it keeps claiming it has but surprisingly can't find.

"The Indiana Voter ID Law is thus unconstitutional: the state interests fail to justify the practical limitations placed on the right to vote, and the law imposes an unreasonable and irrelevant burden on voters who are poor and old."
US Supreme Court Justice David Souter, in his dissent to Crawford v. Marion which upheld Indiana's voter ID law.

"Night and day. I felt we'd been hosed."
Kenneth Allard, former NBC military analyst, on how the Pentagon used TV military analysts to feed disinformation about Iraq to the media and public.

"As amazing as it may seem, Mr. Obama seems to have concluded that things like that can lead to bitterness. His mistake, of course, was saying so. The rules call for him to see only what's right, everywhere he goes, while fixing what's wrong. What candidates are supposed to do, and what they too often do, is declare the genius of the local folk and then go to Harrisburg and Washington to wield the power of the government in favor of narrow interests that work contrary to the interests of those local folk. Sure, my tax bill will result in your job going to Malaysia, but check out my patriotic lapel pin."
Scranton Times-Tribune editorial board, endorsing Obama and commenting the controversies over his "bitter" remark and lack of a flag pin.

"And so people end up, they don't vote on economic issues, because they don't expect anybody's gonna help them. So people end up, you know, voting on issues like guns-you know are they going to have the right to bear arms. They vote on issues like gay marriage. You know, they, they take refuge in their faith, and their communities, their families-things they can count on. But they don't believe they can count on Washington."
Barack Obama, defending his remarks on why people in small towns and rural areas are bitter and vote on 3G issues.

"Every time that the interrogator asks me about a certain piece of information, and I talk, he asks me if I told this to the Americans. And if I say no he jumps for joy, and he leaves me and goes to report it to his superiors, and they rejoice."
Ali al-Hajj al-Sharqawi, a prisoner the CIA rendered to Jordan, in a smuggled message about the torture he was subjected to on behalf of the US.

''I would simply note that governments don't censor information to conceal lies. They censor information to conceal the truth.''
Ben Wizner, ACLU staff attorney and military commission observer, on the restrictions the Bush administration has set on defendants and observers to prevent fair trials in the name of national security.

"The people inside the Beltway don't seem to get how big an issue this is."
Darcy burner, Democratic candidate for Congress and participant with other candidates in Responsible Plan, on how Democratic leaders in DC think they can just focus on domestic issues. They've been so good at losing elections on national security, why stop now?

"I just kept thinking, we could have had him. It came out later that the president had been briefed and had turned down my request for soldiers. I found that heartbreaking."
Gary Berntsen, who lead CIA operations in Afghanistan, on how Bush squandered the chance to defeat Al Qaida and kill or capture Osama Bin Laden at Tora Bora. Iraq was already more important to him.

"Yoo wasn't acting as a lawyer in order legally to analyze questions surrounding interrogation powers. He was acting with the intent to enable illegal torture and used the law as his instrument to authorize criminality."
Glenn Greenwald on the release of the infamous "torture memo" by John Yoo, which made the president a dictator allowed to torture without legal restriction, and leading directly to the torture at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, etc.

"The danger of a McCain presidency is not only that he would prolong our presence in Iraq but that he would seek to fulfill neoconservative dreams of a war expanded from Iraq into Iran and Syria, leading to a regional conflagration. With his campaign already sowing the arguments for a wider conflict, we will not be able to say we weren't warned."
Joe Conason on the danger in McCain's apparent desire to begin more wars in the Middle East.

"I feel mighty. When the creationists saw me and Dawkins in a lineup, I am the one that had them so frightened that they had to call for the guards."
Biologist PZ Myers, who was expelled from the theater showing the film "Expelled" at the insistence of producers who knew he wouldn't agree with the film. The film is about how creationists are denied their free speech rights in academia. No, they don't see the irony, any more than they've ever figured out why their opinion pieces don't get published as scientific research.

"Never seen anything like that. I bet a lot of folks in that dealership were Republicans. Most, based on snippets of conversation I heard, were Southerners. Almost all were white. And they watched, listened, and agreed with what Barack Obama was saying about race in America."
Daily Kos diarist Socratic, a resident of heavily Republican Cobb County, Georgia, writing about the reactions of other people at a car dealership which had Obama's race relations speech on the TV.

"Take Dad's words and put them in the mouth of Obama's preacher (or in the mouth of any black American preacher) and people would be accusing that preacher of treason. Yet when we of the white Religious Right denounced America white conservative Americans and top political leaders, called our words 'godly' and 'prophetic' and a 'call to repentance.'"
Frank Schaeffer, former fundamentalist preacher, and a founder along with this father of the modern religious right.

"According to both the 2001 and 2007 IPCC reports, neither Greenland nor Antarctica should lose significant mass by 2100. They both already are. Here again, the conservative nature of the IPCC process puts it at odds with observed empirical realities that are the basis of all science."
Physicist Joseph Romm, on how the IPCC reports on climate change, rather than being consensus reports, are actually conservative reports that downplay the problem.