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All I Quotes

“In 1995, we had evidence of the brother-in-law of Osama bin Laden being in the Philippines, living in the Philippines. We had evidence of front organizations set up in the Philippines. And we uncovered evidence about, which would help the U.S. with - about the perpetuators of the World Trade Center bombing.”

“In 19951995, (scientist) Theunis Piersma showed that Red Knots find shellfish up to eight times more frequently than would be expected if they were doing random searches...As a knot's bill descends into the sand, it pushes on the thin rivulets of water between the rains, creating a pressure wave that radiates outward. If there's a hard object in the way - say, a clam or a rock - the water must flow around it, which distorts the pattern of pressure. The pits on the knot's bill tip can sense those distortions, detectings surrounding objects without having to make contact with them. This ability, which Piersma calls "remote touch" is impressive enough, but the knot improves it even further by probing the same areas repeatedly, stabbing its beak up and down several times a second. This stirs up the sand grains, which settle into a denser configuration, heightening the buildup of pressure from the beak and making the distortions more obvious. Every time the knot lowers its head, the foud around it becomes more obvious, as if it were using a kind of sonar based on touch instead of hearing.”

“In 1996 Dorothy Mackey wrote an Op-ed piece, “Violence from comrades a fact of life for military women.” ABC News 20/ 20 did a segment on rape in the military. By November four women came forward at Aberdeen Proving Ground, in Maryland, about a pattern of rape by drill sergeants. In 1997 the military finds three black drill sergeants to scapegoat. They were sent to prison and this left the commanding generals and colonels untouched to retire quietly. The Army appointed a panel to investigate sexual harassment. One of the panelists was the sergeant Major of the Army, Eugene McKinney. On hearing his nomination, former associates and one officer came forward with charges of sexual coercion and misconduct. In 1998 he was acquitted of all charges after women spoke (of how they were being stigmatized, their careers stopped, and their characters questioned. A Congressional panel studied military investigative practices. In 1998, the Court of Appeals ruled against Dorothy Mackay. She had been outspoken on media and highly visible. There is an old Arabic saying “When the hen crows cut off her head.”“This court finds that Col. Milam and Lt. Col. Elmore were acting in the scope of their duties” in 1991-1992 when Capt. Mackey alleged they harassed, intimidated and assaulted her. A legislative remedy was asked for and she appealed to the Supreme Court. Of course the Supreme Court refused to hear the case in 1999, as it always has under the feres doctrine. Her case was cited to block the suit of one of the Aberdeen survivors as well!”

“In 1996 or 1997, out of nowhere, Fox News comes on and it's on channel 360 on Direct TV, and out of 300 million Americans, on every single night, anywhere from 3 to 5 million watch it, we're talking about at no more than 2 percent of the American public is watching Fox at any given moment. Yet, ABC, CBS, NBC, the New York Times, the institutional left, CNN, MSNBC, the record companies, Hollywood, all seem to be committed towards aligning their minds and their money and their other resources to try to shut up Fox News.”

“In 1996, the late, great New York Times columnist William Safire published a column, 'Blizzard of lies,' in which he laid out a series of falsehoods by Hillary Rodham Clinton and declared 'Americans of all political persuasions are coming to the sad realization that our First Lady -€” a woman of undoubted talents who was a role model for many in her generation -€” is a congenital liar.'”

“In 1997, when I started as a professional athlete, my sport was not like it is now. I needed to develop myself to beat the next generation, but things also changed in the sport. Bikes have changed, the sport has gotten faster, and it's becoming more professional. But my goal always was to try to be one step in front of all the others. That was my motivation. That helped me to work every day during the year, and very hard. And it never stopped.”

“In 1998, Anthony Williams was elected mayor of Washington, DC. Mr. Williams had attended Harvard and Yale, clearly wanted to run an efficient city government, and had considerable white support. Although he was black, Mr. Williams left many blacks wondering if he was “black enough.” A black writer for the Washington Post raised “the question of whether whites, assuming they care one way or the other, even understand the concept of ‘How black is a black person?’ ” He went on to say that Mayor Williams had fired incompetents, but that “the firings hurt black workers most of all, creating the impression—fairly or unfairly—that he has little or no special concern for people who look like him.” A black politician who is more concerned about efficiency than about jobs for blacks may not be black enough. The writer concluded: “Blackness . . . is a state of common spiritual idealism that serves to unite the group for the purpose of survival. . . . [T]here is not one person of color who can separate himself or herself from the rest of the people of color.” The mayoral election in Washington 12 years later raised exactly the same question. Incumbent Adrian Fenty was black, but not black enough. Like Mr. Williams before him, he hired people for their ability, and not one of his top three appointments in public education was black, nor were the police chief, fire chief, or attorney general. “How can there not be one African-American leader in that cluster?” asked his 2010 challenger, Vincent Gray, also black, in a question that resonated with black voters. Mr. Gray went on to win with 80 percent of the black vote. A columnist who is himself black explained Mr. Fenty’s loss: “In short, the mayor appointed the best people he could find, instead of running a racial patronage system, as a black mayor of a city with a black majority is apparently expected to.”

“In 1999 Putin was not a public figure accustomed to journalists and the free exchange of information. In the perestroika years Putin had been stationed in Germany as a KGB officer, and he missed everything that happened, including Gorbachev’s campaign of glasnost—or openness—when newspapers were competing to expose Stalinist crimes; Soviet apparatchiks argued with dissidents like Andrei Sakharov at Congress of People’s Deputies, broadcast in real-time on television; and the pages of democratic Moskovskie Novosti were read aloud by Muscovites on Pushkin Square. Putin had little idea of how the West functioned from his posting in East Germany, which was under total control of the secret services. He missed even the fall of the Berlin Wall, because he was serving in Dresden, 125 miles south of Berlin.”

“In 1999, The Black Book of Communism endeavored to attempt the impossible task of tabulating a Marxist-Leninist death toll in the twentieth century. It came up with a figure approaching 100 million. Here is the breakdown: *USSR: 20 million deaths *China: 65 million deaths *Vietnam: 1 million deaths *North Korea: 2 million deaths *Cambodia: 2 million deaths *Eastern Europe: 1 million deaths *Latin America: 150,000 deaths *Africa: 1.7 million deaths *Afghanistan: 1.5 million deaths *The international communist movement and Communist parties not in power: about 10,000 deaths”

“In 1999, when Vladimir Putin came to power, many thought he was wonderful. He was young, he didn't drink like Yeltsin, and he seemed to be saying all the right things. That strengthened the hope that everything would at last be put right. This talk really annoyed me. I didn't like the idea of Putin as "successor"; I wanted a genuine presidential election, with competing candidates. If we imagine that Putin was a Communist who campaigned and won fairly, I would have been very upset, but I would have accepted the result. Now, though, Putin was being foisted on Russia as payment for his loyalty and willingness to provide legal immunity to the former president and his family. I knew that I couldn't believe a word Putin said. his appointment made me determined to resist. I didn't want someone of that kind to be the leader of my country. My feelings were very strong. I wanted to register my presence as far removed from Putin as possible, on the opposite side of the political arena, so that later, when I was a grandfather, I would be able to tell my grandchildren, "I was against it from the outset!" All that remained was to decide which party to join. The Communists still had the largest organization and were the obvious choice for someone who wanted to make it clear they were opposed to Yeltsin's successor, but for me the merest hint of the Soviet past was like a red cape to a bull. The Liberal Democratic Party of Russia seemed to be in opposition, but I did not trust its leader, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, to stand up to the new regime. In the democratic wing, there were the Union of Right Forces (URF) and Yabloko. The former included some well-known officials like Anatoly Chubais and Boris Nemstov (both of whom seemed to me then to be Young Community League types). Yabloko, which bore more resemblance to a bunch of amiable nerds, was the only genuinely democratic party, overtly opposed to Putin, and that seemed preferable. My decision must have seemed odd to some people, and I might have hesitated longer, but I wanted my position to be absolutely clear: I would join the opposition. When there was talk that the electoral threshold to the Duma could be raised from 5 percent to 7 percent, and there were doubts as to whether a democratic party would be able to achieve the new minimum, that only increased my motivation. So I took myself off to Yabloko's headquarters in the center of Moscow. It was not at all how I had pictured the headquarters of a parliamentary party. It was a complete shambles.”

“In 2000, 41 percent of all borrowers with subprime loans would have qualified for conventional financing with lower rates, a figure that increased to 61 percent in 2006. By then, African American mortgage recipients had subprime loans at three times the rate of white borrowers. Higher-income African Americans had subprime mortgages at four times the rate of higher-income whites. Even though it’s own survey in 2005 revealed a similar racial discrepancy, the Federal Reserve did not take action. By failing to curb discrimination that its own data disclosed, the Federal Reserve violated African Americans’ legal and constitutional rights.”

“In 2000, interior minister [of France] Jean-Pierre Chevenement said Europe should become a place of race-mixing (métissage) and that governments should make efforts to persuade Europeans to accept this. In 2007, both candidates in the French presidential election took the same view. Socialist Ségolène Royale, said that “miscegenation is an opportunity for France,” adding that she would encourage immigration and would be “president of a France that is mixed-race and proud of it.” Nicolas Sarkozy, the conservative candidate who won the election, said he was proud of “a France that understands that creation comes from mixing, from openness, and from coming together—I’m not afraid of the word—from miscegenation.” It is common to project contemporary views upon the past. George Washington University professor Amitai Etzioni has written that people who marry across racial lines are “accepting the core American value of openness and living up to its tenets.” Andrew Sullivan, former editor of The New Republic has written that “miscegenation has always been the ultimate solution to America’s racial divisions.” These two got it wrong. For most of American history, miscegenation was the ultimate nightmare for whites. That whites should now see it as the ultimate solution to racial conflict is a sign not only of how radically our thinking has changed but also of how stubborn racial conflict turned out to be. Civil rights laws were supposed to usher in a new era of racial harmony. To propose now that the only solution to racial enmity is to eliminate race itself through intermarriage is to admit that different races cannot live together in peace. Of course, widespread miscegenation would not eliminate race; it would eliminate whites. Whites are no more than 17 percent of the world’s population and are having perhaps seven percent of the world’s children. No one is proposing large-scale intermarriage for Africa or Asia. Nor would mixing eliminate discrimination. Blacks, South Americans, and Asians discriminate among themselves on the basis of skin tone even when they are the same race. Thomas Jefferson looked forward to the day when whites would people the Americas from north to south. Today such a view would be universally scorned because it would mean the displacement of other populations, but the revolution in thinking among today’s whites leaves no grounds to argue against their own displacement through immigration or disappearance through intermarriage. Whites may have a sentimental attachment to the notion of a white America, but if races are interchangeable that attachment is irrational. If the only legitimate group sentiment for whites is guilt, perhaps it is only right that they should retreat gracefully before the advances of peoples they have wronged. There could hardly be more striking proof not only of how the thinking of whites has changed but how different it is from that of every other racial group. All non-whites celebrate their growing numbers and influence—just as whites once did. Whites—not only in America but around the world—cheerfully contemplate their disappearance as a distinct people.”

“In 2000 the then Prime Minister of Japan [Yoshirō Mori] asked me to return to this process, this conversation, these talks, and to do so, incidentally, on the basis of the 1956 declaration. I agreed. Since then we have conducted dialogue in this regard but I cannot say that our Japanese partners and friends have remained within the limits of the 1956 declaration.”

“In 2001 New York came under attack, and thousands of people simply evaporated, leaving behind only dust and bits of gold Rolex watches. We were told that we had nothing to worry about, that we should go shopping. I was eager to please my country, for shopping had long been an answer for me, but what I couldn't pay for, I stole. I started to accumulate stuff I felt would make me feel whole: I surrounded myself with symbols of status. I believed the TV commercials with all my heart. I felt that those material things I was being sold defined me.”

“In 2001, the Associated Press published a three-part investigation into the theft of black-owned land stretching back to the antebellum period. The series documented some 406 victims and 24,000 acres of land values at tends of millions of dollars. The land was taken through means ranging from legal chicanery to terrorism.”