In their words …

“I think there’s going to be a little bit of a sticker-shock problem.”

– Washington state Sen. Brad Benson, R-Spokane, weighing the political chances of a proposal to raise the state gasoline tax by 15 cents a gallon over the next 10 years.

“We are not hearing from the grass roots that, by golly, you guys in Congress have to work on this.”

– U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, chairman of the Senate panel responsible for Social Security, quoted by the Washington Post after saying President Bush hasn’t satisfied people’s concerns about solvency of the Social Security fund or what to do about personal accounts.

“You can’t carry it right up to an election. That’s just political dynamite.”

– House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., predicting that passage of the president’s Social Security plan would need to happen by next spring, after which members of Congress will begin getting wrapped up in the midterm election campaigns of 2006.

“If you bring a gun in a bank, you can face life in prison. Or you can write a series of bad checks and score 10 times that amount and get parole.”

– Police Detective Steve Williams of Eugene, Ore., explaining to MSNBC why methamphetamine addicts find identity theft more attractive than armed robbery as a way to support their habits.

“It’s kind of insulting that someone would decide because our name is different than Smith or Jones that we’re not American.”

– Spokane County native Deborah Kay Carollo, whose name was included by Soap Lake resident Martin Ringhofer on a list of voters whose names made him suspect they are illegal immigrants.

“DNA doesn’t solve cases. Detectives solve cases.”

– Spokane Police Sgt. Joe Peterson, noting that technological advances are helpful in cracking long-standing criminal investigations, but it takes skilled law-enforcement officers to take advantage of them.

“You just know.”

– Spokane Public Schools’ district director of high schools Emmett Arndt, explaining how officials determine whether a student who has been suspended from one school over disruptive conduct can not be trusted to enroll in another school in the district.

“We simply cannot afford errors of this magnitude.”

– President Bush’s commission on weapons of mass destruction, in a report that harshly criticized the way U.S. intelligence agencies evaluated circumstances in Iraq leading up to the U.S. invasion.