“If we don’t do this, we will be known as the party of Herbert Hoover forever.”

– Vice President Dick Cheney, who tried to get Senate Republicans to support an automaker bailout by reminding them of the 1920s Republican administration that preceded the Depression and was blamed for letting it happen.

“It was a big collage of chaos, and it revolved around drugs.”

– Admitted methamphetamine user Gina M. Johnston, who headed a forgery and theft ring out of a rented walk-in closet and was sentenced to more than 12 years in prison on an organized crime charge.

“In the past few months we started to feel secure, but today we lost everything.”

– Kurdish businessman Kamal Aziz Khokaram, who was knocked to the ground in a blast caused by a suicide bomber that killed 55 people and wounded dozens more at a popular restaurant in Kirkuk, where efforts to calm tensions had been thought to be working.

“The Committee’s report details the inexcusable link between abusive interrogation techniques used by our enemies who ignored the Geneva Conventions and interrogation policy for detainees in U.S. custody.”

– U.S. Sen. John McCain, after the Senate Armed Forces Committee released bipartisan findings that high officials in the Bush administration were responsible for abusive treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay and in the Middle East.

“It’ll be a place with 200 windows and 30 coffee shops, which you can’t find anywhere else in the world – very exciting, but also with cultural attractions. And you won’t have to be embarrassed to say you came.”

– Amsterdam City Councilman Lodewijk Asscher, boasting of a plan to curb crime in the Netherlands city by restricting its liberal prostitution and drug trade to a narrower area.

“Complaints make the staff tense, and the job tends to jump to the front of the line, and then it gets rushed and a mistake is made and it just compounds.”

– Tacoma-area optometrist David Hays, talking about serious backlogs in a state program that relies on prison inmate labor to make eyeglasses for Medicaid clients.

“If she runs, you will see more Kennedys than you have ever seen in you life.”

– Robert F. Kennedy Jr., predicting how his family members will rally on behalf of his cousin Caroline, daughter of President John F. Kennedy, if she is appointed to Hillary Clinton’s soon-to-be-vacant Senate seat from New York and runs for re-election in 2010.