Top 10 Quotes of the Day for 2017

These are not necessarily the top ten best quotes of the year. They’re just the top ten among those I happened to have posted as a Quote of the Day. They’re in no special order.

#1. Lou Dobbs wants to arrest Barack Obama

Responding to Barack Obama’s suggestion that it’s a good idea to have an “edit function” before you tweet: I mean, he should be brought back by the marshals. Isn’t there some law that says presidents shouldn’t be attacking sitting presidents?

#2. A Trump aide admits that presidenting is hard

I kind of pooh-poohed the experience stuff when I first got here. But this shit is hard.

#3. Donald Trump says people believe whatever you tell them

After Billy Bush called him out for inflating his TV ratings: People will just believe you. You just tell them and they believe you.

#4. Donald Trump demonstrates how #3 works

When Trump was campaigning, he said that the country’s low unemployment numbers were fake. But now that he’s president and these are his numbers, he feels very differently: When we got those great reports, I kept saying—you know, those numbers were 4.2, 4.3—I said, for a long time, they don’t matter. But now I accept those numbers very proudly. I say they do matter.

#5. Steve Bannon on what Trump’s base cares about

Bannon explains to Joshua Green why the Trump campaign decided not to renounce white nationalism too strongly: We polled the race stuff and it didn’t matter.

#6. The Attorney General of the United States is amazed at what a judge can do

Attorney General Jeff Sessions can’t believe that a federal judge in Hawaii has the same powers as any other federal judge: I really am amazed that a judge sitting on an island in the Pacific can issue an order that stops the President of the United States from what appears to be clearly his statutory and Constitutional power.

#7. An Obamacare opponent wonders what he was thinking

Away from the fog of the campaign, Patrick Murphy, owner of Bagel Barrel in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, sees the light on Obamacare: I can’t even remember why I opposed it. Everybody needs some sort of health insurance.

#8. Donald Trump on NATO

Trump explains that when he originally said NATO was obsolete, it was only because he didn’t know anything about it: Wolf [Blitzer] asked me about NATO, and I said two things. NATO’s obsolete — not knowing much about NATO, now I know a lot about NATO — NATO is obsolete.

#9. Donald Trump casually wipes out Puerto Rico’s debt after Hurricane Maria

Trump to Geraldo Rivera: They owe a lot of money to your friends on Wall Street and we’re going to have to wipe that out. You’re going to say goodbye to that, I don’t know if it’s Goldman Sachs but whoever it is you can wave goodbye to that.

Mick Mulvaney to CNN, reinstating Puerto Rico’s debt after all: I wouldn’t take it word for word with that.

#10. The tweet that launched a thousand idiocies

Donald Trump, bored and restless during a weekend alone at Mar-a-Lago, decides to liven things up. Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my “wires tapped” in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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