September/October 2002 Issue

Dan Quayle

honoring our rubber-stamp congress, whose members have found plenty of time to do squat

Image: AP/Wide World Photos

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Stepping in from outside the ring, the former Senator never fails to win his own award. During the increase of violence in Israel, Quayle struggled to maintain a balanced attitude toward the Palestinians, asking, “How many Palestinians were on those airplanes on September 9? None.”

 

From The Source:
Audio File of Quayle’s NPR Appearance

From the Archives:
What’s So Funny?

The September 11 Demagoguery Award

Rep. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) suggested that a good strategy to combat terrorism would be to “arrest every Muslim that crosses the state line.”

Senator Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) told NBC that Chelsea almost died in the World Trade Center collapse. Chelsea, meanwhile, was writing a piece explaining how she was in Manhattan but nowhere near the towers.

Rep. John Cooksey (R-La.) told a radio audience, right after 9/11, “If I see someone come in that’s got a diaper on his head and a fan belt wrapped around the diaper on his head, that guy needs to be pulled over.”

Freshman Rep. Brian Kerns (R-Ind.) told his hometown paper that he’d witnessed the disaster at the Pentagon: “I’m in shock. I thought it was strange that they were letting airplanes still fly after the World Trade Center. Then it was so low, and it just banked into the building. I still can’t believe it.”

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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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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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