Cutting Quotes

I can get onstage and cut that off and be superinstinctive. To be a good live performer, you have to be instinctive. It’s like, to walk in the jungle, or to do anything where there’s a certain tightrope wire aspect you need to be instinctive. And you have to be comfortable at it also.

His presidency ended more than a decade ago, but politicians, Democrat and Republican, still talk about Ronald Reagan. Al Gore has an ad noting that in Congress he opposed the Reagan budget cuts. He says that because Bill Bradley was one of 36 Democratic Senators who voted for the cuts. Gore doesn’t point out that Bradley also voted against the popular Reagan tax cuts and that it was the tax cuts that piled up those enormous deficits, a snowballing national debt.

When you cut human beings down to size, we’re really quite simple creatures; food, shelter, warmth, light, heat and you build it up from there really until you finally go Gucci shoes or whatever it is or whatever your consumer desires are. All those desires are ultimately, they’re about gratification.

Republicans favor tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, but these had no stimulative effect during the George W. Bush administration, and there is no reason to believe that more of them will have any today. As for the idea that cutting regulations will lead to significant job growth, it’s just nonsense. It’s just made up.

It’s obvious that a lot of Tea Party members tend to be elderly. You’ve seen that famous sign, ‘Tell the government to keep its hands off my Medicare.’ And I think as long as the government does keep its hands off their Medicare, they’re fine with talking about low taxes. But once they start to realize that the Republicans really do want to not just cut Medicare, but essentially abolish it, you know, I just think those people are not going to be part of the Tea Party. They’re going to be over with Occupy Wall Street.

The growing inequality of wealth and income distribution is both a moral and economic problem. If the wealthy are unwilling to pay more taxes, then this is going to lead to spending cuts. And if you put off the table things like national defense, then you’re going to end up cutting more and more out of programs that aid the poor. So, I think there are consequences to this idea that tolerance for inequality requires us to – to just do nothing to make the wealthy contribute a higher share of resources to fund the government.

I have been very outspoken in my opposition to cuts in what I would call the means-tested entitlement programs: Medicaid, food stamps, and all of that. I feel very, very strongly that those cuts as proposed are unjust, but I am not prepared to label Ronald Reagan a “sinner.”It seems to me that when you invoke the adjective “moral” you must be careful to distinguish what it is you mean by that.

To be sure, [NASCAR] stars were initially ex-bootleggers for the most part drawn from that talent pool in the Carolinas hills: “good ol’ boys” as they referred to themselves. That’s exactly how they would be described in the press that slowly became enamored with their raucous life style. That has all changed, with the drivers of today polished and clean-cut athletes who are expected to behave like commercial puppets in public.