DigbyOnce again it’s time for our Weekly Reader quiz to make sure you’re keeping up. How many of these statements can you identify? And don’t miss the bonus video at the end, but first, who said the following:

1. Are you going to convict Jack Bauer? Say that criminal law is against him? ‘You have the right to a jury trial?’ Is any jury going to convict Jack Bauer? I don’t think so.

2. Through its actions, Hamas sought to divide the Palestinian nation. We reject that. It is the position of the United States that there is one Palestinian people and there should be one Palestinian state.

3. Whether the President was told about Abu Ghraib in January (when e-mails informed the Pentagon of the seriousness of the abuses and of the existence of photographs) or in March (when Taguba filed his report), Bush made no known effort to forcefully address the treatment of prisoners before the scandal became public, or to reevaluate the training of military police and interrogators, or the practices of the task forces that he had authorized. Instead, Bush acquiesced in the prosecution of a few lower-level soldiers. The President’s failure to act decisively resonated through the military chain of command: aggressive prosecution of crimes against detainees was not conducive to a successful career.

4. I have filed papers with the New York City Board of Elections to change my status as a voter and register as unaffiliated with any political party. Although my plans for the future haven’t changed, I believe this brings my affiliation into alignment with how I have led and will continue to lead our City.

5. And this is it: No more pontificating, no more vacillating, no more triangulating, no more broken promises, no more pats on the head, no more ‘we’ll get around to it next time,’ no more taking half a loaf, no more tomorrow.

For the men and women who are leaving this country to go serve in Iraq, there is no tomorrow. For women around this country who have . . . been diagnosed with cancer or breast cancer, you can’t talk about putting universal health care in tomorrow.

We need to do these things now. We — our party — we need to be bold, we need to have backbone, we need to have courage. It is time for us to lead again. It is time for us to show the leadership that America and the world needs from us.

6. Where I differentiate with the other candidates is I leave no residual forces. And my view is this: We cannot do the hard diplomatic work in Iraq until our forces are withdrawn.

7. So many of us knew this back then, even when it wasn’t popular to say so. . . . We knew back then this war was a mistake. We knew back then that it was a dangerous diversion from the struggle against the terrorists who attacked us on September 11th. We knew back then that we could find ourselves in an occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences.

We are sixteen votes away in the Senate from ending this war. And so we need to keep turning up the pressure on all those Republican Congressmen and Senators who refuse to acknowledge the reality that the American people know so well. We will call them, and knock on their doors, and we will bring our troops home.

8. . . . what you’re seeing now in this part of the 21st century is going to be played out over time. This is an ideological struggle. We’re looking at the difference between a group of people that want to represent the Palestinians who believe in peace, that want a better way for their people, that believe in democracy — they need help to build the institutions necessary for democracy to flourish, and they need help to build security forces so that they can end up enforcing what most of the people want, which is to live in peace — and that’s versus a group of radicals and extremists who are willing to use violence, unspeakable violence sometimes, to achieve a political objective.

9. What we can say is that if torture today remains a “scandal,” a “crisis,” it is a crisis in that same peculiar way that crime or AIDS or global warming are crises: that is, they are all things we have learned to live with.

10. Vincero! Vinceroooooooo….oooooo!

Bonus 11. We are passionate about politics, and in this era of Republican corruption, excess and failure, that passion sometimes manifests itself as anger. But how can you not be angry? So many institutions have failed us in the last decade, that being vitriolic seems the only sane response. . . . I’m a blogger-pundit, a role for which I am abundantly qualified. . . . I have opinions, I write them down, and a lot of people read them. Yes, that’s all there is to it. Sorry, David Broder.

Answers:

1. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, lecturing other judges on constitutional law in the age of Bush. Compare Scalia’s remarks to those of a US prosecutor from the Nuremberg War Crimes trials.

2. Secretary Rice, blaming Hamas instead of US policies that she promoted for dividing Palestinians, reported in Washington Post, after she and President Bush did everything they could to divide Palestenians into “good” and “evil” forces. Jeremiah 12:13.

3. Sy Hersh, explaining to Wolf Blitzer that the President knew early on about General Taguba’s findings, but did nothing to discourage the use of of torture and demeaning treatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib.

4. New York Mayor Bloomberg, explaining his change from Republican to not affiliated.

5. Senator Edwards, speaking at Take Back America. Reported by Bob Geiger.

6. Governor Richardson, speaking at a forum sponsored by the AFSCME labor union, reported by Reuters.

7. Barack Obama, at Take Back America, anticipating Hillary Clinton’s speech today. Reported by Bob Geiger.

8. President Bush, in a press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Olmert, proving that Glenn Greenwald is right . Bush was insisting that he believes in democracy while explaining his support for Fatah, who just lost control of Gaza after losing elections in January 2006, and his opposition to Hamas, who now control Gaza and won those elections. The two men undoubtedly discussed Olmert’s plans for airstrikes on Gaza, again, this morning.

9. Mark Danner, noted scholar delivering a commencement address at Berkeley, expressing dismay at how the rhetoric of this era has numbed us to the fact that torture is the adopted policy of the United States. This was in digby’s homework assignment. You did do your homework, didn’t you?

10. Paul Potts, winner of a British talent show, proving why opera lovers are everywhere.

11. The incomparable Digby, the reason we have the phrase “what Digby said,” accepting an award on behalf of the progressive blogoshere, at TBA. And check out the people on the stage: America’s finest media critics; an emerging new media.