Verbatim: Feb. 13, 2006

  • "I will give you $200k sometime tomorrow afternoon! I love to give you money."

    ROBERT STEIN, former contracting officer for the U.S.-led coalition government in Iraq--who last week pleaded guilty to bribery, conspiracy and money-laundering charges--in a January 2004 e-mail to a contractor also facing charges in the bid-rigging scandal

    "I brought the gavel down at 10. I was the only one in the room though."

    JOHN BOLTON, American ambassador to the United Nations, who last week began a monthlong stint as Security Council president, on his failure to get the 14 other members to begin meetings promptly

    "I feel like the dog who caught the car."

    JOHN BOEHNER, Republican Congressman of Ohio, on his surprise election as House majority leader, a position Tom DeLay formally relinquished three months after he was indicted on campaign-finance charges

    "It would only take a bit of water to get on board this ship, and it would be all over."

    DAVID OSLER, industrial editor of the London shipping paper Lloyd's List, on the instability of the 35-year-old Egyptian ferry that sank in the Red Sea last week while transporting some 1,400 people, only a few hundred of whom were rescued

    "Our children aren't puppies, madam."

    HEADLINE, in a Kenyan newspaper, on a New Zealand businesswoman's offering famine relief in the form of a variant of her company's powdered dog-food formula. Countering accusations of racism, she claimed, "I eat it myself"

    "That would be like Madonna playing the Virgin Mary."

    REVEREND JASON JANZ, fundamentalist assistant pastor in Denver, criticizing evangelical Christian filmmakers for casting an openly gay actor to play an American missionary in their film End of the Spear

    "If you're wondering what I'm doing at the prayer breakfast, so am I. I'm certainly not here as a man of the cloth, unless that cloth is leather."

    BONO, at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, where he urged fellow speaker George W. Bush to "tithe" an additional percent of the federal budget to international AIDS programs and Africa

    Sources: Washington Post; New York Times; AP (2); Los Angeles Times; New York Times; Washington Post