* “My children have watched their prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, kowtow to a fundamentalist coalition in Israel. They are convinced that what ties Israel and America today is not a covenant of humanistic values but rather a new set of mutual interests: war, bombs, threats, fear and trauma.”–Avraham Burg, former speaker of the Israeli Knesset.
* “If anybody has been harboring doubts about the status of U.S. leadership in space, well, there’s a one-ton, automobile-size piece of American ingenuity, and it’s sitting on the surface of Mars right now.”–John P. Holdren, President Barack Obama’s science advisor.
* “Romney’s pressing need to inject some authenticity–or at least some personality–into his campaign is the primary reason he should talk more about his faith. Take away Romney’s religion and you are left with Harvard, Bain and various corporate boardrooms. … Romney’s reticence on religion leaves a large personal and biographical gap.”–Michael Gerson, Washington Post.
* “In the end, the strongest case against Bain capitalism is a metaphor: Mitt Romney made a fortune swapping equity for debt. That’s what we’ve done for the past 30 years in this country, turning a great many of our assets into deficits for short-term gain. We need to do the opposite now.”–Joe Klein, Time magazine.
* “Governor Romney and Representative Ryan are the strongest team to return America to prosperity and to defend our interests abroad.”–U.S. Sen. John McCain.
* “If we focus on growth, then we get growth, and our deficit will go down. If we just focus on the deficit, we’re not going to get anywhere. This deficit fetishism is killing our economy.”–Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz.
* “This year shows the convergence of suburban-growth slowdown with city-growth gains. They’ve reached a kind of tipping point.”–Brookings Institution demographer William Frey in noting the culmination of a trend that started around 2007.
* “Incredibly, the show is a big hit in China. I’ll be honest with you, I didn’t know they got HBO in China. … What they can’t get over, when they see the show, is a free press.”–Aaron Sorkin, creator of HBO’s The Newsroom.
* “Football is entertainment in which the audience is expected to delight in gladiatorial action that a growing portion of the audience knows may cause the players degenerative brain disease. Not even football fans, a tribe not known for savoring nuance, can forever block that fact from their excited brains.”–George Will, Washington Post.
* “Florida should hold off on its plan to remove noncitizens until the off-season. Purging the rolls now risks removing many more eligible citizens than noncitizens.”–Richard L. Hasen, University of California, Irvine, law professor and author of “The Voting Wars: From Florida 2000 to the Next Election Meltdown.”
* “Rick Scott is out there promoting Rick Scott. That not only is undercutting Mitt Romney, it may be hurting Connie Mack.”–Brad Coker, Mason-Dixon Research pollster.
* “Over the years, we’ve heard and read about many developers who would like to include a baseball stadium in their plans. Our position remains the same–we will consider any potential ballpark site in Tampa Bay, but only as part of a process that considers every ballpark site in Tampa Bay.”–Michael Kalt, Tampa Bay Rays senior vice president of development and business affairs.
* “I think there’s some come-early, stay-late traffic.”–Tampa Bay Host Committee president Ken Jones on the more than 90,000 hotel room nights that have been booked for the Republican Convention–more than the 75,000 that organizers originally projected.
* “It’s not a slight to him. He’s on a different career path. He wants to be governor of Florida.”–Retired USF political scientist Darryl Paulson on the absence of Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam from the list of GOP Convention speakers.
* “It’s an ounce of prevention to avoid a pound of repairs.”–TPD spokeswoman Laura McElroy on the 6-foot security fences that will be built around downtown government buildings during the Convention.
* “Not a second can be lost in forging new alliances and exploiting every conceivable tactical opportunity to make the life sciences the foundation of our region’s economic recovery.”–Hillsborough County Commissioner Mark Sharpe.
* “It’s not been easy, but I am ever the optimist. I think that we will come out of this (economic slump) poised to lead this state.”–Mayor Bob Buckhorn in presenting the $804.4 million budget to City Council.