This Week's Silliest Quotes

The week’s wackiest quote, hands down, belonged to Congresswoman Yvette Clarke (D-Brooklyn), who told political comedian Stephen Colbert that blacks in her district were Dutch slaves at the time Brooklyn joined New York City in 1898. Then there was Australia’s Gina Rinehart, the planet’s richest woman, who was at it again speaking power to truth: While Rinehart is estimated to “earn” US$625 per second, she called on her country’s miners to take a pay cut. Read and weep!

• “I would say to them, ‘Set me free.’ ” (Congresswoman Yvette Clarke, claiming Brooklyn’s African Americans were Dutch slaves in 1898.)

• “The evidence is inarguable that Australia is becoming too expensive and too uncompetitive to do export-oriented business. Africans want to work, and its workers are willing to work for less than $2 per day. Such statistics make me worry for this country’s future.” (Gina Rinehart, addressing the Sydney Mining Club.)

• “We need a president accustomed to signing the front, not the back, of checks.” (National Review staff’s “689 Reasons to Defeat Barack Obama.”)

• “$1 million per job. That’s what America’s top money man says we’ve spent on stimulus from the Fed alone.” (CNN’s Erin Burnett, incorrectly identifying the Federal Reserve’s asset purchases as government spending.)

• “Bill Clinton just impregnated Sandra Fluke backstage.” (Ann Coulter DNC tweet.)