Quotable & Notable

“Today is Ash Wednesday ... and once again Catholic colleges will be giving up the NCAA basketball championship for Lent.”

-- Lead-in to a report by National Public Radio sports commentator Frank Deford

“The Dubai Ports World saga showed our worst attributes. Xenophobia. Isolationism. Ignorance of global trade.”

-- Kansas City Star columnist Mary Sanchez

“My first thoughts were [darn], the party’s over.”

-- Hip-hop entrepreneur Russell Simmons on the Smithsonian Institute’s plans to gather artifacts and amass a definitive collection hip-hop’s 30-year journey from inner-city subculture to international phenomenon

More than half; one in four

-- The number of Americans who can name at least two members of the TV family the Simpsons versus the number who can name more than one of the five freedoms guarateed by the First Amendment, according to a McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum survey

One in eight

-- Ratio of U.S. soldiers returning from the Iraq War with posttraumatic stress disorder or another mental illness according to the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research

“Our analyses tended to get dismissed as ‘nay-saying’ and ‘hand-wringing,’ to quote the president’s press spokesman.”

-- Former State Department intelligence analyst Wayne White on new revelations that the White House repeatedly ignored U.S. agency warnings beginning as early as October 2003 that the Iraqi insurgency could turn into civil war

National Catholic Reporter, March 10, 2006