Times Watch Presents the Quotes of Note for 2006 from The NY Times

It's unanimous! Times Watch guest judges Stephen Spruiell, who runs National Review Online's Media Blog, and Times critic William McGowan, author of the upcoming book Gray Lady Down, both picked as his worst quote of the year one from New York Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. (The quote also earned Quote of the Year honors from Times Watch's parent organization, the Media Research Center.) Spruiell says it was the "sheer arrogance" of Sulzberger's speech that put the paper's publisher over the top.

Here are some other quotes that made the Times Watch list:

"Our government had turned its energy and attention away from upholding the rule of law and toward creating law-free zones at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Haditha, and other places around the world. And let's not forget the sustained assault on women's reproductive freedom and the hijacking of public policy by religious fundamentalism." -- Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse talking at Harvard, June 9.

"Critics also say that Latinos often wind up as cannon fodder on the casualty-prone front lines. African-Americans saw the same thing happen during the 1970's and 1980's, an accusation that still reverberates. Hispanics make up only 4.7 percent of the military's officer corps." -- Lizette Alvarez in a story on U.S. Army recruiting of Hispanics, February 9.

For more of the worst quotes from 2006 from the New York Times, see the Times Watch Quotes of Note for 2006.

"Representative F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. has no tolerance for illegal immigrants, either in his political life or personal life….A bipartisan irritant from a state nowhere near the Mexican border, he has outsize influence on the fate of the country's estimated 11 million illegal immigrants….He is commonly described as 'prickly,' 'cantankerous' and 'unpleasant'….One could dismiss him as something of a cartoon, except that Mr. Sensenbrenner has been a feared and vital character in some defining political dramas, like the Clinton impeachment, the passage of the USA Patriot Act and the current legislative donnybrook over immigration, an issue that he calls his toughest in nearly four decades of public life." -- From Mark Leibovich's July 11 profile of Republican Rep. Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin.

"I'm in my mid-40s and who grew up in poor countries like Morocco, you know, they will tell you that when they went to school in the mornings, they used to get milk, and they called it Kennedy milk because it was the Americans that sent them milk. And in 40 years, we have gone from Kennedy milk to the Bush administration rushing bombs to this part of the world. And it just erodes and erodes and erodes America's reputation." -- Reporter Neil MacFarquhar on the July 31 edition of Charlie Rose.