The American Civil Liberties Union referred to a proposal to install cameras in unmanned toll booths as "creeping fascism."

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President Bush's 1991 crime bill imposes the death penalty for certain violent crimes. On the list: assassinating the president, hijacking an airliner, and murdering a federal poultry inspector.

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In New York City, on the afternoon Joel Steinberg was arrested for beating his six-year-old illegally adopted daughter, Lisa, his landlord received dozens of phone calls inquiring whether, if the little girl died, Steinberg's rent-controlled apartment would become available.

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Senator Joseph Biden at the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas, quoted verbatim by the Wall Street Journal, September 12, 1991:

Okay, I'm beginning to understand. So, natural law informed the notion of liberty. You and I have both read—because of our backgrounds, I suspect—we've both read—I won't get into Aquinas and Augustine and all that, but Locke looked back to the concept of natural law as an evolving notion. Montesquieu talked about it. Jefferson understood it. He was in Paris. He was probably the only one that fully understood it. But others who were there writing the Constitution, they talked about it, they had what they wrote—both the Declaration, as you say, in other places and in the Constitution—they reduced these broad notions of natural law—the natural rights of man to this document.

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The Washington Post, September 18, 1991:

Nine days before the [National Endowment for the Arts] advisory council met, the review panel was reconvened by telephone. Frohnmayer explained that "the record was not as complete as it might otherwise be" with respect to the Hughes, Miller and Fleck grants and said he wanted to deal with "the artistic issues."

The panelists praised all three artists and again voted unanimously to award the grants. "Though there may be backlashes and pain as a result of this, I really feel it's extremely important that we embrace the arts... We mustn't be afraid," one unidentified panelist said.

"Let me ask the very crass and difficult political question," Frohnmayer said. "What am I going to say when one of our critics comes in... and says, 'Geez, they funded a guy who whizzes onstage?' "

A panelist answered: "Who knows? Who cares? They're good."

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In Devil's Lake, North Dakota, Christian fundamentalists are demanding that Central High School drop its decades-old nickname, the Satans.

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