Some quick hits

A lot of the short quotes or links I used to post here now go to my Twitter feed, since it takes so much less effort.

James Taranto: “Why did Obama win the Nobel Peace Prize? Because he pandered to the prejudices of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.”

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JammieWearingFool on the terrorist plot against a GOP congressman: “I blame MSNBC, CNN, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and the leftwing blogosphere for fostering this climate of hate against Republicans.”

Consistent standards… no fair!

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Why didn’t Pinch Sulzberger get a cabinet position?

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Jules Crittenden: "It's a sad state of affairs when a Frenchman mocks an American president and you have to go with the Frog."

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Durable goods orders, housing sales dropped in August. Direct result of Cash for Clunkers diverting money from one kind of purchase to another? Probably, every time government incentivizes one kind of behavior it’s at the expense of another.

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“I can recall no other major American speech in which the narcissism of a leader has been quite so pronounced.” In the Washington Post, mind you, on Obama's UN debacle.

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The Empire State Building was illuminated red and yellow for a week, celebrating China's 60 years of communist rule. Really? What a disgusting gesture, celebrating that soul crushing death cult.

Depends on whose ox is being gored, etc.

So, consumers are now gouging the oil companies, do I have that right?

And speculators are artificially driving prices down, correct?

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Random factoid: Last month was the 70th warmest October in the 114 years for which we have records.

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Of the 425 Guantanamo prisoners released, 50 have been re-captured trying to kill Americans again. And I have to doubt that we’ve captured 100% of the repeat war criminals.

Yeah, closing Guantanamo sounds like a terrific idea…

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Signs of sanity across the pond:

“Italy and Germany agree that measures to cut greenhouse gases shouldn’t weigh on the economy, Germany Chancellor Angela Merkel said at a press conference Tuesday, indicating government support for tough new measures in Europe is waning.”

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Unfortunately, signs of insanity at home:

“The Governor of California has just said that the US is the greatest polluter in the world, which is manifestly untrue on any level.”

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NR offers a counter cliché on bailing out the UAW:

"We’ve heard of too big to fail. Isn’t there such a thing as too failed to bail?"

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From a must-read account of a conversation between Jay Nordlinger and the heroic Chinese dissident Jian-li Yang:

We turn back to China and the Olympics: “A park was set aside for protest,” says Jian-li — was set aside at least in theory. “But not a single application for a protest or demonstration was approved.” In addition to which, there were not as many potential protesters around as there might have been: because “everyone had been arrested before the Olympics.”

The world’s journalists letting the Olympics pass by without shining a bright light on the human rights hell that is China – shameful.

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Our conflict with Iran is becoming more intense, and looks like it will be the biggest challenge facing the Obama administration. By that I mean real, existential challenge, not a transient issue like a slowing economy.

Which is what makes French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s take so unsettling. Sarkozy calls Obama’s stance on Iran “utterly immature” and characterizes it as “formulations empty of all content.”

Sarkozy also fears that Obama will undermine the united European resistance by “arrogantly” ignoring the UN Security Council and opening direct talks with Iran with no preconditions.

Let us hope that Sarkozy underestimates the president-elect, our future depends on it.

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Did Al Qaeda number two Ayman Zawahiri really call Obama a "house Negro" in an audio tape released Tuesday? I though that was a slur used exclusively by American racists to refer to blacks who did not think the way they are damned well told to think, who choose to stray away from the ideological plantation.

How odd to hear it coming from an Arab.

Anti-(some)-war, etc.

Where were the denunciations by anti-war groups and the demonstrations over Russia’s attempt to annex Georgia? What naked hypocrites they are…

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It is heartbreaking that Taiwan is allowed to compete in the Olympics (and participate in other international organizations) only if they do so under the moniker “Chinese Taipei.”

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It’s all corruption in the end: A Rasmussen poll says 55% Say Media Bias Bigger Problem Than Campaign Cash.

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Did you catch Obama saying the following of his wife:

"She's just a wonderfully normal, levelheaded person. Any American woman who meets her would immediately identify her as a fellow traveler."

With husbands life that, who needs enemies? The sad thing is, many on the left won’t even recognize what a catastrophic gaffe it is.

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From Jay Nordlinger’s excellent series on the Beijing Olympics:

[T]he 1936 Games were a great boon to the Nazis, giving them legitimacy and cementing their power. Years later, the journalist William Shirer wrote, “Hitler, we who covered the Games had to concede, turned the Olympics into a dazzling propaganda success for his barbarian regime.” And Duff Hart-Davis, in his book Hitler’s Games, tells us that Berlin was turned out prettily and benignly — creating the illusion that Nazi Germany was “a perfectly normal place, in which life went on as pleasantly as in any other European country.”

I fear that history might be repeating itself.

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Amplifying on my post on global warmist desperation, check out Joel Achenbach’s observation:

Somewhere along the line, global warming became the explanation for everything. Right-thinking people are not supposed to discuss any meteorological or geophysical event -- a hurricane, a wildfire, a heat wave, a drought, a flood, a blizzard, a tornado, a lightning strike, an unfamiliar breeze, a strange tingling on the neck -- without immediately invoking the climate crisis. It causes earthquakes, plagues and backyard gardening disappointments. Weird fungus on your tomato plants? Classic sign of global warming.

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Of course, not everybody sees possible global warming as a bad thing; some knuckle-dragger named Dave Lindorff (who bears an appropriate resemblance to Rob Reiner) sees a “silver lining”:

Look at a map of the US. The area that will by completely inundated by the rising ocean—and not in a century but in the lifetime of my two cats—are the American southeast, including the most populated area of Texas, almost all of Florida, most of Louisiana, and half of Alabama and Mississippi, as well as goodly portions of eastern Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina. […]

So what we see is that huge swaths of conservative America are set to face a biblical deluge in a few more presidential cycles.

Then there’s the matter of the Midwest, which climate experts say is likely to face a permanent condition of unprecedented drought, making the place largely unlivable, and certainly unfarmable. […]

So again, we will see the decline and depopulation of the nation’s vast midsection—noted for its consistent conservatism. […]

Finally, in the Southwest, already parched and stiflingly hot, the rise in energy costs and the soaring temperatures will put an end to right-wing retirement communities like Phoenix, Tucson and Palm Springs. […]

So the future political map of America is likely to look as different as the much shrunken geographical map, with much of the so-called “red” state region either gone or depopulated.

There is a poetic justice to this of course.

It is sad that such naked bigotry can find a home in what appears to be a real newspaper of some kind; this is the stuff of fringe hate groups.