"Democrats need to change their party mascot from the donkey to the squirrel. They divert the media's and the electorate's short attention spans with fleeting, fuzzy objects -- like the main canine character in the animated Pixar movie 'Up,' who was easily distracted from his main thoughts and serious duties by every last little moving trifle. 

"Embassy attacks? Quick, find a squirrel! Warnings ignored? Squirrel! American troops killed by long-plotting jihadis exploiting security weaknesses? Squirrel! First Amendment sabotage by White House officials in the name of political correctness? Squirrel! Chronic joblessness, high gas prices, exploding dependency? Squirrel! Squirrel! Squirrel!  

"As Election Day draws nearer, the Obama campaign and its surrogates in the Fourth Estate have infested the political arena with an army of tactical and rhetorical rodentia."

"Obama officials fasten on the video so they can flinch from hard truths. They can’t bring themselves to say that the protesters hate us and our freedoms. They can’t admit that electing President Barack Hussein Obama, with generations of Muslims in his family (as he boasted in his Cairo speech), wasn’t enough to win over the Muslim world. They can’t look dispassionately on an Arab Spring that is sputtering out into more radicalism and more disorder. And, most disturbing of all, they can’t muster a full-throated defense of free speech that doesn’t give ground to the premises of Muslims hostile to it."

"We are reaching -- or may already have passed -- the practical limits of 'economic stimulus.' Last week, the Federal Reserve adopted an open-ended bond-buying program of $40 billion a month to goad the economy into faster growth. But even before the announcement, there was skepticism that it would do much to lower the unemployment rate, which has exceeded 8 percent for 43 months. The average response of 47 economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal was that a similar program might cut the jobless rate 0.1 percentage point over a year. 

"There is a desperate air to Bernanke's latest move. At best, it will reinforce a long-awaited housing revival. At worst, it will founder on obvious problems. How much lower can the Fed drive long-term interest rates? How much money can the Fed shovel into the economy without rekindling inflationary expectations and behavior? The Fed is on the brink of moving beyond what it understands and can control."

"[A]t at the same time that it does nothing, the administration warns Israel sternly, repeatedly, publicly, even threateningly not to strike the Iranian nuclear program. With zero prospect of his policy’s succeeding, Obama insists on Israeli inaction, even as Iran races to close the window of opportunity for any successful attack.
 
"Not since its birth six decades ago has Israel been so cast adrift by its closest ally."

"Apologizing for America, appeasing our enemies, abandoning our allies and slashing our military are the hallmarks of Mr. Obama's foreign policy. The Obama economy, with its high unemployment, massive debt and out-of-control spending, has rightly demanded our attention. As we head to the polls in November, we cannot ignore what is an even more dismal national-security record. An America already weakened by four years of an Obama presidency will be unrecognizable after eight."

“The world tells Israel, 'Wait. There’s still time,’” Netanyahu said Tuesday, according to The Associated Press. “And I say: 'Wait for what? Wait until when?' Those in the international community who refuse to put red lines before Iran don’t have a moral right to place a red light before Israel.”

"Time is passing. Yet, for the United States of America, there will be no forgetting September the 11th. We will remember every rescuer who died in honor. We will remember every family that lives in grief. We will remember the fire and ash, the last phone calls, the funerals of the children."

"At their convention, Democrats swore that GM is 'thriving,' but the market doesn’t think so: GM shares have lost half their value since January 2011. And while the passing of the Great Recession has meant growing sales for all automakers, GM is seriously lagging behind its competitors: Its sales are up 10 percent, a fraction of the increases at Kia, Toyota, Volkswagen, and Porsche. With its sales weak, its share price crashing, and its business model still a mess, some analysts already are predicting that GM will return to bankruptcy — but not until after the election. ...

"We have bankruptcy laws and bankruptcy courts for a reason. It may make sense to expedite the proceedings for very large firms such as GM in order to prevent disruptions in the supply chain that would, as Ford’s executives argued, harm other, healthier firms. But bankrupt is what GM was, and bankrupt is what GM is, a fact that will become blisteringly apparent should the government ever attempt to sell off the shares it owns in the company. 

"The GM bailout was a bad deal for GM’s creditors, for U.S. taxpayers, and, in the long run, for the U.S. automobile industry and our overall national competitiveness. No wonder the Democrats are campaigning on a fictionalized account of it."

"Barack Obama is deeply overexposed and often boring. He never seems to be saying what he's thinking. His speech Thursday was weirdly anticlimactic. There's too much buildup, the crowd was tired, it all felt flat. He was somber, and his message was essentially banal: We've done better than you think. Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes? 

"There were many straw men. There were phrases like 'the shadow of a shuttered steel mill,' which he considers writerly. But they sound empty and practiced now, like something you've heard in a commercial or an advertising campaign. 

"It was stale and empty. He's out of juice."

"Clinton rallied the faithful splendidly; but Michelle Obama had done that already on Tuesday, maybe more effectively.
 
"And its length and blizzard of detail suggest this tasty Chick-fil-A of a speech won’t change the mind of anyone who has drawn his own conclusions about how the Obama years have gone for him.
 
"But Clinton did change the subject a bit from the catcalls at the inclusion of God and Jerusalem in the Democratic platform, and for that, he did his president and his party a considerable service.
 
"Still, those lunatic boos are more likely to stick in the memory, and to pop up in ads, than will Clinton’s speech."