"If you thought the half-billion-dollar, stimulus-funded Solyndra solar company bust was a taxpayer nightmare, just wait. If you thought the botched Fast and Furious border gun-smuggling surveillance operation was a national security nightmare, hold on. Right on the heels of those two blood-boilers comes yet another alleged pay-for-play racket from the most ethical administration ever. 

"Welcome to LightSquared. It's a toxic mix of venture socialism (to borrow GOP Sen. Jim DeMint's apt phrase), campaign finance influence-peddling and perilous corner-cutting all rolled into one."

"'Damn the economy -- I need to be reelected!' That, basically, was President Obama’s message to the nation in yesterday’s Rose Garden speech ostensibly addressing DC’s runaway deficits. 

"Obama knew full well that the GOP-run House won’t back tax hikes while the nation flirts with double-dip recession. (Somebody has to be the adult.) Yet he insisted on them anyway (some $1.5 trillion, in fact), claiming they merely ask 'the most fortunate among us' -- that is, the most productive -- 'to pay their fair share.' 

"In other words, Obama told Americans bluntly he’s itching for another standoff."

"President Obama’s $787 billion Stimulus left America sputtering, like a Chevy Volt without its extension cord. Having learned nothing from this failure, Obama recently unveiled Stimulus Jr. — the American Jobs Act. Costing $447 billion, Stimulus Jr. boasts roughly half of its predecessor’s audacity. 

"Speaking Thursday night at a Democratic National Committee event at a private residence in Washington, D.C., Obama told supporters that Stimulus Jr. would 'add as many as 1.9 million jobs.' That equals $235,263 each — quadruple the $57,491 cost of an average private-sector position. Even worse, major tax hikes fuel Stimulus Jr. Too bad Obama ignores House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan’s loophole-closing, tax-rate-slashing vision."

"Barack Obama now faces perhaps his most politically crippling deficit of all: a credibility deficit. 

"That observation is reflected in the latest Bloomberg poll, which finds that on the heels of his big jobs speech last Thursday night, more than half of Americans (51%) do not believe the president's claim that this latest $447 billion spend-and-tax-or-borrow scheme will create new jobs. ... 

"American voters can't conceive of how $447 billion of more debt and spending will create jobs when the last three years have already given us $4 trillion of new debt with no jobs. What is even harder to believe is the president's assurance that the new American Jobs Act 'will not add to the deficit. It will be paid for.' How can this plan be paid for when the first, $830 billion, plan has never been paid for?"

"[L]et’s assume for the time being that there was no criminal conduct here, no violation of government procedures, no fraud. Let’s assume everyone in the administration acted in good faith. There’s still a scandal — the scandal of the government handing out hundreds of millions of dollars to unproven and speculative businesses. Even the shrewdest venture capitalists lose money on most of their investments. But when they lose, it’s their money, not ours.

"The scandal is still going on. The Energy Department has been busy handing out more loan guarantees in the past few weeks — $150 million to 1366 Technologies of Lexington, Mass. (73 percent for Obama in 2008), 80 percent of $344 million to Solar City of San Mateo, Calif. (72 percent for Obama in 2008). Will one of them be the next Solyndra?

"The real scandal is the 'green jobs' loan-guarantee program itself. And the ones getting scammed are American taxpayers."

"Word just came that Bob Turner has won the special election in New York’s ninth Congressional district—perhaps by as much as 10 points—while it was a foregone conclusion earlier tonight that in Nevada’s second, Mark Amodei had won the special election there with at least 60 percent of the vote. ... 

"These may prove to be among the most suggestive special-election results in modern American history. The Democratic candidate Harris Wofford ’s win in the 1991 special for Senate in Pennsylvania proved a harbinger of Bill Clinton ’s victory in 1992, and Republican Scott Brown’s win in Massachusetts in January 2010 presaged the shellacking in the midterms last year. If Obama loses next November, the writing on the wall will have appeared tonight."

"I have shaken Romney's hand a few times, and I can say he feels surprisingly lifelike. But politically he just seems fake, even though what you see is what he really is. Romney is a much better candidate than he was in 2008, but there's still something about the guy that makes people say, 'There's just something about that guy.' And given Romney's rich history of flip-flops, he just seems untrustworthy to the tea-fueled base of the GOP. ... 

"Perry, the Texas governor, has a very different challenge. He doesn't have to worry about seeming lifelike enough. He needs to figure out just how much larger than life he can appear without becoming a caricature. 

"As it is, there are days where Perry seems like he could count on two hands the number of times he's had to shoot a man for cheating at cards."

"'Everything in this bill,' Obama said in his eighth paragraph, 'will be paid for. Everything.' 

"By whom? Well, in the 24th paragraph he tells us that he is asking the 12-member super-committee Congress set up under the debt ceiling bill to add another $450,000,000,000 or so to the $1,500,000,000,000 in savings it is charged to come up with. The roving camera showed the ordinarily hardy super-committee member Sen. Jon Kyl looking queasy. 

"Obama is like the guy in the bar who says, 'I'll stand drinks for everyone in the house,' and then adds, 'Those guys over there are going to pay for them.'"

"From the firefighters who set out to rescue the victims of al-Qaida’s war on America, to the passengers on Flight 93 who were the first to hit back, to the troops who have waged the fight abroad, it has been a decade of heroes, traditionally defined — men willing to risk life and limb for their country, their mission, their friends. ... 

"Why did Jay Jonas and his unit in the North Tower of the World Trade Center, evacuating as it was on the verge of collapse, stop to carry out a distressed woman even though it slowed their escape? Why did a band of passengers on Flight 93 storm the cockpit of their hijacked plane? Why did Jason Dunham, Ross McGinnis, and Michael Monsoor — all Medal of Honor winners from the Iraq War — throw themselves on grenades to save their comrades?

"Ask a firefighter such a question and he’s liable to answer, 'That’s just what we do.' What we do, in turn, is express our astonishment and gratitude."

"It's easy to see how the debates could become a contest in which each of the two leading candidates attempt to undermine the other's conservative bona fides. Others, notably Michele Bachmann, whose victory in the Aug. 13 Ames straw poll in Iowa was overshadowed by Perry's candidacy announcement the same day in Charleston, S.C., have an incentive to do so, as well. 

"The challenge for Perry and Romney, who both have more executive experience than candidate Obama had in 2008, is to show the discipline and focus to establish themselves as serious general election candidates with better ideas about how to jump-start the economy than the hapless incumbent."