"Running the [ObamaCare] exchanges would be an administrative nightmare for states, requiring a complicated set of rules, mandates, databases and interfaces to establish eligibility, funnel subsidies, and facilitate purchases. All of this would have to take place under broad and often incoherent statutory requirements and federal regulations that have yet to be written. 

"The exchanges would create unsustainable pressures on each state's insurance market, treating similarly situated people differently by providing far greater subsidies for those in the exchanges than those in employer plans -- yielding perverse incentives that distort consumer and employer decisions and increase costs. ... 

"President Obama won re-election and Democrats maintained control of the Senate this month, but the states hold the future of ObamaCare in their hands. Knowing the harm the law would do to their citizens, to the economy and to American health care, governors should refuse to become its enablers."

"A few days ago, the president announced that he would be holding firm on his demand for $1.6 trillion in new tax revenue from the rich as part of any deal he would make to address the 'fiscal cliff' and our debt problem. In theory, the president promises some spending cuts. That's what he calls the 'balanced approach,' and it is a recipe for disaster because it will both fail to address our debt problem and hurt the economy. ... 

"The bottom line is that Obama's 'balanced approach' more closely resembles the historic failures -- the fiscal adjustments that don't successfully reduce a nation's debt-to-GDP ratio. What's more, history reveals that the balanced approach generally results in tax increases but rarely delivers on the spending cuts. That's unfortunate, considering that if the government could actually collect $1.6 trillion over 10 years from tax increases, this amount still wouldn't be enough to fill in the projected $6 trillion cumulative deficit over the period."

"States have to defend themselves against the giant takeover of states’ powers and duties by Obamacare. The decision to 'just say no' has to be taken by mid-December. Encourage your governor to say no and to sue alongside of Oklahoma ...  Not only is this the right way to proceed for a state intent on protecting its citizens from an ever-expanding federal government, it may also present the Supreme Court with a second bite at the Obamacare apple via a different set of issues not dependent on the 'is the penalty a tax' debate. ...

"The left is attempting to declare the Obamacare fight over. It isn't. It is a 15 round fight."

"I’m not annoyed that the Obama administration is lying to us about Benghazi, David Petraeus and the rest of this messy, farcical story.

"I’m annoyed that they expect us to believe them. ...   

"I’d like to believe that our president would never lie to us about a terrorist attack that killed four Americans, including an ambassador. I’d like to believe that our president is above politically manipulating the resignation of a CIA chief and successful general. 

"I’d like — no, I’d love — to believe it all. Unfortunately I can’t. Can you?"

"David Petraeus, who might have been the most respected man in America, has resigned due to a personal scandal that threatens to turn into a national-security scandal. ...

"Rather than looking to Petraeus, we should look — as we have looked for a decade or more — at the hundreds of thousands of men and women, most of whose names we do not know, who have chosen a life of sacrifice and service in our nation’s military.

"[...] Individually, they are awash in flaws, as we all are. Taken as a whole, they are exactly the authority figures the nation needs and deserves — examples of sterling human conduct that overcome personal weaknesses rather than examples of personal weakness that serve to discredit human achievement."

"Having suffered not one but several humiliating defeats on Tuesday, Republicans are in danger of embracing 'comprehensive' immigration reform — which is to say, amnesty — out of panic. The GOP does need to do better among Hispanics and other voters, but this is not the way to achieve that — and, more important, it is bad policy. A formal policy of refusing to enforce the law is not obviously the best substitute for an informal policy of refusing to enforce the law. ... 

"The Republican party and the conservative movement simply are not constituted for ethnic pandering, and certainly will not out-pander the party of amnesty and affirmative action. Republicans’ challenge is to convince Hispanics, blacks, women, gays, etc., that the policies of the Obama administration are inimical to their interests as Americans, not as members of any collegium of grievance. That they have consistently failed to do so suggests that Republican leadership is at least as much in need of reform as our immigration code."

"They lose and immediately the chorus begins. Republicans must change or die. A rump party of white America, it must adapt to evolving demographics or forever be the minority. …

"Additionally, warn the doomsayers, Republicans must change not just ethnically but ideologically. Back to the center. Moderation above all! …

"The answer … is not retreat, not aping the Democrats' patchwork pandering. It is to make the case for restrained, rationalized and reformed government in stark contradistinction to Obama’s increasingly unsustainable big-spending, big-government paternalism.

"Republicans: No whimpering. No whining. No reinvention when none is needed. Do conservatism but do it better. There’s a whole generation of leaders ready to do just that." 

"Barack Obama won a moderately close victory over Mitt Romney on Tuesday. But oddly, nothing much has changed. The country is still split nearly 50/50. There is still a Democratic president, and an almost identically Democratic Senate at war with an identically Republican House, in a Groundhog Day America. 
 
"Obama's win did not really reflect affirmation of his first term, given that the president made only halfhearted efforts to defend Obamacare, the stimulus, huge Keynesian deficits and his attempts to implement cap-and-trade. So if there is a second-term agenda, even Obama supporters don't quite know what it will be. ...

"Popular lore attests that insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results. Let's hope that the same Democratic president, the same polarized Congress and the same divided country do something differently from the last lost four years."

"Barack Obama won a second term but no mandate. Thanks in part to his own small-bore and brutish campaign, victory guarantees the president nothing more than the headache of building consensus in a gridlocked capital on behalf of a polarized public. 

"If the president begins his second term under any delusion that voters rubber-stamped his agenda on Tuesday night, he is doomed to fail. 

"Mandates are rarely won on election night. They are earned after Inauguration Day by leaders who spend their political capital wisely, taking advantage of events without overreaching. Obama is capable -- as evidenced by his first-term success with health care reform. But mandate-building requires humility, a trait not easily associated with him."

"Who wins?  

"Who knows?"