"The International Atomic Energy Agency is expected to unveil a report Wednesday on what it knows about Iran's efforts to develop nuclear weapons, and the early word is that it contains a few bombshells. But let's not overstate its significance. There's no scarcity of reliable information about Iran's nuclear programs, licit and illicit. The only question is whether the report will do much to end the current scarcity of Western will to do something meaningful to check them."

"If President Obama ever expected the economy to improve significantly before the 2012 election, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke buried that hope last week. 

"The Fed’s grim forecasts of what the Obama economy will look like throughout next year were bleaker than its modest earlier estimates. High unemployment will persist throughout 2012, along with sharply slower economic growth rates. ...

"This is a great and prosperous country with a long and proud history of overcoming economic adversity. It can do so again under the right policies. Mr. Obama’s policies are not working and are never going to work."

"Is there something about the word ‘green’ that makes people go weak in the head? 

"Rivaled only by the ‘get tough on Netanyahu’ fiasco and the Gunwalker scandal, the ‘Green Jobs’ meltdown is the most comprehensive and conspicuous policy failure of the Obama administration to date.  What three months ago was widely hailed by the establishment press as a sign of the futurism and forward-thinking of the Obama Administration now, post-Solyndra, is increasingly seen for the bone headed blunder it was.  ..."

"The federal government has lost another 72 million of your tax dollars. Here we go again. 

"The feds have gambled with your money again, and they've lost it again; this time with a company called Beacon Power. You've probably never heard of this company. Candidly, before the announcement of its bankruptcy filing this week, neither had I. Just as you probably had never heard of Solyndra before its bankruptcy, neither had I. But your government has heard of both. 

"Solyndra and Beacon received loans the government guaranteed -- $535 million and $72 million respectively. In each case, your tax dollars were spent when these companies borrowed money they couldn't return. In each case, federal bureaucrats used your money to pay back loans investors gave to these failing companies because the bureaucrats want to wean us off of oil and onto so-called green energy, and because the government was friends with the investors. In each case, the investment the federal government made in these firms was risky and was lost."

"In the world of sexual-harassment law, the accusations are bad enough. You’re guilty until proven innocent. The law is skewed toward the plaintiffs -- it’s hard to get even the silliest charges tossed out, and even then it often costs upward of six figures to do so. ... 

"Even what constitutes 'sexual harassment' has crossed from common sense into farce. In the 1970s, my mother was a lawyer who faced the real thing as one of the very few women in a testosterone-fueled district attorney’s office. Today, women are at or near parity with men in most every field, and are even ahead of them among entrants to the professions.  

"Yet where sexual-harassment law once protected women from being forced to be the playthings of crude lechers, it’s been transformed to enforcing a prim puritanism that drains the humor and humanity from the workplace. People are afraid to make an innocent joke or compliment a co-worker’s appearance for fear of crossing some unspoken line that will bring down the wrath of the human-resources department."

"In various cities across the country, mobs of mostly young, mostly incoherent, often noisy and sometimes violent demonstrators are making themselves a major nuisance. 

"Meanwhile, many in the media are practically gushing over these 'protesters,' and giving them the free publicity they crave for themselves and their cause -- whatever that is, beyond venting their emotions on television. 

"Members of the mobs apparently believe that other people, who are working while they are out trashing the streets, should be forced to subsidize their college education -- and apparently the President of the United States thinks so too. 

"But if these loud mouths' inability to put together a coherent line of thought is any indication of their education, the taxpayers should demand their money back for having that money wasted on them for years in the public schools."

"We shouldn't gut defense. A central question of our budget debates is how much we allow growing social spending to crowd out the military and, in effect, force the United States into a dangerous, slow-motion disarmament. ... 

"Defense spending is unlike other spending, because protecting the nation is government's first job. It's in the Constitution, as highways, school lunches and Social Security are not. We should spend as much as needed, but that amount is never clear. Even in the Cold War, when the Soviet Union's capabilities were intensively analyzed, there was no scientific and exact number. ... 

"By itself, defense spending doesn't ensure that our national power will be wisely or effectively deployed. This depends on our civilian and military leaders. But squeezing defense will limit their choices and expose U.S. troops to greater risk. Those who advocate deep cuts need to specify which goals -- combating cyber warfare, countering China, fighting terrorism -- should be curtailed."

"The world economy has once again dodged Armageddon. The European Union finally forged a Greek bond deal, and a rescue fund big enough to ring-fence banks and sovereign debt, in order to avoid a catastrophic, Lehman-like contagion event. At the same time, the U.S. economy moved away from the threat of recession with a third-quarter real gross domestic product report of 2.5 percent. In response, stocks are soaring. We'll live to see another day. ... 

"If only Washington would quit tampering with our free-market economy, and if only the president would see that the American economic system is supposed to reward success, not punish it, the animal spirits would recover and we'd double the economic growth rate. Unemployment would come way down in the process."

"Since 1985, college costs have risen more than 450 percent, which is about 4.5 times the rate of inflation. There is no justification for higher-education costs to have soared so dramatically. Faculty salaries have increased in most cases, but at only about a 10th of the rate of overall growth. Colleges and universities cite a variety of other factors, such as higher administrative costs and overhead, but these claims are unconvincing. The real reason schools charge more is because they can get away with it. ... 

"The higher-education establishment has no incentive to control costs so long as government continues to make it easy for students to get into debt and then have it forgiven. Mr. Obama would have us believe this racket can continue at no cost to the taxpayer. You don’t need a college degree to see through that one."

"The President has been talking a lot about math lately. He’s been saying that, quote, 'If we’re not willing to ask those who’ve done extraordinarily well to help America close the deficit… the math says… we’ve got to put the entire burden on the middle class and the poor.'  

"This is really a stunning assertion from the President. When you look at the actual math, you quickly realize that the way out of this mess is to combine economic growth with reasonable, responsible spending restraint. Yet neither of these things factors into the President’s zero-sum logic."