United States

The election of Barack Obama should put an end to the idea that the USA is an especially racist nation. Racism is a universal human tendency and will never be eradicated, but there is no other place on Earth where this could have happened. One simple fact: in every state that I've seen polls from, Obama did as well or better than Kerry among white voters.

I can't say it any better than Peter Robinson:

“The great man or woman in history,” writes the philosopher Sidney Hook in his book, The Hero in History, “is someone of whom we can say on the basis of the available evidence that if they had not lived when they did, or acted as they did, the history of their countries and of the world…would have been profoundly different.”

Scottsdale has been an innovative city since I was in junior high. It was the first town to have those big plastic garbage cans that could be emptied by machine. Until 2005, it had a contracted-out fire department.

I've got another one of my ear/sinus infections, so I don't know how much I'll blog before then. So here's an early Thanksgiving card from Mark Steyn:

Here's the official Iranian government version of Columbia University's foolishness of the day:

ScrappleFace:

Modeled after the success of the Plan B anti-pregnancy drug, which itself has surged in popularity since over-the-counter sales began last year, Mr. Bush’s ‘Plan B Surge’ calls for pulling troops out now, then waiting until al Qaeda has established a Muslim caliphate headquartered in Baghdad.

At that point, the Bush plan prescribes a massive introduction of U.S. troops to bring down the Qaeda government.

I’ll be all for making US and European taxpayers bear a disproportionate share of the load for the cost of carbon when the governments of China and India agree to payments to me in perpetuity for every useful invention created by the Western world that is deployed in those countries to drive growth.

David Frum, on the cynical attempt by the Democrats to have it both ways on the war (emphasis added):