* “So my best advice to Israelis is: Focus on your election–on Jan. 22–not ours. I find it very sad that in a country with so much human talent, the Israeli center and left still can’t agree on a national figure who could run against Netanyahu and his thuggish partner, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman.”–Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times.
* “When Republicans claim that this was a status quo election, they point to their continued hold on the House. … True enough, but that’s not because Americans didn’t vote to undo them. It’s because Republicans have so gerrymandered congressional districts in states where they controlled redistricting the past two years that they were able to elude a popular vote that went the Democrats’ way.”–Harold Meyerson, Washington Post.
* “Republicans have the same problem as the Beach Boys. Their fans are dying.”–Comedian Bill Maher.
* “Team Romney has every reason to be shellshocked. Its candidate, after all, resoundingly won the election of the country he was wooing. Mitt Romney is the president of white male America.”–Maureen Dowd, New York Times.
* “My trip to Iowa has nothing to do with 2016.” Florida Sen. Marco Rubio.
* “We (Republican Party) need to reach out aggressively to non-white voters, and Marco Rubio will be a key voice.”–Rubio’s pollster Whit Ayres.
* “Given America’s demographic direction, the overwhelming loss of Hispanic votes gradually will complicate the Republican political task to the point of impossibility. Unless this problem is solved, the GOP will remain on a long, downward slope toward irrelevance.”–Michael Gerson, Washington Post.
* My plea is to protect public investment. Infrastructure, job training and basic scientific research are the country’s seed corn–the spending that allows us to be more productive and prosperous in the future.”–Christina D. Romer, economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley and former chairwoman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers.
* “President Obama should pause before choosing a successor to CIA Director David H. Petraeus and rethink the role of the nation’s primary intelligence agency. Its main focus for the past decade has been fighting terrorists and insurgents.”–Walter Pincus, Washington Post.
* “The Reagan administration was generally skeptical about costly environmental rules, but with respect to protection of the ozone layer, Reagan was an environmental hero. Under his leadership, the United States became the prime mover behind the Montreal Protocol, which required the phasing out of ozone-depleting chemicals.”–Prof. Cass Sunstein, Harvard Law School.
* Hard work beats talent when talent fails to work hard.”–NBA scoring champion Kevin Durant.
* “The next move obviously is to have Fidel Castro throw out the first pitch next year.”–Miami radio talk-show host Jeff DeForest on what to expect from the Miami Marlins after their blockbuster, fire-sale trade of prominent players with big salaries.
* “The good thing is Tampa is a very different place than it was when I got here. It is far more embracing, far more diverse and far more open because of the influx of many new people.”–Mayor Bob Buckhorn.