Quotes of the day

Obama's decision to replace McChrystal with Gen. David Petraeus is a stroke of brilliance, an unassailable move, politically and strategically. On a political level, McChrystal has many fans inside Congress and the military, but Petraeus has orders of magnitude more. No one could accuse Obama of compromising the war effort, knowing that Petraeus is stepping in. On a strategic level, while McChrystal designed the U.S. military policy in Afghanistan, Petraeus is its ur-architect. Petraeus literally wrote the book on counterinsurgency strategy while McChrystal was still running the black-bag hunter-killers of the special-ops command. Petraeus has also spent the last year and a half as head of U.S. Central Command, supervising military operations throughout the Persian Gulf and central Asia, including Afghanistan. McChrystal has built relations with political and military leaders in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Petraeus has been building the same relations, plus some.--Fred Kaplan

Barack Obama, who has in recent days turned haplessness into an art form, played a masterstroke today, making perhaps the canniest, wiliest, even wisest decision of his generally rudderless presidency. I refer, of course, to his appointment of David Petraeus to the Afghan war command, in place of the Rolling-Stoned Stanley McChrystal. In doing so, Obama has, at a stroke, taken Petraeus out of the 2012 presidential race.--Tunku Varadarajan

General Stanley McChrystal was wrong to say the things he said — to have his aides mock Vice President Joe Biden and others — before a Rolling Stone reporter. That cost him his job. That was right. But make no mistake: General McChrystal was right. President Obama is a ditherer who on the campaign trailed mocked and tried to block General Petraeus’s surge in Iraq. Vice President Joe Biden is an idiot on foreign affairs who wanted to divide Iraq into three parts. Only Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stood by General McChrystal. This incident tells our allies how deeply the American military really is about their child commander-in-chief who loves the perks and the adulation of the job but golfs when he should be getting the war won. President George W. Bush gave up golf when the war began and American soldiers began coming home in flag-draped coffins.--Don Surber

Hey, Remember When Harry Reid Called Petraeus A Liar? And insisted that the surge engineered by Petreaus had failed?--William Jacobson

The development of the typical app cost $35,000 and the median paid app earns $682 dollars per year after Apple took its cut. You see where this is going.. We get to break even on our App Development costs in... 51 years.--Toni Ahonen

... the shareholders ALREADY own the company. So when they sue the company, they are suing themselves. And the lawyers get rich in the process. Sweet.--Kid Dynamite

Talking about American jobs lost to trade is like giving casualty stats for a war and only counting dead U.S. soldiers. It's inaccurate, and it reveals a skewed, provincial view of the world.--Katherine Mangu-Ward

Don't you threaten me!--Larry Summers

Don't you bully me!--Christina Romer

It is typical of young lawyers going into constitutional law that they have inflated dreams of what constitutional law can do and what courts can do," Bork said. "That’s the danger of Ms. [Elena] Kagan that she hasn’t had any experience that would lead her to mellow…the academia is not a place where you use prudence and caution and other virtues of a judge.--Robert Bork

As you can see there is almost nothing that has happened in the Obama years that Reynolds is not directly responsible for (Except, perhaps, Michelle Obama's recent nip and tuck. Developing.).--Vanderleun

[China's dating contest for millionaires] feels much the same as an emperor selecting his concubines out of a row of girls in ancient times. The only difference is that it’s now for the wealthy class, not the emperor.--Chinese office worker

Overall, the results suggest that attending to the health of one’s friends’ marriages serves to support and enhance the durability of one’s own relationship, and that, from a policy perspective, divorce should be understood as a collective phenomenon that extends far beyond those directly affected.--McDermott, Christakis, and Fowler

John Isner beats Nicolas Mahut 6-4, 3-6, 6-7, 7-6, 70-68 in Wimbledon epic.--Guardian