National Review Online has a treasure trove of pieces today.

Marc Thiessen quotes the Washington Post. It's good to know the Obama administration is using the time-honored strategy of "holding out hope" to protect us.

Abdulmutallab remains in a Detroit area prison and, after initial debriefings by the FBI, has restricted his cooperation since securing a defense attorney, according to federal officials. Authorities are holding out hope that he will change his mind and cooperate with the probe, the officials said.

Victor Davis Hanson:

When we do know for a fact that Mutallab tried to blow up a plane, we get a presidential "allegedly" ("a passenger allegedly tried to ignite an explosive device on his body, setting off a fire"), and yet when we don't know all the facts, as in the Professor Gates mess, we get instantaneous certainty ("the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home.")

Thomas Sowell thinks the changes in boxing over the years mirror the changes in society as a whole:

The first thing I noticed about the boxers back in the era of Joe Louis, from the 1930s into the 1950s, is that they all wore regulation boxing trunks and they didn’t have tattoos. There was no trying to outdo each other with garish trunks or wild tattoos. They didn’t try to stare each other down when the referee was giving them instructions before the fight.

Seldom did any of these boxers go in for showboating during the fight, and there was no denigrating the other fighter, before or after the fight.

Some predictions for 2010:

We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism will, after three months as a “sleeper,” shoot to the top of the bestseller charts. There it will meet Sarah Palin’s cheery memoir. The two books will thereupon mutually annihilate in a burst of gamma rays.

Chris Dodd loses his election. Capital police need to use a crowbar to loosen his grip on his office desk.

Victor Davis Hanson again:

Freedom of the individual explained not only why America became wealthy and the world’s dispossessed flocked to our shores, but also why it had a moral sense about the world in its willingness to confront, rather than appease and apologize to, thugs and totalitarians. Everything that the United Nations Human Rights Council is now for, we used to be against.

And Victor Davis Hanson yet a third time:

When a Nigerian national, with a history of radical Islamic sympathies, previously reported to U.S. authorities by his father as a threat to America, buys a one-way ticket with cash, has no check-in luggage, previously was denied a British visa, boards a plane easily, and is prevented only by a courageous tourist from murdering over 300 innocents — and when all that is characterized as the system working like “clockwork” — well, something is terribly wrong.