Lunchtime Links

Reviews of Obama’s Nobel speech: unusually good, realistically idealistic, academic and verbose, elegiac and strange.

Trust between the United States and Japan has “dissolved faster than wasabi in soy sauce.”

Rove predicts there’ll be “44, 46 or more” Republicans in the Senate in 2011.

The long-awaited Spitzer comeback may be nigh.

It’s not just the birthers: 39 percent of Israelis think Obama’s a Muslim.

Enter gay-baiting as the Houston mayoral race heads to a runoff.

The GOP attempts what TWI’s Matt DeLong would term a “rare (and risky!) double-flip” on Medicare.

Newsmax lists the lawmakers who are most loved — and hated — by their Hill colleagues.

Hanukkah begins tomorrow night; here’s how it became the number-one holiday of secular Judaism.