He's Just Not That Into The Special RelationshipI thought this was going to be the time when everyone likes us again, yet here is Obama trashing all our BFFs in order to suck up to the sandpit bullies.
[Mark Hemingway]
It's the top story in our web-briefing, but if you haven't heard the President gave U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown a gift 25 DVDs of classic American films. Given enough exposure, no doubt Brown will soon develop a taste for the strange and provincial American cultural expression known as "cinema." I hear it's finally starting to catch on abroad. Now here's the gift's Brown gave Obama:Mr Brown’s gifts included an ornamental desk pen holder made from the oak timbers of Victorian anti-slaver HMS Gannet, once named HMS President.These gifts are even more impressive and thoughtful than these few paragraphs suggest, given the amazing story behind the Resolute and how it is a symbol of U.S.-U.K. relations. So Brown has clearly outclassed Obama in that regard.
Mr Obama was so delighted he has already put it in pride of place in the Oval Office on the Resolute desk which was carved from timbers of Gannet’s sister ship, HMS Resolute.
Another treasure given to the U.S. President was the framed commission for HMS Resolute, a vessel that came to symbolise Anglo-US peace when it was saved from ice packs by Americans and given to Queen Victoria.
Finally, Mr Brown gave a first edition set of the seven-volume classic biography of Churchill by Sir Martin Gilbert.
But I also love the symbolism of that final gift — Martin Gilbert's classic Churchill biography. If it seemed a bit tone deaf when Obama returned the Churchill bust that had been in the White House, well it now appears that no less a figure than the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom is subtly sending a message that Obama should better understand the historical importance of one of his country's greatest leaders. Well played.
Ignored or Dissed?I'm not completely convinced of the Telegraph's arguments (yet) but again, I deeply believe Obama needs to break his habit of throwing friends under the bus during this time of global crisis.
Despite the fact that Gordon Brown's address to a joint session of Congress yesterday got 16 standing ovations, the general reaction to the first visit of the British Prime Minister during the new era of hope and change has been one of indifference. His plea to reject protectionism is likely to be given lip service, even as the Porkulus Act authorizes it, but that's about as much as he'll get. The general impression I get around this town is that Britain today is a busted flush — fatally weakened by its own financial mess combined with its currency crisis. Nevertheless, you'd have thought the President's most important ally in Afghanistan deserved better than this. I'm not about to endorse James Delingpole's theory that Michelle Obama was behind it all, but it does look as if the special relationship with Britain is one area of FDR's policy that his devoted disciple will not be following.
MIAMI - An abortion clinic owner is accused of delivering a live baby during a botched procedure and then throwing the infant away.
Belkis Gonzalez, 42, was arrested Tuesday and charged with practicing medicine without a license and tampering with evidence, both felonies, said Ed Griffith, a spokesman for the Miami-Dade State Attorney's office. If found guilty, Gonzalez would face at least a year in prison and up to 15 years.
The teenage mother, Sycloria Williams, has filed a lawsuit alleging that Gonzalez knocked the infant off the chair where she had given birth, and then scooped the baby, placenta and afterbirth into a red plastic biohazard bag, and threw it out.
Snow DayAnd my husband givers her an answer....
The most frequently received comment I've received today is "I'm slammed." What happened to the glorious days when we looked out the window, saw the white, cold wonderland, and went straight back to bed — with a book or even better plans (until kids or shovelling absolutely demanded your presence)?
Re: Snow DayI think he is very right. The more affordable energy we have the better everyone can use the available technology to innovate our lives and do things like work from home as my husband does at least one day a week.
The simple answer, Kathryn, is that technology has successfully "disintermediated" severe weather. It's a great example of adaptation to severe weather enabled by two things: a) innovation and b) access to affordable energy (the tech is useless without electricity and of only marginal usefulness if just the rich have access to it). So it is odd, to say the least, that climate alarmists say that if severe weather increases, we should reduce access to affordable energy (and, separately, impose restrictions on innovation they haven't approved beforehand).
We should remember that when he came into office, Gordon Brown had such a spectacular honeymoon period that he was looking into the prospect of a general election that could have destroyed the Conservative Party forever. Today, it looks like the Conservatives will be returned to power with a huge majority. So when he sat down with the President in the Oval Office today, it was tempting to think that the two men, obviously unseparated in ideology, are merely separated by their relative positions on the curve of their political careers. Certainly the two share the same capacity for self-delusion over the role of regulation in the banking crisis, as I explain here. Therefore, when they call for a Global New Deal, I suspect they do not realize that they are heading down a road Pete Wehner describes here:Barack Obama — supremely ambitious, young, and new — has revived an age-old debate over how the economy works. He is casting his lot with collectivists and statists; his intent is to put us on a glide path to European-style socialism. Unless he is able to suspend the laws of economics, I rather doubt Obama will succeed. As a result, he may end up not repudiating Thatcherism and Reaganism, but revivifying them.One can but hope.
Anatomy of Vero Possumus by Victor Davis Hanson
It is odd that after five weeks we can pretty much see the next four years:
1) Gorge the Beast on the home front. Shock-and-awe, "We're in the Great Depression" hysteria stuns the country into buying into what will be a multi-trillion dollar borrowing commitment. Once the desired social agenda is in place (and it is now), then there will be no alternative but to raise taxes and return wealth to its proper owners. (This is a variant of the Reagan-era "starve the beast" concept of cutting taxes, and supposedly cuts of wasteful spending follow — but a far more successful variant since taxing a few "greedy" is always easier than cutting everyone's entitlements.)
2) Carterism abroad. The al-Arabiya interview, the Hamas billion-dollar stimulus (the Chinese loan us the billion to give them,) and the Russian rebuff on Iran (no "haggling" please) sum up the Enlightenment arrogance that soaring rhetoric, stated good intentions, occasional abandonment of principle, and demonstration of caring and sensitivity can win over almost anyone. Of course, that assumes that disputes don't reflect genuinely antithetical values, but simply miscommunication and misunderstanding — or unnecessary "Manichean" world views of wrong and right. We've been here before between 1977-1980, so how it will end is no mystery. (No wonder they sent back to the owners the Churchill bust; whether the Brits send back one of Stanley Baldwin or Clement Attlee remains to be seen.)
3) The passive-aggressive style. We will get utopian rhetoric about a new ethical bar, followed by the nominations of serial tax dodgers, lobbyists, and DC insiders. We will hear sermons about a new bipartisanship, followed by comical attacks on talk radio, and deeming "unpatriotic" any who resent the ramming through of the largest increase in debt in a half-century. And there will be vero possumus oratory about a new unity and brotherhood, as serial attacks on private-jetting and Super Bowl-partying "rich" deliberately conflate the mega-rich with the small business-people and professionals who make between $250,000 and $500,000 and provide most of the nation's jobs and the nation's income tax revenue — and therefore must be both gouged and demonized in the process.
All that is left for central casting is the cardigan sweater and the fist pounding on the desk.
No, seriously, try this with your boss sometime. First, go buy a Mercedes on the company credit card. Then tell him that you saved money because you were planning on buying a Lear Jet — two years after your mandatory retirement age. Then ask him for an attaboy, or even a raise. See what he says. I dare you.
Meanwhile, not a penny of the actual money raised under the Obama budget ever goes to reducing the deficit. It all goes to new or increased spending. Obama says that he and his team went "line by line" through the budget and found "$2 trillion in savings." But along with the fictional Iraq war savings, the bulk of the rest — a trillion dollars — comes from increased taxes.
Ladies and gentlemen, I am a refugee from socialism. I left Britain soon after Tony Blair's election and have watched my native country decline from afar as managerial socialism and the regulatory state took hold.
But I am also a refugee from transnationalism. A good part of my native country's decline has been due not just to the disastrous Obama-like policies of Tony Blair and his hapless successor Gordon Brown, but to the gradual, almost invisible cession of sovereignty from the once-proud United Kingdom to the vainglorious European Union. In the few minutes I have to address you today, I would like to describe how this happened and how it can happen to the United States, constitution and all, if we are not vigilant.
The dismaying message here is that President Obama's policies have become part of the economy's problem.Read the whole thing and weep.
Americans have welcomed the Obama era in the same spirit of hope the President campaigned on. But after five weeks in office, it's become clear that Mr. Obama's policies are slowing, if not stopping, what would otherwise be the normal process of economic recovery. From punishing business to squandering scarce national public resources, Team Obama is creating more uncertainty and less confidence -- and thus a longer period of recession or subpar growth.
The Democrats who now run Washington don't want to hear this, because they benefit from blaming all bad economic news on President Bush. And Mr. Obama has inherited an unusual recession deepened by credit problems, both of which will take time to climb out of. But it's also true that the economy has fallen far enough, and long enough, that much of the excess that led to recession is being worked off. Already 15 months old, the current recession will soon match the average length -- and average job loss -- of the last three postwar downturns. What goes down will come up -- unless destructive policies interfere with the sources of potential recovery.
Lawmakers in at least 15 states are sponsoring similar resolutions. They say they're fighting back against decades of federal overreach, culminating in the stimulus package.Let's hope more states jump on this bandwagon and fight to preserve their rights and fight the so-called Stimulus Act.
And that we needed to adapt our appeal, because, after all, what's important in politics is winning elections. And so we have to understand that the American people, they want Big Government. We just have to find a way to tell them we're no longer opposed to that. We will come up with our own version of it that is wiser and smarter, but we've got to go get the Walmart voter, and we've got to get the Hispanic voter, and we've got to get the recalcitrant independent women. And I'm listening to this and I am just apoplectic: The era of Reagan is over? When the hell do you hear a Democrat say the era of FDR is over? You never hear it. Not only that, the President of the United States today thinks he's FDR, thinks he's Abraham Lincoln, and sometimes, Tuesday night, thinks he's Ronald Reagan. Our own movement has members trying to throw Reagan out while the Democrats know they can't accomplish what they want unless they appeal to Reagan voters. We have got to stamp this out within this movement, because it will tear us apart. It will guarantee we lose elections. [Applause]In short, Go Limbaugh Go!!
We have to. You see, to me it's a no-brainer. It's not even something to me: How do you get rid of Reagan from conservatism? The blueprint -- the blueprint for landslide conservative victory is right there. Why in the hell do the smartest people in our room want to chuck it? I know why. I know exactly why. It's because they're embarrassed of some of the people who call themselves conservatives. These people in New York and Washington, cocktail elitists, they get made fun of when the next NASCAR race is on TV and their cocktail buds come up to them, those people are in your party? How do you put up with this? It would be easy to throw them overboard, so as to maintain these cocktail party/Beltway/New York City/inside-the-Beltway media relationships. But I tell you: This notion that Reaganism is dead, conservatism needs to be refined, let's take a look at this. We've got to go get the Walmart voter. I opened my remarks tonight by telling the people watching on Fox who we conservatives are. When I look out at you in this audience, I don't see a Walmart voter. And I don't see a black, and I don't see a woman, and I don't see a Hispanic. I see human beings who happen to be fortunate enough to be the luckiest people on Earth since you are Americans. [Applause]
Conservatism -- for us to make the decision that we've got to figure out policies, to get the Walmart voter -- psst, we've got most of them already, is the bottom line. Conservatism is a universal set of core principles. You don't check principles at the door. This is a battle that we're going to have. And there are egos involved here, too. When the situation like ours exists, there are people who want to lead it. They want to redefine it. Their egos are such that they want to be the next X, whoever it is. So there will be different factions lining up to try to define what conservatism is. And beware of those different factions who seek as part of their attempt to redefine conservatism, as making sure the liberals like us, making sure that the media likes us. They never will, as long as we remain conservatives. They can't possibly like us; they're our enemy. In a political arena of ideas, they're our enemy. They think we need to be defeated. Why do you think -- you all in this room know this. For those of you watching at home, my first address to the nation -- [Laughter] -- I'm sure you paid close enough attention, that you knew at one time Senator McCain was the favorite Republican of all the cable news networks and the Sunday shows. And they would just -- I mean their tongues would be on the floor. The media people (panting) when they knew McCain was coming. And they would treat McCain as the greatest guy in the world. Did you wonder why? You were told he was moderate. He was not strict. He was not an authoritarian, he was able to walk to the other side of the aisle, able to get along with the enemy. And everybody wants love and bipartisanship.
I should have mentioned below that there's a rally in favor of affordable energy planned for 1-3pm also near the Capitol Power Plant. More details here. If you're able to make your way there and would like a picket sign, may I suggest "TODAY — A GOOD DAY FOR COAL!"
It's Snowing in DC, So There Must Be a Global Warming Protest
And indeed there is. A group of obviously obsessive activists are planning to protest the Capitol's coal-fired power plant this afternoon. Certain of the usual suspects, including public employees like NASA's Jim Hansen, have expressed a desire to get arrested, thereby creating some climate martyrs. The fact that their arrests, if captured on camera, will forever be depicted as in deep snow doesn't appear to have curtailed their enthusiasm. In any event, these people forget that their alarmism has consequences. There is a short ton of studies out there which show that cutting access to the affordable energy that coal provides has severe consequences in terms of income, employment, and health. I outline some of the research here. Getting rid of coal makes people poorer, destroys jobs, and kills people.
"The man who is President Obama's newly minted urban czar pocketed thousands of dollars in campaign cash from city developers whose projects he approved or funded with taxpayers' money, a Daily News probe found.Got to love the careful phrasing of "well-timed" and ask yourself, "For whom?".
Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion often received contributions just before or after he sponsored money for projects or approved important zoning changes, records show.
Most donations were organized and well-timed."
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