24 November Links Round-Up

David Colley writes in the NYT (h/t Scott L.) that Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower missed an opportunity to end WWII early.

What he doesn't point out is that if Allied armies had pushed further, faster, into Germany and other Nazi occupied parts, they might have changed the course of the Cold War too.

Meanwhile in this week's Global View, Bret Stephens makes some scary comparisons between President Obama and Jimmy Carter. We should be so fortunate to have a one & done from Obama.

The WSJ's Review & Outlook editorial examines the revealing emails written by climate scientist-hacks in England and other parts and draws the obvious conclusions--that scientists are not a-political and they have an agenda.

And finally, William McGurn writes about my favorite Democrat, Joe Lieberman. Senator Lieberman stood tall on Iraq, and won re-election in 2006 against a Democrat & a Republican as an Independent. And now he's standing tall against Obamacare--specifically the public option.

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Kim Strassel: 'Wanted By The Democrats: Wildly Optimistic Individual To Oversee National-Jobs-Creation Program. PhD In Imaginary Numbers Required'

Maybe those people who said Obama was Jimmy Carter-lite (or heavy, depending) were right?

Description: The Democratic Party seeks a wildly optimistic individual to oversee a national jobs-creation program. Jobs can be real, or not, so long as the public thinks the party is "doing something." The National Jobs Creator will have at his disposal Congress to pass new "jobs legislation" (aka The It-Is-Not-Another-Stimulus Act of 2009).

The NJC will oversee a dynamic team whose side responsibilities include selling this to the public and saving our behinds in next year's election. This is a potential career status position.

Minimum Qualifications:

• Masters Degree from an accredited program in communications/spin. Candidate must be able to explain to the public why "new jobs legislation" is necessary despite assurances the "old jobs legislation"—a $787 billion "stimulus"—is working. Applicant must demonstrate ability to explain why, despite a global recession, we continued socializing health care, and only just noticed that, wow, Houston, we have a problem. (Candidate might consider researching McDonnell, Bob, Gov.-elect of Virginia, who just kicked us in an election and did it talking about "jobs." That got us wondering.)

Candidate must explain the "new jobs legislation" to a wary public. Candidate must clarify how extending unemployment benefits will create jobs; how extending health insurance for the unemployed will create jobs; how taxing financial transactions to pay for this will create jobs. Candidate is responsible for immediately restoring party credibility on this issue, despite all past failed Keynesian spending and, let's be honest, some (holy moly!) embarrassing stimulus "job counting."

Mostly I'm just embarrassed for all my liberal (they probably prefer progressive), Obama-supporting friends who thought Bush was just so horribly irresponsible when it came to spending and the economy and that Obama would be so much smarter and economically savvy.

Sorry, guys. Hope/change perception ≠ reality.

Related & awesome (h/t Matt L.): The Decline: The Geography of a Recession. Do yourself a favor and check out this excellent graphic showing the recession in geographical terms, county-by-county, across the United States. It's painful.

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Obama's Nobel: I Saw This And Thought It Was A Joke (UPDATED)

But then I remembered that they also gave one to Jimmy Carter.

And Al Gore.

And Yasser Arafat.

And I said to myself, "yeah, makes sense."

Like Ace said, somewhere (h/t Matt L.):

High school kids want to be popular. Nations want to be prosperous, secure and in America's case, a force for good in the world.

And like Bob & Tom said on the radio this morning (also, h/t Matt L.):

isn't this a bit like awarding super bowl MVP right now?

&

The Europeans are so mad that they weren't the ones to elect Barack Obama.

Or, like My Old Man said:

Is today April 1? This shows what a joke this [the Nobel Peace Prize] is.

But wait, there's more: I just got an invite to join someone's Facebook group (yup, I'm popular too): Help Barack Obama win the Heisman Trophy!

Then, of course, there's this: Nobel Peace Prize For Awesomeness

This is so utterly ridiculous, I almost wonder if this is a send-up of Obama. But then I remember how seriously these Nobel folks take themselves and realized that no, it is not a joke.

This is so outrageous, I almost feel bad for President Obama--I mean, this makes two weeks in a row that the Europeans (who are more in love with him, even, than the leftists) have made a clown of our President.

For shame. Does the office of the President of the United States mean nothing to these people?

UPDATE 10 October 1:09am BDT: Jansen G. does me one better and writes something intelligent about Obama's Prize:

So, Obama got awarded a peace prize for yet another promise, this time for promising a nuclear free world. After having added this venerable achievement to his trophy case, I have to say, Obama has done quite well making promises. US Senator? Check. President of the United States? Check. Nobel Peace Prize? Check. Though, all this makes me wonder: are any of these promises contractually enforceable? Because I'm not seeing much, if any, performance.

As for the substance (if you can call it that) of this Nobel Peace Prize, Obama promised reconciliation in the M-E, climate change, and a world free of nuclear weapons. Has there been any performance of any of these promises? No! Obama's speech in Egypt has had little affect on the contentious realities in the M-E, largely b/c it failed to address the real source of conflict (US involvement in anything related to or impacting M-E oil flow).
Performance on climate change? The conference on climate change doesn't start until December and its a virtually guaranteed failure given the interests of BRIC et. al.

And while Obama may believe in the ideal of a nuclear free world, he knows just how dangerous in addition to impractical an ideal it is. No one in their right mind believes disarming nuclear arsenals will do anything but create even stronger incentives for horizontal proliferation, further destabilizing already pressing crises. And that's just the catch. Obama either (A) disingenuously attempts a halfhearted, impractical endeavor to dismantle nuclear arms resulting in planned failure that potentially destabilizes a system that's fenced-in the powerful incentives of the prisoner's proliferating dilemma, or (B) he abandons the thought of an attempt to rid the world of weapons and goes down as one of the world's most undeserved Nobel Peace Prize winners. The obvious and preferable option is B, to continue to indulge in the proven double standard of the "powers-that-be." But one has to think that eventually these myriad of catch-22's that Obama promises his way into will expose him for the 'serial breachor' of promises he is.

Obama is an archetype with which, thanks to teen movies, we are all familiar: the popular kool kid who only hangs out with the leftist dork when no one else is around. And then, because the dork has a crush on the kool kid, he/she endlessly makes excuses for Obama.

Obama's apologists will always have a reason for why he was/is unable to deliver on his sweet nothings.

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'Hopeychangers'' Pusillanimous Retreat In Eastern Europe

Mark Steyn:

In a sense, the health-care debate and the foreign-policy debacle are two sides of the same coin: For Britain and other great powers, the decision to build a hugely expensive welfare state at home entailed inevitably a long retreat from responsibilities abroad, with a thousand small betrayals of peripheral allies along the way. A few years ago, the great scholar Bernard Lewis warned, during the debate on withdrawal from Iraq, that America risked being seen as “harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend.” In Moscow and Tehran, on one hand, and Warsaw and Prague, on the other, they’re drawing their own conclusions.

There's been a lot of talk lately that Barack Obama is the second coming of Jimmy Carter.

If only.

President Obama's posture towards North Korea, Venezuela, Iran, Russia, Honduras, Afghanistan, etc., makes President Carter look positively potent.

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Arthur Laffer: 'Double Digit Inflation & High Interest Rates'

Ready for a return to the '70's, writ large?

Some of you can go ahead and throw out the baby with the bath-water on this guy (Arthur Laffer) if you like, but to me, he's making a lot of sense.

Here we stand more than a year into a grave economic crisis with a projected budget deficit of 13% of GDP. That's more than twice the size of the next largest deficit since World War II. And this projected deficit is the culmination of a year when the federal government, at taxpayers' expense, acquired enormous stakes in the banking, auto, mortgage, health-care and insurance industries.

With the crisis, the ill-conceived government reactions, and the ensuing economic downturn, the unfunded liabilities of federal programs -- such as Social Security, civil-service and military pensions, the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation, Medicare and Medicaid -- are over the $100 trillion mark. With U.S. GDP and federal tax receipts at about $14 trillion and $2.4 trillion respectively, such a debt all but guarantees higher interest rates, massive tax increases, and partial default on government promises.

But as bad as the fiscal picture is, panic-driven monetary policies portend to have even more dire consequences. We can expect rapidly rising prices and much, much higher interest rates over the next four or five years, and a concomitant deleterious impact on output and employment not unlike the late 1970s.

Further down in the column, he suggests that the Fed contract the money supply by selling Bonds. Only they can't do it because the Obama administration is having to sell bonds to fund their outrageous expansion in government spending.

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Prepare For Overreach - Quote Of The Day

Philip Jenkins, American Conservative magazine, writing about 2008's similarities to 1976 (thanks to Political Diary):

The key mistake Democrats made [after Jimmy Carter won the White House] in 1976 was failing to realize what brought them to power. Democrats won because of public dissatisfaction with the previous regime, which had overseen the economic crisis, and also because of a wider fear that America would have to live with diminished expectations. But although they won on largely economic grounds, Democrats acted as if they had a sweeping mandate for cultural transformation -- for social libertarianism, affirmative action and egalitarianism, dovish internationalism, and idealistic notions of human rights. These ideas dominated a radical Congress and were enthusiastically adopted by the cohort of Carter appointments to the judiciary. They all ignored a basic principle: just because people are unhappy where they are does not mean they are willing to go anywhere you try to lead them.

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If Jimmy Carter Were Running Today

He'd be a Republican and his name would be Mike Huckabee. Huckabee holds Democrat-like positions on foreign, domestic, and fiscal policy. It's one thing to nominate a principled conservative who ends up losing to a Democrat, it's something else altogether when the candidate wins simply because he's a (former) Baptist minister.

Mike Huckabee is a loser in the general election.

- Congrats to Ron Paul for winning 10%. We don't agree with many of Paul's positions, but his presence in the race forces the rest of the candidates to make sure they are true to conservatism's small-government roots.

- The big winner is John McCain, a candidate we admire, not Mike Huckabee. McCain was already trending well in New Hampshire polls, and Romney's performance in Iowa can only help him.

- The big, big story tonight is not the 3rd place finish by Shrillary, but the win by Barack Hussein Obama--the first black man to win a Presidential primary. We don't like his politics or even the candidate, but this is moment is good history. Congratulations, Senator Obama.


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