† Obama Is Just About Every U.S. President All Rolled Into One!: Commenting on President Barack Hussein Obama’s having found his populist voice with full-throated denunciations of Wall Street bankers and K Street lobbyists, The Wall Street Journal's Kimberley Strassel notes that the administration is taking a page from FDR’s playbook when it comes to domestic policy:

FDR was re-elected in 1936 for many reasons, but among them was his fiery denunciations of "economic royalists," "economic tyranny," and "economic slavery." Business knew it was in the president's crosshairs and put its capital on strike. The economy didn't recover until the war.

Team Obama is already witnessing a repeat. The U.S. economy ought to be flying out of recession. Yet bank lending is sluggish. Companies refuse to hire. Business is going elsewhere to raise capital: China last year outstripped the U.S. as a center for initial public offerings. The market gyrates on Washington's latest political drama.

A venture capitalist recently remarked to me that the uncertainty the administration has created is "nothing short of paralyzing." Nobody will invest in an industry that might be the next to be overtaxed, overregulated, or publicly disemboweled.

Add to that uncertainty the administration's new populist bent, and it's a recipe for a continued capital freeze.

For his part, historian Walter Russell Mead, Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, likens Obama’s “Jeffersonian” foreign policy to Jimmy Carter’s - with a soupçon of Richard Nixon - in this fawning and cringeworthy cover story in the January/February 2010 issue of Foreign Policy magazine:  

Like Carter in the 1970s, Obama comes from the old-fashioned Jeffersonian wing of the Democratic Party [minimize foreign commitments and, as much as possible, dismantle the national-security state] and the strategic goal of his foreign policy is to reduce America's costs and risks overseas by limiting U.S. commitments wherever possible. He's a believer in the notion that the United States can best spread democracy and support peace by becoming an example of democracy at home and moderation abroad. …

Jeffersonians like Obama argue that even bad regimes can be orderly international citizens if the incentives are properly aligned. Syria and Iran don't need to become democratic states for the United States to reach long-term, mutually beneficial arrangements with them. And it is North Korea's policies, not the character of its regime, that pose a threat to the Pacific region.

At this strategic level, Obama's foreign policy looks a little bit like that of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. In Afghanistan and Iraq, he hopes to extract U.S. forces from costly wars by the contemporary equivalent of the "Vietnamization" policy of the Nixon years. He looks to achieve an opening with Iran comparable to Nixon's rapprochement with communist China. …

A Jeffersonian policy of restraint and withdrawal requires cooperation from many other countries, but the prospect of a lower American profile may make others less, rather than more, willing to help the United States.

There is an additional political problem for this president, one that he shares with Carter. In both cases, their basic Jeffersonian approach was balanced in part by a strong attraction to idealistic Wilsonian values [promotion of democracy and human rights as the core elements of American grand strategy] and their position at the head of a Democratic Party with a distinct Wilsonian streak. …

Like Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and Martin Luther King Jr., Barack Obama doesn't just love the United States for what it is. He loves what it should - and can - be. Leadership is not the art of preserving a largely achieved democratic project; governing is the art of pushing the United States farther down the road toward the still-distant goal of fulfilling its mission and destiny. …

With great dignity and courage, Obama has embarked on a difficult and uncertain journey. The odds, I fear, are not in his favor, and it is not yet clear that his intuitions and instincts amount to the kind of grand design that statesmen like John Quincy Adams and Henry Kissinger produced in the past. But there can be no doubt that American foreign policy requires major rethinking. …

If Obama's foreign policy collapses - whether sunk by Afghanistan or conflicts not yet foreseen - into the incoherence and reversals that ultimately marked Carter's well-meaning but flawed approach, it will be even more difficult for future presidents to chart a prudent and cautious course through the rough seas ahead.  

Editorial Note: Á propos of absolutely nothing, Mead throws in a gratuitous Sarah Palin insult and describes Jacksonians as “today's FOX News watchers” - The Stiletto prefers to think of them as today’s Spike TV watchers, BTW – but he doesn’t have the wit to extend his analogy (such as it is) to Hamiltonians, Wilsonians and Jeffersonians. So using Mead’s definitions, today’s Hamiltonians should be watching FOX Business Channel; Wilsonians, PBS; and Jeffersonians, Nat Geo.

† Don’t Know Much About History, Don’t Know Much Foreign Policy: In an address to The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in August 2006, then-presidential hopeful Barack Obama (he wasn't using his middle name back then; only "racists" were) called Iraq "the wrong battlefield."

In six hours of testimony before a five-member panel conducting a government-commissioned inquiry to investigate Britain's role before, during and after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, former British prime minister Tony Blair describes why Iraq was not the “wrong battlefield” in light of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks - even though coalition forces did not find the weapons of mass destruction that their intelligence agencies had warned of for years:

BLAIR: [I]f September 11 hadn't happened, our assessment of the risk of allowing Saddam any possibility of him reconstituting his programmes would not have been the same. But after September 11 … our view, the American view, changed, and changed dramatically.

Straight after 9/11, in the statement of made to the House of … I specifically deal with this issue, to do with weapons of mass destruction and the danger of the link with terrorism. Here is what changed for me the whole calculus of risk. It was my view then, it remains my view now. The point about this terrorist act was that over 3,000 people had been killed on the streets of New York, an absolutely horrific event, but this is what really changed my perception of risk, the calculus of risk for me: if those people, inspired by this religious fanaticism could have killed 30,000, they would have. For those of us who dealt with terrorism from the IRA, and, incidentally, I don't want to minimise the impact of that terrorism; each act of terrorism is wicked and wrong and to be deplored. But the terrorism that an organisation like the IRA were engaged in was terrorism directed towards a political purpose, maybe

6 unjustified, but it was within a certain framework that you could understand.

The point about this act in New York was that, had they been able to kill even more people than those 3,000, they would have, and so, after that time, my view was you could not take risks with this issue at all, and one dimension of it, because we were advised, obviously, that these people would use chemical or biological weapons or a nuclear device, if they could get hold of them that completely changed our assessment of where the risks for security lay, and just so that we make this absolutely clear, this was not an American position, this was my position and the British position, very, very clearly, and so, from September 11 onwards we obviously had to deal with Afghanistan, but from that moment, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Iraq, the machinery, as you know, of AQ Khan, who was the former Pakistani nuclear scientist and who had been engaged in illicit activities and in distributing this material, all of this had to be brought to an end.

[O]ur perception of the risk had shifted, and the reason for dealing with Iraq and I think I said this at the time was because it was Iraq that was in breach of the United Nations Resolutions, had ten years of defiance and I felt, we felt, it was important that we make it absolutely clear he has to come back into compliance. …

Now, my assessment of risk prior to September 11 was that Saddam was a menace, that he was a threat, he was a monster, but we would have to try and make best. If you had asked me prior to September 11, did I have any real belief in his good faith. No, I didn't. Did I really think that a new sanctions framework was going to do the trick? No, I didn't. On the other hand, precisely because the consequence of military action is so great, for me the calculus of risk was, "Look, we are just going to have to do the best we can".

After September 11, that changed … [I]n my view, we cannot afford the possibility that nations, particularly nations that are brutal, rogue states, states that take an attitude that is wholly contrary to our way of life, you cannot afford such states to be allowed to develop or proliferate WMD.

RODERIC LYNE (Panelist, former ambassador to Moscow):  Why Iraq?

BLAIR: [S]sometimes what is important is not to ask the March 2003 question, but to ask the 2010 question. Supposing we had backed off this military action, supposing we had left Saddam and his sons, who were going to follow him, in charge of Iraq, people who used chemical weapons, caused the death of over 5 1 million people, what we now know is that he retained absolutely the intent and the intellectual knowhow to restart a nuclear and a chemical weapons programme when the inspectors were out and the sanctions changed, which they were going to be. I think it is at least arguable that he was a threat and that, had we taken that decision to leave him there with the intent, with an oil price, not of $25, but of 3 $100 a barrel, he would have had the intent, he would have had the financial means and we would have lost our nerve.

JOHN CHILCOT (Panel Chairman): [W]hat broad lessons you have drawn you have drawn some already in the course of your testimony and … whether you have regrets about key aspects of the Iraq conflict?

BLAIR: [L]essons that can be learned about nationbuilding … [Y]ou have got to look very carefully at what type of forces you require because there will be a security situation that you face, a challenging security situation. I also think you have really got to look at the issue to do with the nature of this threat from AlQaeda on the one hand, Iran on the other, and the impact that that will have, not just on Iraq but potentially in different arenas right round the Middle East region and beyond. … I genuinely believe that if we had left Saddam in power, even with what we know now, we would still have had to have dealt with him, possibly in circumstances where the threat was worse and possibly in circumstances where it was hard to mobilise any support for dealing with that threat. I think we live in a completely new security environment today. I thought that then, I think that now. … [I]f I'm asked whether I believe we are safer, more secure, that Iraq is better, our own security is better with Saddam and his two sons out of power and out of office than in office, I indeed believe that we are, and I think in time to come, if Iraq becomes, as I hope and believe that it will, the country that its people

18 want to see, then we can look back, and particularly our armed forces can look back, with an immense sense of pride and achievement in what they did.

CHILCOT: And no regrets?

BLAIR: Responsibility but not a regret for removing Saddam Hussein. I think that he was a monster, I believe he threatened, not just the region but the world, and in the circumstances that we faced then, but I think even if you look back now, it was better to deal with this threat, to deal with it, to remove him from office, and I do genuinely believe that the world is safer as a result.  I know sometimes, because this happens out in the region, sometimes people will say to me, "Well, Saddam was a brake on Iran". Let's be clear, there is another view of foreign policy in this instance, which is the way, if we had left Saddam in place, he would have controlled Iran better. I really think it is time we learned, as a matter of sensible foreign policy, that the way to deal with one dictatorial threat is not to back another, that actually the best answer to what is happening in Iran is to allow the Iraqi people the freedom and democratic choice that we enjoy in countries like ours.

Congress should ask Obama to testify about his thought processes leading to his conclusion that Iraq is “the wrong battlefield” and that withdrawing from Iraq while ramping up in Afghanistan addresses the rogue nation and terror threats Blair described in 2003 and today.

† Fact-Checking Obama’s SOTU Speech (AKA “You Lie!”): A new Rasmussen telephone survey finds that Americans do not believe many of the claims President Barack Hussein Obama made about his administration’s policy and legislative successes in his State of the Union speech:

The president in the speech declared that his administration has cut taxes for 95% of Americans. … [J]ust 21% of voters nationwide believe that taxes have been cut for 95% of Americans. Most (53%) say it has not happened, and 26% are not sure. …

The president also asserted that “after two years of recession, the economy is growing again.” Just 35% of voters believe that statement is true, while 50% say it is false.

Obama claimed that steps taken by his team are responsible for putting two million people to work “who would otherwise be unemployed.” Just 27% of voters say that statement is true. Fifty-one percent (51%) say it's false. …

On all the points raised in the president’s speech, there is a huge partisan divide. On the question of cutting taxes for 95% of Americans, hardly any Republicans or unaffiliated voters believe it's true. However, Democrats are evenly divided: 34% say the tax cuts have been delivered, 29% say they haven’t, and 38% are not sure.

Sixty-three percent (63%) of Democrats agree with the president’s statement that the economy is growing again. Seventy percent (70%) of Republicans and 60% of unaffiliated voters disagree.

As for the claim about two million jobs, 46% of Democrats say it’s true, while 77% of Republicans say it’s not. As for those not affiliated with either major party, 24% say it’s true, and 59% say it’s false.

Note that even amongst Dem voters, fewer than half believe that Obama has delivered on jobs and tax cuts.

† Living In These Mad, Mad, Madoff Times: The U.S. is “a country that has long shunned haggling outside of car dealerships and mattress stores … until the Great Recession,” reports The Washington Post:

Firms are desperate for revenue, Americans are feeling broke, and the aisles from Best Buy to Macy's and even your neighborhood Giant - as well as the 1-800 numbers at Comcast and Verizon - have become venues for let's-make-a-deal.

A recent Consumer Reports study found that 66 percent of American consumers had haggled at least once in the preceding six months, with an 88 percent ka-ching rate on gadgets, clothes, furniture and steak. …

The recession merely popped the lid off a retailing shift that has been brewing for a decade. EBay gave millions of consumers dealmaking training wheels (top bid for a "Goonies" DVD: $3.50). The Internet offers instant pricing data (do a Google search on "Lucky jeans and deal and DC"). And don't forget Priceline, which lets consumers name their price for flights, hotels and rental cars (thank you, William Shatner).

† You Can’t Make Fun Of Obama? Sez Who?: Washington Post media analyst-cum-political pundit Howard Kurtz reports that the openly left-leaning “Daily Show” host Jon Stewart – “a pop-culture bellwether” – has begun to pole fun at President Barack Hussein Obama, albeit somewhat gingerly:

After showing video of Obama speaking to schoolkids, the "Daily Show" host said in amazement: "You set up a presidential podium and a teleprompter in a sixth-grade classroom? … I'm not a political adviser, campaign strategist, et cetera, but that's not a great photo op in a middle school classroom." …

[W]hile the White House notes that Obama used the prompter to address journalists, not the students, the details matter little in comedy.

Stewart's barbs are generating partisan buzz. In a tweet, Americablog's John Aravosis invoked Martha Coakley's Massachusetts loss in trashing the prompter joke: "So is this the new post-coakley Jon Stewart, picking on Dems for insignificant BS to burnish his indie credentials. Third time in 7 days." The conservative Fox Nation site, by contrast, ran the video under the gleeful header "Jon Stewart Mocks Obama's Teleprompter Dependence." …

None of these jokes are particularly cutting, but what's telling is that they're being told at all. During the campaign, Lichter says, comedians made far more jokes about George W. Bush and John McCain than about Obama. …

The left's honeymoon with Obama ended long ago. Liberal commentators, including [Keith] Olbermann, Rachel Maddow and Ed Schultz, have taken shots at him for being too cautious or compromising on various issues. But there is something about a comic caricature that is indelible. …

We've all seen Jon Stewart fire his comic bazooka, against Tucker Carlson on "Crossfire" and Jim Cramer over CNBC's financial coverage. With Obama, he's merely using a popgun. But given Stewart's platform, even that has quite an echo.

† Updates To Previous Posts (sixth item, Global Warming Is In The Eye Of The Beholder): On the heels of a retraction of inaccurate claims that Himalayan glaciers are melting away, The Telegraph (London) reveals that a 2007 report by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – which claims mountain ice in the Andes, Alps and Africa is disappearing – is based on a 2002 article in Climbing magazine quoting anecdotal evidence from mountain climbers and on a master’s degree dissertation by a geography student that included that interviews with mountain guides in the Alps:

The IPCC's remit is to provide an authoritative assessment of scientific evidence on climate change. …

Sceptics have seized upon the mistakes to cast doubt over the validity of the IPCC and have called for the panel to be disbanded. …

But some researchers have expressed exasperation at the IPCC's use of unsubstantiated claims and sources outside of the scientific literature.

Professor Richard Tol, one of the report's authors who is based at the Economic and Social Research Institute in Dublin, Ireland, said: "These are essentially a collection of anecdotes.

"Why did they do this? It is quite astounding. Although there have probably been no policy decisions made on the basis of this, it is illustrative of how sloppy Working Group Two (the panel of experts within the IPCC responsible for drawing up this section of the report) has been.

"There is no way current climbers and mountain guides can give anecdotal evidence back to the 1900s, so what they claim is complete nonsense."

The IPCC report, which is published every six years, is used by government's worldwide to inform policy decisions that affect billions of people. …

Experts claim that loss of ice climbs are a poor indicator of a reduction in mountain ice as climbers can knock ice down and damage ice falls with their axes and crampons. …

The chair of the IPCC Rajendra Pachauri has faced mounting pressure and calls for his resignation amid the growing controversy over the error on glacier melting and use of unreliable sources of information.

† Updates To Previous Posts (Is Obama Already A Lame Duck?): The IL Senate race for the people’s seat that President Barack Hussein Obama occupied before trading up to the White House, “will be among the most symbolically important and expensive races in the country this year,” reports The Washington Post -  and it’s one that that Repubs have high hopes of winning:

After Republican Scott Brown's victory in Massachusetts this month, the GOP sees a clear path to victory in this Democratic state - and his name is Mark Kirk.

Kirk, 50, a moderate five-term Republican House member, appears to be the man of the moment. As the likely GOP nominee to emerge Tuesday, Kirk is seen as a formidable, well-funded candidate, a Navy Reserve officer who has done two tours in Afghanistan and who can withstand the weight of a White House set to defeat him. …

Democrats have criticized Kirk for soliciting support from Sarah Palin and for switching his position on cap-and-trade - a measure intended to reduce carbon emissions by taxing certain forms of energy use. He was one of a handful of Republicans who voted for the House bill. But after tea-party activists protested at his office, he came out against it.

Kirk said in an interview that he shifted his position after he traveled the state and heard from businesses that the measure would "hammer them and cost jobs."

Paul Green, director of policy studies at Roosevelt University here, said: "Kirk will have plenty of time to modify his positions in the general. He is going to be very tough to beat if the current trends continue. None of the other candidates' résumés match up to his."

If Obama campaigns for the Dem candidate – who will be damaged goods going into the fall election because of a particularly nasty primary campaign - and the seat goes to Kirk, perhaps he will finally hear the message that voters across the country have been sending him.

Editorial Note: Obamagirl seems to have a new crush: Former Gov. Mike Huckabee (R-AR) - for whom she promised to do a campaign video, should one be needed. HuckPAC has a paltry $192,000 in the bank - roughly one-tenth the amount Mitt Romney has amassed - suggesting that he either isn’t running for president in 2012, or is laying low for as long as he can so as not to have to give up the free - actually, priceless - national exposure he gets on his eponymous talk show on FOX.

† Updates To Previous Posts (third item, How ACORN Got Buried By “Squirrelly Right-Wingers”): After the arrest of ACORN nemesis James O’Keefe for a sting operation at the New Orleans office of Sen. Mary L. Landrieu (D) that went awry, The New York Times examines the phenomenon of his brand of “gonzo journalism or a conservative version of ‘Candid Camera’ ” and its key practitioners:  

Those methods took root on college campuses in the latter half of George W. Bush’s presidency, fostered by a group of men and women in their late teens and early 20s with a taste for showmanship and a shared sense of political alienation - a sort of political reverse image of the left-wing Yippies of the 1960s. They studied leftist activism of years past as their prototype, looking to the tactics of Saul Alinsky, the Chicago community organizer who laid the framework for grass-roots activism in the ’60s, as well as those of gay rights and even Communist groups.

They held “affirmative action” bake sales with prices set based on the age and race of the buyer, posed as donors to Planned Parenthood seeking to contribute to the abortion of African-American fetuses only, and held a mock “Love Thy Prisoner” campaign to find American homes for Guantánamo inmates. …

In the incident in New Orleans, several of the group’s central players came together. They had met through a small community of conservative college newspaper editors that is fostered by advocacy organizations supported by old Republican families like the Coorses and Scaifes.

One of those arrested was Stan Dai, 24, a former editor in chief of the irreverent GW Patriot at George Washington University, where he published an anti-feminist article lampooning the play “The Vagina Monologues.” His version was called “The Penis Monologues.”

Another was Mr. Basel, 24, the co-founder of a conservative publication at the University of Minnesota, Morris, that features headlines like “Third World Countries Need Sweatshops” and “I Hate Che Guevara T-Shirts.”

The fourth was Robert Flanagan, 24, who did not know the others before roughly two weeks ago, his lawyer said, when Mr. O’Keefe gave a speech for the Pelican Institute for Public Policy, a libertarian organization in New Orleans for which Mr. Flanagan works a few hours a week. Until then, Mr. Flanagan, a star athlete and son of a federal prosecutor, had not been known by friends to be particularly provocative in his conservatism, though he had been sharply critical of Ms. Landrieu on the institute’s blog.

And then there was Ben Wetmore, 28, who was not arrested but who allowed Mr. Dai, Mr. O’Keefe and Mr. Basel to stay at his house in New Orleans this month. The authorities have not indicated that Mr. Wetmore, a Loyola law student, was connected to the incident at Ms. Landrieu’s office, but he has nonetheless played a vital role in Mr. O’Keefe’s career, as well as that of Mr. Basel and other activists.

Editorial Note: Columnist Doug Giles - the father of O’Keefe’s ACORN partner, Hannah Giles – correctly notes that O’Keefe’s misadventure does not absolve ACORN of any wrongdoing. Also, The Times could have mentioned that O’Keefe and the other conservative pranksters have liberal counterparts in the Yes Men.

† Updates To Previous Posts (Obama Administration Christmas Bomber Missteps Worse Than You Think): In response to its bumbling performance in the Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab case, the National Counterterrorism Center has selected “more than three dozen of its most capable analysts from across its ranks to form what it calls pursuit teams to focus on threats from Yemen and other offshoots of Al Qaeda that could imperil the United States,” reports The New York Times:

“We have dedicated teams that don’t have any responsibility for producing intelligence, but simply for following up on these small leads,” Michael E. Leiter, the center’s director, told the House Homeland Security Committee this week in the latest of several recent appearances on Capitol Hill. …

The pursuit teams are just the beginning of an ambitious effort that intelligence officials say could potentially add several hundred additional analysts to the more than 200 specialists who work on terrorism and watch list duties now, officials said. Congress would need to approve financing for the additional hires. …

Terrorism and national security experts applauded the counterterrorism center’s decision to create the new analytical teams and start their training, but some expressed dismay that such an obvious job had not been created until now.

Let’s hope that these new teams of Columbos are operational, and not aspirational, before the next attempted terror attack.