THE radio talkback host Rush Limbaugh has said he wants to see President Barack Obama fail, warning that the core free enterprise values of the nation are “under assault” and its very survival is at stake.

Limbaugh, who in the absence of a clear leader of the Republican Party is being championed by some as its intellectual voice, delivered an hour-long diatribe against the President and his policies at the Conservative Political Action committee forum in Washington.

“There are going to be more controls over what you can and can’t do, how you can and can’t do it, what you can and can’t drive, what you can and can’t say, where you can and can’t say it,”

Limbaugh’s take on the Obama budget, which includes tax rises for the wealthiest 5 per cent of Americans and an emissions trading scheme which will raise the cost of electricity to pay for health-care reforms and green energy projects, is helping to galvanise the Republicans into opposing key elements of it.

Eric Cantor, a leading congressional Republican, said the budget “obviously has raised a lot of concerns”.

He foreshadowed opposition to a second top-up $US410 billion spending bill now working its way through Congress.

“What we see in this budget, frankly, is an attempt, again, to try and stimulate the economy through government expenditure. And, you know, at best what that can do is redistribute wealth. It can’t create jobs; it can’t create wealth,”

The head of the White House Budget Office, Peter Orzag, hinted that the Administration might be prepared to use procedural tactics to ram through its health and energy proposals, by treating them as budget bills which require only a 50 per cent vote to pass instead of a 60 per cent vote to end a filibuster in the Senate.

Meanwhile the Obama Administration is gearing up for another week of difficult financial news, beginning with the likelihood that American International Group, the world’s biggest insurer, will seek a further $US30 billion in government capital when it reports a record quarterly loss of $US60 billion later this week. The company has already received $US150 billion in taxpayer funds, but is deemed too big to fail.

The chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, is due to give evidence on the budget outlook. There will also be a raft of figures released on unemployment statistics, consumer credit and spending.

Technorati Tags: barack obama, Ben Bernanke, Economy, eric cantor, Rush Limbaugh

FORGET the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. President Barack Obama may instead be called upon to use all his skills as a mediator to resolve the Israeli political conflict.

A week after elections that saw the Kadima party of the Foreign Minister, Tzipi Livni, win the most votes but Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party claim victory because right-wing parties won more votes overall, the country is waiting to see who will lead the next government.

The problem for Netanyahu is that if he forms a government with all the right-wing parties, it will appear so extreme that few international governments will want to deal with him.

It’s not hard to see why.

Netanyahu’s largest would-be coalition partner on the right is Avigdor Lieberman, the Soviet-born leader of Israel Our Home, who is under investigation for money laundering and tax fraud.

One of Lieberman’s main policies is to force Arabs born in Israel to swear an oath of loyalty to the state or face being stripped of their birthrights and expelled.

Another of Netanyahu’s would-be coalition partners is National Union, a party that wants Israeli Arabs expelled to places like Turkey and Venezuela.

The way Netanyahu sees things, Livni, and most of her party, are former members of Likud after all, so surely there is a way for the two of them to work out an agreement that sees him as prime minister and her as foreign minister?

Yet why should Livni join a coalition in which her party has the most seats, yet has her relegated to a second-string role?

For the moment, Livni is standing her ground, and insisting that she will not join a government under Netanyahu’s leadership.

The only compromise that Livni will accept is an arrangement that sees establishment of a rotation agreement that would see the prime ministership shared between herself and Netanyahu.

Hence the stalemate which now confronts the President, Shimon Peres, who must decide by the end of the week which political leader he will formally ask to form a government.

Enter Obama.

According to a report in yesterday’s Jerusalem Post, the US President is being mooted as the man who could sit Netanyahu and Livni down in a room and get them to shake hands.

The report suggests that Obama is keen to play a behind-the-scenes role to ensure that a unity government is formed.

If and when Israelis will see a new government sworn in remains an open question.

In the meantime, Ehud Olmert, another man under a corruption cloud who announced his resignation as Prime Minister six months ago, continues to lead.

Technorati Tags: barack obama, Benjamin Netanyahu, Tzipi Livni

THE US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, has cast doubt on a Bush administration claim that North Korea had a clandestine program to enrich uranium, and has said she would focus on getting the Pyongyang Government to give up its stock of weapons-grade plutonium.

“There is a debate within the intelligence community as to exactly the extent of the highly enriched uranium program,” Mrs Clinton told reporters traveling with her to Asia on her first voyage as the chief US diplomat.

Mrs Clinton also believed the Bush administration’s decision to walk away from an agreement negotiated during her husband’s administration – the 1994 Agreed Framework – helped create the crisis over North Korea’s nuclear weapons.

“The Agreed Framework was torn up on the basis of the concerns about the highly enriched uranium program,” Mrs Clinton said.

“There is no debate that, once the Agreed Framework was torn up, the North Koreans began to reprocess plutonium with a vengeance because all bets were off. The result is they now have nuclear weapons, which they did not have before.”

Plutonium and uranium offer different ways to make a nuclear weapon.

North Korea’s plutonium-based reactor at Yongbyon was frozen under the 1994 deal, though there were suspicions that its scientists had extracted enough plutonium for one or two weapons. When the Agreed Framework collapsed in 2002, North Korea restarted the reactor and obtained enough weapons-grade material for at least a half-dozen weapons.

The stalled talks over the North Korean program will be a priority topic for discussions Mrs Clinton will have in Tokyo, Seoul and Beijing; she is also travelling to Jakarta during her week abroad.

“My goal is the denuclearisation of North Korea,” Mrs Clinton said.

“That means a verifiably complete accounting of whatever programs they have and the removal of the reprocessed plutonium that they were able to achieve because they were given the opportunity to do so.”

When North Korea moved forward in ending the program, the US would be open to working with them, she said.

Her comments came as the country marked the birthday of its leader, Kim Jong-il, with praise for its “great father”, renewed threats against South Korea and an apparent vow to go ahead with a rocket launch.

There is international concern that the North is preparing to test its longest-range missile. Yesterday North Korea indicated it would proceed with a rocket launch as part of what it called a space program, echoing the explanation it gave in 1998 when test-firing a long-range missile.

Technorati Tags: george w. bush, hillary clinton, North Korea, uranium claims

On his third day in office, President Barack Obama has focused on the Middle East, calling on Israel to open its borders with Gaza to allow humanitarian aid and commerce.

And he has appointed one of America’s most talented negotiators to broker lasting peace in the troubled region.

Mr Obama also announced plans to close the contentious detention centre at Guantanamo Bay within 12 months and to ban “enhanced interrogation” used by the CIA in the past, branding it torture and contrary to American values.

The announcements signal – particularly to the Arab world – that the new administration will pursue vigorous diplomatic engagement and is prepared to realise America’s faults when it comes to meeting international obligations. The changes mark a return to what Mr Obama terms “core values”.

The new Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, arrived at her department to rousing applause and told staff she would welcome debate and ideas.

“The President is committed to making diplomacy and development the partners in our foreign policy, along with defence. And we must be smarter about how we exercise our power,”

The most tangible evidence of the new approach was in statements on Gaza from Mr Obama, who offered an even-handed assessment of the conflict.

Under the former president George Bush, the US strongly supported the Israeli actions in Gaza and blamed Hamas for bringing suffering on its own people. The US was also a reluctant supporter of ceasefire talks.

But Mr Obama said:

“Just as the terror of rocket fire aimed at innocent Israelis is intolerable, so too is a future without hope for the Palestinians.”

“I was deeply concerned by the loss of Palestinian and Israeli life in recent days, and by the substantial suffering and humanitarian needs in Gaza. Our hearts go out to Palestinian civilians who are in need of immediate food, clean water and basic medical care, and who’ve faced suffocating poverty for far too long.”

“Now we must extend a hand of opportunity to those who seek peace. As part of a lasting ceasefire, Gaza’s border crossings should be open to allow the flow of aid and commerce, with an appropriate monitoring regime with the international and Palestinian Authority participating.”

Mr Obama said the US would “actively and aggressively” seek a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

“The outline for a durable ceasefire is clear: Hamas must end its rocket fire; Israel will complete the withdrawal of its forces from Gaza; the US and our partners will support a credible anti-smuggling and interdiction regime, so that Hamas cannot re-arm,”

Technorati Tags: barack obama, gaza, Guantanamo Bay, hillary clinton, Microsoft, Middle East

THE US president-elect, Barack Obama, has confirmed that he will pursue a clear policy of engagement with Iran and press immediately for peace in the Middle East.

Speaking on the ABC News television program This Week, Mr Obama said he wanted to work directly with Iran – a country whose president has called for Israel’s destruction – to improve relations and halt a nuclear program that Tehran describes as peaceful, but the West believes is not.

“We are going to have to take a new approach,” he told the program’s host, George Stephanopoulos, in his first interview since arriving in Washington.

“My belief is that engagement is the place to start.”

Mr Obama said he wanted to adopt “a new emphasis on respect and a new willingness on being willing to talk” to the Iranians, while making it clear “that we also have certain expectations”.

The remarks suggest a clear departure from the often pointed and deprecatory speech that has prevailed between the Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the US President, George Bush.

The New York Times reported on Sunday that Mr Bush had told the Israelis last year he had authorised covert action intended to sabotage Iran’s suspected effort to develop nuclear weapons.

Mr Obama also softened his pledge to close the US’s controversial prison at Guantanamo Bay within the first 100 days of his administration, saying it was proving a more complex task than he had thought.

As next Tuesday’s inauguration approaches, Mr Obama has scaled back some of the ambitious time frames he set himself during the election campaign and immediately after winning the election in November.

The withdrawal of troops from Iraq within 16 months may be adjusted depending on advice from the generals; the economic stimulus package that he hoped to sign on inauguration day is now likely to take until mid-February; and the timetable on closing Guantanamo is likely to be more protracted.

Washington will be pre-occupied this week with two important issues: the economy and the confirmation hearings for Mr Obama’s cabinet nominees.

Hillary Clinton’s hearing, on Tuesday, is expected to be straightforward because she has been extensively vetted in the past and because she is a senator.

But not all the hearings are likely to go as easily. Republican senators such as Arlen Specter, the party’s highest-ranking member on the judiciary committee, have voiced objections over Mr Obama’s choice for attorney-general, Eric Holder.

Mr Holder, a former undersecretary in the Attorney-General’s Department, is under fire over his role in the pardon by the former president Bill Clinton of the millionaire Marc Rich, often cited as one of the most egregious uses of such pardons.

Mr Holder has admitted it was a mistake to support the pardon, but Mr Obama is under pressure because he has promised to ensure the Justice Department’s integrity is restored, and some Republicans see Mr Holder as a partisan figure.

There have also been concerns expressed about Leon Panetta, Mr Obama’s choice for director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Several senators, including some Democrats, have expressed concern about his lack of intelligence experience.

Mr Panetta was chief of staff to president Clinton and would have been part of White House security briefings, but has no direct intelligence experience in the agency or the military.

Mr Bush is also expected to ask Congress this week to release the second $US350 billion of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, after consultations with the Obama economic team. It is likely to include funds to help small business and to assist directly victims of foreclosure.

But many in Congress, Democrats and Republicans alike, are angry at the lack of accountability for the first $US350 billion, which was used to help the big banks.

Technorati Tags: barack obama, iran, iraq

THE countdown clocks that George Bush’s chief of staff distributed 990 days ago are still ticking. His advisers tallied their remaining time last week and calculated fewer than 300 hours to go.

Cardboard cartons are stacked in the West Wing as files are carefully catalogued for the archives. By Friday, the last official work day of the Bush White House, all but the most senior officials will have turned in their government-issued BlackBerrys and badges.

This is what Mr Bush is calling the season of “the lasts”.

But while life inside the White House may be winding down, the legacy-building is gearing up. The White House website features an extensive recitation of Mr Bush’s “highlights and accomplishments”, including a document titled “One hundred things Americans may not know about the Bush Administration record”. First on the list is “Kept America safe”.

Mr Bush devoted his last public policy address, delivered in Philadelphia on Thursday, to his No Child Left Behind education legislation, one of his few bipartisan achievements. It was no accident that the civil rights activist the Reverend Al Sharpton was among the guests, a not-too-subtle reminder, as Mr Bush said, that “Al and I have found common ground”.

On Saturday there was another last: Mr Bush’s last flight aboard Air Force One, a trip to Norfolk for the commissioning of the George H. W. Bush, an aircraft carrier named after his father. It was a sentimental family affair.

The elder Bush, 84, who walked slowly with a cane as he, his son and their wives stepped off the presidential helicopter and onto the ship’s flight deck, told Fox News that he regarded the ceremony as “the last big thing in my life”.

The younger Bush used his remarks to pay tribute to “the best father anyone could ever ask for”. For the 43rd president, it was a chance to remind Americans of his ties to the 41st. “It’s a series of Auld Lang Syne moments, of gathering together friends and allies, and occasionally adversaries, to celebrate the special good moments of the administration,” said Kenneth Duberstein, who was president Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff. “It is done by every president as he heads towards the finish line.”

Technorati Tags: george w. bush, great economic disaster since the Great Depression, legacy

We like our failed presidents to be Shakespearean, or at least large enough to inspire Oscar-worthy performances from magnificent tragedians. So here, too, George Bush has let us down. He is not a memorable villain so much as a sometimes affable second banana whom Will Ferrell can nail without breaking a sweat. He is smaller than life.

The last NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll on Bush’s presidency found that 79 per cent of Americans will not miss him. He is being forgotten already, even if he’s not yet gone. You start to pity him until you remember how vast the wreckage is, stretching from the Middle East to Wall Street to Main Street and even into the heavens, which have been a safe haven for toxins under his passive stewardship.

The one indisputable ability of his White House was to create and sell propaganda both to the public and the press. Now that bag of tricks is also empty. In what was intended as a farewell victory lap to show off Iraq’s improved post-surge security, Bush was reduced to ducking shoes.

Iraq burned, New Orleans flooded, and Bush remained oblivious to each and every pratfall on his watch. Americans essentially stopped listening to him after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, but he still doesn’t grasp the finality of their defection.

Bush is equally blind to the collapse of his propaganda machinery. Almost poignantly, he keeps trying to hawk his goods in these final days. Though no one is listening, he has given more exit interviews than either Clinton or Reagan. Along with old cronies like Karl Rove, he has embarked on a Bush “legacy project”, as Stephen Hayes of The Weekly Standard described it on CNN.

To this end, Rove has repeated a stunt he first fed to the press two years ago: claiming that he and Bush have an annual book-reading contest, with Bush chalking up as many as 95 books a year, by authors as high-falutin’ as Camus. This hagiographic portrait of Bush the Egghead might be easier to buy were the former national security official Richard Clarke not quoted in the new Vanity Fair saying that both Condoleezza Rice and her deputy, Stephen Hadley, had instructed him early on to keep his memos short as the President is “not a big reader”.

Another, far more elaborate example of legacy spin is on the White House website: a booklet recounting “highlights” of the administration’s “accomplishments and results”. With big type, much white space and child-like trivia boxes titled “Did You Know?”, its 52 pages are the literary correlative to “Mission Accomplished”.

Bush kept America safe (provided his presidency began September 12, 2001). He gave it record economic growth (provided his presidency ended December 2007). He vanquished the leading al-Qaeda terrorists (if you don’t count bin Laden and al-Zawahri). He gave Afghanistan a thriving “market economy” (if you count its skyrocketing opium trade) and a “democratically elected president” (of one of the world’s most corrupt governments). He supported elections in Pakistan (after propping up Pervez Musharraf past the point of no return). He “led the world in providing food aid and natural disaster relief” (if you leave out emergency chief Michael “Brownie” Brown and Katrina).

But the brazenness of Bush’s alternative-reality history is itself revealing. The audacity of its hype helps clear up the mystery of how someone so slight could inflict so much damage. So do his many exit interviews.

The man who emerges is a narcissist with no self-awareness whatsoever. It’s that arrogance that allowed him to tune out even the most calamitous of realities, freeing him to compound them without missing a step. The President who famously couldn’t name a single mistake of his presidency at a press conference in 2004 still can’t.

He can, however, blame everyone else. Asked if he feels any responsibility for the economic meltdown, Bush says: “People will realise a lot of the decisions that were made on Wall Street took place over a decade or so before I arrived.” Asked if the 2008 election was a repudiation of his administration, he says: “It was a repudiation of Republicans.”

“The attacks of September 11 came out of nowhere,” he said in another interview, as if he hadn’t ignored frantic intelligence warnings that summer of an al-Qaeda attack. But it was an “intelligence failure”, not his relentless invocation of patently fictitious “mushroom clouds”, that sped us into Iraq.

The crowning personality tic revealed by Bush’s final propaganda push is his bottomless capacity for self-pity. “I was a wartime president, and war is very exhausting,” he told C-Span. “The president ends up carrying a lot of people’s grief in his soul.”

With this level of self-regard, it’s no wonder that Bush could remain undeterred as he drove the country off a cliff. Bush failed because, in the end, it was all about him.

The New York Times

Technorati Tags: economic crisis, george w. bush, hurricane Katrina disaster, Iraq war, Middle East

Leaders from the world’s biggest economic powers known as Group of Twenty (G20) gathered in Washington today for a crisis summit to reshape the global financial order as recession spreads to a growing number of countries.

US President George Bush was hosting more than 20 leaders from the world’s richest nations and emerging economic powerhouses, including Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, at a working dinner at the White House followed by formal talks tomorrow.

George Bush appeared somewhat standoffish as he greeted Prime Minister Kevin Rudd at a G20 working dinner at the White House.

It was the first time the pair have met in person since the controversial leaking of a phone conversation between the men last month.

The normally gregarious president gave Mr Rudd a very business-like greeting at the entry to the White House.

While other world leaders got big smiles and pats on the back from Mr Bush, the Australian prime minister had to make do with a brief handshake and a relatively stony face from the president as the pair posed for photographers and TV crews.

The leak controversy centres on a claim in The Australian newspaper on October 25 that the outgoing US president asked Mr Rudd: “What’s the G20?”, an allegation since denied by both Canberra and Washington.

Adding to the intrigue, the editor-in-chief of The Australian, Chris Mitchell, was said to have been at a dinner party at the prime minister’s Sydney residence, Kirribilli House, on the night in question.

Over recent days, Mr Rudd has repeatedly refused to answer questions about whether he or anyone in his office had leaked the information to the newspaper.

Though the US leader faces mounting calls from Europe, Russia and other emerging nations to increase financial market control, Bush’s term ends on January 20 and he cannot make firm commitments for president-elect Barack Obama.

While Obama himself was not attending the summit, former secretary of state Madeleine Albright and an ex-Republican congressman were using the opportunity to pursue contacts on his behalf with foreign leaders, finance ministers and top bureaucrats.

While the crisis began in the US housing market, it has triggered plunges in global stock markets and mass lay-offs as the financial sector struggles to stay afloat, swamped with subprime mortgages turned sour.

Technorati Tags: bush, economic summit, G20, Kevin Rudd

There are challenges ahead for Obama.  
After losing 1 million jobs this year, another 260,000 evaporated in October, with unemployment at a 14-year high in America.

The backbone of America’s industrial might, Ford and General Motors, is on the brink. The slowdown is accelerating and has not yet hit the bottom.

Christmas looks bleak.

In his first press conference since winning the trust of the American people, Barack Obama wanted to project firm engagement and determination, and he succeeded. Flanked by his vice-president, Joe Biden, and his top economic advisers, including former cabinet secretaries and CEOs from the old and new economies, Mr Obama was clear: he would “confront this economic crisis head on” and “take all necessary steps” to get America moving again.

Mr Obama’s face, tightly drawn after non-stop campaigning and no pause to properly celebrate his historic victory as the first African-American to be elected president, betrayed the intensity of the challenges ahead.

Mr Obama was undaunted.

“I do not underestimate the enormity of the task ahead … America is a strong and resilient country. And I know we will succeed if we put aside partisanship and politics and work together as one nation. That’s what I intend to do.”

This is what the American people wanted and needed to hear, and Wall Street, too, with the Dow up solidly after digesting Mr Obama’s performance.

Obama conveyed that he will be ready on day one of his time as President.

He was wary about the cheeky congratulations from Iran’s leader and did not spill any national security beans to which he is now privy.
He has been reading Lincoln, talking to the former presidents and engaging in extensive canine research with his daughters.

And then there was a flash of his smile, a wave, and a desire to keep moving.

Technorati Tags: barack obama, economic crisis

US President George Bush, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso have agreed to a series of summits with world leaders on the global financial crisis.

The first summit is to be held in the United States “soon after the US elections” on November 4, read a joint statement after the trio met at Camp David in Maryland today to discuss the world crisis.

The leaders will “review progress being made to address the current crisis and to seek agreement on principles of reform needed to avoid a repetition and assure global prosperity in the future”, the statement read.

Later summits “would be designed to implement agreement on specific steps to be taken to meet those principles”, the statement read.

Sarkozy – whose country currently holds the rotating EU presidency – and Barroso arrived today for a three-hour meeting with Bush at the president’s retreat at Camp David, outside the US capital.

The European leaders are seeking to overhaul the Bretton Woods system that has governed international finance since the end of World War II, and launch a new system.

The first of the summits will likely be held in November, White House spokesman Tony Fratto said, without giving a date.

According to the joint statement, the three leaders “had a very positive discussion” about continuing to coordinate steps needed to solve the crisis.
“We are in this crisis together,” Bush said when he welcomed the Europeans, detailing steps that have been taken to bolster lending institutions around the world. “These are historic measures suited to our system which I believe will work,” Bush said.

Ban has proposed holding talks at the UN secretariat in New York, saying that would “lend universal legitimacy to this endeavour and demonstrate a collective will to face this serious global challenge”.

Bush administration officials seem less impassioned about systemic reform and some kind of global market oversight than Sarkozy and the Europeans.

The president has barely begun the long route of US systemic reform that, in any case, will fall upon his successor in the White House in January 2009.

“As we make the regulatory and institutional changes necessary to avoid a repeat of this crisis,” Bush told Sarkozy and Barroso in Maryland, “it is essential that we preserve the foundations of democratic capitalism – the commitment to free markets, free enterprise and free trade”.

Technorati Tags: crisis summit, george bush, Jose Manuel Barroso, Nicolas Sarkozy