Sceptic's choice

The American people have discovered, rather late in the day, that Barack Obama did not possess the wisdom of King Cnut. The story of Cnut is often retold wrongly – that he was attempting to control the tides, and failed. In fact, he was demonstrating to his excessively worshipful people that he did not have the power of  a God to control natural phenomena like the tides.

Obama wasn’t so modest, and had no qualms about excessive worship. The Wall Street Journal asks “What happened to Obama?”:

In short, the spell that Mr. Obama once cast—a spell so powerful that instead of ridiculing him when he boasted that he would cause “the oceans to stop rising and the planet to heal,” all of liberaldom fell into a delirious swoon—has now been broken by its traumatic realization that he is neither the “god” Newsweek in all seriousness declared him to be nor even a messianic deliverer.

Humility isn’t usually a strong point with people suffering from a Messiah complex. And WSJ’s answer:

He is still the same anti-American leftist he was before becoming our president, and it is this rather than inexperience or incompetence or weakness or stupidity that accounts for the richly deserved failure both at home and abroad of the policies stemming from that reprehensible cast of mind. (source)

Now Rick Perry has entered the race for Republican nomination, and unlike Obama, he won’t be making any attempt to control the weather:

Perry calls global warming “all one contrived phony mess that is falling apart under its own weight.” Unlike many of the other GOP presidential candidates, he hasn’t expressed concern about climate change in the past, so he won’t have to do any back-pedaling. Notorious climate denier realist [apologies, this is the Guardian, after all – Ed] Marc Morano is a big fan: “Based on climate views alone, anyone who is holding their nose voting for Mitt Romney because there’s no other viable candidate will now rejoice to have an option with Rick Perry.”

The Texas governor will announce his intentions in the early primary state of South Carolina on Saturday, then head to New Hampshire andIowa to rub elbows with all of the other aspiring commanders-in-chief. As a social and fiscal conservative, governor of a state that’s been adding jobs (even if they’re low-wage), and owner of a full head of lustrous hair, Perry is expected to swagger to the front of the pack in the contest for the Republican nomination.

Perry served as Al Gore’s Texas campaign chair in the 1988 presidential race, just before switching his party allegiance from Democrat to Republican, but conservatives don’t have to worry that Perry holds any residual affection for the former veep. “I’ve heard Al Gore talk about man-made global warming so much that I’m starting to think that his mouth is the leading source of all that supposedly deadly carbon dioxide,” Perry said in 2007. (source)

At least the American people will have the choice of a genuinely sceptical candidate in 2012. Hopefully, Australia will have the same in 2013 (or before).

Cheap politics

This environmental disaster could not have come at a better time for the Obama administration, desperate to push their economy-wrecking climate bill through the Senate, and he shamelessly hijacks the BP oil spill to lecture the American people on the evils of fossil fuels (despite the fact that cheap energy is what drives economic growth and prosperity – duh):

In his first Oval Office address, Obama compared the need to end the country’s “addiction to fossil fuels” to its emergency preparations for World War II and the mission to the moon. Hours after the government sharply increased its estimate of how much oil is flowing into the gulf, the president warned that risks will continue to rise because “we’re running out of places to drill on land and in shallow water.” He called for fast Senate action on an energy bill that has already passed the House.

“There are costs associated with this transition, and some believe we can’t afford those costs right now,” Obama said. “I say we can’t afford not to change how we produce and use energy, because the long-term costs to our economy, our national security and our environment are far greater.”

In other words, because of one spill (albeit a big one) we should take our economies back to the Dark Ages, right? I can just see people abandoning their SUVs on the roadside as we speak…

Read it here.

All going wrong

You wait ages for an Obama story, then two come along at once. The UK Telegraph reports on Obama’s woes in pursuing his deep green agenda. Not only is the cap-n-trade bill going nowhere, but the EPA’s endangerment finding (that labels the essential, harmless trace gas CO2 a “pollutant”) is being challenged in the courts:

President Barack Obama’s climate change policy is in crisis amid a barrage of US lawsuits challenging goverment directives and the defection of major corporate backers for his ambitious green programmes.

The legal challenges and splits in the US climate consensus follow revelations of major flaws in the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, which declared that global warming was no longer scientifically contestable.

Critics of America’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are now mounting a series of legal challenges to its so-called “endangerment finding” that greenhouse gases are a threat to human health.

That ruling, based in part on the IPCC’s work, gave the agency sweeping powers to force business to curb emissions under the Clean Air Act. An initial showdown is expected over rules on vehicle emissions.

Oil-rich Texas, the Lone Star home state of Mr Obama’s predecessor George W Bush, is mounting one of the most prominent challenges to the EPA, claiming new regulations will impose a crippling financial toll on agriculture and energy producers.

“With billions of dollars at stake, EPA outsourced the scientific basis for its greenhouse gas regulation to a scandal-plagued international organization that cannot be considered objective or trustworthy,” said Greg Abbott, Texas’s attorney general.

“Prominent climate scientists associated with the IPCC were engaged in an ongoing, orchestrated effort to violate freedom of information laws, exclude scientific research, and manipulate temperature data.

“In light of the parade of controversies and improper conduct that has been uncovered, we know that the IPCC cannot be relied upon for objective, unbiased science – so EPA should not rely upon it to reach a decision that will hurt small businesses, farmers, ranchers, and the larger Texas economy.”

Makes Penny Wong’s claim that there is a global trend towards greater climate action even more ludicrous.

Read it here.

Ex-Worst President

The party’s over for Obama. And how. Maybe it’s something to do with all spin and no substance (a bit like Kevin Rudd really), and promising to pay billions of US taxpayers money to third world countries to advance the cause of global socialism, er, “tackle climate change”:

At 9.20pm today, in Massachusetts, or 1.20pm on the Australian east coast, the era of Obamamania abruptly ended. The euphoria surrounding the elevation of Barack Obama to the American presidency was brought to a crashing end.

It didn’t even last a year.

Tomorrow is the first anniversary of Obama’s inauguration as President of the United States.

On the eve of that anniversary, the people of Massachusetts, the bluest of blue Democratic states, delivered a thunderous rejection of the Democratic Party and, by implication, the President.

In a special election to fill the seat vacated by the late Senator Ted Kennedy, the people of Massachusetts did something they had not done for more than 40 years: they elected a Republican to represent them in the Senate.

This was unimaginable one year ago, as Washington was gripped by euphoria over the charismatic Obama.

Shockingly, today’s election wasn’t even close.

With 2 million votes counted, a previously obscure Republican state Senator, Scott Brown, 50, defeated the Massachusetts Attorney-General, Martha Coakley, 56.

The margin was 52 per cent to 47 per cent, a resounding turnaround, given Massachusetts’ voting record.

The result is a political earthquake.

It sure is. And as I read on one of the blogs, Jimmy Carter is now celebrating that he is no longer the “worst ever US president in history.”

Read it here.