. . . er, yes, I know that Michael Jackson died, I’m just trying to see whether I can hold off having to write about that. Though if I get any more e-mail requests, I guess my hand will be forced.

For now, though, I’d rather discuss the Clean Energy and Security Act, otherwise known as the Waxman-Markey bill after its leading Congressional sponsors, that was passed in the US House of Representatives yesterday by a narrow 219-212 vote. This is the legislation that would move the US towards a “cap and trade” approach to regulating greenhouse-gas emissions. One key to understanding the push for such a law is clearly the issue’s whole international aspect: the rest of the world rather expects the United States to embark on something of this sort, whether it is Europe that already is further ahead in its environmental legislation or it is China and India who are definitely behind, but looking on to see whether there will ultimately be American inaction that can justify their own.

That’s why it is good to see an article in the authoritative French newspaper Le Monde such as the one just written by Corine Lesnes. Obama launches his green revolution, she proclaims in the piece’s very title, which features at the top an oddly hagiographic photo of Obama standing in front of what seems to be an early-American wilderness mural, perhaps during a visit to the Department of the Interior. (more…)

The well-respected German opinion newspaper Die Zeit is now reporting that a spokesman for German Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel has announced that she is planning to visit President Obama in Washington on Thursday and Friday next week (25-26 June). The main items on the agenda are said to be coordinated preparation for the upcoming G8 summit in L’Aquila, Italy (8-10 July) and the Mideast peace process – oh, and yes, what is happening in Iran, as well. (more…)

While Benjamin Netanyahu heads to the White House later today for his first official meeting with President Obama, is anyone listening to the Israeli Armed Forces Radio? At least the ANP, the Netherlands national press agency, is listening, and it provides the information that enables the Algemeen Dagblad to report on what is going on under the radar back in the Middle East while the American and Israeli heads of government have their discussions.

Whether the Israeli Armed Forces Radio broadcast in question is an explicit advertisement or not is unclear, but its point is to announce the opening of registration to purchase one of twenty new houses in Maskiot, a Jewish settler colony in the occupied West Bank. In fact, as we learn from its very own Wikipedia article, Maskiot is so deep into the West Bank – it’s way over on the other side from Israel, right on the Jordan river, for Heaven’s sake – that past attempts to expand it have drawn the publicly-expressed ire of UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, the British government, and even George W. Bush’s Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice.

Where is the public anger now? Clearly this sort of thing, in addition to being a direct slap in the face to the Palestinian Authority, is tremendously counter-productive to the sort of two-state solution and peace negotiations which are the main elements of the desired American approach to achieving an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement. Does Netanyahu really remain unaware of this as he heads to meet with President Obama over precisely such measures, or is he just breathtakingly cynical?

After Barack Obama finished up his speech on Sunday to the tens of thousands present on Prague’s Castle (Hradčanské) Square, he decided to wade into the crowd a bit. In the process, one enthusiastic Czech got so close as to pat the head of the Most Powerful Man on Earth.

An article in the largest-circulation quality Czech daily, Mladá fronta dnes (I patted Obama on the head. He hugged me.), has the details about this character, as well as a couple of pictures of the incident in question so you can decide just how outraged you’d care to be. That guy’s name is Jaroslav Suchý (a fairly common Czech last-name; it means “dry”), and he’s no stranger to the Czech security service. But hold on, it’s not what you think: as the head of that organization, Lubomír Kvíčala, told MFD:

That person who lightly touched the president on his hair I know. We already encountered him a couple of times at previous visits of the American president Bush and at a visit by Mrs. [Condoleezzaa] Rice. He is just enthusiastic about such visits and loves them. He’s definitely not dangerous.

According to Suchý himself, he was waiting at the checkpoint offering access to Castle Square from midnight Saturday, i.e. seven hours before the gates were opened for the public, and other on-the-scene MFD reporters confirm that he was among the first to be admitted by police, which enabled him to rush up to grab a prime position up front (into what generally would be termed the “mosh pit” in a rock-concert context – here, it turned into the “press-the-flesh zone”). As one such reporter states, “[f]or a whole three hours he loudly let people in his vicinity know how he was looking forward to the speech.” And Suchý himself also told MFD that “although I don’t really speak English, I clapped at every one of Obama’s sentences. Despite the fact that I was mainly looking at the president rather than the [translated] sub-titles.”

The article goes on to note that, when Jaroslav Suchý is not tracking down and applauding high-ranking American officials, he is pursuing a case in the Czech courts seeking compensation for being forced to attend “special schools” (i.e. schools for the handicapped), which he claims he was forced into solely because of the color of his skin. Perhaps some of you, examining the article’s photos again, may think this is some sort of joke, but it likely is not: the Czech Republic does still have an ethnic-discrimination problem, although it is not directed against black people (who are exceedinly rare) but against the Romany, or “gypsies.” So apparently the authorities where Suchý grew up kept classifying him as a gypsy.

You likely missed it in the thick series of happenings and photo-ops that have flooded the world’s front pages since Barack Obama first took flight last Tuesday for London, but there was a bit of a mini-crisis brewing at the NATO summit (his next stop after the G20 meeting in London) even as he addressed all those German and French students in Strasbourg at that “town hall” meeting on Friday. It wasn’t very complicated: the current Danish prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen was lined up to succeed Jaap de Hoop Scheffer as NATO Secretary-General at the summit, but there was a serious monkey-wrench in the works: the top Turkish leaders did not want Rasmussen in that post, and they were ready to insist that he not get it and so exercise the effective veto they and every other one of NATO’s 28 members have on such a top position. (The Turkish complaints against him related to the late 2005/early 2006 Danish cartoons affair, plus a Kurdish-language TV station – “Roj TV” – that broadcasts in Denmark.) Things even reached the point that – horrors! – the news conference scheduled for 1:00 PM on Saturday afternoon did not happen until a good two-and-a-half hours later, which is when De Hoop Scheffer could finally appear on the stage shaking hands with his Danish successor.

As befitting its status as one of Denmark’s best-regarded daily newspapers, Berlingske Tidende has some good coverage of this affair (NATO’s declaration-of-confidence in Denmark), written by Ole Bang Nielsen. First off, Nielsen makes it clear just what this appointment means to the Danes themselves, namely a recognition that Denmark is no longer just a “footnote-nation and hesitant member of NATO,” as well as a personal vote of support to Rasmussen himself. To get there past the Turkish opposition, though, truly took a tremendous diplomatic full-court press – “the large European NATO lands finally threw in all their political ballast against Turkey,” as Nielsen writes. Breaking up that NATO meeting without having Rasmussen in place as the Secretary-General would have been a humiliation – especially for German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who basically had announced the day before that Rasmussen would be named – so those European countries did indeed throw in everything, including Turkey’s prospective EU membership. Yes, EU matters generally do not belong being linked to NATO issues (the memberships of the two organizations don’t match very exactly, anyway), but Nielsen writes that certain threats were made nonetheless against Turkey’s EU membership process should it continue to hold out against the Dane. It seems even that the EU enlargement commissioner (Olli Rehn, a Finn) was on-hand personally to utter authoritative remarks toward the Turks such as “This does not look good from a European perspective, if Turkey does not give way.” There you have it: ordinarily Rehn did not even belong there at the NATO meeting at all, since he is an EU official, and because Finland is not a member of NATO anyway. (more…)

If this is Saturday, and you’re the American president, then that countryside you see down below, outside of the windows of Air Force One, must be the Czech Republic. Yes, today Obama and entourage flies on to Prague, and Dan Bilefsky in the New York Times already has the details about how he has the tricky task before him of visiting a country’s capital while taking care to have very little to do with top leaders of the government there – and pulling all this off without seeming impolite or ungrateful for the hospitality. The first trick involves invoking a presidential desire for a night off in scenic Prague, to grab the chance for an intimate dinner with Michelle at a “secret location,” in order to avoid any extended encounter-over-a-meal with either Prime Minister Mirek Topolánek (who publicly labeled Obama’s domestic budget plans a “road to hell”* only a few days ago; is a rather stolid, apparatchik-type guy anyway; speaks little English – and, most vitally, is now but a “caretaker” prime minister after his government fell this past week) or President Václav Klaus (speaks excellent English, now is in whip-hand position to determine composition of the next Czech government – but who could also bring on an attack of extreme presidential indigestion, no matter how excellent the food served, with his outspoken and negative opinions about the EU and climate change; for more about this in English, from the Economist, see here). (more…)

Did you know that Barack Obama’s first visit to Europe as US President actually begins tonight? I didn’t know that, but that’s only one of the interesting facts you can pick up (if you read Dutch) from Frank Poosen’s preview of the president’s visit published today in the Flemish newspaper Het Nieuwsblad (The Obamas tear through Europe).

Yes, the US first couple (and the rest of their 500-person entourage) fly into London’s Stansted airport (misspelled in the article) sometime tonight, to be then helicoptered promptly to their hotel in London proper. Poosen adds that up to six helicopters will be taking off from Stansted at roughly the same time, each heading to London by a slightly-different route – it’s a helicopter shell-game designed to befuddle any terrorist stationed just outside the airport with an anti-aircraft missile, you see. (more…)

“Sssssshhhhhh – keep it down, will ya? That’s exactly what Rush Limbaugh together with just about the rest of the Republican Party have been loudly declaiming these past few weeks, and we all know that is hogwash. Who is this guy who is piling on this organized campaign of slander against the President?”

Actually, it’s Josef Joffe, one of the publishers of the prestigious German weekly commentary newspaper Die Zeit, who in a new article (title: “The Monster Budget”) calls Obama a “social democrat,” i.e. in the European style. OK, he actually doesn’t call Obama a “social democrat” directly, but instead writes about the “social-democratization” of America that he detects Obama is aiming for on the evidence of the Federal government budget that he just submitted to the Congress. His lede reads “Barack Obama’s proposed budget drives expenditures, debts, and taxes to new heights.” It all sounds like we still might prefer to keep Rush Limbaugh in the dark about this, don’t you think? (Do you remember if Rush understands any German?) (more…)

The big news the past week on the international relations front was President Obama’s “secret letter” he had hand-delivered to Russian president Medvedev last month. In it, he supposedly suggested – or at least hinted at – a possible deal whereby the US would stop the planned deployment of an anti-missile system with the radar installations in the Czech Republic and the actual anti-missile missiles in Poland, in return for Russia’s assistance in stopping the alleged drive by Iran to develop nuclear weapons.

Even if nothing ultimately comes of it, this move certainly denotes some new thinking being applied to both Russo-American and Iranian-American relations. Then again, what about the Czechs and the Poles? As is so rightly pointed out in that NYT article (the one I link to above), in those countries “leaders invested political capital in signing missile defense cooperation treaties with the United States despite domestic opposition.” (more…)

I’ve had this editorial in the Frankfurter Rundschau by Mario Müller (title: “Every man for himself”) held off to the side for a couple days until I could find the chance to address it adequately, because it reminds us of a simple but bald fact that we would all do well to remember: state aid to help the auto industry survive, or even an individual auto company, is precisely protectionism, plain and simple. So many of the heads of government circulating around the world today piously declaring “Protectionism! No indeed, we can’t allow that,” if they nonetheless are willing to extend financial support to their countries’ auto interests, are simply the usual sort of political hypocrite that we have all come to know rather too well.

Given that such pronouncements were apparently the main output coming out of the otherwise disappointing special EU summit last Sunday over the economic crisis, we probably need to include under that “hypocrite” rubric President Sarkozy of France. Chancellor Merkel of Germany potentially belongs there, too, depending on what she decides to do about Opel in particular, and decision time is coming very soon now that GM has indicated that that division will run out of money in a month. It probably would also include the leaders of some other EU members who themselves have more recently built up a thriving auto sector – like the Czech Republic and Slovakia – except that those governments simply don’t have the money to spend on any such thing. And sad to say, it could also include Barack Obama – again, depending on what he decides to do about the new requests for mega-money from GM and Chrysler.

They don’t like being hypocrites, of course, but from Obama on down the political impulse to supply some assistance to your national auto manufacturers is usually pretty overwhelming. So let’s follow along with Müller why that’s really not the thing to do. As he points out, blatant and ham-handed instruments of protection, like tariffs assessed at the incoming port or airport, while still prevalent, are no longer so much in vogue. Instead, governments (yes, even those within the EU, where it is supposed to be a completely open market) pursue their protectionism in more subtle ways, such as giving native companies certain tax breaks, or awarding subsidies – which is precisely the aid that the auto-makers from the US to France to Germany are asking for. Quite simply, this provides native firms with an unnatural advantage, enabling them to sell their wares for less and/or to gain a greater profit by doing so even though they probably are not the most-efficient producer. Meanwhile, of course, it’s the taxpayer who is paying for this dubious privilege of shifting production to a less-efficient producer.

Again, all of this will likely butter no parsnips when it comes to the political decisions whether to accede to the auto firms’ calls for help, as economically-distorting as such subsidies can be shown to be. It’s at least refreshing to be able to get such a public reminder of the point in the (on-line) pages of a major newspaper in a country whose economy is dominated by the auto industry to an even greater extent than it is in the US.

Just in case it might be of interest, here is the article on the Obamas’ choice of a White House dog from the Financial Times Deutschland. Yes, that’s right: the article in the Financial Times Deutschland about the Obamas’ dog. (It’s entitled “There will always be more dogs”.)

Actually, if you’re willing to concede that a serious business newspaper like this is supposed to be reporting about dogs in the first place, the article (by Anja Rützel) is faintly amusing. As we all know by now, the First Pet is to be a Portuguese water dog, but Ms. Rützel lightly casts doubt upon what she clearly regards as a somewhat weird choice: “A properly-trimmed water dog looks like he has wrapped a bed-side rug around himself and is wearing to the rear some very tight stockings.” Then again, such dogs apparently have webbed feet and have been known to save drowning people – is the White House planning to cut payroll by doing without a lifeguard for the swimming pool?

Ms. Rützel also briefly examines the names for the dog brought forth so far (and immediately rejected) by Michele Obama. She claims “Frank” has been hailed by the election committee of Germany’s governing SPD party (whose candidate for Chancellor in the elections this year will be Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier – get it?), but could ultimately prove problematic during international negotiation sessions at the White House. (“Heel, Frank!” the President might brusquely command.) As for “Moose,” she comes up with the (not-so-original) thought that this name might just tempt Sarah Palin to shoot the dog out of a helicopter.

Where did Obama’s political “honeymoon” go? I guess it comes down to the times being a little too serious for cutting much slack to any new presidential administration, especially one coming into office with so much committment to “change” and so many electoral promises to keep. And keep them he had better, or the Flemings (that’s the Dutch-speaking Belgians) will let him know about it; already their main daily, De Standaard has the headline up Obama breaks first electoral promise.

Now, to be sure, it does not seem to be the case that De Standaard has dispatched one or more of its reporters over to Washington to function as Flanders’ watchdog over the Obama administration for the rest of its term; newspapers around the world are trying to cut costs these days, not add to them. You’ve got to be smart in the news biz and get more out of less by leaning heavily on time-honored economic concepts like specialization and comparative advantage. So De Standaard relies mainly on the special website, called Politifact.com, that the St. Petersburg Times has set up to monitor (in great detail) Obama’s many electoral promises.

Sure enough, there is already problem about the speed with which President Obama is signing newly-passed bills from Congress into law. It’s not that he’s too slow; it’s that he’s too fast, since his “Sunlight Before Signing” promise entailed putting each bill on-line for five days before signing it, “giving the American public an opportunity to review and comment on the White House website.” Yet the very first bill he signed into law, the “Lilly Ledbetter Pay Equity Bill,” was dispatched from the president’s desk a mere two days after the Senate passed it on to him, and in any case it does not seem that its text was put on-line even for that period. And then the next, the SCHIP bill extending children’s public health insurance, he signed into law a mere couple of hours after it was passed by the Congress.

The Standaard article continues: “An Obama spokesman confirmed that Obama wants to bring more transparency into government with the so-called “Sunlight Before Signing” measure, but said he hoped the measure would be implemented soon.”

Even amid the general euphoria last Election Day at the gaining of America’s highest office by an African-American, there was still a sprinkle of rain on that parade. (Here at €S we are always on the look-out for the rain on the parade!) Do you remember? It was right on November 5, the day after, that Russian President Dmitri Medvedev offered his own form of congratulations by announcing that Russia intended to deploy short-range missiles (presumably nuclear-capable) to Kaliningrad, that little piece of Russia lying on the Baltic Sea, to the West of Lithuania – and just to the North of Poland, where the US still has signed a treaty paving the way for it to install an anti-missile system, controlled by radar itself stationed within the Czech Republic. Russia has always been sore about that anti-missile system, apparently fearing that it is aimed against itself some way and/or that the deployment would hinder her own capability to sway/intimidate her former satellite states in Eastern Europe, so that this deployment to the Kaliningrad enclave threatened to become the start of a Cold War-like missiles confrontation.

Now a somewhat more reassuring word comes from Germany’s paper-of-record, the FAZ: Russia stops rocket-deployment in Kaliningrad. The article cites the Russian news-agency Interfax as quoting a unnamed member of the Russian General Staff to the effect that this step was taken “since the new American government seemingly is distancing itself from forcing through the setting-up of parts of the planned anti-missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic.” (more…)

“I’m addicted to it,” President Obama reportedly told his interviewers on CNBC recently when they asked about his Blackberry. Still, could he be allowed to have it? The two presidents America has had so far during the Digital Age of e-mail and Internet – Clinton and Bush Jr. – famously had nothing to do while in office with e-mail and were never seen toting a mobile telephone. The concerns had to do both with the law (e.g. the obligation to preserve any written communications and the legal standing any messages might have) and with routine communications security.

On that latter point, at least, there might not be that much to worry about, according to a recent analysis in the German newsmagazine Focus (Blackberry security: The enemy in the telephone). The lede:

In contrast to his predecessors, US President Barack Obama may make use of a smartphone – but within strict limits. How insecure are Blackberry & Co.?

Not as insecure as you may fear, as it turns out, and that from German experience. As the article relates, back in June 2005 the auto-producer Audi decided to ban Blackberry use among its employees out of fears of industrial espionage by its competitors. The company was particularly concerned about the fact that all Blackberry e-mails are routed through the servers of RIM, the device’s Canadian manufacturer. But RIM was able to persuade Audi that this traffic was encrypted in such a way that even RIM itself could not break the code and read any messages – even if directed to do so by some government authority. Later, in response to a pronouncement by the German Office for Information Technology Security (in German, the BSI) that the Blackberry was too vulnerable for use by government officials who had to send secure communications, RIM managed to gain for its equipment a Common Criteria security certificate, basically meaning that a process of independent testing (presumably by the Standards Council of Canada) confirmed the Blackberry’s adherence to a very strict set of international security standards – strict enough, in fact, that Common Criteria certification was routinely recognized as good enough for any equipment to be allowed for German government use without further question. Late last year the prestigious German Fraunhofer [Research] Institute also was willing to certify the security of the Blackberry’s encryption, to a 24-million-year-before-cracking standard.

Alright, but what if the President loses his “Obamaberry”? (President Bush Jr. famously lost the watch off his wrist in an adoring crowd of Albanians, after all.) That’s also not really a problem; off-the-shelf commercial products are available today to mere-mortal users for powerfully encrypting the data on the machine, and no doubt US Government experts can take that at least one step further. (Plus, there is not supposed to be that much contact information on the machine in the first place, since it’s only supposed to be used for communication with engste Bekannte – “closest intimates.” Although I suppose Disney and various other youth-marketeers would love to get a direct line to Malia and Sasha.) The same considerations can be applied to the prospect of bugging, as well as spam and malware.

Heard the latest? Barack Obama actually is descended from Dutch ancestors! And that word comes from a French source, namely Libération, which a few days ago, at the time of the inauguration, came out with Batavian rumor: Is Barack Obama of Netherlands origin? (“Batavian” is simply a historical adjective meaning “Dutch.”) However, that Libération article does make reference to an article from last November in the Dutch (tabloid-quality) newspaper De Telegraaf (The Dutch roots of Obama), which itself further references an even-earlier article in De Volkskrant (of February, 2008) as well as another investigation into the subject on a Dutch history website.

Fine, but what’s the point? The point is this: Barack Obama’s great-grandfather might have been a Dutchman resident in Kenya. The surname “Obama” is supposedly not really that common there in the land of origin of Barack Obama Sr. Indeed, it rather seems quite close to “Obbema,” a typical surname from Friesland, which is a section of the Netherlands along the North coast that still has its own language (Frisian), a different history, and even a slightly-different culture. This small detail prompted the family-lineage-researcher Koen Verhoeven to go discover records of a certain Jelle Obbema, from Friesland, who sometime around 1870 went to seek his fortune in Kenya, and in fact made it big there in the peppermint trade. While making all this money, Jelle still found time to chase the native women, but, as all these accounts make plain, “he took his responsibility,” i.e. to support those children he sired and to give them his last name. One of these was a son named Sjoerd-Bark, in the Frisian custom of giving children double names (as in “Geert-Jan”). The thought is that this Sjoerd-Jan was later connected to Barack Obama Sr. – the similarity of their given names (“Bark” – “Barack”) is supposed to make that connection.

To my mind, it is there that this tale loses its credibility, since “Barack” is well-known to be derived from the Arabic root for “to bless” or “to be blessed.” (Compare the president of Egypt: Mubarak. And remember that the transmission of Arabic influence into Kenya would have come via Swahili, that common East African language – an official language in Kenya, along with English – which gleaned much of its vocabulary from Arabic.) Still, as these Dutch articles point out, Jelle Obbema and the relatives he left behind in Friesland were all impressive athletes, although this in the field of ice-skating rather than basketball. And then there is inscription to be found under the Obbema family coat-of-arms: Ja, wy kinne!, which naturally means “Yes we can!”

Yes We Can! Barack Hussein Obama is now 44th president of the United States!

Time to assess reactions to that historical event from over on this side of the Atlantic. I’m tempted just to see what the Netherlands press has to say, particularly because of the great cover on today’s editions of the local quality free paper, De Pers: The black Jesus has landed! (Careful with that link: it will download for you the PDF of the entire issue.) “And now Barack Obama, since yesterday the new boss of the world, must really get to work,” the headline continues. “He is being looked to for carrying out wonders for every Tom, Dick, and Harry.”

I like that sort of irreverent, tongue-in-cheek attitude (at least I think that’s what the De Pers editors intended there), but let’s briefly survey instead coverage from the French press, to which it seems I traditionally turn first in the wake of some significant global event. (more…)

We always like to go against the grain here at EuroSavant, so today – the historic day of Barack Obama’s inauguration as 44th president, note that coverage here of reactions to that event begins tomorrow – let’s take a look at an opinion piece from the German Frankfurter Rundschau, authored by Arno Widmanm, entitled Obama’s helplessness. Here’s the lede: “The historical event was the election. Once in office, the new president of the United States will be able to bring about less change [or Change, if you like] than many have dreamed about.”

Isn’t that what so many of us are worrying about even as we witness, each in our own way, the inauguration delirium now playing out in America’s capital city? That Obama: as Widmann is glad to put it, “The United States has in him one of the most intelligent, alert, and communication-gifted presidents in its history.” I mean, just go read his books, and compare them to other politicians’ tired, ghost-written literary output! (more…)

So now Israel has unilaterally decided to stop bombarding the Gaza Strip. Gee – why just now? Could it have anything to do with the inauguration of an entirely-new American administration on Tuesday? And could the timing of whole episode from the attacks’ very beginnings on 27 December be somehow connected to a desire to take advantage of the “hands-off” attitude of top American leaders while Israel still could?

For all the evident excitement about Inauguration Day, people need to stay on the alert on Monday, tomorrow: Pardon Day. That is the last day of George W. Bush presidential power, and so surely the day he will issue a set of shocking and unprincipled pardons to protect himself and his underlings from, among other things, war crimes charges. Isn’t this clear? Doing so at any point before would have spoiled the effect of (and probably increased the volume of flying shoes at) his rather pathetic “farewell tour” of self-justifying interviews and press conferences. So stay tuned.

Oh, and Obama has a fresh foreign policy crisis waiting for him as soon as the inauguration euphoria winds down. Yes, it’s Gaza too, but I’m referring more here to North Korea’s new “all-out confrontational posture” towards South Korea (the latter’s military is now on high alert) together with its claims to have procured enough plutonium for four or five nuclear weapons.

UPDATE: Well now, on the question of further pardons it looks like I was wrong!

I’d like to take up again the subject of the rather unconventional German governmental response – so far – to the surging economic troubles to be found in Germany as well as more widely, prompted as I am to do so by the reader response I’ve received. You might recall that we can summarize that response as “Times might be tough, but there’s no need for this government or any other to spend huge sums, go way into debt, or otherwise endanger the EU’s Stability Pact that is supposed to underpin the euro.” (But also remember that this unorthodox position seems to be held only at the German government’s top levels, with plenty of insistent calls to start spending coming from elsewhere, including lower-down in that same government.)

This whole question in its broader sense – which could be phrased, ¡¿Caramba!, what can we do to stop the onrushing Great Depression? – is put into sharp relief by a commentary from Thursday in the Financial Times by the historian Niall Ferguson* (in English of course: The age of obligation, h/t to Naked Capitalism). (more…)

They’re getting impatient out there in the outside world for Obama – real impatient. Last week’s attacks in Mumbai only made this situation worse, to the point that India’s crisis has somehow become Barack Obama’s crisis. This we read even in the normally-sober Financial Times Deutschland, in an article by Washington correspondent Sabine Muscat: “Evil prophecy for Obama.” The lede: “He is not yet president. And still the attacks in India are the first test of the foreign-policy man Barack Obama.”

In truth, this “Barack Obama’s first foreign policy test” has been a red-hot label looking for something to which to affix itself ever since he won the election, if not even before. For one thing, remember the remarks on the campaign-trail by Joe Biden – comments apparently not particularly welcomed by the Obama campaign – about how there surely would occur some international crisis early in the new administration, one deliberately engineered to test the new president’s resolve. As Muscat points out, this “evil prophecy” was also a line White House press spokesperson Dana Perino was pushing – for obvious partisan purpose – just before the election, and it was certainly part of John McCain’s own pitch, implicitly if not explicitly. In these early-transition days, then, it would not have taken much of an unpleasant nature, happening anywhere in the world, to turn into “Obama’s first foreign challenge,” with all eyes swiveling to Chicago to see what he intended to do about it. (more…)

The website Politico came out yesterday (fittingly, a Sunday) with an article noting that President-elect Obama has yet to attend church – any church – since he won the election. His two predecessors did manage to do that as they waited to take office – George W. even headed to services while the 2000 election results were completely up in the air in recounts and litigation, poor fellow – but Obama has instead chosen to spend his Sunday mornings at the gym.

A Dutch paper this morning picked up on this story, and naturally it was the Nederlands Dagblad, an explicitly Christian newspaper: Obama waits on going to church. (No sign of the story, though, on the website of that other Dutch Christian newspaper, the Reformatorisch Dagblad.) Their coverage (from the “foreign editor”) for the most part repeats that of Politico, although they also obliquely justify why it might be that the Obama’s have not yet found their new church-home, by mentioning that which church they might choose is currently the subject of feverish speculation equal to that which attended the choice of Sidwell Friends as their daughters’ new school. And they quote an unnamed Obama staff-member reassuring us that “The Obama family attaches much worth to religious experience in a church.”

Here’s something you’ll be glad to hear: the Netherlands stands ready to assist with the mooted closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay that the Obama transition team is reported to be working on. As reported in the Dutch Christian newspaper Nederlands Dagblad (“Help US close cell on Cuba”), Dutch Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen stated “I hope that the closing of Guantánamo Bay will be one of Obama’s first deeds. We want to actively support him with that.”

Great! So does that mean, for example, that the Netherlands will be willing to take in some of the 250-or-so prisoners who remain? You know, probably some of them are actually terroristic nasties, but nasties whom US authorities will nonetheless have problems ever prosecuting because of how some of the evidence against them was gained (i.e. by torture). So while it’s conceivable that about the only thing that can eventually be done is to set them free, quite often their native countries don’t really want to have them back.

Well . . . not so fast. The good Foreign Minister will first need to consult with his colleague, the Justice Minister: “I want to take a look with Hirsch Balin [that's the Dutch Justice Minister] how they can get a trial in accord with our norms and values.”

As long as we’re still covering the various reactions to Obama’s presidential victory of last week, let’s be sure not to miss the musings of Berlingske Tidende’s Poul Høi, who in his reporting and now in his own blog Amerikanske Tilstande (= “American Conditions”; here is the homepage), has had interesting things to say about the US – inspired by his on-the-scene reporting – for a number of years now. And in reaction to this historical election result he doesn’t come up short: his latest post is even entitled Obama and Sambo.

(Maybe I should have just stolen that title to make a more eye-catching heading for this blogpost, but I decided against it. By the way, the only other European columnist I can think of that I would want to watch specifically for any reaction to the election would be Agnès Giard, sex-blogger for France’s Libération, whom I have certainly covered before. But it seems politics generally lie outside of what she regards as her journalistic remit; the article she happened to post right after the election was actually entitled Declaration of love to the zombies. So there you have the link, although I’m not going to deal with that one, you’ll have to read the piece in French yourself. But no, rest assured that it has nothing to do with any politician, whether American or not.) (more…)

The ramifications of Obama’s electoral victory last Tuesday are still percolating through the European political consciousness, if the steady supply of commentary in the media there is any indication. We surely would not want to miss, for example, the just-issued commentary from L’Humanité, the organ of the PCF, the French Communist Party, which in its (web-)pages asks United States: Change of an Era? (more…)

For all the deluge of advice that the Obama transition team is receiving from every quarter, publicly and privately, about what the goals should be for his new administration, it’s obvious to all that addressing the precarious state of America’s economy has to be priority #1. (Yes, even over puppy selection.) The President-elect made that clear himself in his radio address yesterday, stating “I want to ensure that we hit the ground running on Jan. 20, because we don’t have a moment to lose.” Actually, maybe not even that: waiting all the way until next January 20 increasingly seems some sort of quaint constitutional anachronism in the face of what seems to be the accelerating decline in the American economy.

(As in, for example, Paul Krugman here: “Any way we can get current management at Treasury to take early retirement, and get the new guys in right away?” But remember that, until Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s second term in office, American presidents were in fact inaugurated on March 4 of the year following that in which they were elected. That four-month delay proved to be very dangerous a couple of times, most notably in 1861, when seven Southern states had seceded from the Union before Abraham Lincoln could take office, and in 1933, when FDR ascended to the presidency following a series of catastrophic bank-runs.)

For one thing, if they wait until next January 20 to do anything, General Motors may already be gone. That at least is the message from Jens Nymark in Denmark’s business newspaper Børsen: General Motors can be finished this year. (more…)

“[T]his is a major issue,” President-elect Barack Obama noted in his first post-election news conference yesterday. “I think it’s generated more interest on our Web site than just about anything.” He was speaking, of course, about the pressing personnel decision for his incoming administration: what sort of quadruped is to be appointed as First Dog? America’s allies clearly share his concern; it’s the subject of an article in no less than the Financial Times Deutschland (The animal for the president, by Anja Rützel). The lede: “Barack Obama promised his daughters a whelp. What that says about the new president and means for all of us.” (more…)

One of the occupational hazards of having just won the presidency, I suppose, is the tidal wave of advice, from parties near and far, that immediately crashes over you. Here’s a counselor who might make Barack Obama sit up and take notice, if he could ever hear word of what he has to say: yes, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of Iran. We learn about Mahmoud’s suggestions to Barack courtesy of the French press agency AFP, as published in an article in the French conservative newspaper Le Figaro: Iran: Obama should opt for pacifism.

These words of wisdom, obviously issued in reaction to Obama’s election, were actually conveyed through Ahmadinejad’s press spokesman, Ali-Akbar Javanfekr, speaking on al-Alam, an Iranian TV station. (Which is why Obama will never hear of them. By the way, in the article AFP incorrectly calls the TV station “Arabic”; if you’re curious, you can peruse its English-language website.) (more…)

It’s Obama! Let’s take a broad range of European editorial responses to his historic presidential victory and look at each briefly in turn – using what we could even call the Andrew Sullivan format, but with translation. (more…)

The excitement is mounting . . . in less than a day we should all know who the 44th President of the USA will be! That is, unless we come up against another vote-counting disaster such as occurred in the state of Florida back in 2000, Patrick Sabatier reminds us in his article for the French news-magazine Le Point: The four lessons of an historic campaign. Thanks for that, M. Sabatier, and unfortunately what you foresee could well come true, what with the unprecedented flood of voters expected to show up at the polls today, even after the similar throngs that flocked to the early-voting sites opened by some (but by no means all) states.

If we do get some sort of definitive result out of the day’s proceedings, Sabatier points out that it can only turn out one way, if you pay attention to the pollsters and other experts, namely a victory for Barack Obama. So why not go ahead and offer “four lessons” out of the American electoral campaign, as seen from a French perspective? Although, that said, Sabatier at the same time does take care to factor the possibility of a surprise McCain victory into his conclusions. (more…)

Tired of all the US election news? (“Obama, McCain, Obama, Palin, William Ayers, Rashid Khalidi . . .” and on and on.) Well, today is the day before Election Day 2008: here at EuroSavant I just can’t stop now – and you can be quite sure that I’ll be monitoring foreign coverage of the results later this week as well. Just be patient, all of this will soon pass . . .

In the meantime, you have the occasional foreign article about the US elections that you rather wish did not have to be there, like what we see today in the main Czech daily Mladá fronta dnes: You’ll be arrested at the polls, leaflets mislead American voters. The lede:

In the last hours before the presidential elections American voters are being flooded with dirty tricks. Misleading e-mails go to Americans, disquieting telephone calls occur, and people find under their doors slanderous pamphlets. Their purpose is to dissuade people from voting, to mislead and confuse them. A part of these tricks this year have a racist flavor due to Barack Obama’s dark skin.

The article (no by-line given) proceeds to give a pretty good list of the various don’t-get-out-the-vote schemes that have been uncovered so far; some of them I hadn’t even heard of yet. (more…)