Tag Archives: president

Bowling for Cubberley (Free Music Inside!)

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Usually, it’s impossible to argue with people who make comparisons between the incumbent US administration and various past totalitarian systems, particularly when the argument turns to a comparison between George W Bush and the Austrian guy with the Charlie Chaplin moustache. Whatever you think of George W Bush and his administration – still a mystery to many people in the US as well as abroad – he’s no Hitler, and the US are still a largely liberal democracy – albeit a deeply divided and angst-ridden one with a progressively eroding system of common values.


A regular guy from Texas.Though I hope to the contrary, I believe the weeks following the US Presidential election will become a much bigger electoral and legal debacle than most commentators are willing to admit now. In the end, this election might well become a testament of the principal current American weakness – deep social and partisan divisions, if not outright hatred between the camps. American politics now appears to consist predominantly of conceptually empty labels – very soon even rituals of Patriotism may be exposed as nothing more than a band aid for a mentally and spiritually ailing nation.
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Anti-Americanism?

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2000 British readers of the Radio Times voted Homer Simpson for President. The cartoon character tops a list of several fictional TV characters, which UK tellly viewers would prefer as US president. According to the BBC, “The West Wing’s” “real” fictional US President, Josiah Bartlet, polled second, only slightly ahead of radio therapist Frasier (link via Pulpmovies blog).

While it is true that executing such a poll is utterly bizarre in itself, I must applaud those interviewed for assembling such a supreme cast for a fictional replay of the 2004 Presidential race. British humour at its best.

Naturally, the German ZDF television is not quite as subtle: The title of tonight’s feature about the President and the Senator was only slightly biased: “Cowboy vs. Gentleman.” Just another example of what Christoph Amend wrote about in last week’s “Die Zeit” (in German) – Fernsehweh (impossible to translate, the word means something like “it hurts to watch what is actually broadcast given our desire to watch something better” – true, German can be very concise at times).

Buttiglione on his way out?

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While most observers still expect a compromise between incoming Commission president Barroso and those groups in the EP which threatened to block his entire team over the Buttiglione row – Mr Barroso will meet with leading MEPs tomorrow -, according to EUPolitix.com’s press review, the Polish newspaper Rzeczpospolita reports that Rocco Buttiglione may “resign” today and be “replaced by Italy?s highly regarded foreign minister Franco Frattini.”

Update from EUPolitix:

Further pressure on Barroso to reshuffle his team came on Wednesday afternoon from parliament?s Greens who said Buttiglione was ?unacceptable? as a commissioner. One solution doing the rounds in parliament?s corridors late on Wednesday is for a three way swap of portfolios between the Italian, Dutch and French commissioners-designates. Buttiglione would take over the transport portfolio, Neelie Kroes would move to justice and Jacques Barrot would take on the competition dossier.

Update: After meeting with leading MEPs incoming commission president Barroso decided to take a chance with an unchanged commission line-up, including Mr Buttiglione. Without an apology, the latter once again regretted his comments that will now lead to a stand-off with the European Parliament on October 27. Even though Mr Barroso’s commission has backing from the center-right European People’s Party, Josep Borrell, the Parliament’s president said that with Socialist, Green and Liberal Parliamentary groups opposed it’s far from certain that Mr Barroso will win the vote. Given the institutional problems involved – as well as Mr Barroso’s offer to set up a cross-departmental working group on human rights – the latter Parliamentary parties haven’t ruled out voting for it yet – but remain highly critical. More here.
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Scary Reading.

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For all its amazing sensoric and analytical abilities, more often than not the human mind is simply overwhelmed with the world’s complexity, confused by its uncertainty. Philosophers have dreamed of an easy life without the pain inflicted by their insatiable urge to reflect, to question everything, to leave no stone unturned.

Of course, no philosopher is needed to understand that such a tendency is not necessarily helpful when it comes to making decisions. A good decision today is usually preferable to an optimal one at some unspecified time in the future. However, the opposite – confidence to decide appropriately that is not founded on facts – is at least as bad, and probably worse. Balancing reflection and decisiveness based on intuition or ideological determination is above all important for political leadership.

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It’s Deficit Time Again

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There’s a fair amount of talk again this week about the various government deficits and what to do with them. Earlier in the week the FT had a piece about the current state of play with the US deficit whilst the Economist is busy musing one more time over the ongoing saga of the EU growth and stability pact.

These two situations appear, on the surface, to be somewhat similar, but in reality it may be more interesting to consider how they differ.
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Peek Data

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It’s sometimes interesting to give some thought to the things we believe, and don’t believe, about people. For some George W Bush is one of the most ruthless US Presidents we have seen in years, for others he is apparently the perfect gentleman, playing exactly by the rule book:

Financial markets may be all ears on Thursday night for hints about August job growth from President Bush, but they will be listening in vain since he plans to purposely avoid an early peek……………

“While the president typically sees the jobs data the evening prior to its release, he will not receive the jobs numbers tonight, nor will any of the people who are working closely on his speech,” said White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan.

Instead, Bush will wait with everyone else until Friday to see the hotly anticipated news.

The US Labor Department sends the data, due out at 8:30 a.m. today (Washington time), to the president’s economic advisers the night before. Normally there is not much importance attached to this, but this time clearly there might have been. I didn’t see the speech, but from the reports I’ve read, there was no special mention of the jobs state of play. Also, interestingly, there seems to have been no special reaction in the financial markets to this absence: they clearly see George as a gentleman. Whatever the numbers finally are (and we will still have to wait till later today to actually see them) I’m sure everyone will read the sub-text the way they want to, although clearly glowing numbers (which I personally am not anticipating) would give the most knee-jerk Bush critics a rather harder time.

Rodrigo Rato: Wagging The Finger, Or Wagging The Dog?

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I have already posted on my own blog about what I see as the surreal consequences which might follow from this wish becoming a reality. If what I think happens next to the Spanish economy really does happen – and I have no doubt whatsoever that the housing bubble will crash one or other of these days – then the situation will be a bit like having Menem at the head of an IMFwhich is telling Argentina that they should have thought about the consequences before getting into all that trouble……..

My interest here today, however, is more the European dimension of this process. Firstly, if it is true, as the FT seems to contend, that the European candidature will carry the field, what does this tell us about the IMF? Secondly, maybe focussing on the IMF managing directorship is to miss the point. Maybe the real horse-trading is over future control at the ECB. In other words: will this be a case of wagging the finger, or wagging the dog?
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Eta And The Spanish Elections

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As someone who lives and works in Barcelona (capital of Catalonia, and formal definition in the eyes of the local nationalists of being Catalan), it is really rather frustrating to find that about the only time we make it to the European headlines (apart, of course, from when Bar?a wants to buy some world famous footballer like Beckham) is when one of the players in the greater-Spanish political arena – in this case Eta – wants to exploit some situation or other here to its own advantage. Outside of this context (and with, of course, the honourable exception of George Orwell) Catalonia is little heard of, and even less understood.
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Detente with Czech Communists?

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I’m mighty flattered that I’ve been promoted to “guest blogger extraordinaire” even though I’ve been silent the whole of this year so far (due mainly to illness). Sorry about that!

Well, here goes.

Take a look at this Czech press review from today, in which Prague daily Lidove Noviny reports that Miroslav Grebenicek, the Communist Party for over a decade, narrowly missed getting ousted from his position. (He was apparently told he could run for European Parliament if he stepped down.) This might sound like small beans to outsiders, and truth be told, viewed by itself, it is. But it’s one small piece of a much largers story…
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Klaus: Grumpy Old Man

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Jiri Pehe — once an advisor to Vaclav Havel, now an academic and a go-to man for international journalists seeking smart quotes about Czech politics — once pointed out to me that Czech president Vaclav Klaus is more anti-integration than just about every mainstream politician in Europe with the exception of one branch of the British Conservative Party. The only other guy who might approach him is Hungary’s nationalist noisemaker Viktor Orban, whose star was fading last I checked.

Yesterday’s Czech papers were awash with Klaus’s comment that he’d prefer to have no European constitution at all. He’s thus the first European head of state (but oddly, not an EU head of state) that has rejected the constitution. EuroSavant hits the nail on the head with this sentence: “I get the picture here of old grandpa over there sounding off in the corner, right when the rest of the family has gotten together to try to make a decision – he’s got some mighty strange views, and he’s sure to express them in his cranky way, but as long as you are polite and say ‘Yes, grandpa’ you can otherwise pretty much ignore him.” (Pragueblog expressed similar sentiments recently: The Czechs are dealing with Klaus the same way they dealt with the Communists. That is, let him have his special title and then ignore him.) But…
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