Sarkozy and Netanyahu will probably not be exchanging Xmas cards then

Just when you think it couldn't get any worse for the French president it does.

Nicolas Sarkozy has been caught calling Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a "liar" in a private conversation with President Obama overheard by journalists.

It came after the two leaders appeared together at a news conference during a G20 summit meeting in Cannes last Thursday, they retired to a room for what they thought was a private conversation.

The report on this website says that Obama chided Mr. Sarkozy for not warning him that France would vote to admit the Palestinians into UNESCO.

The two men began discussing the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

“I cannot stand him,” Mr. Sarkozy was quoted as saying. “He is a liar.”

Mr. Obama is reported to have replied, “You’re fed up with him, but I have to deal with him every day!”

Christie drops out-Does that leave the door open for Romney

Procrastinating politicians has been keeping a watchful eye on the Republican nominee race across the pond.

The news overnight is that New Jersey Governor,Chris Christie has decided he won't be running leaving the door wide open for former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney is what appears to be a straight fight with foot in the mouth candidate Rick Perry.

According to the Wall Street Journal

Mr. Christie's announcement dashed the hopes of a small legion of donors, pundits and leading figures in the Republican Party who had argued that the governor, known as a blunt-talking spending hawk, would draw in moderate voters and push the GOP fiscal agenda in Washington. Some of those backers said they feared the existing candidates hadn't shown they have wide enough appeal to beat President Barack Obama next year.

Recent days have seen Romney leap into an early lead with the consensus being that the more people hear Perry speak,the less they like him.

The weekend's gaffe over sending sending troops to Mexico certainly didn't help but whilst polls show that Romney could give Obama a fight next November,he has yet to win over part of the GOP elite and this article says

While Romney’s differences with the Tea Party are well known, the Christie clamor showed how some Republican elders want a candidate with economic credentials who can tap into the emotions of the electorate in a way the cool, buttoned-down Romney cannot.

Obama's damp squib on Palestine

There is a great piece in this morning's Indy by one of,in my opinion anyway,the best authorities on the Middle East Robert Fisk.

His attack on Barack Obama's handling of the Palestinian request for nationhood is quite brilliant.

Here are a couple of passages

A Martian listening to this speech would think that the Palestinians were occupying Israel rather than the other way round. No mention of Israeli occupation, no mention of refugees, or the right of return or of the theft of Arab Palestinian land by the Israeli government against all international law. But plenty of laments for the besieged people of Israel, rockets fired at their houses, suicide bombs – Palestinian sins, of course, but no reference to the carnage of Gaza, the massive death toll of Palestinians – and even the historical persecution of the Jewish people and the Holocaust.

In fact he quotes another writer Yael Sternhell

"The limp, unimaginative speech that US President Barack Obama delivered at the United Nations... reflects how helpless the American President is in the face of Middle East realities,

As Palestine prepares to hand in its formal request for UN recognition in just a few hours when President Mahmoud Abbas will deliver his historic address to the UN,the past few days have shown just have divided the world is on this issue.

America,as is usual,is standing firmly behind Israel and will use the US veto to block the Palestinian move at the security council and has been working overtime to discourage the application.

Britain and Europe however seem slowly to be warming to the idea.Both David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy have made conciliatory comments and William Hague has been warned that Britain’s improved status in the Middle East could be compromised if Britain takes Israel’s side at the UN.

Time for Obama to shrug off 2009

It must be a first for a State of Union address to refer to root canal surgery but Barack Obama managed it last night.

Talking of the banking rescue he believed it was as popular as a visit to the dentist but said that the country had little or no choice.

Post crisis,the President told his audience that creating jobs must be the nation's number one focus.

Certainly 2009 has not been the year that Obama hit the ground running.Partly the agenda was already set out in the previous year's banking crisis and Afghanistan policy.

Obama though made it clear that he would not be cowed by Washington’s politics, his own mistakes, or the Massachusetts election into giving up on health care reform.

That must be good news for his supporters and all the world will be hoping that 2010 is a more constructive year

Dear Mr President

An open letter to Barack Obama from the writer PJ O'Rourke

In your conduct of foreign policy, I had expected you to be wrong. I hadn’t expected you to be a self-righteous bumbler, lecturing humanity on morals while possessing no clear moral vision of your own. You are the kind of thinker who outsmarts no one but himself, by turns too skeptical and too credulous, too permissive and too controlling, too understanding and too obtuse.

A Democrat shocker

The overnight news from Massachusetts comes as no surprise to watchers of American politics with the Democrats losing the Senate seat formerly held by Ted Kennedy.

Exactly a year after his inauguration,it seems the voters are giving a thumbs down to the Obama regime.

More importantly the Democratic majority on the Senate is washed away putting in jeopardy any legislation deemed too controversial by the conservative classes including health care.

Scott Brown's victory over Democrat Martha Coakley is a devastating blow given the state attorney general, had a double-digit lead in polls just weeks ago and that Barack Obama had personally campaigned for her.

Next up is November's congressional elections and a repeat of this result could wipe out the Democrats hold on Congress leaving Obama a lame duck president for his final two years in office.

Another quote of the day

Whilst Douglas Alexander will make quote of the day on this side of the pond,Andrew Sullivan may have found quote of the day on the other side

A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee," - Bill Clinton, to Teddy Kennedy, referring to Barack Obama, while appealing to Kennedy to endorse Hillary for president in 2008.

A quite appropriate cover

After this morning's announcement of the winner of the Nobel Peace prize



Mehdi Hasan's article is also worth a read and he claims that

there is the pattern of presidential candidates railing against the incumbent's record, only to find themselves sympathising with their predecessor's predicament and policies once they have taken his place

According to Mehdi

1.On health, he has proposed reforming the system of care that leaves 46 million Americans uninsured, but has retreated at the first sign of trouble, backing down on the "public option" - a government-run rival insurance plan -

2.On climate change-he has failed to persuade Congress to take substantive action on emissions and has yet to pledge significant financial support for developing countries to help them cope with the coming climate crisis

3.The multibillion-dollar bank bailout, approved by Bush, has simply been continued by Obama in the same vein

4.his tax plans have done little to advance even modest social-democratic goals

5.On Guantanamo bay according to the Columbia University law professor Scott Horton, force-feeding operations have continued at the camp, and are apparently administered with "such violence and brutality" that one prisoner has died.

6.In Afghanistan, the US is increasing its capacity to imprison people by expanding facilities at bases such as Bagram, where human rights groups have documented many incidents of torture and several unexplained deaths in custody.

What are the Nobel committee up to

I was fairly astounded when I saw the news that Barack Obama has won the Novel Peace prize this morning.

Nothing against him but exactly what has he done to promote peace in 2009.

I guess that the award suggests that the committee are jumping on the Obama bandwagon somewhat and could be accused of looking for a poster boy in this image dominated age taht we live in.

Benedict Brogan agrees

The whole busines of a bunch of Scandinavian worthies doling out the profits of a long-gone dynamite maker’s fortune has always smacked of the worst sort of self-satisfied plutocrats worthiness. But this takes the biscuit. President Obama remains the barely man of world politics, barely a senator now barely a president, yet in the land of the Euro-weenies (copyright PJ O’Rourke) the great and the good remain in his thrall. To reward him for a blank results sheet, to inflate him when he has no achievements to his name, makes a mockery of what, let’s face it, is an already fairly discredited process (remember Rigoberta Menchu in 1992? Ha!).

The moment when Obama swatted that fly

Why Obama is quiet over Iran

John Dickerson explains why Barack Obama is keeping a low profile over Iran at Slate.

The situation is fragile. The U.S. position can't be explained in sound bites, and Obama doesn't want to talk, anyway. If he inserted himself into the story, he would be giving President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a villain to point to. It would also distract from the story—which, as it plays out, is a good one: The Iranian people are protesting for democracy. Finally, the president needs to save his meddling for a bigger problem. Despite the current uproar, the urgent problem is how to stop Iran's effort to obtain nuclear weapons. Obama doesn't want to do anything that will keep him from getting back to that quickly.

What Obama must achieve in Egypt today

Barack Obama's trip to the Middle East is not going to get the airtime that this momentous occasion should get but it is worth focusing on some of the issues that need to be tackled.

Over at Open Democracy,Nader Hashemi writes that his speech in Egypt requires three things to bring on board the sceptical Muslim audience that he will address.

1.that it should be a townhall-style meeting with everyday Egyptian citizens.

The symbolic value of such an event cannot be overstated. The sight of an American president, in open and uncensored dialogue with ordinary Muslims, will go a long way towards demonstrating respect for the Islamic world.

2.that it must address the key topic in the Arab world which is Palestine and

3.

Obama must be prepared to offend - albeit indirectly - his Egyptian hosts. There is a pungency in the leader of the "free world" delivering a major speech to Muslims in one of the least free parts of the world. Hosni Mubarak is one of the most despised as well as one of the longest-standing dictators in the Arab world - a status owed to a mix of his close alliance with the United States, his security forces' internal repression and his collusion with Israel in maintaining the siege of Gaza.

What the papers are saying about the 100 days

The Times features American blogger Arianne Huffington who asks has it been only 100 days? and says that they have been among the most eventful in history.

His poll numbers are a vindication of the idea that, with the right leadership, Americans are mature enough to heed those words and not expect immediate results.

However there are some negatives amongst which she puts the Bank Bail out which she says had a

reliance on the bank-centric beliefs of Larry Summers and Tim Geithner.

For the Guardian it has been a good start recognising that

Some of the many balls he has thrown in the air will come crashing down. But that does not invalidate the purpose.

and concludes that

The Obama brand has done what it says on the tin and produced a leader of candour and vision. The real challenge of government still lies ahead, but for the moment he is simply the coolest politician on the planet.

The Telegraph believes that it is time for the President to end the campaigning and says that

there are worrying signs that the administration's method of operation will lead to failures further down the line. Mr Obama prefers the role of board chairman to chief executive. Yet, at a time when he has needed to build consensus behind his transformative plans, he has been hampered by poor appointments to his management team –

Those who say he is moving too slowly have underestimated the task says the Independent which says that

In part, this is because the hopes he raised were so high, especially among America's disadvantaged. In part, it is because the Republicans, still licking the wounds from their defeat, have spurned the cross-party co-operation Mr Obama favoured. There is no political unity on how to tackle the economy. But it is also because the ideological fissures, so deep during both the Clinton and Bush presidencies, were reopened by Mr Obama when he published the White House documents relating to CIA interrogations. His efforts to draw a line under this shameful chapter had the opposite effect. They polarised opinion and left him flailing, uncharacteristically, between two extremes.

Air Force One on a roll

Staying with Barcak Obama's popularity,you can see why the popultaioin of New York was not particually taken with this air display from air force one

The 100 days in popularity terms

There will be no doubt much written about Barack Obama's hundred days which are completed tomorrow.

In terms of approval ratings he is trailing in fourth palace compared to other President's-mind you not bad given the economic crisis as this graph courtesy of the Economist shows

A top publishing tip

Great piece from Alice Fishburn over at Comment Central.

She reports on the best way to get yoour book up the Amazon charts

First, orchestrate a rare meeting between President Obama and President Chavez. Lay on the backslapping and good cheer to attract instant media attention.Then assure your book gets handed over as a gift at the key photo moment.The result? Your book leaps from number 54,295 to number 2 on Amazon overnight.

"This is almost as embarrassing as it gets"

This takes some beating-A Turkish news anchor decides to black himself up for Barack Obama's visit.

Ht-Mother Jones

Is Obama the best one for the crisis?

Staying on the subject of the G20 Gideon Rachman writes a good if rather worrying piece in the FT this morning

The gap between ambition and reality was apparent on each stage of Mr Obama’s European odyssey

She considers that there may be a more fundemental problem

The new American president faces an economic disaster at home, a stalemated war in Afghanistan, unpredictable adversaries in places such as North Korea, and largely unhelpful allies in Europe. This week Mr Obama cemented the impression that he is an unusually gifted and intelligent politician. But that does not mean he will succeed. It could just be that he is the right man at the wrong time.

Clegg -a bit miffed

A little snippet of information from James Forsyth over at Coffee House who says that Nick Clegg was not entirely happy with the fact that he was not meeting President Obama

'I am really annoyed,' [Clegg] told me. 'As it was not a state visit I understood I wouldn't get to see [Obama]. But when I found out Obama was meeting the Queen and David Cameron I got on the phone to David Miliband to ask him what was going on.
'Frankly, it doesn't look good for Cameron to see him and for me not to.'
At one point he turned to Cable and told him: 'If I do get to go, I will give Obama a copy of your book.'"

Needless to say,Clegg's office have both denied this conversation and that he tried to speak with David Miliband.

Obama reaches out to the Iranian people

For thise who haven't seen it this is the President reaching out to the Iranian people.Patronising? well possibly with his reamarks on their contribution to civilisation and the common humanity that he says binds the two nations together.

Mind yoiu he cannot be accused of going back on an election promise