WikiLeaks cables reveal how US manipulated climate accord

The Guardian UK:

Hidden behind the save-the-world rhetoric of the global climate change negotiations lies the mucky realpolitik: money and threats buy political support; spying and cyberwarfare are used to seek out leverage.

The US diplomatic cables reveal how the US seeks dirt on nations opposed to its approach to tackling global warming; how financial and other aid is used by countries to gain political backing; how distrust, broken promises and creative accounting dog negotiations; and how the US mounted a secret global diplomatic offensive to overwhelm opposition to the controversial "Copenhagen accord", the unofficial document that emerged from the ruins of the Copenhagen climate change summit in 2009.

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Embarrassment in Seoul

WSJ: The world won't follow slow-growth, weak-dollar America

Entrepreneurship, the kind that creates industries and jobs on the scale we'll need in the next century, is about two things: Ideas that spring randomly from some slightly crazed dreamer's head; and worse, they often get filthy rich if the dreams are real. The left likes neither. --Daniel Henninger (WSJ)

"We are going to spend four years treading water. If we tread quickly enough, we may get enough growth to save the Democrats, but not the nation."

At the jobs summit, Mr. Obama said "I want to hear from CEOs what's holding back our business investment." Really?

How about the world's highest corporate tax rate? How about the 5.4% health-care surtax on top of the expiring Bush tax cuts, which will push the top marginal individual rate, paid at the outset by many entrepreneurs, well over 40%?

Set aside income taxes as the unransomed hostages of progressive dogma. Justify this: The Senate health-reform bill imposes a $4 billion annual excise tax on medical devices and diagnostic equipment. In a slow-innovation economy, which is what we have now, medical and diagnostic miracles sit at the intersection of American science, technology, education and IQ. That stuff defines American entrepreneurship and ingenuity. If the Obama Democrats will tax these people, they'll tax anything that produces income, no matter how innovative or job-creating.

The Obama bet is that the U.S. can be a Franco-German welfare state, with a mammoth public sector, and still compete with China, India, Brazil, Korea and the rest. This is a pipedream. We are going to spend four years treading water. If we tread quickly enough, we may get enough growth to save the Democrats, but not the nation.

ObamaJobs: Uncle Sam's Hiring Hall

Obama is a weak sister

PS: Isn't that a picture of Larry, Moe, and Curly???

Very little occurred in terms of negotiations, but it seems Europe had no trouble with ultimatums.

This isn’t “smart power.” It’s mindless, unilateral surrender. That seems to be Obama’s specialty at home and abroad.

Obama’s trip shows he excels … at caving

Naïveté Obama style

I knew this would happen...was just waiting for the first toll and here it is:

The Moscow Delusion

Europeans told President Barack H. Obama that they have no intention of helping him to stimulate the world economy

Little to hail from President's first economic summit

By Irwin M. Stelzer
Examiner Columnist | 4/3/09 7:37 AM

(London) - It is 60 years to the day since President Harry S. Truman signed the Marshall Plan into law to give much needed aid to a prostrate Europe.
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It is one day since the Europeans told President Barack H. Obama that they have no intention of helping him to stimulate the world economy.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, presiding over an economy that was sed by America 60 years ago, and that has been supported by American consumers ever since, wouldn’t play.

Neither would French President Nikolas Sarkozy, whose nation’s memory of the liberation of the Paris they so easily surrendered has, er, dimmed with time...

The Daily Beast's guide to who came out on top at the G-20

By the end of their London summit, G-20 leaders had settled on a $1 trillion global stimulus, and influential people the world around are couldn’t be happier—and sadder, and angrier, and every emotion in between. Our guide to who came out on top at the G-20 and the good, bad, and ugly details everyone’s obsessing over.

A sampling:

THE GOOD
Financial Times: Summit Success Reflects a Different Global Landscape
They gave it to us straight.

“The London summit was not, after all, a flop,” begins the wrap-up from Financial Times editor Philip Stephens. He goes on to offer a cautious thumbs up, arguing that the G-20 represents a “substantial success,” largely due to “its unspoken recognition of the remaking of the geopolitical landscape.”

THE BAD
The Daily Beast: The Day Obama Fell to Earth
And if you thought the G-20 was lame, just wait for NATO.

President Obama may be lighting up the world stage, but The Daily Beast’s Andrew Neil notes that “the President did not get what, for him, was the original purpose of this G20 summit: a coordinated global fiscal stimulus.”

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