Lucid Links (040609, Morning)

Noteworthy Net-worthies:

From LifeNews.com — “President Barack Obama’s Pro-Abortion Record.” It only covers the period from Election Day last year through March 17. Based on his record before the election, up to and including his opposition to legislation to protect children who are born alive, either as a result of an abortionist’s unsuccessful effort to kill them in the womb, or by the deliberate delivery of the baby prior to viability, his antilife record should surprise no one, including faux prolife congressmen Steve Driehaus and John Boccieri.

At RedState, on the Kos children — “Calling conservatives Nazis isn’t even hyperbole to their minds. But calling Obama’s socialist policies socialist is an incitement to murder.”

Related — The New York Times’s David Leonhardt has never retracted his erroneous claim in February 2007 that manufacturing was in a recession (the day after his claim the group that most closely tracks the sector said that manufacturing was growing, and it continued to grow for the next nine months). Last week, he held up Nazi Germany as the best example of where economic stimulus worked. I kid you not. You see, FDR in the 1930s and Japan in the 1990s just didn’t do enough. Zheesh.

Best-kept secret in America, as reported by the Financial Times — “President Barack Obama’s plan to push through climate change legislation as part of his $3,600bn (£2,508bn) federal budget appeared all but dead on Thursday after the Senate ruled out fast-track action on the issue. A Republican-sponsored amendment passed on Wednesday night (April 1) ruled that Congress should not try to set up a cap-and-trade system to regulate greenhouse gas emissions as part of the budget “reconciliation” process.” May it stay that way.

Second-best-kept secret in America, via CNSnews.com, from (European Union President Mirek) Topolanek, who is also the president of the Czech Republic, on Obama’s non-stop “stimulus” — “All these steps, these combinations and permanency, is the road to hell …. We need to read history books and the lessons of history, and the biggest success of the EU is the refusal to go this way.”

Eweek’s Roy Mark, who, based on his archive, appears to lean left: “The Cybersecurity Act of 2009 introduced in the Senate would allow the president to shut down private Internet networks. The legislation also calls for the government to have the authority to demand security data from private networks without regard to any provision of law, regulation, rule or policy restricting such access.” Reaction is mostly muted. What if Bush had proposed this?

Hmm — “The New York Times sharply criticized Bill Clinton for a mere inclination of his shoulders towards Japanese Emperor Akihito in 1994.” Yet, as Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey notes, “So far, the media has remained entirely silent on Barack Obama’s deep-waist bow to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.”

At the Wall Street Journal — “The (employment) numbers are even drearier when you notice that only the government seems to be hiring these days.”

Barack Obama, in his Sunday newspaper column — “if you buy a car from Chrysler or General Motors, you will be able to get your car serviced and repaired, just like always. Your warrantee will be safe. In fact, it will be safer than ever because it will be guaranteed by the United States government.” Uh-huh. Just like Social Security, which has almost no real assets (just IOUs from the rest of the government, which is over $11 trillion in debt), and which is on track to begin running deficits in 2011, if not 2010. Read the whole thing, as it reveals quite a bit of the statist’s mindset.

Elaborating — Obama seems to assume that people are just going to start buying GM and Chrysler cars because he intervened. I don’t think so. I think we’re going to see the two companies’ sales go into the tank in April and May more, perhaps far more, than they already did during the first full quarter since their bailouts commenced. I don’t have to encourage this trend, though I feel even more strongly than I did a few months ago that it would be a very good thing. As I said then: “Consumers with long-term concerns about their pocketbooks (and everyone else’s) should not buy GM or Chrysler vehicles.” Now such a decision would also be soundly based on concern for the future of economic freedom.