Michael Ramirez cartoon for Jan. 20, 2009 at Investor's Business Daily

Obama’s in and he’s all about change and…copying Bush? John Hinderaker at Power Line blog notes that President Barack Obama’s inauguration speech, along with his national security appointments, smacks of predecessor W. and notes that even comedians are commenting on the similarities. It doesn’t speak well of liberals, he writes, that they actually seem to be hoping that he’s lying, that his actions will somehow contradict all the rhetoric. Below, even Jon Stewart of The Daily Show jabs at the incoming president through an eerie montage of speech snippets comparing the two presidents, though the left-leaning TV news-satire host waxes apologetic.

Clinton did, Kennedy didn’t, and Geithner shouldn’t. Hillary Clinton is the new Secretary of State, but a once-favored candidate to replace her as a Senator from New York, Caroline Kennedy, has bowed out. Jim Geraghty argues for National Review Online that her withdrawal is a good thing, and that the whole case in her favor seemed built upon her royal blood. Meanwhile, for the same outlet, Byron York tears into Timothy Geithner, Obama’s pick for treasury secretary whose confirmation has been stalled somewhat ironically over a failure to properly file and pay taxes, because the man wouldn’t ‘fess up in the Senate hearing. Regardless, York predicts Geithner will prevail because his Democratic allies, who lead the Finance Committee, are rushing the vote.

Obama spells setbacks for the pro-life movement. The new President has said he would sign into law the Freedom of Choice Act if it lands on his desk, and some analysts suggest the latest iterations of the bill would roll back many of the pro-life movement’s hard-fought gains—forty states restricting late-term abortions for instance. Michael J. New, writing for NRO suggests conservatives have been in this position before, under the Clinton Administration, and that the movement to ban or restrict abortions wasn’t stamped out then, so there is cause for hope. G. Tracy Mehan, III takes a slightly more practical view for The American Spectator: Obama would be well-advised not to risk losing his immense political capital when his main task is to deal with the economy.

Don’t you get it? Hamas doesn’t just want a separate Palestine, but wants the annihilation of Israel, writes former New York Times foreign correspondent Clifford D. May for NRO. Israel likely timed its recent attack on Gaza, where Hamas fighters have been in control since last year, to beat the inauguration of Barack Obama, May argues. That’s because Obama likely would have made ending the battle one of his top priorities. But Israel had to fight, May argues, and the war is far from over—just to keep things in perspective.

If Obama brings back Carterism, it won’t be good. Many commentators have compared President Obama’s foreign policy prescription to that of former President Jimmy Carter. Arthur Herman lays out a thorough explanation in Commentary magazine of how and why Carter’s policies didn’t work nearly as well as Reagan’s, Clinton’s, or even W’s. Then he worries in writing that Obama’s pledge for “aggressive diplomacy” is meaningless and that this new Carterism almost belittles America’s record for tough peacekeeping. Are we shying away from rather than donning our mantle as leader of the free world?

“I hope he fails,” Rush Limbaugh says of Obama, but don’t take it out of context. The conservative talk show host defended his statement here, noting that he would be proud to earn the headline “Limbaugh: I Hope Obama Fails” from the “Drive-By Media.” But it’s about liberal economic policies that have failed and will continue to fail, he notes, and haven’t the liberals, after all, been out to secure the failure of Bush’s policies? R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. over at The American Spectator, comes to his defense after multiple stories (and even a senator) have focused on the sensationalism of the comment rather than the content of the argument.

Obama’s stimulus plan has creeped its way to almost $800 billion. The President-elect is reacting to news of an ever-worsening economy and projections that 3.5 million people could lose their jobs in the next year. Some are fearing the stimulus plan could open the door to Congressional pet projects rather than programs that will really drive economic recovery. Vice President-elect Joe Biden defended the plan with a staid response: only bold moves will rescue the economy.

For what it’s worth, Washington hospitality workers will have jobs. With numerous inauguration events planned, the need for waiters and bartenders is up. Probably no consolation for the actors and artists in Los Angeles who make their living the same way.

Biden and Cheney aren’t getting along as well as Bush and Obama. In a bout of back-and-forth criticism, Biden has called Cheney the most dangerous Vice President in history, and in a Fox News interview (below, about halfway through), Cheney responded by criticizing Biden’s knowledge of the Constitution. Christmas cheer, anyone?

Blago’s “Individual D” revealed, and seeks immunity. There have been no accusations of wrongdoing from the authorities, but businessman Raghuveer P. Nayak has apparently sought legal protection in exchange for cooperating in the ongoing investigation into Governor Rod Blagojevich’s alleged scheme to sell President-elect Barack Obama’s now-vacant Senate seat. Blago apparently wanted to appoint Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. and pressured Nayak to pony up campaign money. The Chicago drama is getting more interesting by the day.

VHS: An Obituary. Before the entertainment industry was panicking over competition from DVD sales, there was the videocassette. It revolutionized the entertainment industry, and this Christmas will likely be the last one you’ll be able to find one anywhere other than a 99-cent store, as the L.A. Times reports. So, a big THANK YOU to VHS for ushering in the era of movies-on-demand and personal movie libraries. I wonder how long Blu-ray will last.

In preparation for Christmas, an homage to the Man Behind the Story. If you haven’t seen A Christmas Story, you can catch it during the annual marathon on Dec. 25. For now, you can learn everything you ever wanted to know about Jean Shepherd, the writer, radio personality and narrator from the movie who wrote the stories on which the film was based.

Is “Palin-ized” the hot political put-down? Politicians have said New York Senate candidate Caroline Kennedy is “Sarah Palin-ized” because of the way she and her team are handling the media, including asking reporters to submit questions in writing first. Somehow Palin has managed to leave a permanent mark on American politics.

Blago’s Football: if you’ve been hiding under a rock, perhaps you’ve missed the single greatest passage to appear in an American newspaper in the last 10 years, maybe forever. It’s in a piece entitled, “Two Sides of a Troubled Governor, Sinking Deeper,” by Monica Davey in the New York Times. It concerns the disgraced Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevitch, the man who is under investigation for trying to sell Pres-Elect Barack Obama’s vacated Senate seat. The piece talks about the Governor’s egomaniacal and narcisstic demands, which were at odds with his everyman public persona.

The passage reads:

And yet, Mr. Blagojevich, 52, rarely turns up for work at his official state office in Chicago, former employees say, is unapologetically late to almost everything, and can treat employees with disdain, cursing and erupting in fury for failings as mundane as neglecting to have at hand at all times his preferred black Paul Mitchell hairbrush. He calls the brush “the football,” an allusion to the “nuclear football,” or the bomb codes never to be out of reach of a president.

Seriously, just read that paragraph over and over. You don’t even need to read the rest of the article. This is what perfection looks like.

Bush got shoe-ed away. Lame duck loser—i.e. Georgie W. Bush Jr.—went to Iraq this weekend for a non-victory lap and thought he was going to come away with some sentimental fluff pieces about how he really cares. Instead, he got a different sort of photo-op: an Iraqi journalist—and now, hero to the world—threw his shoes at Bush during a small press conference. Bush—like he’s been doing for the duration of his two terms—ducked. Lame.

The world’s biggest Ponzi scheme just got worse. Bernie Madoff, the Wall Street legend who bilked “hundreds and possibly thousands and include major banks, hedge funds, charities and pension funds” has ripped off everyone from bank HSBC, a Steven Spielberg foundation, and Mort Zuckerman. His ponzi party was brought to an abrupt halt when he admitted to two employees that his fund was “just one big lie,” with “absolutely nothing” left and that he planned to distribute the remaining $200 million to family and friends before turning himself in. The whistle was blown before he got a chance to do that.

Senator Kennedy, the sequel. It looks like Caroline Kennedy has tossed her hat in the ring for Senator Hillary Clinton’s seat in New York. The New York Times points out that she would be filling a seat once held by her uncle, Robert F. Kennedy. Should she get the post, this could be an interesting political play. Imagine a day, 8 years into the future, say, and we’d have another possible female presidential candidate with even bigger name recognition than Clinton.

In Denver this morning, something took place that seemed a lot like a time-warp flash-forward to the Democratic National Convention, which isn’t supposed to be coming here until the end of August. This morning the Obama campaign held a rally at the University of Denver that caused traffic jams that made the highways look like a mini-version of the nightmare Los Angeles 405! In the end, I parked in someone’s driveway. Others were just parking on lawns around the city campus. Preliminary reports were putting the crowd at something like 10,000 people. Lines started before 7 am and snaked all around the campus, literally around whole city blocks. It was clear by 8:30 am when they opened the doors to Magness Arena that we weren’t all going to get a seat. So they shuttled us into overflow sections. Half the overflow crowd— thousands of us—filed into the Arena gym and the rest were seated in the lacrosse field outside, snow piles from last week still rimming the edges of the grass.

Waiting for the doors to open, I started asking people why they came out, whether it was their first time to a political rally, etc. The response was always pretty much the same: “Are you kidding me, fool? Look around you?” People talking to one another in the crowd were all saying things like: “Can you believe this?” and “This is insane!”

And it was. This thing was no political rally, not like any of the political rallies I’ve ever been to in my life. This was no Dukakis rally. This was no Clinton rally, whatever they say. It was different. This damn thing was a rock show. The crowd was buzzing for two hours out there in the Colorado briskness and when Caroline Kennedy got up and said that there was something about all this she recognized from conversations she had been having her whole life with people about the way her father energized Americans, the crowd went mad, even in the overflow gym, where we were watching her on a JumboTron and she couldn’t hear any bit of the clapping or hooting that was bouncing off the rafters.

Obama took a while to get on stage because he was making a tour of the rally, speaking first in the open air to the lacrosse field crowd, then stopping in and giving us gym dwellers some love and then heading to the main stage to rock the house.

He gave an early nod to John Edwards for making his campaign about the people. He said the Democratic field this year has been exemplary, etc, that they all want to “turn the page on the disastrous policies of the Bush/Cheney years,” for which he got much applause. “In November, one thing we know for sure: the name George W Bush will not be on the ballot,” he said, and the crowd roared. But then: “The thing, though, is it’s easy to be against something. We have to look ahead and also turn the page on the politics that made the Bush/Cheney policies possible. From now till November, we will be deciding what kind of party we want to make: a divisive party that continues the toxic politics of the past or one that uplifts and provides hope… We will win not by choosing a candidate who will unite the opposition party against us. We need one who will unite all of the people in our country who are yearning for change. On the first day in office… I don’t want to come in with 47 percent for, 47 percent against, and 5 percent undecided, all of whom apparently live in Ohio and Florida. No. We need a candidate who brings more than that…”

And so on. Generally, given the much-remarked-upon similarities in their platforms, Obama today was articulating as strongly as ever, with newly powerful fully endorsed references to JFK, what’s at stake in the choice between Obama and Clinton. To that end, even in articulating policy initiatives, he sounded a lot like Kennedy.

“Some people, they’re looking back, Clinton versus Bush… they want to build a bridge back to the 20th century. They think we need someone practiced in power. But John Kennedy, when he was considering running for the presidency, he was counseled by Harry Truman to wait, to build more political experience. But Kennedy said ‘No, I can’t wait, the time is now, a new generation is ready.’ This is our moment. The old politics won’t do. This election is not about us versus them, not about rich versus poor… certainly not about black versus white. It’s about the past versus the future. If I’m the nominee, they can’t make this election about the past because you will have already chosen the future.”

And:

“Young people graduating from college with thirty, forty, fifty thousand dollars in debt is not my idea of America… I propose $4000 tuition credits per year for every college student in the country. We will expand Americorp around the country… But this is a call to service for young people. You see, we’ll invest in you and you will invest in us and we will carry the country together into the future.”

And:

“When I’m president, we won’t wait any longer to do something about the environment. Kennedy’s generation went to the moon. This is our challenge. We have to act before our planet passes a threshold. There isn’t anyone else…”

Behind Obama on the stage sat clapping what looked like a significant cast of Colorado Democrats, including former Denver mayor Frederico Pena, current mayor John Hickenlooper, state senators and so on. Elder statesman Gary Hart sat right behind the podium, looking himself like a Kennedy, all jaw and outsize mane of white hair. In a telling moment—either a “this is the next generation” moment or an “I don’t care if I look like a groupie” moment or both, Hart pulled out his own digital camera and held it high to get a good shot of Obama and then took a snap.

Note: During the speech, I was scrawling in a notebook that I dropped in the four inches of snow that fell while I was driving home. So the official transcript from Denver may look a little different from the paragraphs above.