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I did CNN.com with Politics Daily’s Matt Lewis and The Muslim Guy, Arsalan Iftikhar on Barack Obama’s trip to Copenhagen:

Embedded video from <a href=”http://www.cnn.com/video” mce_href=”http://www.cnn.com/video”>CNN Video</a>

And now for a little bit of European news on a day that may he packed with it due to President Obama abandoning our allies in Eastern Europe for the Russians. Yesterday, the European Parliament re-elected Manuel Barroso as President of the European Commission. Not a big deal right? Not exactly. You see, this is the first time that the leadership of the European Union has been elected without a “Grand Coalition” of the right and left. Instead, the center-right European Peoples’ Party joined forces with the right-leaning (aka econmic) Liberals and Euro-skeptics.

Here’s what Bloomberg reported:

Barroso’s victory in the EU Parliament stemmed from support by the Christian Democrats, the biggest faction, and the pro- business Liberals, the third-largest group. The vote was 382 to 219, with 117 abstentions.

Socialist and Green members, still unhappy that Barroso supported the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 when he was Portuguese government leader, refused to back his reappointment while failing to present a rival candidate. The Socialists, the second-biggest faction, said Barroso could pick up their support when putting together his next team of commissioners, who will need Parliament approval as a whole.

The leadership of the European Parliament has an option for the first time in history. They can decide to govern from the center-right. This vote was the first example of this coalition actually working. This follows after a crushing defeat of the left in the European elections and the right governing in the leading European countries: Italy, France, Germany, Poland, Sweden, and others, and David Cameron all but certain to be the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. This gives the right the control of the European Council, in addition to the Commission and Parliament.

Let’s see if the leadership of the European Parliament learns this lesson.

 At 9:18 Friday night, I got an alert from the Washington Post. Barack Obama had slapped tariffs on imports of Chinese tires. Barack Obama’s handling of this issue shows several things. First, it shows a real contempt for China, trade policy, and his international relationships more broadly. As one of my liberal friends likes to point out, this action demonstrates how the Democrats really cannot be taken seriously as the internationalist party.  And it shows the implicit contradictions in much of Obama’s economic policy.

Let’s start with the time of its announcement: 9:18pm. Really? Saturday morning in China? This tells us who the audience for this policy was: the United States. It tells us that Obama is willing to subordinate trade policy — just before the G-20 meeting no less — to domestic politics that he is embarassed about. Why else release this late on a Friday night?  (note that by statute, he didn’t have to release a response to International Trade Commission recommendations until the 17th. He picked this timing)

By Saturday afternoon, China issues scathing remarks. By Sunday, they announce counter-tariffs against US chickens and auto-parts. We have a full scale trade war.  And Asian and European markets open the week down. Thanks Barack…

So Barack Obama started a trade war for entirely domestic reasons, jeopardizing the recovery, and is afraid of the headlines here, why he doesn’t care about international opinion. How does that sound?

Now, why chickens and auto parts? I don’t immediately understand the chickens, although I suspect it is a pretty good business for us, but I understand auto parts. 

US auto parts are made by the United Autoworkers, the same union that Obama bailed out when he bailed out GM and Chrysler, two companies that had becoming wards of their union pension funds. In addition to hurting the unions, this could hurt the auto manufacturers themselves, which Obama owns and which opposed the tire tariffs because it will raise their costs. First he screwed the car companies for the UAW, now USW. Perhaps this is a lesson for when he takes over the health care sector. 

So where was the logic in this? He helps his allies, with one hand, but hurts them with the other. He hurts the economy. He hurts the government run companies. And he opens a trade war just in time for the G-20 to create real structural damage to the US economy.

Furthermore, this is how he is celebrating the anniversary of the death of Lehman Brothers. By sticking the knife in the economy.

That’s change I can believe in.

I am watching MSNBC’s Morning Joe. Joe Scarborough is going off the rails by mischaracterizing John McCain’s statement to the Huffington Post. McCain said:

"I know what side I’m on," McCain cut in. "I’m on the side of the people. I’m not on Ahmadinejad’s side or Mousavi. I’m on the side of the Iranian people and I’m on the right side of history. And I’m not going to walk on the other side of the street while people are being killed and beaten in the streets of Iran."

This seems clearly the right answer. There is plenty of evidence that Mousavi is a thug. It is clear that Ahmadinajad is … bad.

But you can be on the side of a process that empowers the people with honest elections.

McCain’s point is that President Barack Obama called people getting beaten up and killed in the streets an "robust" "debate".  Obama has no instinctual interest in defending human rights. This fundamental problem for Obama and much of the left was nicely characterized by EJ Dionne earlier this week in the Post.

That’s something to be outraged about. Both sides are going off the rails on this issue.

Between June 4 and June 7, citizens of 27 European countries voted in a new 736 seat European Parliament. The European Parliament website contains provisional results. This parliament and this election may have a significant impact on a number of patterns in international politics and business. It is worth summarizing some of the results.

Going into the elections, there were several questions. First, would the center hold? With caveats, it did. Second, what impact would the global economic downturn have? Signficantly, the socialists were rejected, to the benefit of the right. Third, how strong would the anti-EU sentiment be in the UK? Very, and this could have some complicating results for the larger European project. And fourth, what does this tell us about the upcoming election in Germany and, potentially, the UK? Labour in trouble in the UK. Probably still good news for the Christian Democrats in Germany.

So, let’s start with the core details, the results, mostly cribbed from the BBC, with additional notes, which are all after the jump.

In answer to the first question, the center significantly held. The European Peoples’ Party (EPP), the party of the center-right, dominated the evening. They had allied with the “European Democrats” to form the EPP-ED parliamentary group that had led the last parliament. the “European Democrats” were, primarily the British Conservatives (”Tories”) and the Czech ODS party. The Tories won 24 seats, up 1 from the previous Parliament, while ODS won 9.  In other words, the old EPP-ED coalition won 297 seats, up 15 from the previous Parliament, while the Liberals added 5, and the Socialists lost 26. Net loss for the center is 6, or less than 1%.  Now this fudges some details like why the Tories and ODS left, but we will get to that.

The center holding is even more remarkable when you look at particular countries. For examples, in France, the socialists lost 13 seats, but Sarkozy’s UMP picked up 11 of those. The Greens also picked up 8, all but 1 of their net gain. In Spain, which has the highest unemployment in the Eurozone, the Socialist government lost 2 seats, with the EPP and the Liberals each picking up one of them. Similarly, in Germany, the EPP lost 7 seats, but the very free market Free Democrats/Liberals picked up 5 of those.

To summarize what happened and to answer the second question, a pro-free market polarity carried the day. Between the EPP and the Liberals, while the Socialists were roundly defeated in nearly every country. In a time of economic unrest, Europeans turned to the right for answers to economic questions.

This is not to say that there were not significant shifts. The most obvious is the underlying cause of the “European Democrats” leaving the EPP-ED, concern about the scope of the European project. In European politics, opposition to EU expansion and the broader European project occupies a similar role as the immigration debate does here. The European Union is the most obvious mechanism of loss of national identity. It is taking people’s money, it is allowing poorer workers who don’t share language and customs from the East, it is more unaccountable and its politicians are in Brussels, not national capitals, etc. The Tories and Czech ODS are openly more skeptical of the European Project. In the UK, the anti-EU UK Independence Party picked up a seat and the far-right British National Party picked up 2. In Austria, Romania, and the Netherlands, this shift has been most clear. There is a clear anxiety about the European project out there that has even  been suggested by German Chancellor Angela Merkel in her recent statement about the European Central Bank.

The clearest manifestation that this anxiety will take will be in how the Lisbon Treaty process is resolved. The Lisbon Treaty is the “Constitutional Treaty” that failed in French and Dutch elections several years ago, and recently in Ireland. In recent months, the Polish and Czech Parliaments have approved it, although the Presidents have refused, so far, to sign the bills. Ireland still has to put it on the ballot again, and, importantly the UK has to do something. The collapse of the Labour Party in the UK, combined with a majority of the vote in the UK for either anti-EU parties (BNP and UK) or skeptic parties (Tories), means that the British government has a crisis on their hands. The old Tony Blair promise of a referendum on a new “constitution” may become politically necessary. The UK may be the block to Lisbon, not Ireland. And all this is prior to the analysis of what The Economist calls “record abstention.”

Finally, the upcoming national elections. The UK Labour Party was crushed. Manuevering has started to remove Gordon Brown, even if Labour Party rules offer no mechanism to allow it. In Germany, Angela Merkel and her preferred allies took 48% of the vote, and a clear majority of the European Parliament seats. Unless something changes, a new, more free market approach is likely coming after the next German election in September. In France, even though Nicolas Sarkozy is no longer personally popular, the Socialists continue to be discredited as a party of opposition.

It is clear that in Iowa, the debate is not  about experience. It will be a fight between Mitt Romney’s money and Mike Huckabee’s churches. There are real doubts that Huckabee can sustain a challenge to any mainstream GOP candidate. Ultimately, his foreign policy and other flubs might create real problems. One imagines the pressure [...]

Imagine what would happen if this happened on the first day of a Barack Obama or a Mitt Romney presidency, from the New York Times:
An attack on a political rally killed the Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto near the capital, Islamabad, Thursday. Witnesses said Ms. Bhutto was fired upon at close range before the blast, [...]

UPDATE: My friend Erick at Redstate makes the same point.
Today, John McCain got some press for stating, as a number of people had already, that David Petraeus should be Time’s Man of the Year, not Vladimir Putin. He is transparently correct.
But there is a broader point that should be made in the context of the [...]

We might have just found the issue and story that crystalizes the anxieties of all Americans around a protectionist message. The story is:
Citigroup Inc., the biggest U.S. bank by assets, will receive a $7.5 billion cash infusion from Abu Dhabi to replenish capital after record mortgage losses wiped out almost half its market value. … [...]

Today, John Bolton spoke to Rob Bluey’s and Heritage’s Conservative Blogger Lunch. Allegedly, we were talking about Bolton’s new book. Rather than focus on the book, Bolton urged us to make foreign policy an issue in 2008 and then took questions.
I asked two sets of questions, one about the race for UN Secretary General, the [...]