Who cares where Obama leads as long as "We Can!"

Click and you will get a idea of what many have been suggesting. (See 1 below.)

Hamas is planning a tactical move to bring condemnation upon Israel as it seeks to protect its borders from a possible invasion of as many as 40,000 Palestinians - many shielding terrorists etc. Is this the initial phase of the two front war being planned by Hamas and Hezballah?

Olmert leaves for Japan just as this crisis with Hamas looms. The visit was planned months ago and could produce positive results between the two nations but it could also prove to be unwise in view of Hamas' plans. (See 2 and 3 below.)

Modest progress on less contentious issues claimed to have been made between Israeli and Palestinian negotiators. (See 4 below.)

Frank Rich offers his thoughts on why Hillary's strategy imploded. (See 5 below.)


An editorial which asks a simple question- Where will Obama lead us should he become president? Few really seem to have a clue and even more seem not to care because "we can" conveys such a powerful message. (See 6 below.)

Dick


1)http://www.barelypolitical.com/bp-music-videos/episode/Crush_on_Obama

2)Palestinians plan mass rush on Gazan-Israeli border Monday

Palestinians, swarmed across breached border to Sinai Jan. 23, plan to batter Israeli border Feb. 25

Beefed-up Israeli military and security forces prepared to repulse thousands of Palestinians planning to crash the full length of the Gazan-Israeli border and its crossings at 10:00 a.m. IT Monday, Feb. 25.

Military sources report Hamas is engineering a “popular” protest to be much more violent than the Jan. 23 Palestinian surge into Egypt through the border wall smashed by its bulldozers.

Behind the human shield of women, children and elderly leading the assault on Monday, Hamas, Jihad Islami and Fatah are expected to shoot, send in suicide bombers and unleash a Qassam barrage. If Israeli forces are goaded into opening fire, civilian casualties may be heavy enough to draw international condemnation. If they hold back, the Palestinian terrorists will capture the border fence and knock it over.

By preventing a full-scale military operation against the Palestinian missile and terror campaign from Gaza and imposing a siege instead, prime minister Ehud Olmert and defense minister Ehud Barak have left the initiative with Hamas which exploits it to the hilt.

Human chains which will “demonstrate” along the border from the Rafah terminal in the south to Erez in the north is organized by the Committee for Breaking the Israeli Siege headed by Hamas, although the terrorist group’s spokesmen claimed it is a “spontaneous” protest against the Israeli blockade.

Israel’s military and security chiefs are conferring urgently Sunday night with chief of staff Lt. Gen. Gaby Ashkenazi.

The Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem told reporters that non-lethal measures for dispersing crowds are ready to ward off the massive assault on the border fence in an effort to avoid civilian casualties.

After weeks, Egypt finally cracked down on the Palestinian invasion of Sinai when its foreign minister threatened to “break the arms and legs” of infiltrators. Even then, they were defied by the Palestinian invaders.

It looks now as though the long-delayed big confrontation between the IDF and Hamas will not take place inside the Gaza Strip but on Israeli soil.

3)Prime Minister Olmert Leaves for Japan


Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's trip to Japan was planned well in advance; he
has accepted invitations that he received last year both from current
Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda, as well as from the latter's
predecessor, Shinzo Abe. No Israeli Prime Minister has visited Japan since
then Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's visit in 1997, despite the
deepening of bilateral relations and Japan's great importance as an economic
superpower with global influence.

Prime Minister Olmert's current visit has two main aspects - diplomatic and
economic.

In the diplomatic sphere, Japan has shown great interest in the diplomatic
process between Israel and the Palestinian Authority and is even prepared to invest considerable funds in strengthening the PA's economic infrastructure, out of recognition that economic stability would ensure both political stability and the
ability to advance the process. In this context, Japan is focusing most of
its efforts on a large-scale economic project - "Corridor for Peace and
Prosperity". This initiative concerns the building of joint Israeli, Jordanian and PA factories and projects in the Jericho area, which will ensure thousands of jobs and a source of livelihood, mainly for the Palestinian people. Prime Minister Olmert fully
recognizes the importance of economics as a lever for the diplomatic process, and also supports the project that Japan is trying to promote. During the visit, both nations will make a genuine effort to advance the project. Similarly, the Prime Minister will update Japanese leaders on the progress, developments and difficulties in the diplomatic process, especially the problem of terrorism, based both in the Gaza Strip and in Judea and Samaria.

Another diplomatic issue that Prime Minister Olmert intends to raise in his
talks is Iran's aspiration to equip itself with nuclear weapons. Following
the publication of the latest International Atomic Energy Agency report, which raised additional question marks about Iran's actions and policies and provided very few unequivocal facts in this context. The Prime Minister intends to discuss with his hosts the need for the international community to act forthwith in order to prevent Iran from attaining nuclear weapons. Israel believes that the way to do this at the
present is via economic and diplomatic sanctions. To this end, an additional meeting of the UN Security Council is required in order to discuss a third round of sanctions against a country that does not hesitate to continuously threaten the destruction of Israel. These threats are being made without any provocation by Israel and in the absence of any bilateral conflict.

These threats are - to Israel's regret - fed by an irrational hatred. Prime
Minister Olmert believes that countries such as Japan, the United States,
Germany, France and the United Kingdom have the ability to also take
additional measures on their own, regardless of UN Security Council
sanctions, in order to restrict trade with Iran. These countries, if they
choose to act with determination in this context, could cause the extremist
regime in Iran to retreat from its intentions to arm itself with nuclear
weapons. Japan has already begun to enact a responsible policy in this
regard and has taken upon itself to restrict Japanese companies' trade with
Iran; this effort must be continued.

In addition to the diplomatic issues, Prime Minister Olmert will also focus
on the development of economic ties. Prior to the visit, his bureau
contacted the Japanese government and inquired regarding those areas in
which it was possible to strengthen bilateral cooperation. According to the
issues that were suggested, a list was formulated - in cooperation with the
Industry, Trade and Labor Ministry's Foreign Trade Administration and Export and International Cooperation Institute - of approximately 20 leading
Israeli industrialists and businesspeople, who would join the Prime Minister
during his visit. During his visit, Prime Minister Olmert will hold a joint
seminar for the Israeli business people and their Japanese counterparts and
will brief them on the economic situation in Israel. The Prime Minister will also meet with Japanese economic leaders and will visit a leading Japanese industrial
plant, which also exports to Israel. He hopes to increase Israeli exports
to Japan, which are currently approximately one-third of imports. More jobs
will thus be created in Israel and unemployment will continue to decline.

4) Negotiations begin to make progress

The chief Israeli and Palestinian negotiators on Sunday launched joint working committees to seek agreement on some of the less contentious issues between them, an Israeli official said, in a first sign of progress in the relaunched talks.

The new teams will work on common concerns about water, the environment, economic and judicial matters, while leaving the tough subjects of borders, Palestinian refugees and the status of Jerusalem to the political negotiators, said Arye Mekel, spokesman for chief negotiator Tzipi Livni, who is Israel's foreign minister.

Officials on both sides were careful not to trumpet the appointment of the committees as a breakthrough in the talks, but the top Palestinian negotiator, ex-premier Ahmed Qureia, has said in the past that the committees would not be named until there was enough progress to warrant that.

Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said that while the sides met Sunday, no committees were formally launched.

"(Qureia) and I met with Minister Livni today and it was decided that whenever a subject arises that needs some experts we will bring them," he said. "But I cannot say that we launched anything today."

Peace talks were frozen for seven years of Palestinian-Israeli violence, Relaunching them at a high profile Mideast conference in November hosted by US President George W. Bush, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert pledged to will strive to reach a peace deal this year. They are under international pressure to show progress, but little has been visible so far.

The main issues facing the negotiators have stymied decades of peace efforts. Arguably the touchiest is Jerusalem, where the Palestinians want to create a capital in the eastern sector. But both sides lay claim to the explosive joint holy site in the Old City, where the Al Aqsa Mosque compound sits atop the ruins of the biblical Jewish Temples.

No less volatile is the future of Palestinian refugees from the 1948-49 war that followed Israel's creation. With their descendants, they number in the millions. Palestinians insist they have a right to return to their original homes in Israel, while Israel demands that they be resettled in the new Palestinian state. Other major issues are final borders and the future of Jewish settlements in the West Bank. No progress is reported in any of those areas.

Livni and Qureia met for 90 minutes Sunday at a Jerusalem hotel, along with about 10 experts from each side who will work on the technical questions - but not the "core issues," Mekel told The Associated Press.

Another Israeli official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the talks, said that because the committees would not deal with the main issues, it was doubtful that their appointment marked real progress.

Abbas and Olmert held their latest summit Tuesday, and officials on both sides warned that stalling the talks could endanger prospects for a treaty this year and foster more violence.

5) The Audacity of Hopelessness
By FRANK RICH

WHEN people one day look back at the remarkable implosion of the Hillary Clinton campaign, they may notice that it both began and ended in the long dark shadow of Iraq.

It’s not just that her candidacy’s central premise — the priceless value of “experience” — was fatally poisoned from the start by her still ill-explained vote to authorize the fiasco. Senator Clinton then compounded that 2002 misjudgment by pursuing a 2008 campaign strategy that uncannily mimicked the disastrous Bush Iraq war plan. After promising a cakewalk to the nomination — “It will be me,” Mrs. Clinton told Katie Couric in November — she was routed by an insurgency.

The Clinton camp was certain that its moneyed arsenal of political shock-and-awe would take out Barack Hussein Obama in a flash. The race would “be over by Feb. 5,” Mrs. Clinton assured George Stephanopoulos just before New Year’s. But once the Obama forces outwitted her, leaving her mission unaccomplished on Super Tuesday, there was no contingency plan. She had neither the boots on the ground nor the money to recoup.

That’s why she has been losing battle after battle by double digits in every corner of the country ever since. And no matter how much bad stuff happened, she kept to the Bush playbook, stubbornly clinging to her own Rumsfeld, her chief strategist, Mark Penn. Like his prototype, Mr. Penn is bigger on loyalty and arrogance than strategic brilliance. But he’s actually not even all that loyal. Mr. Penn, whose operation has billed several million dollars in fees to the Clinton campaign so far, has never given up his day job as chief executive of the public relations behemoth Burson-Marsteller. His top client there, Microsoft, is simultaneously engaged in a demanding campaign of its own to acquire Yahoo.

Clinton fans don’t see their standard-bearer’s troubles this way. In their view, their highly substantive candidate was unfairly undone by a lightweight showboat who got a free ride from an often misogynist press and from naïve young people who lap up messianic language as if it were Jim Jones’s Kool-Aid. Or as Mrs. Clinton frames it, Senator Obama is all about empty words while she is all about action and hard work.

But it’s the Clinton strategists, not the Obama voters, who drank the Kool-Aid. The Obama campaign is not a vaporous cult; it’s a lean and mean political machine that gets the job done. The Clinton camp has been the slacker in this race, more words than action, and its candidate’s message, for all its purported high-mindedness, was and is self-immolating.

The gap in hard work between the two campaigns was clear well before Feb. 5. Mrs. Clinton threw as much as $25 million at the Iowa caucuses without ever matching Mr. Obama’s organizational strength. In South Carolina, where last fall she was up 20 percentage points in the polls, she relied on top-down endorsements and the patina of inevitability, while the Obama campaign built a landslide-winning organization from scratch at the grass roots. In Kansas, three paid Obama organizers had the field to themselves for three months; ultimately Obama staff members outnumbered Clinton staff members there 18 to 3.

In the last battleground, Wisconsin, the Clinton campaign was six days behind Mr. Obama in putting up ads and had only four campaign offices to his 11. Even as Mrs. Clinton clings to her latest firewall — the March 4 contests — she is still being outhustled. Last week she told reporters that she “had no idea” that the Texas primary system was “so bizarre” (it’s a primary-caucus hybrid), adding that she had “people trying to understand it as we speak.” Perhaps her people can borrow the road map from Obama’s people. In Vermont, another March 4 contest, The Burlington Free Press reported that there were four Obama offices and no Clinton offices as of five days ago. For what will no doubt be the next firewall after March 4, Pennsylvania on April 22, the Clinton campaign is sufficiently disorganized that it couldn’t file a complete slate of delegates by even an extended ballot deadline.

This is the candidate who keeps telling us she’s so competent that she’ll be ready to govern from Day 1. Mrs. Clinton may be right that Mr. Obama has a thin résumé, but her disheveled campaign keeps reminding us that the biggest item on her thicker résumé is the health care task force that was as botched as her presidential bid.

Given that Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama offer marginally different policy prescriptions — laid out in voluminous detail by both, by the way, on their Web sites — it’s not clear what her added-value message is. The “experience” mantra has been compromised not only by her failure on the signal issue of Iraq but also by the deadening lingua franca of her particular experience, Washingtonese. No matter what the problem, she keeps rolling out another commission to solve it: a commission for infrastructure, a Financial Product Safety Commission, a Corporate Subsidy Commission, a Katrina/Rita Commission and, to deal with drought, a water summit.

As for countering what she sees as the empty Obama brand of hope, she offers only a chilly void: Abandon hope all ye who enter here. This must be the first presidential candidate in history to devote so much energy to preaching against optimism, against inspiring language and — talk about bizarre — against democracy itself. No sooner does Mrs. Clinton lose a state than her campaign belittles its voters as unrepresentative of the country.

Bill Clinton knocked states that hold caucuses instead of primaries because “they disproportionately favor upper-income voters” who “don’t really need a president but feel like they need a change.” After the Potomac primary wipeout, Mr. Penn declared that Mr. Obama hadn’t won in “any of the significant states” outside of his home state of Illinois. This might come as news to Virginia, Maryland, Washington and Iowa, among the other insignificant sites of Obama victories. The blogger Markos Moulitsas Zúniga has hilariously labeled this Penn spin the “insult 40 states” strategy.

The insults continued on Tuesday night when a surrogate preceding Mrs. Clinton onstage at an Ohio rally, Tom Buffenbarger of the machinists’ union, derided Obama supporters as “latte-drinking, Prius-driving, Birkenstock-wearing, trust-fund babies.” Even as he ranted, exit polls in Wisconsin were showing that Mr. Obama had in fact won that day among voters with the least education and the lowest incomes. Less than 24 hours later, Mr. Obama received the endorsement of the latte-drinking Teamsters.

If the press were as prejudiced against Mrs. Clinton as her campaign constantly whines, debate moderators would have pushed for the Clinton tax returns and the full list of Clinton foundation donors to be made public with the same vigor it devoted to Mr. Obama’s “plagiarism.” And it would have showered her with the same ridicule that Rudy Giuliani received in his endgame. With 11 straight losses in nominating contests, Mrs. Clinton has now nearly doubled the Giuliani losing streak (six) by the time he reached his Florida graveyard. But we gamely pay lip service to the illusion that she can erect one more firewall.

The other persistent gripe among some Clinton supporters is that a hard-working older woman has been unjustly usurped by a cool young guy intrinsically favored by a sexist culture. Slate posted a devilish video mash-up of the classic 1999 movie “Election”: Mrs. Clinton is reduced to a stand-in for Tracy Flick, the diligent candidate for high school president played by Reese Witherspoon, and Mr. Obama is implicitly cast as the mindless jock who upsets her by dint of his sheer, unearned popularity.

There is undoubtedly some truth to this, however demeaning it may be to both candidates, but in reality, the more consequential ur-text for the Clinton 2008 campaign may be another Hollywood classic, the Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy “Pat and Mike” of 1952. In that movie, the proto-feminist Hepburn plays a professional athlete who loses a tennis or golf championship every time her self-regarding fiancé turns up in the crowd, pulling her focus and undermining her confidence with his grandstanding presence.

In the 2008 real-life remake of “Pat and Mike,” it’s not the fiancé, of course, but the husband who has sabotaged the heroine. The single biggest factor in Hillary Clinton’s collapse is less sexism in general than one man in particular — the man who began the campaign as her biggest political asset. The moment Bill Clinton started trash-talking about Mr. Obama and raising the specter of a co-presidency, even to the point of giving his own televised speech ahead of his wife’s on the night she lost South Carolina, her candidacy started spiraling downward.

What’s next? Despite Mrs. Clinton’s valedictory tone at Thursday’s debate, there remains the fear in some quarters that whether through sleights of hand involving superdelegates or bogus delegates from Michigan or Florida, the Clintons might yet game or even steal the nomination. I’m starting to wonder. An operation that has waged political war as incompetently as the Bush administration waged war in Iraq is unlikely to suddenly become smart enough to pull off that duplicitous a “victory.” Besides, after spending $1,200 on Dunkin’ Donuts in January alone, this campaign simply may not have the cash on hand to mount a surge.

6) The Obama Enigma. Where would he lead America?


THE NATIONAL Journal magazine recently ranked Barack Obama as the most liberal senator in 2007 -- an assessment that is subject to legitimate quibbling but will no doubt be featured by Republicans if Mr. Obama wins the Democratic nomination for president. Democratic voters in a Pew Research Center poll last month put Mr. Obama to their left ideologically, Hillary Rodham Clinton to their right. Are these analyses accurate? When the Illinois Democrat talks about bringing together red and blue America, does he mean that he will persuade the red (Republican) part to come around to blue (Democratic) policies -- or does he mean that he will forge a new, centrist answer that will bridge the red-blue divide? Is he a liberal at heart who tacks occasionally to the center or more of a centrist capable of suppressing leftist instincts when political circumstances demand?

It's telling, at this relatively late stage in the nominating process, that the answers are not clear -- at least not to us. Granted, broad terms such as "liberal" or "conservative" can be more misleading than informative. Mr. Obama himself disparages such labeling as a simplistic enterprise, writing to the liberal Web site Daily Kos that "the whole 'centrist' versus 'liberal' labels that continue to characterize the debate within the Democratic Party misses the mark." University of Chicago law professor Cass R. Sunstein, an informal adviser to Mr. Obama, places the candidate not at a particular spot along the ideological continuum but as a "visionary minimalist," willing "to think big and to endorse significant departures from the status quo -- but [preferring] to do so after accommodating, learning from, and bringing on board a variety of different perspectives."

Yes, but where is Mr. Obama most comfortable himself? Where would he strive to take the country? It is possible to draw conflicting lessons from his record. As New York Times columnist David Brooks has pointed out, Mr. Obama was not part of the bipartisan Gang of 14 that tried to avert a showdown on judicial filibusters; he was not among the 68 senators voting for a bipartisan agreement on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act; he dissented from the part of the bipartisan immigration deal that displeased unions. His campaign platform is orthodox liberal Democratic fare. So is Mr. Obama a standard liberal clad in the soothing language of inclusiveness?

Perhaps, but one could read the record and arrive at a different conclusion. Mr. Obama not only declined to filibuster Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.; he was initially inclined to vote for him, according to The Post's Perry Bacon Jr. Even in the heat of a primary campaign, he has shown some brief glimmers of divergence from the party line: He dared to mention the notion of "merit pay" in an appearance before the teachers union, and he told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel editorial board that, although he is a "skeptic" about school vouchers, "I will not allow my predispositions to stand in the way of making sure that our kids can learn" if research shows that they work. His book "The Audacity of Hope" is laced with hints of a more complex Obama than the campaign trail version -- more conflicted, for instance, about the benefits of free trade than the campaign trail's NAFTA-basher. "In his view of history, in his respect for tradition, in his skepticism that the world can be changed any way but very, very slowly, Obama is deeply conservative. There are moments when he sounds almost Burkean," Larissa McFarquhar wrote in the New Yorker last year.

The closing weeks of a primary campaign aren't especially conducive to thoughtful discussions of political philosophy. But if not now, when? Mr. Obama's rhetoric about bridging partisan differences has been inspiring, his personal story is moving and his qualities of leadership are undoubted. But do voters understand where, exactly, he would like to lead them?