Why Look Any Further , For shame and Flip it!

Fred Siegel allegedly knows another Obama that the public has yet to learn about or even cares to. Siegel suggests it is all there if anyone cares to look but most do not because they are too far gone - head over heels, as it were - with the Chicago Messiah who intends to become our next president. Therefore, why look any further. (See 1 below.)

I have always maintained GW tolerates dissent until a decision is made and then he expects everyone to toe the line. The public rarely sees the tug of war that stays within until and unless someone leaks. We only see the finished product and everyone hewing the line. Therefore, we are seldom exposed to the inner give and take. Those who cannot stomach GW assume there is none. Thus, it has been with N Korea. For untold months we have witnessed one concession after another on our side but none by the N Koreans. Now we have the revelation about N Korea supplying Damascus with a reactor which the Israeli's effectively dismembered.

What will be the final result with N Korea's own nuclear status is anyone's guess. At one point it seemed we were willing to cave and allow them to retain their nuclear weaponry and we might still do so. Do we have a choice short of war? Is the release of this information orchestrated to put pressure on N Korea - to make it difficult, if not impossible, for them to lie their way out of another embarrassment and wind up "king of the mountain?" (See 2 and 3 below.)

Olmert prepared to exchange land for promises. Tangibles for intangibles. (See 4 below.)

More radical splinters from the Islamist tree. This time from Pakistan. To hear and believe them, they intend to engulf the world. (See 5 below.)

Hillary causes Tom Hayden's wife grievous angst because the Clintons are about making it appear Obama is un-electable and to the Hayden's that is an unforgivable sin. Hayden suggests the Clintons and Fox Network are in cahoots - what depths will the Clintons sink to to win? For Shame! (See 6 below.)

Victor Davis Hanson understands the Hayden's angst. Is there another McGovern episode lurking out there? (See 7 below.)

Clinton may not make it through the desert but she also has caused Obama to drink a lot of his own water. Indiana is quite important and should Hillary win there it is highly likely she will press on and that will simply make the problems mount for the Democrats. By then the entire Party should be parched. Is a shot gun wedding in the offing? I doubt it, but they could possibly flip a coin should they choose to run as a team! Then they could finesse the problem and let the voters sort it out.

Dick


1) The Obama Way: A Chicago pol’s special brand of insincerity
By FRED SIEGEL

Political campaigning necessarily produces a wide gap between words and deeds — this is the price of bringing together a broad coalition with disparate interests. All effective politicians are at times authentically insincere or sincerely inauthentic. Exaggeration, embellishment, overstatement, double-talk, systematic deception, and lies presented as metaphorical “truths” are the order of the day.

So of course Barack Obama is no different. He exaggerates the credit he deserves for a very limited piece of ethics-reform legislation. He embellishes when he presents himself as having had a consistent record on the Iraq War, when in fact he’s done a fair amount of zigzagging. He engages in double-talk when, on NAFTA and Iraq, he tells the rubes one thing and the policy people another. He overstates when he presents his minimal accomplishments in the Illinois senate as proof of his stature. He engages in systematic deception when he says he doesn’t take money from lobbyists. He presents a lie as metaphorical truth when he says it was the 1965 “Bloody Sunday” attacks on peaceful civil-rights protesters in Selma, Ala., that inspired his parents to marry (they had been married for years already).

All of this is unappealing, but also unexceptional. What makes Obama different is that there’s not just a gap but a chasm between his a ctions and his professed principles — this would normally kill a candidacy. And because his deeds are so few, the disparity is all the more salient. Obama, far more than the others, is the “judge me by what I say and not what I do” candidate. He wants to be the conscience of the country without necessarily having one himself.

The disparity between Obama’s rhetoric of transcendence and his conventional Chicago racial and patronage politics is a leitmotif of his political career. In New York, politicians (Reverend Al excepted) are usually forced to pay at least passing tribute to universal principles and the ideal of clean government. But Chicago, until recently a city of Lithuanians, blacks, and Poles governed by Irishmen on the patronage model of the Italian Christian Democrats, is the city of political and cultural tribalism.

Blacks adapted to both the tribalism and the corrupt patronage politics that accompanied it. Historically, one of the ironies of Chicago politics is that the clean-government candidates have been the most racist, while those most open to black aspirations have been the most corrupt. When the young Jesse Jackson received his first audience with Richard Daley the elder, the mayor — impervious to the universalism of the civil-rights movement in its glory — offered him a job as a toll-taker. Jackson thought the offer demeaning but in time adapted. In Chicago, racial reform has meant that today’s Mayor Daley has been cutting blacks in on the loot. Louis Farrakhan, Jesse Jackson, Jeremiah Wright, and Barack Obama are all, in part, the expression of that politics. It hasn’t always worked for Chicago, which, under the pressure of increasing taxes to pay for bloated government, is losing its middle class. But it has served the city’s political class admirably.

For all his Camelot-like rhetoric, Obama is a product, in significant measure, of the political culture that Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass described thus: “We’ve had our chief of detectives sent to prison for running the Outfit’s (i.e., the mob’s) jewelry-heist ring. And we’ve had white guys with Outfit connections get $100 million in affirmative action contracts from their drinking buddy, Mayor Richard Daley. . . . That’s the Chicago Way.” At no point did Obama, the would-be savior of American politics, challenge this corruption, except for face-saving gestures as a legislator. He was, in his own Harvard Law way, a product of it.

Why, you might ask, did the operators of Chicago’s political machine support Obama? Part of the answer was given long ago by the then-boss of Chicago, Jake Arvey. When asked why he made Adlai Stevenson — a man, like Obama, more famous for speeches than for accomplishments — his party’s gubernatorial candidate in 1948, Arvey is said to have replied that he needed to “perfume the ticket.”

Obama first played a perfuming role as a state senator. His mentor, Emil Jones, the machine-made president of the senate, allowed him to sponsor a minor ethics bill. In return, Obama made sure to send plenty of pork to Jones’s district. When asked about pork-barrel spending, Jones famously replied, “Some call it pork; I call it steak.”


Obama repaid the generosity. When he had a chance to back “clean” Democratic candidates for president of the Cook County board of supervisors and Illinois governor, he stayed with the allies of the Outfit. The gubernatorial candidate he backed, Rod Blagojevich, is now under federal investigation, in part because of his relationship with Tony Rezko, the man who helped Obama buy his current house.

The Chicago Way has delivered politically for Obama even this year. Ninety percent of his popular-vote lead over Hillary Clinton comes from Illinois, and two-thirds of that 90 percent comes just from Cook County. Some of this advantage came from the efforts of Obama’s political ally, the flame-throwing reverend James Meeks, a political force in his own right. Meeks, who mocks black moderates as “niggers,” is an Illinois state senator, the pastor of a mega-church, and a strong supporter of Jesse Jackson’s powerful political operation, which has put its vote-pulling muscle squarely behind the Obama campaign.

It was only with Obama's remarks about “bitter,” white, working-class, small-town voters that we saw his difficulties appealing beyond the machine’s reach. He won his U.S. Senate race in 2004 not only because his opponents self-destructed, but also because of the machine’s ability to deliver votes (this minimized his need to campaign among working-class whites downstate). In Pennsylvania he has lacked such assistance — and the campaigning has not gone nearly so well. First Obama pretended to be a bowler and scored a 37. Then, appearing before a supposedly closed San Francisco audience, he complained that small-town Pennsylvanians “cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment, as a way to explain their frustrations.”

This is the man who belongs to a church built around bitterness, rancor, and conspiratorial fear. During the Reverend Wright affair, Obama not only repeatedly lied about what he knew and when, but violated the spirit of the civil-rights movement in its mid-1960s glory. When as a young man I was on the periphery of the movement, there was an unwritten rule that if people told racist jokes or speakers engaged in defamatory rhetoric, you needed to register your immediate disapproval by confronting the speaker or ostentatiously walking out.

Wright’s “black theology” is essentially a Christianized version of Malcolm X’s ideology of hate. But for 20 years Obama, who had planned to run for mayor of Chicago, kept silent about the close if at times competitive relationship between Reverend Wright, whose 8,000-member mega-church gave him his political base, and Louis Farrakhan. His ambition overrode his moral integrity.

As part of his “black value system,” Reverend Wright attacked whites for their “middle classism,” “materialism,” and “greed in a world of need.” Obama sounded similar notes in his recent address at the Cooper Union, in which he laid the blame for the sub-prime mortgage crisis on those who had “embraced an ethic of greed, corner cutting, and inside dealing.” But that’s exactly what Obama did in buying his luxurious house. Given the choice of purchasing a less expensive home or getting into bed with his fundraiser-cum-slumlord-cum-fixer Tony Rezko, Obama chose the latter. Then again, the oppressed of Trinity Church are building Wright a $1.6 million, 10,340-square-foot home complete with four-car garage, whirlpool, and butler’s pantry. This house, which backs onto a golf course, is to sit in Tinley Park, a gated community that is 93 percent white.

The Obamas’ charitable giving is consistent with Reverend Wright’s talking left while living right. Obama and his wife are quite well-off. They had an estimated income of $1.2 million from 2000 to 2004. But the man who preaches compassion and mutuality gave all of 1 percent of that income to charity during those years. Most of that went to subvent Wright’s church.

BELOW THE FRAY
There is a similar chasm when it comes to Obama’s claim to post-partisanship. His achievements in reaching out to moderate voters are largely proleptic. But words are not deeds, and while Obama has few concrete achievements to his name, his voting record hardly suggests an ability to rise above Left-versus-Right. In the Illinois state senate he made a specialty of voting “present,” but after his first two years in the U.S. Senate, National Journal’s analysis of roll-call votes found that he was more liberal than 86 percent of his colleagues. His voting record has only moved farther left since then. The liberal Americans for Democratic Action now gives him a 97.5 percent rating, while National Journal ranks him the most liberal member of the Senate. By comparison, Hillary Clinton, who occasionally votes with the GOP, ranks 16th. Obama is such a down-the-line partisan that, according to Congressional Quarterly, in the last two years he has voted with the Democrats more often than did the party’s majority leader, Harry Reid.

Likewise, for all his talk of post-racialism, Obama has, with the contrivance of the press, played traditional South Side racial politics. The day after his surprise loss in New Hampshire, and in anticipation of the South Carolina primary, with its heavily black electorate, South Side congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. — Obama’s national co-chairman — appeared on MSNBC to argue, in a prepared statement, that Hillary Clinton’s teary moment on the campaign trail reflected her deep-seated racism. “Those tears,” said Jackson, “have to be analyzed. . . . They have to be looked at very, very carefully in light of Katrina, in light of other things that Mrs. Clinton did not cry for, particularly as we head to South Carolina, where 45 percent of African Americans will participate in the Democratic contest. . . . We saw tears in response to her appearance, so that her appearance brought her to tears, but not Hurricane Katrina, not other issues.” In other words, whites who are at odds with, or who haven’t delivered for, Chicago pols can be obliquely accused of racism on the flimsiest basis, but pillars of local black politics such as Reverend Wright, with his exclusivist racial theology, are beyond criticism.

Liberals love Obama’s talk of taking on powerful financial interests. But here too he is rather slippery. In his Cooper Union speech, he denounced in no uncertain terms the “special interests” of people on Wall Street (who are well represented among his campaign donors). He of course had an opportunity to push for repealing the privileged tax treatment of private-equity firms when that question was before Charles Grassley’s Senate subcommittee — but he simply made a pro forma statement in favor of doing so and disappeared into the woodwork. Nationally, as in Chicago, Obama the soi-disant “reformer” never crosses swords with any of his putative foes. To pick another example, he has attacked “predatory” sub-prime lenders while taking roughly $1.3 million in contributions from companies in that line of business.

Obama is the internationalist opposed to free trade. He is the friend of race-baiters who thinks Don Imus deserved to be fired. He is the proponent of courage in the face of powerful interests who lacked the courage to break with Reverend Wright. He is the man who would lead our efforts against terrorism yet was friendly with Bill Ayers, the unrepentant 1960s terrorist. He is the post-racialist supporter of affirmative action. He is the enemy of Big Oil who takes money from executives at Exxon-Mobil, Shell, and British Petroleum. Obama has, in a sense, represented a new version of the Invisible Man, a candidate whose color obscures his failings. Perhaps his remarks about bitter Pennsylvanians’ clinging to their guns have finally made visible the real man and his Harvard hauteur.

But so far, the wild discrepancy between Obama’s words and his deeds, and between his enormous ambitions and his minimal accomplishments, doesn’t seem to have fazed his core supporters, who apparently suffer from a severe case of cognitive dissonance. Like cultists who rededicate themselves when the cult’s prophecies have been falsified, his fans redouble their delusions in the face of his obvious hypocrisy. That is because Obama, in the imagination of many of his fans in the public and the press, is both a deduction from what was — the failures of the Bush administration and the scandals of the Clintons — and an expression of what should be. The ideal, the aspiration, is so rhetorically appealing that it has been assumed to be true. They remind one of Woodrow Wilson’s answer when asked if his plan for a League of Nations was practicable: “If it won’t work, it must be made to work.”

2)Exclusive: Pyongyang scrambles to offset impending Syrian plutonium reactor revelations in Congress


The CIA plans to reveal to a closed-door congressional panel session Thursday April 24 that the Syrian site targeted by Israel’s air raid last September was a reactor capable of producing plutonium for nuclear weapons, thereby offering final proof of North Korea’s nuclear ties with Syria. This is reported by the LA Times.

Middle East sources reveal Pyongyang took the unusual step Wed. April 23, of ordering its Damascus embassy to gather Arab correspondents in the Syrian capital for an extraordinary briefing: The first secretary told them that North Korea had nothing to do with the destroyed reactor. However, he did not deny that Pyongyang maintained extensive military ties of cooperation with Damascus.

This week, a US delegation arrived in the North Korean capital to discuss Pyongyang’s failure to meet its December deadline for dismantling its nuclear program.

3) J'lem fears U.S. hearings on Syrian reactor will unveil classified data
By Amos Harel, Shmuel Rosner, and Barak Ravid

Defense officials in Jerusalem have expressed concern over the possible revelation of classified data pertaining to Israel's bombing of a Syrian nuclear facility last September during Congressional hearings on the incident which are slated to begin Thursday in Washington.

The American administration is slated to provide Thursday, for the first time, extensive details about the nature of the compound destroyed by the Israel Air Force on September 6.

The Los Angeles Times reported Wednesday that Congress will hear from the Central Intelligence Agency that the facility destroyed in the Israel Air Force attack was a nuclear reactor for producing plutonium.

Israel, however, does not intend to break the official silence it has maintained on the matter for the past seven months. Security sources told Haaretz on Wednesday night the government will not go public with new information in the case.

The Prime Minister's Office declined to comment on the matter Wednesday, and referred Haaretz to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's statements last week in his Pesach interview with media outlets, in which he said that "the Syrians know what our position is, and we know what their expectations are."

Thursday's briefings of the Senate and House Intelligence committees, as well as the Senate Armed Services Committee, will deal for the first time with evidence that North Korea was helping Syria build a nuclear reactor similar to its facility at Yongbyon - in the west-central part of the country - a U.S. government official familiar with the matter said Tuesday. That reactor has in the past produced a small amount of plutonium, which can be a component in nuclear weapons.

Since Israel learned of the planned Congressional hearings three weeks ago, defense officials have expressed concerns that publication of classified details about the attack could compel Syria to resort to a violent response, or at any rate reignite tensions between Jerusalem and Damascus.

Partly as a result of Israeli defense establishment pressure on the government, the Americans eventually agreed to hold closed-door briefings. But apparently a representative of the American intelligence community will conduct a background news briefing afterward for senior Washington-based security affairs commentators.

Israel presumes that this news briefing will result in a lot of information that will later be published in the American media.

The information from the U.S. will evidently focus on questions relating to the type of facility that was attacked, the extent of the nuclear partnership between North Korea and Syria, and the quality of the intelligence Israel and the U.S. had about the Syrian program.

The administration will probably volunteer fewer details about the manner in which the attack was carried out, and the forces and units that participated in it. For now, Israel's policy in the matter remains unchanged, and no official reactions are expected from Jerusalem revealing further details about the bombing raid.

Nor, as far as is known, will Israel's military censorship office alter the blackout it imposed on this case, so the Israeli media will be allowed to cite only details that are published in the U.S., without adding any information of their own.

A senior U.S. administration official said that Thursday's briefing was scheduled because the intelligence community had been deluged for months with congressional requests for information about North Korean activity in Syria and the Israeli air strike, and felt it was now time to brief lawmakers.

Middle East experts in the administration are worried that the timing of the briefing might upstage visits to Washington this week by Jordanian King Abdullah II and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, and hurt Arab-Israeli peace prospects with allegations of nefarious activity by an Arab nation with the aid of North Korea, the official said.

4) 'Israel will return Golan if Syria cuts ties with terror'
By HERB KEINON


Western diplomatic officials said Wednesday reports in Syrian publications that Israel had passed a message to Damascus expressing a willingness to withdraw from the Golan Heights as part of a peace deal missed a major part of the story: what the Syrians would have to do.

Olmert reportedly conveys peace message to Assad

According to the officials, who confirmed that messages from Jerusalem to Damascus and vice versa have been going through Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's office for months, Israel made clear that any peace agreement would necessitate Syria ending its support for Hamas and throwing Hamas political leader Khaled Mashaal out of Damascus; ceasing support for Hizbullah; and distancing itself from Iran.

Erdogan is scheduled to hold a meeting with Syrian President Bashar Assad in Damascus on Saturday.

The reports Wednesday appeared in Champress, an on-line Syrian news Web site, and in the Syrian newspaper Al-Watan, which is independent but close to Assad's government.

The Champress report quoted unnamed diplomatic sources as saying that Turkish mediation had succeeded and that Erdogan had informed Damascus that he'd won Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's acceptance of a full withdrawal from the Golan in return for a peace treaty with Syria.

Al-Watan quoted "informed sources" as saying Erdogan had contacted Assad on Tuesday morning to relay the same news.

Neither report specified how much of the Golan Israel was prepared to return.

The Syrian government on Wednesday evening reportedly confirmed the reports.

Expatriates Minister Buthaina Shaaban told Al-Jazeera television that Olmert had informed Turkey Israel was willing to give back the Golan in return for peace.

"Olmert is ready for peace with Syria on the grounds of international conditions; on the grounds of the return of the Golan Heights in full to Syria," she said.

Olmert's spokesman Mark Regev did not categorically deny the reports, saying instead that "we don't make it our practice to comment on every report in the press or on an Internet site.

"Our position is clear and was articulated by the prime minister when he was interviewed before [Pessah]," Regev said. "We want peace with the Syrians, and they know what we expect from them."

In an interview to Yediot Aharonot over the weekend, Olmert was asked whether he was willing to stand by the "deposit" given by former prime ministers Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Binyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak to Assad's father, Hafez Assad, that Israel would eventually withdraw from the Golan in return for peace.

"What I can say is that I'm very interested in peace with the Syrians, I'm working on it, and I hope my efforts will ripen into significant progress. I promise that in issues between us and Syria, they know what I want from them, and I know well what they want from us," Olmert said.

One Israeli diplomatic official said that in a country where the press is very tightly controlled, it was necessary to ask why the Syrians had an interest in letting the story out now.

The official speculated that the reason may be linked to the congressional hearings in Washington scheduled for tomorrow, in which US Intelligence officials are widely expected to testify that North Korea was helping Syria build a plutonium-fueled reactor prior to Israel's strike on Syria on September 6.

According to this official, Syria - by raising expectations of some kind of possible deal with Israel - was trying to divert attention from that testimony, which is likely to harden congressional attitudes even further against Damascus.

5) Pakistan-Based Militant Group Lashkar-e-Islam Vows 'To Spread Islam Across the World'

In Pakistan's tribal district of Khyber Agency, there is ongoing fighting for the control of the region - with occasional phases of truce - between the militant Islamic tribal group Lashkar-e-Islam and rival fighters from the Kukikhel tribe.

Lashkar-e-Islam came into prominence in April 2008, when it tried to extend its control from the Bara area, where it is based, to the Jamrud region of Khyber Agency. The organization was formed three years previously, in response to the increase in crime such as gambling, drug trafficking, and kidnappings for ransom in the tribal district of Khyber Agency.

With the capture of the Jamrud region, Lashkar-e-Islam chief Mangal Bagh sought to extend his control to the entire tribal district. But after dozens of deaths in the fighting, a tenuous ceasefire has been temporarily reached between Mangal Bagh and the fighters from the Kukikhel tribe.

Not much is known about the ideology of Lashkar-e-Islam. Mangal Bagh reportedly had experience as a young teen alongside the Taliban in the 1980s in their fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan. He currently runs an FM radio station that issues orders and codes of conduct to be followed by the local people.

Mangal Bagh has denied links to Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. However, in an interview published by the Urdu-language regional newspaper Roznama Khabrain, he articulated for the first time views that reflect goals typically sought by the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. In it, he said that his organization's activities are not limited to Pakistan, and that it aims to spread Islam across the world.

Following are excerpts from the interview with Mangal Bagh, as published by Roznama Khabrain, [1] as well as from other reports.

"We Are Out to Spread Islam Throughout the Entire World; We Have 180,000 Mujahideen."

In the interview, the Lashkar-e-Islam chief said that his organization was formed to fight criminals in the area. However, he noted: "Before the formation of this organization, [1] used to sit in the company of the ulema; [then I] started serving madrassas and religious people... Along with my usual work, I also work for the religion [Islam]."

About the objectives of Lashkar-e-Islam, Mangal Bagh said: "Allah revealed the Koran, which was not sent for any one particular region of the world. It was revealed for all of humanity. We are out to spread Islam throughout the world."

According to the paper, he said: "Our objective is to impart the teachings of the Koran. There are 180,000 mujahideen in our organization, and all these people work fi sabilillah [for the sake of Allah]. They receive no pay. They manage on their own."

Mangal Bagh said that the Qaed-e-Azam (Great Leader) Muhammad Ali Jinnah liberated Pakistan from the British [under the banner of] "La ilaha illalah" [There is no god but Allah] - i.e. in the name of Islam. He added: "If Islamic laws were followed in Pakistan, we would have to accept it. [But] if the laws of the Jews were followed, we would not accept it."

According to the paper, the group does not force the local people to accept its beliefs and commands. Mangal Bagh said: "If you ask the Muslims and the followers of Sikhism in this region, they are all happy with the organization [Lashkar-e-Islam]. The reports that we force people to raise our flag [on their houses] are incorrect. The people raise the flag on their own."

He added, however, that people in the region are not permitted to sing and dance: "According to the local tradition, singing and dancing are not permitted. People are fined for listening to music because this is a habit of the English [Westerners]. Pakistan can progress only when the government and the people together work for the religion of Islam."

Also in the interview, Mangal Bagh denied any links with Al-Qaeda, but said that the U.S. presence in Pakistan is the "big reason for the lawlessness" in the country. He added: "People of the entire world should expel the Americans from their countries."

Lashkar-e-Islam's 26-Point Agenda for Khyber Agency

Other reports have been published on the details of the Lashkar-e-Islam agenda for the tribal district of Khyber Agency, where the organization acquired near-total control following its successful fight in recent years against another group, Ansar-ul-Islam, which has since disappeared from the scene.

According to a report in Roznama Khabrain published the same day as the interview, Lashkar-e-Islam's 26-point agenda for implementation in the Khyber Agency is as follows: [2]

1. Eradicating all shirk [polytheism/idolatry], bid'at [innovation in Islam] and all un-Islamic practices from Khyber Agency
2. Permitting only Islamic-style graves
3. Enforcing a total ban on the activities of local and foreign terrorists in Khyber Agency
4. Providing [only] justified assistance to the security forces [of Pakistan] deployed in the area
5. Banning any kind of bribe to and from the mujahideen of Lashkar-e-Islam
6. Punishing any activity disturbing the peace without Lashkar-e-Islam permission; punishment will be as per tribal norms
7. Committing to defend the geographical and ideological frontiers of Pakistan
8. Committing to prevent crime and punish criminals
9. Enforcing a total ban on the sale of wine, on gambling, on counterfeit currency, on heroin factories, etc.
10. Enforcing a total ban on paid killers and kidnappers in the region
11. Enforcing a ban on thieves, theft, and stolen cars
12. Abolishing interest/usury in business transactions
13. Forcing fugitives who reside in Khyber Agency to behave properly and to be accountable to the local residents
14. Rehabilitating all mosques in Khyber Agency
15. Committing to protect teachers, male and female students, doctors, and ulema
16. Committing to resolve land disputes and ensure no land goes uncultivated
17. Enforcing a total ban on non-shari'a practices such as magic, charms, etc.
18. Committing to ensure absolute peace
19. Committing to ensure that women are modestly dressed according to Islamic norms when attending school, and to spread education among the people
20. Committing to ensure collective prayers are offered after the azaan [call for prayer] is sounded
21. Protecting of women's rights and resolution of marriage-related matters as per shari'a or tribal practices
22. Committing to total eradication of un-Islamic practices during marriage ceremonies, such as music and celebratory firing into air
23. Banning women from going to mountains to collect wood for fuel; violators will be fined 10,000 rupees
24. Banning women from going to doctors or hospitals unaccompanied by a male relation
25. Enforcing the compulsory wearing of caps, according to tribal traditions
26. Banning the sheltering of rapists, and totally banning homosexuals, in Khyber Agency.

Lashkar-e-Islam Leader Asks LocalSchool Pupils to Join Organization

Mangal Bagh's group began as a response to increasing crime, but its objectives appear to have changed, in accordance with the meaning of its name Lashkar-e-Islam - the Army of Islam.

Upon its recent move into the Jamrud region, the group said that its aim was to eradicate crime. Now, in order to make Khyber Agency crime-free, Mangal Bagh is aiming to create a volunteer force and strengthen its ranks.

According to a report in the Urdu-language newspaper Roznama Jasarat, Mangal Bagh has asked "pupils in the [local] schools to participate in his war, which has started to eradicate crimes and establish law and order [in Khyber Agency where all schools are closed due to the fighting]." [3]

The expansion of Lashkar-e-Islam's activities is causing alarm in the region. The federally administered Khyber Agency is adjacent to the city of Peshawar, the capital of Pakistan's North West Frontier Province. The Peshawar business community is concerned that the group's activities will cause law and order problems in the region. During the group's incursion into Jamrud area, a number of factories and businesses had to shut down.

Roznama Jasarat also said that North West Frontier Province (NWFP) Chief Minister Ameer Haider Khan Hoti had agreed, during a meeting with local traders and the leaders of the NWFP Chamber of Commerce and Industry, to build a fence so that the conflict in Khyber Agency does not spill over into Peshawar and the rest of the province.

[1] Roznama Khabrain (Pakistan), April 18, 2008.

[2] Roznama Khabrain (Pakistan), April 18, 2008.

[3] Roznama Jasarat (Pakistan), April 18, 2008.


6) Why Hillary Makes My Wife Scream
By Tom Hayden


My wife Barbara has begun yelling at the television set every time she hears Hillary Clinton. This is abnormal behavior, since Barbara is a meditative practitioner of everything peaceful and organic, and is inspired by Barack Obama's transformational appeal.

For Barbara, Hillary has become the screech on the blackboard. From First Lady to Lady Macbeth.

It's getting to me as well. Last year, I was somewhat reconciled to the prospect of supporting and pressuring Hillary as the nominee amidst the rising tide of my friends who already hated her, irrationally I thought. I was one of those people Barack accuses of being willing to settle. I even had framed a flattering autographed message from Hillary. But as the campaign has gone on and on, her signed portrait still leans against the wall in my study. I don't know where she belongs anymore.

At least Hillary was a known quantity in my life. I knew of the danger of her becoming more and more hawkish as she tried to break the ultimate glass ceiling. I also knew that she could be forced to change course if public opinion was fiercely opposed to the war. And I knew she was familiar with radical social causes from her own life experience in the sixties. So my progressive task seemed clear: help build an antiwar force powerful enough to make it politically necessary to end the war. Been there, done that. And in the process, finally put a woman in the White House. A soothing bonus.

But as the Obama campaign gained momentum, Hillary began morphing into the persona that has my pacifist wife screaming at the television set.

Going negative doesn't begin to describe what has happened. Hillary is going over the edge. Even worse are the flacks she sends before the cameras on her behalf, like that Kiki person, who smirks and shakes her head at the camera every time she fields a question. Or the real carnivores, like Howard Wolfson, Lanny Davis and James Carville, whose sneering smugness prevents countless women like my wife from considering Hillary at all.

To use the current terminology, Hillary people are bitter people, even more bitter than the white working-class voters Barack has talked about. Because they circle the wagons so tightly, they don't recognize how identical, self-reinforcing and out-of-touch they are.

To take just one example, the imagined association between Barack Obama and Bill Ayers will suffice. Hillary is blind to her own roots in the sixties. In one college speech she spoke of ecstatic transcendence; in another, she said, "Our social indictment has broadened. Where once we exposed the quality of life in the world of the South and the ghettos, now we condemn the quality of work in factories and corporations. Where once we assaulted the exploitation of man, now we decry the destruction of nature as well. How much long can we let corporations run us?"

She was in Chicago for three nights during the 1968 street confrontations. She chaired the 1970 Yale law school meeting where students voted to join a national student strike again an "unconscionable expansion of a war that should never have been waged." She was involved in the New Haven defense of Bobby Seale during his murder trial in 1970, as the lead scheduler of student monitors. She surely agreed with Yale president Kingman Brewster that a black revolutionary couldn't get a fair trial in America. She wrote that abused children were citizens with the same rights as their parents.

Most significantly in terms of her recent attacks on Barack, after Yale law school, Hillary went to work for the left-wing Bay Area law firm of Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein, which specialized in Black Panthers and West Coast labor leaders prosecuted for being communists. Two of the firm's partners, according to Treuhaft, were communists and the two others "tolerated communists". Then she went on to Washington to help impeach Richard Nixon, whose career was built on smearing and destroying the careers of people through vague insinuations about their backgrounds and associates. (All these citations can be found in Carl Bernstein's sympathetic 2007 Clinton biography, A Woman in Charge.)

All these were honorable words and associations in my mind, but doesn't she see how the Hillary of today would accuse the Hillary of the sixties of associating with black revolutionaries who fought gun battles with police officers, and defending pro-communist lawyers who backed communists? Doesn't the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whom Hillary attacks today, represent the very essence of the black radicals Hillary was associating with in those days? And isn't the Hillary of today becoming the same kind of guilt-by-association insinuator as the Richard Nixon she worked to impeach?

It is as if Hillary Clinton is engaged in a toxic transmission onto Barack Obama of every outrageous insult and accusation ever inflicted on her by the American right over the decades. She is running against what she might have become. Too much politics dries the soul of the idealist.

It is abundantly clear that the Clintons, working with FOX News and manipulating old Clinton staffers like George Stephanopoulos, are trying, at least unconsciously, to so damage Barack Obama that he will be perceived as "unelectable" to Democratic superdelegates. It is also clear that the campaign of defamation against Obama has resulted in higher negative ratings for Hillary Clinton. She therefore is threatening the Democratic Party's chances for the White House, whether or not she is the nominee.

Since no one in the party leadership seems able or willing to intervene against this self-destructive downward spiral, perhaps progressives need to consider responding in the only way politicians sometimes understand. If they can't hear us screaming at the television sets, we can send a message that the Clintons are acting as if they prefer John McCain to Barack Obama. And follow it up with another message: if Clinton doesn't immediately cease her path of destruction, millions of young voters and black voters may not send checks, may not knock on doors, and may not even vote for her if she becomes the nominee. That's not a threat, that's the reality she is creating.

7) The Second Coming of McGovern
By Victor Davis Hanson

Hillary won just enough to show that it is ludicrous to oust a 10-point winner at this late junction, but not quite the blow-out that might cause a stampede to her in the next few states.

The Democrats are tottering at the edge of the abyss. They are about to nominate someone who cannot win, despite vastly out-spending his opponent, any of the key large states — CA, NJ, NY, OH, PENN, TX, etc. — that will determine the fall election. And yet not to nominate him will cause the sort of implosion they saw in 1968 or the sort of mess we saw in November 2000.

Hillary won't quit, since she knows that Obama, when pressure mounts, is starting to show a weird sort of petulance, and drops the "new politics" for snideness. And at any given second, a Rev. Wright outburst, an Ayers reappearance, another Michelle 'never been proud' moment, or another condescending Obamism can cause him to nose dive and become even more snappy.

They won't be able to force Hillary out since she still has strong arguments — the popular vote may end up dead even, or even in her favor; while he won caucuses and out-of-play states, she won the critical fall battlegrounds — and by plebiscites; she is the more experienced and more likely to run a steady national campaign; she wins the Reagan Democrats that will determine the fall election; and by other, more logical nomination rules (like the Republicans' fewer caucuses, winner-take-all elections) she would have already wrapped it up. There seems something unfair, after all, for someone to win these mega-states and end up only with a few extra delegates for the effort. The more this drags out, the more Obama and Hillary get nastier and more estranged from each other — at precisely the time one must take the VP nomination to unite the party.

On the plus side, Hillary is showing a scrappy, tough blue-collar talent that is critical for November — but apparently it will be all for naught, or worse, cause lots of these Middle America "clingers" to go over to McCain.

More and more, McCain will want to run against Obama and his far weaker coalition of elite whites, African-Americans, students — and closets of skeletons. More and more, we will start to see the buyer's remorse of midsummer 1972.

All eyes turn to a repeat in Indiana...

8)s Obama Ready for Prime Time?
By KARL ROVE
April 24, 2008; Page A13

After being pummeled 55% to 45% in the Pennsylvania primary, Barack Obama was at a loss for explanations. The best he could do was to compliment his supporters in an email saying, "you helped close the gap to a slimmer margin than most thought possible." Then he asked for money.

With $42 million in the bank, money is the least of Sen. Obama's problems. He needs a credible message that convinces Democrats he should be president. In recent days, he's spent too much time proclaiming his inevitable nomination. But they already know he's won more states, votes and delegates.


8) Is Obama Ready for Prime Time?
By Karl Rove

His words wear especially thin when he was dealt a defeat like Tuesday's. Mr. Obama was routed despite outspending Hillary Clinton on television by almost 3-1. While polls in the final days showed a possible 4% or 5% Clinton win, she apparently took late-deciders by a big margin to clinch the landslide.

Where she cobbled together her victory should cause concern in the Obama HQ. She did better – and he worse – than expected in Philadelphia's suburbs. Mrs. Clinton won two of these four affluent suburban counties, home of the white-wine crowd Mr. Obama has depended on for victories before.

In the small town and rural "bitter" precincts, she clobbered him. Mr. Obama's state chair was Sen. Bob Casey, who hails from Lackawanna County in northeast Pennsylvania. She carried that county 74%-25%. In the state's 61 less-populous counties, she won 63% – and by 278,266 votes. Her margin of victory statewide was 208,024 votes.

Mrs. Clinton's problem remains that she's behind in the delegate count, with 1,589 to Mr. Obama's 1,714. Neither candidate will get to the 2,025 needed for nomination with elected delegates. But the Democratic Party's rules of proportionality mean it will be hard to close that margin among the 733 delegates yet to be elected or declared. Mrs. Clinton will need to take 58% of the remaining delegates. Thus far, she's been able to get that or better in just four of the 46 contests.

Her path gets rougher. While Indiana, Kentucky, West Virginia and Puerto Rico are good territory for her, Oregon and Montana may not be. And Mrs. Clinton will be outspent badly. She entered April with $9.3 million in cash, but debts of $10.3 million. Mr. Obama had $42.5 million but only $663,000 in unpaid bills.

In Pennsylvania, Mr. Obama's money could only wipe out half a purported 20% deficit, but the Real Clear Politics average of recent polls shows Mr. Obama behind by 2% in Indiana and ahead in North Carolina by 16%. Those states will vote in two weeks. The financial throw weight he will have in the Hoosier State could more than erase Mrs. Clinton's lead there, while keeping North Carolina solidly in his column. His money could give him a double knockout on May 6, which would effectively end her bid for the presidency.

If she wins Indiana, however, she will surely go forward – and Democrats run the risk of a split decision in June. Mr. Obama could have more delegates, but she could have more popular votes. In fact, on Tuesday night she actually grabbed the popular vote lead: If you include the Michigan and Florida primary results, Mrs. Clinton now leads the popular vote by a slim 113,000 votes out of 29,914,356 cast.

Mr. Obama will argue he wasn't on the ballot in Michigan and didn't campaign in Florida. But don't Democrats want to count all the votes in all the contests? After all, Mr. Obama took his name off the Michigan ballot; it isn't something he was forced to do. And while he didn't campaign in Florida, neither did she.

And what about the Michigan and Florida delegates? By my calculations, she should pick up about 54 delegates on Mr. Obama if they are seated (this assumes the Michigan "uncommitted" delegates go for Mr. Obama). If he is ahead in June by a number similar to his lead today of 125, does he let the two delegations in and make the convention vote even closer? Or does he continue to act as if two states with 41 of the 270 electoral votes needed for the White House don't exist?

The Democratic Party has two weakened candidates. Mrs. Clinton started as a deeply flawed candidate: the palpable and unpleasant sense of entitlement, the absence of a clear and optimistic message, the grating personality impatient to be done with the little people and overly eager for a return to power, real power, the phoniness and the exaggerations. These problems have not diminished over the long months of the contest. They have grown. She started out with the highest negatives of any major candidate in an open race for the presidency and things have only gotten worse.

And what of the reborn Adlai Stevenson? Mr. Obama is befuddled and angry about the national reaction to what are clearly accepted, even commonplace truths in San Francisco and Hyde Park. How could anyone take offense at the observation that people in small-town and rural American are "bitter" and therefore "cling" to their guns and their faith, as well as their xenophobia? Why would anyone raise questions about a public figure who, for only 20 years, attended a church and developed a close personal relationship with its preacher who says AIDS was created by our government as a genocidal tool to be used against people of color, who declared America's chickens came home to roost on 9/11, and wants God to damn America? Mr. Obama has a weakness among blue-collar working class voters for a reason.

His inspiring rhetoric is a potent tool for energizing college students and previously uninvolved African-American voters. But his appeals are based on two aspirational pledges he is increasingly less credible in making.

Mr. Obama's call for post partisanship looks unconvincing, when he is unable to point to a single important instance in his Senate career when he demonstrated bipartisanship. And his repeated calls to remember Dr. Martin Luther King's "fierce urgency of now" in tackling big issues falls flat as voters discover that he has not provided leadership on any major legislative battle.

Mr. Obama has not been a leader on big causes in Congress. He has been manifestly unwilling to expend his political capital on urgent issues. He has been only an observer, watching the action from a distance, thinking wry and sardonic and cynical thoughts to himself about his colleagues, mildly amused at their to-ing and fro-ing. He has held his energy and talent in reserve for the more important task of advancing his own political career, which means running for president.

But something happened along the way. Voters saw in the Philadelphia debate the responses of a vitamin-deficient Stevenson act-a-like. And in the closing days of the Pennsylvania primary, they saw him alternate between whining about his treatment by Mrs. Clinton and the press, and attacking Sen. John McCain by exaggerating and twisting his words. No one likes a whiner, and his old-style attacks undermine his appeals for post partisanship.

Mr. Obama is near victory in the Democratic contest, but it is time for him to reset, freshen his message and say something new. His conduct in the last several weeks raises questions about whether, for all his talents, he is ready to be president