Let Oren's Wish Beget The Thought!

This was sent to me by my English friend who really needs to get a job. Perhaps I need to as well.

I am posting because it shows how wide the gulf between Islam and the West remains and some government agency or public foundation funded the research or came up with these laws and/or information because no one,in his right mind, would initiate this research simply by themselves. This is why we need more government so people can be taken off unemployment roles and given serious jobs coming up with these brilliant ideas.(See 1 below.)

Now for the more mundane so it is back to Olmert and his trials and tribulations. Let Oren's wish beget the thought (See 2 and 2a below.)

Barak to tell the U.S. time is of the essence regarding Iran. It will be interesting to watch the sand in GW's hourglass set beside that of one pertaining to Iran's development of nuclear bombs. (See 3 below.)

If this report is correct I find it unbelievable that Iraq would allow Israeli planes to train on its sovereign soil without its permission. (See 4 below.)

For once Assad might just have it right. (See 5 below.)

Caroline Glick keeps tap dancing on Olmert's head. (See 6 below.)

I helped select Matt Miller as a White House Fellow and now he is telling Obama what to do. (See 7 below.)

Have a great weekend.

Dick


1) In Lebanon, men are legally allowed to have sex with animals, but the animals must be female. Having sexual relations with a male animal is punishable by death.




In Bahrain , a male doctor may legally examine a woman's genitals, but is prohibited from looking directly at them during the examination. He may only see their reflection in a mirror.




Muslims are banned from looking at the genitals of a corpse This also applies to undertakers. The sex organs of the decease= must be covered with a brick or piece of wood at all times.


The penalty for masturbation in Indonesia is decapitation.





There are men in Guam whose full-time job is to travel the countryside and deflower young virgins, who pay th=m for the privilege of having sex for the first time






In Hong Kong , a betrayed wife is legally allowed to kill her adulterous husband, but may only do so with her bare hands.


The husband's illicit lover, on the other hand, may be killed in any manner desired.





Topless saleswomen are legal in Liverpool, England - but only in tropical fish stores.





In Cali , Colombia , a woman may only have sex with her husband, and the first time this happens, her mother must be in the room to witness the act.




In Santa Cruz, Bolivia, it is illegal for a man to have sex with a woman and her daughter at the same time.



In Maryland, it is illegal to sell condoms from vending machines with one exception: Prophylactics may be dispensed from a vending machine only 'in places where alcoholic beverages are sold=for consumption on the premises.'




Banging your head against a wall uses 150 calories an hour.





Humans and dolphins are the only species that have sex for pleasure.




The ant can lift 50 times its own weight, can pull 30 times its own weight and always falls over on its right side when intoxicated.


Butterflies taste with their feet.


An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain. Meanwhile, Starfish don't have a brain.


Turtles can breathe through their butts.

2) Olmert suspected of asking various bodies to fund same foreign trips
By Jonathan Lis, Tomer Zarchin and Ofra Edelman

Israel Police and the Justice Ministry released a joint statement Friday saying Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is suspected of asking a number of different public organizations, and the state, to pay for the same trips abroad. The noney was then allegedly used for family holidays.

"The prime minister was asked to give his account about suspicions of serious fraud and other offenses," said the police and the ministry joint statement, following a third round of questioning of Olmert in an ongoing corruption investigation.

The statement says that the latest suspicions pertain to Olmert's stint as Jerusalem mayor and his time as minister of industry and trade, during which he allegedly asked for and received the money from organizations primarily in Israel and primarily involved in public activity.

According to the suspicions, Olmert's travel agency allegedly sent an individual receipt to each organization who gave money for the same flights, as though each had been the only contributor.

Each body then had its own receipt that it had funded the trip, and the surplus money - apparently a substantial amount - was allegedly deposited in a private bank account in Olmert's name, which was handled by the same travel agency. The suspicion is that these funds were then used to pay for private trips abroad for Olmert and his family.

Olmert is also suspected of receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars from Jewish-American millionaire Morris Talansky over a 15-year period.

The Prime Minister's Office said following the interview Friday that "the earth did not shake and the sky did not fall," alluding to indications that the current round of questioning would be harsher than the last.

Most of the questions were standard and pertained to business Olmert conducted abroad and in his posts as trade minister and Jerusalem mayor, the PMO said in a statement.

The interview comes amid heightened wrangling between the police and Olmert's associates. A police source said Thursday that the allegations are extremely serious and that an ordinary citizen would have been arrested by now had such accusations been leveled.

Olmert's associates accused the police Thursday of turning the case into a "personal campaign" against the prime minister, suggesting that Olmert would not be treated fairly during the interview.

Law enforcement sources said that had Olmert not been prime minister, he would have been arrested long ago. "Anyone else would have been arrested had similar suspicions been raised against him. Unlike any other suspect, Olmert is getting privileged treatment. He is setting the date and duration of the questioning," a source said.

Olmert's media adviser Amir Dan said that "it's time the police stopped their tendentious leaks. When the police leak, its called 'the public's right to know,' but when a suspect tries to defend himself he is accused of damaging the rule of law."

2a) ANALYSIS: Olmert won't be able to recover from this interrogation
By Amir Oren


At noon, when the white cars with the blue flashing lights sail on, Ehud Olmert will cease serving as prime minister. Officially, certain procedures will still be required for an orderly transfer of government, but for all practical purposes Olmert's tenure ends Friday morning. A jaded public is no longer moved by these interrogations: It's hot, it's boring, again those shots of the police arriving at the Prime Minister's Residence to interview him.

But make no mistake: Olmert will not be able to recover from this interrogation and from the public response to its contents, once they are revealed. Toward evening the walls will begin to shake. Reports of Olmert's interrogation will mean expediting the pace of Olmert's ouster, from weeks to hours.

Two years ago today, on the eve of Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser's abduction on the Lebanese border, Olmert visited Israel Defense Forces headquarters and heard surveys filled with satisfaction. But one of the generals, Planning Division head Yitzhak Harel, warned him that processes over previous years had created "a hollow army." Friday, as Brig. Gen. Shlomi Ayalon and his team prepare to interrogate Olmert, it must be said that in the Olmert case the police have proved not to be hollow. Their conduct over the past two months made up for earlier embarrassments and mishaps. In their handling of the Olmert case the Israel Police succeeded in positioning itself as a professional organization that does not show favoritism even when the suspect holds the top job in the country.

Preparations by Ayalon's team of investigators are shrouded in secrecy, as though they are safeguarding strategic surprises - affairs yet unknown - and not just tactical surprises from the realm of envelopes. It is very possible that Olmert prepared well for the last war, utterly blind to the real threat impending in another sector.

If this turns out to be the case, the investigators and State Prosecutor's Office will be able to notch up an immense achievement. This past week Olmert, his lawyers and spokesmen exhausted their energy on Talansky's cross-examination, on the legal inquiries in the United States, and on scandalous verbal sparring, without breaching the field-security wall of the police and prosecution. As on the eve of his first interrogation two months ago, Olmert will fail to know what questions are about to hit him and generate credible answers to them. The interrogators possess a fundamental, incriminating version, and Olmert will have to work hard to contradict it. He is a step away from an indictment on offenses of fraud, aggravated breach of trust, and maybe also bribe-taking.

The envelopes case has been compared to a table with three legs - Morris Talansky, Shula Zaken, and Uri Messer. Even if each leg is slightly weakened, they would still remain solid enough together to support the case. So it will be useless to Olmert if the cross-examination finds that Talansky gave him only four envelopes in three places and not eight envelopes in five places. His problem this morning is that he might discover that the investigators are bringing into his official residence another table, or tables; that in this battle, Talansky is not alone.

The moment of truth has arrived for Olmert, and for Israeli society and the political system which unthinkingly raised him up to the prime ministership and are about to bring him down.

3) Barak to tell US time running out Iran
By YAAKOV KATZ AND HERB KEINON

In a series of consultations apparently aimed at coordinating policies against the Iranian nuclear threat, Defense Minister Ehud Barak will head to the US on Monday for talks at the Pentagon, days after Mossad chief Meir Dagan was in Washington for meetings with key intelligence officials. Sources say Israel is urgently trying to convince the US that Iran is closer to passing the nuclear threshold than Washington believes.


Dagan's visit came as Iran held a second day of military maneuvers on Thursday and claimed to have test-fired more long-range missiles meant to show that the country can defend itself against any attack by the US or Israel.

Barak will spend three days in the US for talks with Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

Defense officials said he would likely also meet with President George W. Bush.

A week after Barak's visit, IDF Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi will head to Washington for his own round of talks with American defense chiefs, including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Michael Mullen, who was in Israel two weeks ago.

Barak hinted at Israeli readiness to attack the Islamic Republic on Thursday.

"The Iranian issue is a challenge not just for Israel but for the entire world," Barak told a meeting of the Labor Party faction. "Israel is the strongest country in the region and we have proven in the past that we are not deterred from acting when our vital interests are at stake."

But he quickly noted that "the reactions of [Israel's] enemies need to be taken into consideration as well."

A senior government official said the Dagan, Barak, Ashkenazi visits to Washington were part of the "routine, close consultations" held between Israel and the US.

Another government source said it would be an exaggeration to imagine that the meetings had to do with drawing up operational plans for any type of military action against Iran. According to this source, no decision had been made on the matter, and Israel was extremely unlikely to take any unilateral action.

A senior US official recently said there was a discrepancy of six to 12 months between the time Israel believed Iran would pass the nuclear point of no return, and when the US felt Teheran will have mastered the nuclear cycle.

The source added that the visits of the Israeli officials came as an intense debate continued to rage inside the US administration between those who favored military action, led by Cheney, and those opposed, led by Gates.

"Iran's response to Europe is not ambiguous," the official said. "Iran rejects the international demand to halt the enrichment of uranium and the world must respond accordingly - by increasing and intensifying the sanctions against Iran."

Also on Thursday, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni told visiting Irish Foreign Minister Micheál Martin that Teheran posed not only a nuclear threat, but also a "comprehensive" threat because of its support for Hizbullah, Hamas and other extremist elements in the region.

Government officials, meanwhile, did not seem overly concerned about Iran's recent missile tests. One official said both sides were signaling the other that they could cause significant damage. The official put the missile tests in the same category as the reportedly large-scale IAF exercise in the eastern Mediterranean in the first week of June, and a well publicized visit Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made to Dimona on July 1.

In response to the missile tests, Olmert's spokesman Mark Regev said Israel "seeks neither conflict nor does it seek hostilities with Iran. Nevertheless, Iran's nuclear program together with their ballistic missile program should be a matter of grave concern for the entire family of nations."

In the second day of exercises in Iran, the Revolutionary Guards claimed to have tested new weapons with "special capabilities" that included missiles launched from naval ships in the Persian Gulf, along with torpedoes and surface-to-surface missiles. A brief video clip showed two missiles being fired simultaneously in the darkness, followed by red plumes of fire and smoke.

On Wednesday, Iran said it tested a new version of the Shihab-3 missile, which officials have said has a range of 2,000 km. and is armed with a 1-ton conventional warhead. That would put Israel, Turkey, the Arabian peninsula, Afghanistan and Pakistan all within striking distance.

In what could be interpreted as an Israeli response to the two-day Iranian exercise, Israel Aerospace Industries put on display for the press on Thursday the air force's most-sophisticated airborne early-warning and control plane, which would likely be used in any strike against Iranian nuclear installations.

The aircraft's sophisticated radar and intelligence-gathering technology as well as electronic warfare systems were developed by IAI's Elta Division and installed aboard a Gulfstream G550 business jet. The plane arrived in Israel in September 2006 and became operation this past February. The aircraft will also be shown at the Farnborough Air Show in England next week.

4) 'Israeli warplanes practice in Iraq'

Israel Air Force (IAF) war planes are practicing in Iraqi airspace and land in US airbases on the country as preparation for a potential strike on Iran, sources in the Iraqi Defense Ministry told a local news network, Friday.

The report, carried also by Iranian news outlets, claimed that recently massive nocturnal activity by IAF craft was noted in several American held airbases, including measures by the US army to increase security around the bases.

The Jerusalem Post could not confirm the veracity of the report.

According to the sources, former military officers in the Anbar province said IAF jets arrive during the night from Jordanian airspace, enter Iraq's airspace and land on a runway near the city of Hadita. The sources estimated the jets were practicing for a raid on Iran's nuclear sites.

The sources also said the American bases in Iraq might serve as a platform for the IAF from which to attack Iran. If Israeli warplanes will take off from Iraq, they can reach Bushehr in five minutes - a "record time," the sources said.

After reports of a massive IAF exercise over the Mediterranean surfaced several weeks ago, an Israeli official told the times that the drill was "the dress rehearsal" for an attack on Iran's nuclear sites.

On Thursday, Defense Minister Ehud Barak said Israel was the "strongest country in the region." Sending a thinly veiled warning to Iran, Barak said Israel "has already proved it did not shy away in the past from acting when it fears its vital interests are at stake."

5) Assad: Israel may not be able to commit.


Whilst Syria is interested in a peace agreement with Israel, and Israel is clearly pursuing the matter more seriously now than in recent years, doubt remains about the possibility of success given the instability of Prime Minster Ehud Olmert's government, Syrian President Bashar Assad told the Lebanese newspaper L'Orient-Le Jour on Thursday.

"I think that Israel is, in a certain way, more serious now regarding the desire for a peace agreement," he said. "I say this with a lot of reservation, because past experience is not encouraging. One must wonder if Israel is capable of committing, especially [the Israeli] prime minister.

"The agreement demands a strong leadership," Assad continued. "Is this leadership which exists today in Israel? I don't know. The process towards peace is even harder than the process towards war. We will try and we will see."

Speaking on the pace of negotiations and the prospect of direct talks, the Syrian president emphasized that "conducting indirect talks does not say that we don't want to sit with the Israelis at the negotiating table - the opposite is true."

However, after an eight-year negotiation freeze, and after Israeli attacks in Lebanon and Syria, trust between the sides is at a low point, Assad said.

"We are now working on two fronts," he explained. "An attempt to build trust, with the intention of examining to what extent Israel really wants peace, and trying to arrive at a basic agreement on issues so that we can move to direct talks."

"In the end, we are speaking about an all-inclusive peace," the Syrian president said. "The intent is peace which includes the Syrians, the Palestinians, and the Lebanese."

"Israel is not serious enough, and therefore we must discern between the signing of an agreement with Israel and coming to a peace agreement."

6) A tale of two hostages
By Caroline B. Glick



Exalting at her liberation by the Colombian military last week, former hostage Ingrid Bentancourt exclaimed, "This is a miracle, a miracle! We have an amazing military. I think only the Israelis can possibly pull off something like this."

Bentancourt's statement made thousands of Israelis wince.

Held hostage in the Colombian jungles for six years by the narco-terror group known as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia or FARC, Bentancourt, a dual Colombian-French citizen who was a Colombian senator and presidential candidate at the time she was abducted, obviously had not heard the news about the "new Israel." Her statements were based on her historical memory of the "old Israel."

She didn't know that the "new Israel" doesn't fight terrorists. The "new Israel" views fighting terrorists as an exercise in futility. Its leaders and military chiefs alike repeat endlessly the mantra that there is no military victory to be had, only a political accommodation.

She didn't know that the week before she was rescued, the "new Israel" made a deal with Hizbullah to release five senior Lebanese terrorists, an unknown number of Palestinian terrorists and hundreds of bodies of dead terrorists in exchange for the bodies of IDF reservists Eldad Regev and Ehud Goladwasser who were murdered by Hizbullah two years ago.

The "new Israel" is the Israel that maintains one-sided "ceasefires" with Hamas and is poised to make a deal with Hamas by which it will release up to a thousand Palestinian terrorists in exchange for IDF hostage Gilad Shalit.

No, Betancourt, was thinking of the "old Israel" — the Israel that electrified the world when it sent its commandos thousands of miles to free its hostages in Entebbe 32 years ago. It was that memory of Israeli heroism that doubtless gave hope to Bentancourt and her fellow hostages as they languished in FARC captivity in the jungle, malnourished, ill-treated and terrorized. The Entebbe rescue allowed them to fantasize that one day, they too would be rescued and their tormentors would be brought to justice. And last week, their dreams came true.

Betancourt had reasons beside her plight as a hostage to associate Colombia's struggle with Israel's. At the time she was abducted, both countries faced similar political and military challenges and at the time both countries seemed to be embarking on similar paths to surmount them.

When Betancourt was kidnapped in April 2002, Colombia had just disavowed a failed strategy of appeasing FARC. To bring FARC to the negotiating table, former president Andres Pastrana agreed to transfer control over a swathe of Colombian territory the size of Switzerland to FARC. Rather than reciprocate this peace offering with one of its own, FARC used its safe haven to increase its recruitment of terrorists and intensify its kidnapping campaign and drug trafficking operations. For nearly four years, Pastrana refused to disavow the phony "peace process" in spite of repeated FARC attacks. It was only in February 2002, after FARC hijacked an airliner and kidnapped its fifth lawmaker in a year that Pastrana finally repudiated his appeasement drive.

Similarly, in 2002, Israel was in the grips of an unprecedented Palestinian terror campaign with suicide bombings going off almost daily. Then prime minister Ariel Sharon had been elected the previous year to replace the discredited Ehud Barak as premier after the latter's appeasement strategy at Camp David had failed and Israel's eight-year-old Oslo appeasement strategy had fallen apart. When Betancourt was taken prisoner, Sharon had just launched Operation Defensive Shield with the express purpose of defeating the Palestinian terror networks in Judea and Samaria.

What Bentancourt didn't know was that since her abduction, Israel and Colombia have gone their separate ways. Under President Alvero Uribe who was elected after her capture, Colombia has moved steadily toward full victory over FARC. On the other hand, Israel has abandoned victory as a strategic concept for contending with its enemies.

Israel's abdication of its struggle against its terrorist enemies was as swift and unmistakable as it was inexplicable. Rather than following up Israel's military defeat of the Palestinian terror machine in Judea and Samaria in 2002 with a similar operation in Gaza or with a political offensive against the PLO which Defensive Shield exposed as the central engine behind the Palestinian terror war, Sharon opted to withdraw from the fight and return to the discredited policy of appeasement which Israeli voters twice rejected.

First Sharon accepted the so-called Roadmap to Peace in 2003. Predicated on the false assumption that the Palestinians are interested in peace with Israel and can be appeased into accepting statehood and Israel's right to exist, the Roadmap precludes any Israeli option for victory.

When the Palestinians refused to end their support for Israel's destruction in spite of the Roadmap, Sharon abandoned appeasement for peace and opting instead for surrender for "quiet." His unilateral surrender of Gaza demoralized Israeli society, weakened Israel's democratic institutions and propelled Hamas and Iran to power in Gaza. Rather than recognize that the move had been a strategic catastrophe which called into question Israel's ability to act as an ally in the US-led war on terror, Sharon launched Kadima as a new political party dedicated entirely to appeasement and capitulation.

After Ehud Olmert replaced Sharon as premier in November 2005, he brought Kadima to victory in the March 2006 elections by pledging to expand Sharon's "capitulation for quiet" strategy to Judea and Samaria. When Israel's neighbors responded to that agenda with war from Lebanon and Gaza, Olmert and his colleagues were forced to return to their previous appeasement for peace agenda. But their refusal to countenance the option of victory over Israel's implacable foes remains the order of the day.

In contrast, the Uribe government in Colombia has never veered from its single-minded goal of defeating FARC both militarily and politically. With US assistance, Uribe has rebuilt Colombia's military into a highly competent counter-insurgency force. His counterinsurgency has brought both defeat and demoralization to FARC's doorstep. FARC's guerilla force which numbered 18,000 just a few years ago, has been reduced by an estimated 50 percent.

Busy with their own survival, FARC's remaining forces have been unable to conduct any sustained operations against the Uribe government or rank and file Colombians in recent years. Restored security has brought economic growth and prosperity. And both have stabilized the Uribe government. Like the Palestinians, FARC enjoys the support of the international Left and leftist governments. In FARC's case, Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez has been the terror group's primary military, financial and political backer.

Ecuador, led by Rafael Correa's Chavez-allied leftist government, has also become a major sponsor of FARC. In March, Uribe risked regional war in order to defeat FARC by raiding a FARC base on the Ecuadoran side of the border. The raid was immensely successful. FARC's deputy commander Raul Reyes was killed and his computers — carrying massive intelligence information — were seized. As Ecuador cut off diplomatic relations and Chavez deployed troops to his border with Colombia, Uribe stalwartly defended the raid. He defended the raid even as the French government attacked him claiming that Reyes had been their negotiating partner in their quest to secure Betancourt's release.

Israel's governments have systematically prevented the publication of information regarding Fatah's leadership role in the terror war, and its ties to Iran, and Syria. They have also refused to take any action against Israeli organizations and politicians bankrolled illegally by foreign governments. In contrast, Uribe moved quickly to use the information exposed by Reyes's computers to discredit Chavez, FARC and their Colombian and foreign sympathizers. Reyes's files showed that neither FARC nor Chavez nor pro-Chavez Colombian Senator Piedad Cordoba were negotiating Betancourt's release in good faith.

Understanding that she was their most powerful bargaining chip against the Uribe government, in their internal discussions, all three attested to their opposition to her release. Uribe's release of the information decreased French pressure for a deal. Chavez was further discredited and Bogota's prosecutor opened a criminal probe against Cordoba on treason-related charges. According to media reports, the Ecuador raid also provided the Colombian military with actionable intelligence it needed to move forward with its plans for last week's rescue mission. That is, each successful raid paved the way for the next achievement.

The Israeli media's response to the Colombia rescue mission has been to inflate the "Israeli role" in the mission. Numerous reports have been published in the local press about the fact that the Colombians hired retired IDF generals Yisrael Ziv and Yossi Kupperwasser to help them build up their counter-terror capabilities. Far from obscuring the yawning gap between Colombia and Israel, these reports bring Israel's abandonment of the fight into sharp relief. They show clearly that Israel's decision to capitulate has nothing to do with an inability to fight to victory.

It is a failure of will rather than a failure of capacity that has brought Israel to its current cowed and humiliated condition where its media argues over how many terrorists should be exchanged for Shalit and ignores completely the very notion that he can be rescued. And of Israel could attempt to rescue him.

While success is never assured, it is a fact that just as Colombia was able to find and rescue Betancourt and her fellow hostages in the jungle, so Israel could, if it dared, conduct a competent operation aimed at rescuing Shalit in Gaza. Like Colombia it could acquire the intelligence necessary to plan and carry out such a raid. Like Colombia, its forces are competent to succeed in such an endeavor.

Until last week's raid, one of the main sources of pressure on the Uribe government was Betancourt's family. Her mother and her children met frequently with Chavez and railed against Uribe in their eagerness to see her released. Speaking of her experience and of her rescue in Paris this week, Betancourt, who over the years tried to escape five times, was clear that she preferred freedom to slavery, even if it came only in death.

As French philosopher Andre Glucksmann wrote in City Journal, it was freedom, not life that she held most sacred. And while she understood her family's actions, she clearly did not embrace their pacifism as she praised Uribe for rescuing her despite the risk that the mission would fail and she and her fellow hostages would be killed. It is hard to imagine that as a soldier, Shalit feels any differently from Betancourt. Why should we assume that he prefers live as a slave than die in a quest for freedom? It is a travesty, that in their inexplicable abandonment of honorable struggle against murderous foes in favor of dangerous appeasement, Olmert and his colleagues have denied Shalit the respect due a warrior and have denied the IDF the right to fight for Israel's freedom.

6) Obama Doesn't Have to Run as a Liberal
By MATT MILLER


Some liberals fret that Barack Obama is tacking to the center after his acquiescence to the Supreme Court's repeal of Washington's handgun law, his shift on telephone company immunity for cooperating with wiretaps, and his call for more faith-based social programs. But this is just the beginning. The logic of the race will shortly lead Sen. Obama to buck bigger liberal pieties on core priorities like schools, taxes and health care in order to win.

In a sense this is overdue. For all the talk about reaching out to Republicans and independents, Mr. Obama's proposals have been far less challenging to conventional liberal thinking than were Bill Clinton's in 1992 -- when Mr. Clinton forced Democrats to overhaul their approach to such central issues as welfare, trade and crime. Mr. Obama's true audacity (and accomplishment) thus far has been to rebrand liberal goals on health care and economic security as "common sense" reforms behind which all Americans can unite.

You can't criticize Mr. Obama for not taking on antique Democratic thinking when it turned out he could win his party's nod without having to. That's just smart politics. But it won't work any longer.


As the general election takes shape, Mr. Obama now faces the one line of attack he didn't have to deal with in his long battle with Hillary Clinton: the charge that he is an extreme liberal whose tax-and-spend instincts will put America on the road to socialism. This drumbeat is already being sounded by conservative commentators who note the gap between the candidate's post-partisan rhetoric and what they dub his "redistributionist" agenda. It will become a roar from the McCain camp that Mr. Obama must silence if he's to sustain his broad appeal.

If the "too liberal" label sticks, Mr. Obama won't win. And if he doesn't demonstrate his openness to more ideologically androgynous means to achieve his goals, he won't be able to govern.

That means Mr. Obama needs three biggish ideas he can punch back with as the charges crescendo. "John McCain would have you believe I'm practically a socialist," Mr. Obama needs to be able to say with a laugh. "Well, ask yourselves this: Is a typical liberal for x, y and z?" These three proposals need to be so self-evidently a break with conventional liberal thinking and interest groups that it will instantly trump the GOP charge in the press, as well as in the eyes of independent voters and open-minded Republicans. Think of them as the policy equivalents of what Bill Clinton did when he distanced himself from the ugly racial animus of hip-hop artist Sister Souljah in 1992.

So what should Obama's three "Sister Souljahs" on policy be? Here are my candidates:

- A new deal for teachers. Mr. Obama knows we need to attract a new generation of teachers to the nation's poorest schools, which today recruit from the bottom third of the college class. While money isn't the only answer (prestige and working conditions also matter greatly), even conservatives admit we'll never lure the talent we need unless the earnings trajectory for teachers in high poverty schools goes well beyond today's average starting wage of around $40,000, peaking after 20 years near $80,000. But we don't need to raise teacher salaries across the board -- it's the specialties (like math and science) and the toughest neighborhoods that face real crises.

Mr. Obama should therefore go beyond vague talk of modest pay reform and offer a bold new "grand bargain" to reshape the profession. He should make a $30 billion pot of federal money available to states and districts to boost salaries in poor schools, provided the teachers unions make two key concessions. First, they have to scrap their traditional "lockstep" pay scale. In this scheme, a physics grad has to be paid the same as a phys-ed major if both have the same tenure in the classroom, and a teacher whose students make remarkable gains each year gets rewarded no differently than one whose students languish. Second, it has to be easy to fire the awful teachers that are blighting the lives of a million poor children.

The unions will scream. But college students and younger teachers will crave the chance to earn, say, $150,000 if they excel. And smart union leaders know that something like this money-for-reform deal is the only way the public will ever invest to bolster teaching. Mr. Obama mentioned the idea of merit pay once a year ago. But the union blowback was so great that he didn't broach the subject again until a few days ago in an address to the National Education Association, when (to his credit) he stood his ground and faced some boos from his union audience as a result.

But now that he's dipped his toe in, he can capture the public's imagination by aiming much higher. He can explicitly endorse something like the breakthrough deal being pushed by Washington, D.C., schools chief Michelle Rhee, under which teachers could opt into a new pay schedule that gives them a chance to earn up to $130,000, but requires them to relinquish tenure and seniority rights as part of the bargain. A fresh Obama call for such "market-based pay" to elevate the status of teaching would be a common-sense, cost-effective way to get the teachers we need to the kids who need them most.

- Lower corporate taxes. Corporate tax rates in the U.S. are the second highest among developed countries. Democrats act as if these taxes are somehow a "freebie," paid by impersonal entities. But "corporations" don't pay taxes, people do. These taxes are ultimately borne by shareholders or employees. And corporate taxes help determine where multinational firms choose to locate, decisions that should be a major concern of policy makers who want to keep good jobs in the U.S. Mr. Obama has hinted he'd "consider" lowering corporate taxes at some point. Better now to say he'll make it a priority (tied to closing corporate loopholes and broadening the base) and parry liberal moans by explaining how high corporate taxes hurt American workers.

- Health savings accounts "done right." Liberals sensibly reject "consumer-directed health plans" loved by Republicans when these plans' high co-pays and deductibles put undue burdens on the sick and the poor. But there's a simple way to structure such plans to address these concerns while still bringing consumer incentives to bear on runaway health costs. The answer is to require such plans to limit the total medical costs a person can incur in a year to a reasonable percentage of income. By calling for annual out-of-pocket maximums to be tied explicitly to earnings, Mr. Obama would forge a new "third way" on health care, and cast himself as an innovator not beholden to the far left view that market forces should play no role in health care at all.

Mr. Obama likes to say, "We need a president who tells you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear." But as a candidate he's rarely made good on this pledge. By embracing this trio of common-sense ideas that will nonetheless raise hackles among his liberal supporters, Mr. Obama can go a long way toward slipping the lefty label that could sink him.