The Washington Post's Glenn Kessler is reporting today that the whole Annapolis meeting was nothing more than a Potemkin village for the rubes at large.  The true thrust of American policy in Israel was established in 2004, when George Bush "personally delivered" a letter to Ariel Sharon in which the US "gave the Jewish state permission to expand the West Bank settlements that it hopes to retain in a final peace deal."

Israel's expansion of West Bank settlements, of course, is one of the major obstacles standing in the way of an agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.  Bush's 2002 Roadmap for peace explicitly prohibited settlement expansion and the AP reports today that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has called on Bush's help to rein in Israeli settlement activity.

More on the flip

The wire services are reporting this morning on Jimmy Carter's announcement today on ABC's This Week of his intention to meet with Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal during Carter's upcoming visit to Syria.  Prior to today, there had been much speculation that he intended to do so, but the Carter Center had refused to confirm whether or not the meeting would take place.

In comments with ABC's George Stephanopoulus, Carter reportedly said:

It's very important that at least someone meet with the Hamas leaders to express their views, to ascertain what flexibility they have, to try to induce them to stop all attacks against innocent civilians in Israel and to cooperate with the Fatah as a group that unites the Palestinians.

More on the flip

With the attention of the American public distracted by tomorrow's appearances on Capitol Hill of Gen. David Petraeus and Amb. Ryan Crocker, the war in Iraq has entered a new and extremely dangerous phase.  Following the collapse of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's foolhardy, ill-planned assault on the Sadrist Mahdi Army last week, the US Army has apparently decided to seize the bull by the horns and destroy Sadr on its own.

That is the context behind the much bally-hooed headline of today that Sadr has offered to lay down his arms -- if Iraq's Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani  orders him to do so.

This just up on the AP wire:

Officials in Iran confirmed for the first time Saturday that the country played an important role in brokering a recent truce between the Iraqi government and anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

Iran's Shiite government helped end the clashes between Iraqi government troops and al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia for the sake of Shiite unity, said a senior Iranian official who deals with Iraq.

"It is in Iran's best interests to see unity among Shiite factions," said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

A quick rip-n-read.  The AP has a story up on the wire right now that in order to salvage its Mideast peace effort, the Bush administration has recognized political reality and abandoned its longstanding policy of no negotiations with Hamas:

To defuse the threat from Gaza militants to Israel and President Bush's Mideast peace program, the U.S. has decided that the ends justify the means.

More on the flip...

Off the Reuters wire, the following story:

Brazil's foreign minister on Monday condemned a Colombian military strike on rebels inside Ecuador and called on Bogota to offer an explicit apology.

"The territorial violation is very serious and needs to be condemned," Foreign Minister Celso Amorim said in Brasilia. "Brazil condemns any territorial violation."

Amorim also said the Colombian government should offer an "explicit" apology to contain the growing crisis prompted by the weekend raid, in which Colombian forces struck at a FARC rebel camp inside Ecuador.

More on the flip

It's totally clear at this point that the Super Tuesday results on the Democratic side were inconclusive -- a virtual tie -- while McCain emerged as the clear frontrunner on the Republican side.  We've also seen in a number of diaries today (e.g., here, here, and here) that Democratic turnout was much higher than the Republicans.

We've got some total numbers now that show not only how close our race was, but also how much we blew the GOP out of the water yesterday.  I think these numbers bode well for Obama in the primaries, but they show once again the Republican contest is simply about the right to lose to a Democrat in November.  Follow me to the other side for more...

Democrats in MA -- and throughout the country -- should be breathing a sigh of relief right about now, because it looks like newcomer Niki Tsongas (MA-5) has a clear ride through to re-election in the fall.

Tsongas's biggest threat was a rematch against Jim Ogonowski, the former Air Force officer and the brother of a 911 martyr who had run against her in the special election to replace Martin Meehan last year.  Ogonowski ran a tough campaign and picked up 45% of the vote -- to Tsongas's 51% -- in what has historically been a safe Democratic district.  The speculation at the time of the special election was that Ogonowski would come back this year, perhaps pulling off the upset this time around.

Instead, he shoots himself in the foot and guarantees Tsongas's seat.  Details on the flip...

The New York Times reports today that Israel is pressing Egypt to use force against Palestinian civilians in order to restore the international border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt:

There were small clashes throughout the day, with short episodes of rock-throwing. Egyptians fired guns into the air and aimed water cannons above the heads of the those in the crowd to keep them back. The new breaches in the wall were large enough for cars and trucks to drive through, and some Egyptian guards then retreated.

Egypt is under pressure from Israel and the United States to restore the international border and regulate it, but does not want to use excessive force against the Gazans, whom the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, has insisted are starving under the pressure of Israeli restrictions on imports and travel.

Meanwhile, Mahatma Gandhi's grandson Arun has been forced to resign from the Nonviolence Institute he founded because he dared criticize Israeli militarism.  Details on the flip.

Boston Globe has very early returns from NH.  With 1% of precinct reporting, Obama and Clinton are tied with 40%, followed by Edwards with 15%.  Richardson has 3% and Kucinich has 1%.

On the Republican side, McCain leads Huckabee 46%-18%.  Paul and Romney are tied at 14%, while 911uliani and Gramps each have 4%.

The numbers aren't all that meaningful yet, but they're something.

UPDATE:  Front page thread now open.  Take the conversation over there.

The Wall Street Journal reported recently on the Democratic consensus for an "activist" economic policy -- more economic regulation and higher taxes on the rich.  In contrast, the Republicans all promise tax cuts, and front-runner Mike Huckabee wants to scrap the federal income tax altogether and replace it with a national sales tax.

Nearly thirty years after Reagan began the demolition of the New Deal, we need expanded government programs in health care, education, and the environment more than ever.  How do we pay for them, though?

The Republicans have been killing us on the tax issue ever since the GOP-Libertarian alliance passed Proposition 13 in California.  Raising taxes, even by introducing greater progressivity in the tax code, opens up a major liability in public opinion.  It’s hard to catch our nuance when the GOP screams "higher taxes" at the top of their lungs, and MSM noise machine repeats it to high heaven.

We need to take this issue seriously, and simply proposing new taxes isn’t the way to do it.  We need a new approach.  On the flip, I suggest one.

This excerpt from Steele's forthcoming book on Obama appeared in Time Magazine about three weeks ago, but given Obama's win in Iowa it seems a good time to quote it.

Thus, the cultural and historical implications of Obama's candidacy are clearly greater than its public policy implications. While Obama the man labors in the same political vineyard as his competitors, mapping out policy positions on everything from war to health care, his candidacy itself asks the American democracy to complete itself, to achieve that almost perfect transparency in which color is indeed no veil over character--where a black, like a white, can put himself forward as the individual he truly is. This is the high possibility that the Obama campaign points to quite apart from its policy goals.

More on the flip...

Update:  Thanks to begone, I see that DHinMI did a much better job on this story some four hours ago.  Go see his diary and ignore this one.

I'm getting this off the Reuters wire, but a lot of services are carrying the story.  Veteran Republican strategist Ed Rollins is going to work for the Huckabee campaign:

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee on Friday hired a veteran strategist and Washington political insider to run his surging campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.

Ed Rollins, who masterminded former U.S. President Ronald Reagan's landslide re-election in 1984 and worked on Ross Perot's independent presidential bid in 1992, will serve as Huckabee's national campaign chairman.

Any doubts now that Huckabee is a credible GOP threat?

Bit more on the flip...

Reuters is running with a story this morning on John Bolton's latest comments to Der Spiegel:

Bolton described the report, released Monday, as a "quasi-putsch" by the intelligence agencies, Der Spiegel said.

The Administration has been engaged in a concerted effort to insist that the NIE changes nothing, and that their Iran policy will continue unchanged.  See, for example, Bush's press conference on Tuesday, Rice's meeting with EU and NATO officials on Thursday, and Hadley's foaming at the mouth when interviewed by Renee Montagne on NPR (listen through to the end -- the best part is when she cuts him off), also on Thursday.

You can take all that and just throw it out the window.  Bolton has just now confessed the administration's position on Iran is purely political.

Heckuva job, Johnnie...

Ewen MacAskill of the British Guardian has a piece up today on the politics behind the release of the Iran NIE.  MacAskill attributes the report in large part to "a little-known intelligence specialist, Thomas Fingar" -- the report's author -- who he claims "almost single-handedly ... has stopped ... any US military action against Iran." He also notes, however, that Fingar's

report marks a decisive moment in the battle between American neoconservatives and Washington's foreign policy and intelligence professionals - between ideologues and pragmatists. It provided an unexpected victory for those opposed to the neocon plans for a military strike.

MacAskill got me thinking, and I started poking around the web a bit for some background on this report.  Below the fold I detail some of the stuff I found, the most interesting of which is a WaPo story from last August based on leaked information from the Fingar report.

One of the most contentious topics in dailykos IP debates has always been any comparison, explicit or implicit, between Israeli policies on the West Bank and Gaza with South African apartheid.  In most cases, defenders of Israel simply reject the idea that any meaningful comparison can be made, and echoing the attacks made by major mainstream Jewish leaders on such figures as Jimmy Carter and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, it is not uncommon that people will be accused of antisemitism for raising the comparison.

Today, no less a figure than Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert weighs in with his opinion.  The AP is reporting that in an interview with Israeli daily Haaretz,

Olmert said it was a vital Israeli interest to create a Palestinian state because of the growing Arab population in the area. "The day will come when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights," Olmert told Haaretz. "As soon as that happens, the state of Israel is finished."

More on the flip...

I had stayed away from the big debate sparked by HarveyMilk's now deleted blackface diary, although I was very troubled by the kneejerk groupthink reaction that called for his banning on account of it.  I know that some kossacks I respect have quit the site because of the fall-out, but I really think we need a more reflective approach.

Even though the whole thing has pretty much blown over, I've continued to have nagging doubts about the way the debate played out.  Not because I think HM made a wise choice in how he expressed his anger at the McClurkin appearance, but rather due to my pretty serious discomfort at the very unreflective way the community responded to him.  When Ty Burr, movie critic for the Boston Globe, published a meditation on blackface in American culture a couple weeks back, it helped clarify some of these issues for me.  In fact, I even wondered if Burr might have read some of the exchanges here on dkos.

Quotes and discussion on the flip.

MSNBC.com is reporting today on a Thanksgiving day tragedy from the Arizona border region.  It seems a forty-five year old woman out camping with her nine-year old son lost control of her van on a US Forest Service road.  With his mom pinned inside the van, the dazed but unhurt boy got out and began looking for help.

Two hours later, he ran into Jesus Manuel Cordova, a Mexican making his way illegally into the United States.  Though the boy apparently spoke no Spanish and Cordova little to no English, somehow the two communicated enough that Cordova figured out what the problem was.  He tried his best to free the mother from the van, but could not.  He stayed with the boy and they watched as the woman died.

Denouement on the flip...