All hail, the optics of the 111th Congress, brought to you courtesy of Rod Blagojevich:

Amir Taheri reports:

Iran is a "short distance" from securing all it needs to make a nuclear warhead. This is the conclusion of a long-awaited report prepared for the French National Assembly (parliament) and submitted to President Nicolas Sarkozy in the last days of 2008.

The report is the fruit of a bipartisan effort headed by Jean-Louis Bianco, a prominent Socialist Member of Parliament, and senior advisor to President Francois Mitterrand in the 1980s and 1990s. Much of the report is based on the in-depth research done by a number of leading French experts on international politics and nuclear proliferation, among them Francois Heisbourg and Therese Delpeche.

Analysing Tehran's strategy, the report asserts that the Islamic Republic will be an effective member of the nuclear club by the end of 2011 at the latest. Moe importantly, perhaps, it makes it clear that 2009 may be the last year in which the major powers would be able to persuade the Islamic Republic not to cross the threshold of making the bomb.

As Taheri notes, this leaves two options: try and stop the mullahs, or begin preparing for the consequences of a nuclear Iran. The president-elect has pledged to prevent Iran from going nuclear, but his administration has also indicated a willingness to adjust to what may be an inevitability. That strategy, as laid out by Hillary Clinton and quoted in Taheri's piece, would involve extending the U.S. nuclear umbrella to our allies in the Middle East -- not only Israel, but also the Gulf states and Saudi Arabia. The aim here would be to prevent what may be the worst outcome of a nuclear Iran: a new wave of proliferation in the most unstable region on the planet. But even if that were prevented by the guarantee of U.S. nuclear deterrence, the United States would be in the awkward position of making a commitment to wage nuclear war on behalf of despotic regimes that do not share our values.

Would the American people tolerate the use of nuclear weapons in retaliation for an Iranian attack on Egypt? The Egyptians would be foolish to count on such support, which means that proliferation is almost guaranteed. If North Korea going nuclear was a black mark on the Bush administration's record, how will it play if Obama presides over the entry of Iran, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia into the nuclear club? Or will that just be called the success of realism?

The New York Times runs a story about Muhammad Saad Iqbal, who claims he was tortured by the Egyptian government at the behest of the Bush administration:

But the full stories of individual detainees like Mr. Iqbal are only now emerging after years in which they were shuttled around the globe under the Bush administration’s system of extraordinary rendition, which used foreign countries to interrogate and detain terrorism suspects in sites beyond the reach of American courts.

Likewise, the AP reported yesterday on the choice of Leon Panetta to head the CIA:

Obama is sending an unequivocal message that controversial administration policies approving harsh interrogations, waterboarding and extraordinary renditions — the secret transfer of prisoners to other governments with a history of torture — and warrantless wiretapping are over, said several officials.

I think the press is forgetting that it was Panetta's old boss Bill Clinton who first approved the use of extraordinary rendition, and he did so by approving a presidential directive that authorized the CIA to hand terror suspects over to...the Egyptian Mukhabarat. There is a tendency for the left to imagine that the Bush administration represents a clean break with the previously lawful and humane history of the executive branch of government, and that the Obama administration will represent a return to that better tradition.

In truth, there is considerable continuity between the Clinton administration policies and those that followed, as there almost certainly will be as this new administration takes up the reins -- and Panetta will presumably enter office with some hands on experience in the kind of rendition to which Muhammad Saad Iqbal claims he was subjected.

In order to add some balance to the glut of anti-Israel protest pictures flooding the AP, Reuters, and AFP photo wires, there will be a pro-Israel rally today in Washington, D.C. at the Israeli Embassy at 12: 30, sponsored by a group of rabbis in the Washington area.

Anti-Israel groups staged a rally at the embassy Friday, marching from there to the Egyptian embassy in solidarity with their "Palestinian brothers and sisters," and whining about Barack Obama's silence on Gaza as they marched.

After ten days of Israeli offensive operations in the Gaza Strip, Hamas' command and control appears to be in disarray, Palestinian analysts told the Jerusalem Post. Hamas leaders are in hiding, and conflicting messages are being put out by Hamas's leadership under Khalid Mashal, who is based in Damascus, and Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas leader in Gaza.

These contradictory messages, Palestinian political analysts said, reflected the state of confusion in Hamas and raised questions as to who was calling the shots in the Gaza Strip. While some Hamas leaders have been openly signaling their readiness to accept a new cease-fire, others are still calling for pursuing the fight against Israel "until victory."

What is clear is that Hamas is now desperate for a lull in the fighting. But it is also eager to score some kind of a "military victory" before a cease-fire is reached. Hamas can't accept a new cease-fire without having proved to the Arab and Muslim masses that it was capable of making Israel pay a heavy price for its military offensive.

Hamas is fighting for its survival and its leaders know that their collapse would constitute a severe blow not only to the movement, but also to its patrons in Teheran and Damascus.

The communications breakdown is so severe that Hamas's military wing, the Izzadin Kassam, is directly taking orders from Mashal in Damascus, the Jerusalem Post reported. Mashal has given the Izzadin Kassam "full freedom to take any measures it deems necessary to prevent the collapse of the Hamas regime." Over the weekend, Hamas responded by arresting and hobbling more than 100 opposing Fatah members and "collaborators."

The Israeli Defense Force has begun its push into the city, and there is a good chance the Israelis can break Hamas's stranglehold in the Gaza Strip. Hamas fighters are nowhere near as disciplined or well trained as the Hezbollah fighters encountered during the 2006 war in Lebanon. And Israeli forces have trained for urban combat for a year, anticipating such a battle.

To break Hamas, Israel must continue to pursue Hamas's leaders and fighters in Gaza and ignore the growing calls for a ceasefire. Any ceasefire that leaves Hamas intact will be a victory for the terror group.

But Israel has another problem. Hamas's real leadership inside Syria will remain no matter what happens to Haniyeh and company. Will Israel's Mossad take a shot at Mashal? This isn't as far-fetched as it might seem. In February 2008, Imad Mugniyah, Hezbollah's military commander, was killed in a car bombing in a secured neighborhood in Damascus. Mossad is believed to have carried out the attack.

Stephen Walt, coauthor with John Mearsheimer of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, has started a new blog at the website of Foreign Policy. He is one of a number of new bloggers the magazine has brought on board ahead of Obama's inauguration. Among the others are some real heavyweights, including Tom Ricks, Peter Feaver, Philip Zelikow, and Christian Brose. (Click here to find links to them all).

Walt kicks things off with a bang, writing up a bizarre counterfactual of Middle East History. In this realist fantasy, Israel loses the Six Day War, the Arabs overrun the country, but the Jews are not driven into the sea. Instead, "a million or so Jews had ended up as stateless refugees confined to that narrow enclave known as the Gaza Strip." What's become of the other 1.7 million Jews that then lived in Israel is not imagined -- as Walt says, this is just "a thought experiment." Walt continues:

Then imagine that a group of hardline Orthodox Jews took over control of that territory and organized a resistance movement. They also steadfastly refused to recognize the new Palestinian state, arguing that its creation was illegal and that their expulsion from Israel was unjust. Imagine that they obtained backing from sympathizers around the world and that they began to smuggle weapons into the territory. Then imagine that they started firing at Palestinian towns and villages and refused to stop despite continued reprisals and civilian casualties.

Here's the question: would the United States be denouncing those Jews in Gaza as "terrorists" and encouraging the Palestinian state to use overwhelming force against them? Here's another: would the United States have even allowed such a situation to arise and persist in the first place?

I've always enjoyed counterfactual histories. John Keegan, David McCullough, and James McPherson, among others, put out a great collection of counterfactual essays examining the great turning points in military history called What If? They explore what might have happened if the Germans had repelled the allied assault on D-Day, or if Augustus's legions had conquered Germania. But it's a game. The authors focus on what might have been if one thing had been different. Walt imagines that everything is different, that the Jews not only lose the war, but they become the Palestinians -- and that their dispossession nurtures the same radical politics that now afflicts the Arab population of Gaza. I think the point is supposed to be that the only thing preventing a solution to the problems of the Middle East is our failure of imagination, but in fact, his questions are meaningless. The nefarious Israel Lobby might respond: What if the bubba had beytsim?

The New Media war against Hamas apologists.

Fallen in battle: Two IDF soldiers remembered.

Just War Theory in Gaza.

Senate to block comedian from the Senate floor today, like George Wallace at the entrance to the Laugh Factory.

Fresh young face at 1600 Pennsylvania to work with most crotchety, aged bunch of coots in Capitol history.

Why does the NYT love Hamas?

Dems dare cross the chosen one with comments on Panetta.

Obama as Bush: He's already an effigy in the Muslim world.

Biden goes unnoticed as he fails to gain entrance to sold-out show of "Benjamin Button" in Delaware.

Write fast! If you are interested in seeing Barack Obama sworn in as President, the official Presidential Inaugural Committee is conducting an essay contest. Although the real goal is fundraising and the website is vague as to whether anyone who fails to contribute will, in fact, be selected to attend the inauguration, it does clearly say that if you submit an essay here on the subject of “What does this inaugural mean to you,” then “…you could still be selected to attend the inauguration.” The deadline is midnight, January 8th.

Allowing the official Presidential Inaugural Committee to provide inaugural tickets to those who donate funds or via gimmicks, such as this essay contest, would be protected by a modification made to Senator Dianne Feinstein’s bill, which would otherwise ban the sale of inaugural tickets. Her original bill failed to pass supposedly because some senators feared that these Inaugural Committee activities were not protected. Senator Feinstein did secure “voluntary” agreements from eBay and StubHub not to sell the inaugural tickets and has pledged to reintroduce her legislation, now modified to meet objections, in the new Congress.

Maybe some Senator will withhold unanimous consent since the point seems to be that what infuriates Senator Feinstein is not that rich people should be able to buy their way into the inaugural; it is that the money may not go to the politically correct authority. After all, the Presidential Inaugural Committee is itself selling inaugural tickets at $50,000 for a set of four including various balls, meal functions, a concert, etc.

It would be nice if someone actually challenged Senator Feinstein’s bill as not going far enough. Beyond tickets sold by the Inaugural committee and reserved for the President-elect and various dignitaries, most tickets are distributed to the public by Senators or Representatives.

Over the weekend, Al Franken's lead over Norm Coleman jumped to 225 votes after officials counted about 1,000 absentee ballots that had been wrongly rejected due to clerical errors. This afternoon, the Minnesota canvassing board certified that Franken is the winner. But, as the St. Paul Pioneer Press explained in an editorial last week--much to the chagrin of Senate Democrats like Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer, and Amy Klobuchar--this doesn't mean the race is over:

We see this as a three-act drama. If, by this time next week, Al or Norm is declared the winner of the recount — that is, at the end of Act II but before Act III — there will be a rush to put that man in the seat immediately. We could imagine a scenario where the Democratically controlled U.S. Senate would be happy to do this if Franken maintains his margin.

That would be a slap in the face to Minnesota fairness.

State law includes the right of an election contest. Seating either man while that is pending will be seen as a partisan power play that breaks faith with the spirit of the law. A court contest need not be drawn out but it is the candidate's right. Norm and Al can cool their heels until it's over.

In an election contest, a three judge panel appointed by the chief justice of the Minnesota supreme court will settle disputes between the Coleman and Franken campaigns. Even though it appears there have been serious problems with the recount that have boosted Franken's numbers, Coleman's odds of overtaking Franken's 225 vote lead in an election contest are quite long.

The most egregious problem is the alleged double-counting of ballots. The Coleman campaign claims that Franken netted about 100 votes in Minneapolis precincts where more votes were counted during the recount than on election night.

"Anybody with a brain realizes you can't trust the agency," said one Republican when I asked him about the appointment of Leon Panetta to run the CIA. So you take someone with a reputation as a competent manager and caretaker and install him there in the hopes that the agency does as little damage to you as possible. On the left, Obama supporters are quick to point to this item Panetta wrote in the Washington Monthly last year, at the height of the Democratic primary, condemning torture. Does it represent political posturing -- a sop to the left -- or Panetta's deeply held views on the issue? I'm guessing the latter, as Panetta's term as White House chief of staff coincided with the first serious use of extraordinary rendition by the Clinton administration. If Panetta was willing to allow the torture of terrorists before 9/11, why would he have changed his mind now?

Panetta will be competent, but the CIA will continue to be a thorn in the side of any president who tries to exert control over its enormous bureaucracy and covert programs. The question is whether he would prefer that the United States return to outsourcing the interrogation of the worst of the worst, or whether he would prefer that his own men do what needs to be done. Panetta has never been particularly partisan in his approach to foreign policy matters, having gained a reputation as a budget guy in the '90s. It's not clear why he would want this job, but for those who wish to imagine that this is a clean break with the Bush administrations effective post-9/11 policies, the history of the Clinton administration suggests that may well be wishful thinking.

Update: More reason to like Panetta is this response from Dianne Feinstein:

“I was not informed about the selection of Leon Panetta to be the CIA Director. I know nothing about this, other than what I’ve read,” said Senator Feinstein, who will chair the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in the 111th Congress.

“My position has consistently been that I believe the Agency is best-served by having an intelligence professional in charge at this time.”

J Street, the Jewish group that bills itself as a pacifist, liberal, pro-Palestinian, pro-Israel alternative to AIPAC, has self-destructed in the last week as Israeli forces clash with Hamas militants in Gaza. Jamie Kirchick profiled the group in the New Republic in May, when J Street first emerged to claim that it represented the vast majority of American Jews who, unlike the thugs and terrorists at AIPAC, oppose the terrorism perpetrated by the Jewish state against the good and decent Muslims of Palestine.

One probably could have predicted that this farce would only last until an open conflict broke out in Israel. Now that Israel is at war, American Jews seem to be rallying to its defense -- even those whose impulses are dovish. Yet J Street continues to rail against Israel and those who would support its action in Gaza. The response came from Eric Yoffie, the president of the Union for Reform Judaism, who is described by Ami Eden at JTA as "arguably the Jewish community's most important dove." Yoffie responded in the Forward to a statement that J Street posted equating Israel and Hamas and finding both equally guilty. He wrote:

"These words are deeply distressing because they are morally deficient, profoundly out of touch with Jewish sentiment and also appallingly naïve.

J Street responded in kind:

The views we hold may not be those of Rabbi Yoffie, and that’s fine. We accept and welcome an open and honest debate about the merits of our pro-Israel positions.

But to call our views “morally deficient”, “naïve” and “out of touch” with Jewish sentiment is to misread the emerging dynamics of centrist, pro-Israel Jews.

The only problem is that J Street doesn't welcome an open and honest debate. The group is dedicated to purging from mainstream discourse "radicals" like Joe Lieberman, who seemed to be a weekly target for the group's petitions and statements in its first few months of operation. It is also at war with AIPAC. What J Street does not protest is the terrorism of Israel's enemies, or the bellicose statements of Iran, or the anti-Israel sentiment of the far left. Eden runs down the creepy statements the group has put out over the last few weeks and concludes:

For those keeping score, according to J Street officials, if you support Israel's current court of action, you are: 1) not a real friend of Israel, 2) do not support sanity and moderation, 3) don't discern nuances, 4) don't feel compassion for dead and wounded Palestinians, and 5) might be a latent racist.

Hey, it's a free country, but if you're going to go around expressing views like those, you lose the right to cry foul when someone turns around and accuses you of saying something that is "morally deficient, profoundly out of touch with Jewish sentiment and also appallingly naïve."

Right-wing Jews may have taken a few potshots over the last few months at J Street's ridiculous claim to represent American Jewry, but now that the group's "moral deficiency" has made them a target for the Jewish left as well, the jig would seem to be up. But that doesn't mean that George Soros won't give the group some obscene amount of money to keep its small staff employed for the next decade, which may well have been the point all along.

The New York Times reported on the front page of its Sunday edition that as part of the planned stimulus program, Obama Considers Major Expansion in Aid to Jobless. If the article is true, it is a very bad sign for both the economy and the culture:

One proposal, as described by Democratic advisers, would extend unemployment compensation to part-time workers, an idea that Congressional Republicans have blocked in the past.

Other policy changes would subsidize employers’ expenses for temporarily continuing health insurance coverage to laid-off and retired workers and their dependents, as mandated under a 22-year-old federal law known as Cobra, and allow workers who lose jobs that did not come with insurance benefits to be eligible, for the first time, to apply for Medicaid coverage.

As far as the economy goes, the plan as discussed basically involves paying more people in both cash and benefits to stay unemployed. This is just about the worst possible approach to reinvigorating the economy.

A major recession will require many people to make real adjustments and do difficult things. They will have to relocate to different states, change careers, accept significantly lower pay while they gain experience in their new careers, work short-term at unrewarding jobs while they go to night school to train for better careers, etc.

In the long run, this Schumpeterian process of creative destruction will benefit both the individual and the economy at large. The individual winds up working in a new, more rapidly growing and thus a more opportunity-filled industry while the country sees its resources--in this case labor resources--reallocated to places and careers where they can do the most good.

In the short term, though, this type of transition wreaks havoc on families and individuals--that is why it is called creative destruction. This means that few people will undertake such changes except under extreme necessity. Anything the government does to reduce that necessity--such as paying benefits and giving health insurance--creates a reason for a waitress in Michigan to stay put and hope things get better when the real opportunity for her may be to move to Arizona and work in the elder-care industry.

Beyond economics, extending these types of benefits is extremely corrosive to the culture. As a small business owner, I can’t tell you how many people over the years have approached me looking for work “off the books” because they were receiving unemployment benefits and didn’t want to lose them. These job applicants perceived getting a job as carrying an enormous tax equal to 100% of the unemployment benefits. Add in normal income and payroll taxes plus the cost of commuting and they saw a job as not worth it. These types of benefits tempt otherwise law-abiding citizens to engage in illegal activities.

Traditional unemployment benefits have already been extended by 13 weeks in states with an unemployment rate of at least 6 percent. This will delay the recovery. To add subsidized health insurance and Medicaid for those who never had health insurance plus give money to former part-timers … this is all a way of slowing necessary changes in the economy.

One can appreciate the need to increase aggregate demand; one can empathize with the desire to help unemployed people, but if the goal is a speedy recovery without undermining law-abiding practices, the rule should be simple: Minimize or avoid situations in which we pay people for staying unemployed.

The ground invasion of Gaza has begun. According to the IDF spokesman, Israel's aims are limited to "deal[ing] a heavy blow to the Hamas terror organization, to strengthen Israel’s deterrence, and to create a better security situation for those living around the Gaza Strip that will be maintained for the long term.” Of course, in order for the Israelis to plausibly claim success, any operation would have to deliver a heavy blow to Hamas and greatly diminish or halt entirely the rocket fire coming out of Gaza. As Martin Kramer explains, Hamas must ultimately be destroyed for the peace process to have any chance of success -- one cannot pursue peace with an organization that denies your very right to exist. If Hamas is not obviously weakened by this operation, then like Hezbollah in 2006, it will emerge with enhanced political credibility (even if its capacity for violence has been severely eroded) and will have advanced its prospects for diplomatic recognition.

Even on the left, there is agreement that the rocket fire must stop -- just disagreement about the best way to achieve this goal, whether diplomacy offers a better chance of success. There is also, one hopes, a broad consensus that Hamas will never be a partner in peace, and that it must ultimately be replaced by a more moderate regime in Gaza if there is to be any chance for a viable two state solution. What the left does not condone is Israel's objective of reestablishing a credible deterrent in Gaza. I wrote earlier this week that the ruthlessness with which Israel has carried out its air campaign in Gaza, including a strike that killed a Hamas leader, Nizar Rayan, along with all four of his wives and nine of his 12 children, was clearly an effort to change the calculus there:

The fight against Islamic radicals always seems to come around to whether or not they can, in fact, be deterred, because it's not clear that they are rational, at least not like us. But to wipe out a man's entire family, it's hard to imagine that doesn't give his colleagues at least a moment's pause. Perhaps it will make the leadership of Hamas rethink the wisdom of sparking an open confrontation with Israel under the current conditions. Or maybe not, and the only way to stop Hamas is to eliminate its capacity for violence entirely.

This excerpt has provoked some bizarre reaction on the left. Glenn Greenwald, as hysterical and long-winded as ever, accuses me of possessing "the very same logic that leads Hamas to send suicide bombers to slaughter Israeli teenagers in pizza parlors and on buses and to shoot rockets into their homes. It's the logic that leads Al Qaeda to fly civilian-filled airplanes into civilian-filled office buildings." Another blogger accuses me of endorsing terrorist ethics, and the Atlantic's in-house gynecologist calls me a thug.

In fact, I was explicitly questioning whether such violence can be effective against a group like Hamas. The target of this strike had already sent one of his own sons into Israel as a suicide bomber. Greenwald presumes that I see Palestinians "as something less than civilized human beings" because I question whether they can be deterred "like us." But I wasn't talking about Palestinians in general, I was talking about the Hamas leadership in particular. If Greenwald believes that Hamas, a terrorist group, is itself the avatar of the Palestinian people, then he is the one who sees the Palestinians as less civilized than the rest of us. If not, then I wonder whether he is illiterate or simply disingenuous. But the Hamas leadership is not like us: Americans may send their sons to war, but they do not send them to certain death for the sake of slaughtering civilians.

It's also striking that Greenwald and his fellow travelers would use words like terrorist and thug to describe me while defending the rights of Hamas, an organization comprised of genuine terrorists and thugs. It's become common for the left to describe its ideological opponents as thugs, and the result, apparently, is the inability to recognize real thuggery when it's staring them in the face.

There is no doubt that Israel has the right to strike Nizar Rayan, even at the cost of killing so many women and children -- these civilians were not intentionally targeted. The question is whether or not this strike, in addition to eliminating a leader of Hamas (and the weapons depot in which he chose to house his family), will also deter Hamas from so brazenly ending the next cease fire. The fact that Greenwald & Co. would react so bizarrely to the mere posing of that question is precisely why their voices are being ignored in this debate. Just the other day Greenwald wrote of how he was perplexed by a poll showing that a majority of Democrats shared his views on Israel's assault, but still the Democratic party was almost uniform in its support for the action. Well, its possible for large numbers of people to hold views that simply aren't serious -- though of course a plurality of Americans still supports Israel's actions in Gaza -- and on this issue, like on telecom immunity and warrantless wiretapping, a large portion of the left simply isn't serious.

On Tuesday, Andrew Breitbart, friend to many here at TWS, launches "Big Hollywood," a website of culture and politics which has "changing Hollywood" as its modest goal.

Breitbart, who helped establish the Drudge Report and the Huffington Post, has discarded more good ideas than most of us have had. (One idea that does not fall into that category was his plan for huskymalemodels.com, a website featuring photos of men whose high-school-era good looks had been compromised by a steady diet of beer and wing in the years since. While there would have been no shortage of "models," I'm not sure that one would have generated much traffic). With Big Hollywood he hopes to engage conservatives and libertarians in the bi-coastal ideas war he has been fighting for years. As Breitbart puts it: "Until conservatives, libertarians and Republicans - who will be the lion's share of Big Hollywood's contributors - recognize that (pop) culture is the big prize and that politics is secondary, there will be no victory in this important battle."

Breitbart lifts the veil on the project in his column today over at The Washington Times. Starting tomorrow, you can access the site here.

... Just not in the United States. David Kenner has a useful list of this year's upcoming elections. Somehow he left out the two most interesting. First, there are the summer elections in Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim democracy. (And, according to David Brooks, perhaps the location of one of Obama's first state visits.) Then, second, there are the provincial and national elections scheduled in Iraq.

Bill Richardson, one adult ticket, under the bus:

Sources tell ABC News that officials on the Obama Transition Team feel that before he was formally offered the job of commerce secretary, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson was not forthcoming with them about the federal investigation that is looking into whether the governor steered a state contract towards a major financial contributor.

Once the investigation became more widely known through national media reports last month, sources tell ABC News, the Obama Transition Team realized the FBI would not be able to give Richardson a clean political bill of health before the new administration is ready to send his nomination up to the Senate for confirmation.

The Richardson camp says the governor was forthcoming, with sources close to the governor noting that there had been reports about the controversy in local media such as the Albuquerque Journal as far back as August 2008. The governor discussed the investigation with the Obama team, they say, and believes that he and his administration have done nothing wrong.

The Albuquerque Journal's first story on the investigation appeared August 29, 2008, according to Nexis Lexis, but no follow-up stories between that first one and Richardson's December nomination. It was after his nomination that national media caught onto the story and began reporting it repeatedly, but it seems it would have taken a minimal amount of vetting of Richardson's coverage in local media by the Obama team to establish what the investigation was all about.

By the way, doesn't this make the second Commerce Secretary miscue "for a presidential transition that has had an exceedingly smooth public face?"

If you're concerned about the dwindling vital signs of Western culture in Britain, pull out the defibrilator, stat.

A national British TV station allowed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to give its alternative Christmas message.

The Guardian is now eulogizing terrorist leaders in official "obituaries" chock-full of euphemisms and moral equivalence. Not news stories, but obituaries.

In the Guardian's estimation, Nizar Rayan was not a murderous terrorist leader who propelled others, including his own children, to violence against Israeli civilians in the name of Islam. He was a "man of the street."

He was not an idiot thug who called Israel an offense to God, but "on the streets of Gaza, where economic and social misery has boosted Hamas's reputation during the past five years, he was something of a hero. He was famed for fighting alongside his men and being seen with them publicly."

"And, he was not merely a fighter," coos the writer before moving onto Rayan's other alleged accomplishments.

To the Guardian, he was not a dangerous radical who used his knowledge of Islamic texts in the service of encouraging suicide bombers, but was "highly regarded as an Islamic academic."

He was not a racist militant who declared the day before he died: "Our only language with the Jew is through the gun."

Instead, he was a "political leader, born 6 March 1959; died 1 January 2009."

And, the Guardian is not merely involved in useful idiocy, but dangerous moral idiocy. Good luck, Britain.

The Obama transition train just keeps on chugging down the tracks to Smoothville, huh?

Bill Richardson reportedly has withdrawn as the commerce secretary-designate in the face of a federal grand jury investigation into whether the former presidential candidate exchanged government contracts for campaign contributions.

NBC News on Sunday reported that Richardson, who is the governor of New Mexico, denies any wrongdoing but the investigation won't be finished before he has to go to Senate confirmation hearings.

Richardson denies wrongdoing, but doesn't want to delay the Commerce Department's work while he's under investigation, he said. Obama issued a statement saying he accepted Richardson's decision with "deep regret."

More details on the allegations Richardson is facing:

A person familiar with the proceedings has told The Associated Press that the grand jury is looking into possible "pay-to-play" dealings between CDR Financial Products and someone in a position to push the contract through with the state of New Mexico.

Richardson said he plans to continue in his role as governor. "I appreciate the confidence President-elect Obama has shown in me, and value our friendship and working partnership. I told him that I am eager to serve in the future in any way he deems useful. And like all Americans, I pray for his success and the success of our beloved country."

The Politico offers this assessment of the withdrawal, from which I can only conclude its writers and editors are suffering from an aggressive form of professional amnesia that omits only new stories that happen in Chicago and are damaging to Barack Obama. It's an affliction that affected much of the press corps during the campaign, and is proving resistant to treatment by reality in a post-election political environment:

Richardson’s withdrawal, which had not been preceded by the sort of rumblings that often accompany such a departure, is the first false start for a presidential transition that has had an exceedingly smooth public face.

Even if one doesn't count Blagojevich's sins against Obama, surely the involvement of the names of Rahm Emanuel and Valerie Jarrett in the investigation is a blemish. If not that, perhaps Obama's clumsy handling of the scandal, for which the Politico itself has criticized him. Then there's Blago's appointment of Burris, and the predicament now facing Senate Dems, which could conceivably have been avoided had Obama insisted forcefully on a special election. And, finally, the row over his pick of Rick Warren for his invocation at inauguration. Obama should not take all the blame for every political mishap in his party during his transition period, but to say the public face has been exceedingly smooth?

Yes, smooth, like the public face of a high-school marching band without a dermatologist.

After a week of air strikes, Israel moved into Gaza after dark tonight, as Israeli officials promised a "lengthy operation:"

Heavy gun battles were reported as troops crossed the border into Gaza. Local TV networks broadcast images of troops marching into Gaza after dark.

"We have many many targets," Maj. Avital Leibovich told CNN. "To my estimation, it will be a lengthy operation." She said the goal of the operation was to take over the areas used by militants to launch rockets against Israel.

"The civilians are not our target, only militants, Hamas militants," she said.

The National Security Cabinet approved the call-up of thousands of reserve soldiers, to enable the expansion of Operation Cast Lead, but it's not clear how deep the ground incursion will go into Gaza or how long it will last.

Defense Minister Ehud Barak made a statement shortly after fighting started, and referred to the goal of the ground troops broadly — "to hit Hamas hard"— acknowledging that the operation poses dangers to soldiers:

"We know there will be dangers, difficulties and victims… It must be said that the ground operation entails dangers to the lives of soldiers," Barak said in a press conference early Saturday night.

Jerusalem Post sources report dozens of Hamas fighters being killed in firefights so far.

Update: More from Barak's statement:

"The campaign won't be easy and it won't be short," he said, emphasizing that the operation entails the risking of Israeli lives. "I know well the dangers that come with an offensive, and what the heavy price will be."

"I don't want to fool anyone. The residents of southern Israel will also undergo some tough times," Barak continued.

The defense minister also addressed the possibility of an escalation in violence in northern Israel, along the border with Lebanon. "We hope that the northern front will remain calm, but we are prepared for any possibility," he said.

When the Democrats captured the majority in Congress two years ago, some of their boosters in the media like Joe Klein predicted an outbreak of “centrism.”

Red State Democrats would ease their party to the middle and end the era of extreme partisan polarization.

Back then Klein wrote a Time cover story titled “Why the Center is the New Place to Be,” filled with hopeful speculation about how the thoughtful center would prevail.

Even House Speaker Nancy Pelosi caught the spirit. On opening day of the 110th Congress in January 2007 she said this to her colleagues:

"I accept this gavel in the spirit of partnership, not partisanship…” Adding… “the American people told us they expected us to work together for fiscal responsibility, with the highest ethical standards and with civility and bipartisanship.”

But two years later the Klein/Pelosi Kumbaya turned into a pipedream. Partisan polarization actually hit new records last year, despite Democrats’ happy talk.

Princeton University political scientist Nolan Mccarty agrees. He analyzed the level of partisan polarization in the recently ended 110th Congress and finds predictions of centrism…well, wrong. Mccarty writes:

In fact, polarization rose in the 110th Congress just as it has almost every term since 1975. The House had set a record for polarization in the 109th, but the 110th broke it. The Senate broke its own record set in 1867.

You can read the full post here.

Hat Tip: The Monkey Cage

Richard Falk is Professor of International Law and Practice, Emeritus, at Princeton University. He is also the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories. Princeton hasn't booted him yet, but the Israelis did, refusing him entry to the country and putting him on the first flight back to Geneva when he arrived a few weeks ago. The reason? As the New York Times characterized the Israeli position, Falk maintains a "hostile position towards Israel." He does not maintain a hostile position to 9/11 truthers, having declared that "only willful ignorance can maintain that the 9/11 narrative should be treated as a closed book.”

Falk once asked and answered this question in an essay titled "Slouching Toward a Palestinian Holocaust":

Is it an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not.

Today Falk takes to the online pages of (where else) the Huffington Post to defend Hamas and its 'harmless' and 'periodic' rocket fire against Israeli civilians. One word that gets frequent use is 'supposed.'

As always in relation to the underlying conflict, some facts bearing on this latest crisis are murky and contested, although the American public in particular gets 99% of its information filtered through an exceedingly pro-Israeli media lens. Hamas is blamed for the breakdown of the truce by its supposed unwillingness to renew it, and by the alleged increased incidence of rocket attacks....

Such Israeli shows of force have been a feature of past Israeli election campaigns, and on this occasion especially, the current government was being successfully challenged by Israel's notoriously militarist politician, Benjamin Netanyahu, for its supposed failures to uphold security....

...the inflammatory threats voiced by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad together with Iran's supposed push to acquire nuclear weapons, the fading memory of the Holocaust combined with growing sympathy in the West with the Palestinian plight, and the radicalization of political movements on Israel's borders in the form of Hezbollah and Hamas.

Is it an irresponsible overstatement to say that Richard Falk is an embarrassment to the United Nations, Princeton University, and even the Huffington Post? I think not.

Greg Sargent, the prolific TPM reporter, announced today that he's heading to the Washington Post to run a new blog. Sargent is an unrepentant Democratic partisan, which means he should fit in well with the staff at the Post, but also a top notch reporter. During the campaign, Sargent would ping the McCain press shop with questions all day long. Because TPM is so overtly partisan, he rarely got the answers he was looking for, but for his persistence, if nothing else, Sargent earned a grudging respect from the McCain staff.

Sargent pretty much carried TPM over the last year, and it's not clear to me how that site survives in its current configuration during a Democratic administration (which they have no interest in investigating) and without their best reporter. Still, for online partisan reporting, TPM set the bar pretty high this election. Republicans have no equivalent outlet. Any strategy to revive the party's fortunes will require developing the kind of online infrastructure the Democrats now have in place, but you can't do that without a bunch of right-wing Greg Sargents.

Just for fun, a brief year in review of Obama's legendary new openness and transparency with the press corps:

So Patterson is leaning towards Caroline according to report:

New York Gov. David Paterson says the search is ongoing, but two people close to him tell The Associated Press they believe Caroline Kennedy will be appointed to replace Hillary Clinton in the U.S. Senate....

Meanwhile, Kennedy seems to be taking the governor's remarks to heart.

"Caroline knows that whoever Gov. Paterson selects will have to prove himself or herself to voters all across the state. If Caroline is chosen she is committed to working tirelessly to deliver for all New Yorkers," the Kennedy camp said in a statement.

That's big of her, since last time she was asked about running in 2010 she told NY1 "Well, if he doesn't select me, I would support the person that he does select." So she will only run if she's given the advantage of incumbency, because she's a Kennedy. It just wouldn't be right to accept a level playing field, but, given the advantage of incumbency, she will be more than happy to 'prove herself,' after the fact, to the voters of New York.

It would be an embarrassment for the Democratic party, which suddenly seems to know nothing but since November 4. But for Republicans, the possibility of Franken, Caroline, and Burris all making it into the Senate is like hitting the trifecta -- incompetence, nepotism, and corruption, respectively, will be the buzzwords for our new Democratic Senate.

Donald Westlake, one of the boss's favorite authors, passed away yesterday. Westlake wrote once for THE WEEKLY STANDARD, a piece that can be read here, and was the subject of a profile in this magazine by Steven Lenzner, which can be read here. Lenzner begins:

Plato, as everyone knows, once defined man as a "featherless biped." His student Aristotle insisted instead that man is by nature a political animal, a being whose capacity for speech compels him to live with others.

So who’s right, ironic Plato or solid Aristotle? I can think of only one living writer who might reconcile the two—and that’s Donald E. Westlake, the author of the best crime-caper stories ever written. Indeed, properly read, Westlake has already reconciled Plato and Aristotle in his stories, by showing us man as the animal who can laugh at himself, use speech to explode human pretensions, and thus reach toward civilization. Donald Westlake is not only our finest living comic mystery writer, but perhaps one of our finest living philosophers.

Read the whole thing.

Update: Also see this recent review of two of Westlake's last novels from the September 1, 2008, issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD, and this post from Terry Teachout as well.

It's true that there are very few examples in 20th century history of a bombing campaign that actually broke the morale of a people at war and sapped them of the will to continue the fight. The Battle of Britain did nothing but harden the resolve of the English, and the destruction of German cities didn't stop the German people from fighting on to the end (even if Bomber Harris and Hap Arnold did much to hasten that end). The use of nuclear weapons was effective in the Pacific, but only after horrific fire bombings that did nothing to bring the Japanese to heel. Bombing worked in Serbia, but not in the First Gulf War or Vietnam.

The Middle East has been no different. Wars have been won or lost by boots on the ground, with air power playing a crucial but secondary role in each of Israel's major wars since its independence. In Israel's current fight in Gaza, against a terrorist organization rather than a state actor, air power alone seems even less likely to produce a successful outcome. The great failure of the 2006 war in Lebanon was an overreliance on air power, and in Afghanistan in late 2001, the same problem contributed to the escape of al Qaeda's leadership from Tora Bora. Still, there aren't many instances of air power used to the effect of this report now coming out of Gaza:

An Israeli warplane dropped a 2,000-pound bomb on the home of one of Hamas' top five decision-makers Thursday, instantly killing him and 18 others, while the Israeli army said troops massed on the Gaza border were ready for any order to invade. The airstrike on Nizar Rayan was the first that succeeded in killing a member of Hamas' highest echelon since Israel began its offensive Saturday. The 49-year-old professor of Islamic law was known for personally participating in clashes with Israeli forces and for sending one of his sons on a 2001 suicide mission that killed two Israelis....

Eighteen other people, including all four of Rayan's wives and nine of his 12 children, also were killed, Palestinian health officials said. A man cradled the burned, limp body of a child he pulled from the rubble.

These people willingly send their own children to their deaths simply to make a statement -- to accomplish nothing but the murder of two Israeli civilians and signal their commitment to the fight. The fight against Islamic radicals always seems to come around to whether or not they can, in fact, be deterred, because it's not clear that they are rational, at least not like us. But to wipe out a man's entire family, it's hard to imagine that doesn't give his colleagues at least a moment's pause. Perhaps it will make the leadership of Hamas rethink the wisdom of sparking an open confrontation with Israel under the current conditions. Or maybe not, and the only way to stop Hamas is to eliminate its capacity for violence entirely. Or Israeli leaders can just try to find a diplomatic solution -- as a majority of Democrats apparently favor. It worked so well with the last cease fire.

"At war today in Gaza, one combatant is committed to causing the most civilian pain and suffering on both sides. The other combatant is committed to saving as many lives as possible -- also on both sides."

Hamas vows revenge on Israel, as soon as it can escape from under the barrage of precision-targeted bombing taking out its leaders.

The many charms of Roland Burris.

Ouch: Illinois Dems deserve Burris, who is "at least six parts ego to one part performance, a charmless, presumptuous irritant on the stump and at the debate lectern."

Ouch: "Caroline is here, in case you all were wondering," Paterson said loudly. "She's 7 and she's ready to go to the Senate."

AP and MSNBC still obsessing over Palin's family members and their significant others, like gossip rags.

Top bidders contenders for Rahm Emanuel's seat rise from the pristine waters of Illinois politics.

Obama transition connects high-minded, educational essay contest for inauguration tickets to its neverending fund-raising efforts.

Happy coincidence: Convention of leather fetishists and Obama inauguration coincide in D.C.

North Carolina governor says it's newspaper's job to be nice to him.

From a very smart Barry Rubin piece at Pajamas Media:

In some ways, the most important — or at least second mos