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WASHINGTON -- The Palestinians had hoped they would see a new day coming after the Bush administration’s eight-year capitulation to all that Israel wanted. But they were wrong. The Obama administration is moving down the same Bush road -- perhaps a little slower -- but nonetheless still enabling the Israelis to continue to violate international law and the U.N. Charter by annexing occupied Arab land. First, the new administration made it clear that U.S. policy opposed new Jewish settlements on the West Bank. This declaration was met with a thumping rejection from the Israeli government led by Benjamin Netanyahu. Then,...

RUSH: It is apparent, ladies and gentlemen, that General John "Swifty" Kerry has taken over Obama foreign policy. You people who thought you were voting for Obama to change foreign policy were wrong. You know, I still can't get over that last sound bite. President Obama, there aren't Bush troops, and there aren't Obama troops. Those are American soldiers, and you've abandoned them, while claiming to these naval people in Jacksonville yesterday you never -- he's embarrassing. Worse than that, it's dangerous. We got John "Swifty" Kerry, who served in Vietnam, by the way, yesterday afternoon at the Council on...

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama has no plans to pull U.S. troops out of Afghanistan. After eight years of war there, withdrawal is not among the options the administration is considering as it designs a new strategy. Also not being considered is any exploration of possible peace talks with the Taliban, the indigenous Islamic group that once controlled large swaths of Afghanistan. When asked whether the U.S. could withdraw from Afghanistan -- a country known as the "graveyard of empires" -- White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said: "That’s not something that has ever been entertained." "I don’t think we have...

Obama's liberal buddies are blocking a surge. This is from the blog at TheHill.com, the Briefing Room. "Nearly two dozen House liberals have signed onto a bill introduced this past week that would prohibit an increase of troops in Afghanistan. A bill introduced by Representative Barbara Lee (D-CA) Thursday would bar funding to increase troop level in Afghanistan beyond its current level. Lee and 21 lawmakers, largely from the liberal Congressional Progressive Caucus..." Do they really need a separate liberal caucus in the House? Aren't they all liberal socialist jerks? They need their own separate caucus? They introduced the bill,...

Here is video of Helen Thomas pressing White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs yesterday over whether President Obama still supports a "Public Option" for Health Care, and whether he will "fight for it." Gibbs customarily dodged the question, and Thomas called him on it, saying she continues to ask about it because "I want your conscience to bother you." . . . (VIDEO)

RUSH: Yesterday at about this same time in this program we shared with you the details of a story in the National Post in Canada (the only place I have found such details) about how irritated with Obama the French president, Sarkozy, was in the way he's dealing with the Iranian situation and their nuclear ramp-up. And it was clear that -- we read the quotes from Sarkozy and things that he had said (that, again, were not reported here in the State-Controlled Media in the United States) he clear thinks Obama is an idiot. He thinks he's naive and...

WASHINGTON -- Have you noticed a climate of hate and mean spiritedness in the land? Whether inspired by racism or not, it certainly exists. This isn’t a unique psychological phenomenon. Remember the brutal anti-unionism of the 1930s, the McCarthy-era anti-communist scare of the 1950s and the Vietnam War protests of the 1960s and early 1970s? President Barack Obama -- the first black U.S. president -- tries diligently to reject claims that racism underlies the public rancor against his health care reform plan and other administration aspirations. He acknowledged recently that there are "some people out there who don’t like me...

With a couple of student journalists ripping the scab off of the stinking boil on the body politic that is acorn, who is best suited to investigate what is clearly the biggest political scandal since Watergate? Eric Holder's DOJ? Yeah, thats' a hoot, as he won't even look into documented intimidation by nightstick wielding thugs outside of a polling place on election day. The FBI?, in a perfect world that would work, except that DC is perfect only in the same way a swamp is, it tends to eat the weak and give up only stinky noxious gases. Budget considerations...

(CNN) -- Former President Jimmy Carter said Tuesday that racial politics played a role in South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson's outburst during President Obama's speech to Congress last week and in some of the opposition the president has faced since taking office. Former President Carter tells "NBC Nightly News" that racism has surfaced in opposition to President Obama. "I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he's African-American," Carter told "NBC Nightly News." "I live in the South, and I've seen the...

WASHINGTON -- Do presidents and other public officials lie? Do birds fly? That age-old question was recently evoked when Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., shouted "You lie" after President Barack Obama told a joint session of Congress that his national health care proposal would not cover illegal immigrants. Wilson’s verbal attack was reminiscent of the back benchers in London’s House of Commons where rhetorical bombast is more frequent than in the halls of Congress. Wilson apologized for his blast but that didn’t stop the House from voting 240-179 to rebuke him for a breach of decorum "to the discredit of the...

Conservatives Claim Obama Pushing Socialist Agenda WASHINGTON -- What have we come to when conservative politicians and parents tell their children not to listen to President Barack Obama? It turned out that his message in his back-to-school address to students was good old-fashioned advice: Stay in school and study hard. The right wingers had claimed the president wanted to promote his "socialist agenda" and involve the federal government in educating their children because of his speech, timed to coincide with the start of the school year. Would they really eliminate Uncle Sam’s financial support of public schools? Of course not....

WASHINGTON -- It’s no surprise that former Vice President Dick Cheney is opposed to the Justice Department’s decision to investigate the torture of prisoners during the Bush-Cheney administration. After all, Cheney has acknowledged that he was "aware" of waterboarding (simulated drowning) of detainees to get them to talk. It’s fair speculation that the orders for this method of torture came from on high. And in the Bush-Cheney administration, no one was higher than the vice president. Cheney has blasted Attorney General Eric Holder’s appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate abuse of prisoners. The duty fell to veteran Connecticut lawyer...

WASHINGTON -- To win concessions from the hardliners on Capitol Hill, President Barack Obama appeared as though he was ready to give up a jewel in the crown of health reform -- the government-run public option. But after liberal Democrats put up a squawk, the White House scaled back, insisting the president’s commitment to the public option hasn’t changed. Will the real President Obama please stand up? Why doesn’t the president come out and say exactly where he stands, where he draws the line? The problem is that for President Obama, there is no "line" on health care. It appears...

WASHINGTON -- It’s all so sad. Well-organized conservatives have launched a full-scale attack on health care reform. And they appear to be winning -- for now. Their victory strategy involves deliberate distortions of the truth and scare tactics. Under the plans Congress is considering, a government bureaucrat will come between you and your doctor, their TV ads intone ominously. You will lose your private health insurance, dumping you into an inferior government plan. You won’t be able to choose your doctor, they say. The desperate opposition also claims we will have "socialized medicine," rationed care and forced euthanasia for the...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: These guys have threatened me again. This was last Friday at the White House, Jake Tapper -- this the presidential daily brief. Jake Tapper says, "Rush Limbaugh went on a very long speech which he compared Democrats to Nazis, the president to Hitler, and I'm wondering if the president's seen any of this. Obviously the Nazi imagery has been condemned by Jewish groups, and I'm wondering if he feels anything about the language being used this way." GIBBS: Any time you make references to what happened in Germany in the Thirties and Forties, I think you're talking...

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama should stick to his guns in pressuring Israel to stop building settlements on Palestinian land. The Israeli land grabs that result in more settlements on the West Bank and the forced eviction of Palestinians in East Jerusalem are clearly violations of international law. The Israeli leadership knows what it is doing and hopes it still has a green light and open-ended support from U.S. policy makers, just as it did in the administration of President George W. Bush. Bush was totally sympathetic with all Israeli military moves, including the catastrophic bombing of Gaza. His administration...

WASHINGTON -- Strong support for health care reform comes from Americans from all walks of life. Thousands of doctors and nurses are on board in support of broad-ranging reform that would bring the security of health coverage to millions of people who lack it. A new Gallup Poll released Wednesday shows that 44 percent of Americans believe a new reform law would improve medical care in the U.S., while 26 percent said it would improve their personal medical care. The insurance industry and some of the medical moguls continue to demonize health care reform as "socialism." The broadcast wing of...

WASHINGTON -- Secrecy is endemic in all governments. It goes with the turf, especially if their leaders hope to hide illegal or immoral behavior, such as torture of foreign prisoners. Many Americans heaved a sigh of relief last January when President Barack Obama banned the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Image-wise, it made the administration look more humane than the Bush-Cheney team. But that is not the whole story. Obama left unaddressed the possibility of torture in secret foreign prisons under our control as in Abu Ghraib in Iraq or Bagram in Afghanistan, not to mention the "black...

WASHINGTON -- I had an historical flashback recently when I read a Washington Post news story about how the U.S. commander in Afghanistan thinks he may need many thousands more troops to win the war. Shades of Vietnam. Do we ever learn? It brought back memories of the late Gen. William C. Westmoreland, the U.S. commander in Southeast Asia, who kept escalating the troop numbers after the 1967 Tet offensive in Vietnam. His strategy produced a debacle for us. When the besieged Westmoreland requested 240,000 more troops, President Lyndon B. Johnson was shocked. The command in Vietnam had been giving...

WASHINGTON -- It’s not news when the White House tries to manage the news. That has always been the case. But it is news when Obama administration officials -- the folks who proclaimed that they would bring unprecedented openness and transparency to government -- fall all over themselves trying to manipulate news briefings and attempting amateurish stagecraft at public meetings. The president relies on a list of handpicked reporters to call on at his formal news conferences -- and the fortunate few are not necessarily accredited reporters but include new age self-appointed journalists or anyone with a laptop. The White...

You Obama supporters, be honest now. Read the following and tell me how you would have reacted: If George W. Bush had made a joke at the expense of the Special Olympics, would you have approved? If George W. Bush had given Gordon Brown a set of inexpensive and incorrectly formatted DVDs, when Gordon Brown had given him a thoughtful and historically significant gift, would you have approved? If George W. Bush had given the Queen of England an iPod containing videos of his speeches, would you have thought this embarrassingly narcissistic and tacky? If George W. Bush had bowed...

CBS' Chip Reid and Helen Thomas double teamed Robert Gibbs today at the daily press briefing on the "tightly controlled" town hall meeting President Obama will hold on health care. Gibbs kept saying lets have this discussion AFTER the meeting. Helen Thomas accused the White House of "controlling the press." She said almost all White House/Obama events are "prepackaged." She accused the White House of not "having any answers."

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama had been playing his cards cautiously on the political turmoil in Iran -- until conservatives goaded him to escalate his rhetorical condemnation of the uprising. Obama had tried to steer clear of any public comment about the disputed reelection of Prime Minister Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the massive protests by supporters of the opposition candidate and the government crackdown on the protesters. At a news conference Tuesday, Obama caved in to those right-wing columnists and political hawks who wanted him to hit the Iranian mullahs harder. These are the same critics who pushed the American people into...

WASHINGTON -- A universal health-care system based on the single-payer model appears to be a bridge too far for politically attuned President Barack Obama. A single-payer system -- such as Medicare for everyone -- would solve the problem of out-of-control costs and would provide health care for all. President Lyndon B. Johnson had the courage to weigh in with all his political clout to win passage of Medicare and Medicaid, star accomplishments of the Great Society. President Franklin D. Roosevelt put all his chips on the table to win passage of the Social Security Act that makes the elderly more...

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama scored big with his eloquent speech to the Muslim world last week. Now he has to put up or shut up. That’s the price of raising hopes that solutions can be found to tough issues, including the long festering Israeli-Palestinian crisis. His task there is complicated by the new hard-line Israeli leadership personified by Benjamin Netanyahu. Of course, Obama also has several critical foreign policy problems bequeathed by his predecessor. Among them are the deteriorating Pakistani-Afghanistan turmoil and nuclear ambitions in Iran and North Korea. Obama’s uplifting rhetoric has raised expectations that he is a...

Karl Rove takes on Maureen Dowd.

WASHINGTON -- Is Supreme Court justice-designate Sonia Sotomayor going to have to eat her words and forget her past to win a seat on the high bench? That would apparently appease some of her right-wing critics, who are grasping at straws in their campaign to try to derail the Hispanic woman’s nomination -- or, at least, try to rough her up a bit. Does she have to be a narrow constructionist and interpret the law their way? Let’s hope not -- conservative jurists have had their way for too long on the high court. If she wins Senate confirmation, Sotomayor...

WASHINGTON -- Former Vice President Dick Cheney is tossing verbal grenades at his successors. Maybe he just can’t stand the loss of power. Pitiful. He is acting like a man who is one step ahead of the sheriff. Actually, that could be the case. The true story of Cheney’s manipulations and deceptions during his eight years in the White House is yet to be told. Right now he sees that his best defense is offense. He has accused President Barack Obama of "recklessness" and weakening national security. Cheney should be grateful to Obama for not throwing the book at him...

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu got together officially this week for the first time, but their talks failed to win agreement on how to solve perennial Middle East problems. They managed to agree on a common concern that Iran is secretly developing nuclear weapons. In meeting with the hawkish Netanyahu, Obama agreed that a nuclear-armed Iran was unacceptable. He warned that the diplomatic talks he was initiating to halt Iran’s program would not continue forever, and he roughly set a one-year deadline for the dialogue. The president also said he wouldn’t foreclose "a range...

It isn’t so much that Dick and Rummy are back. It’s that they never left. They had no intention of turning America’s national security over to the Boy Wonder. The two best infighters in Washington history weren’t yielding turf to a bunch of peach-fuzz pinkos who side with terrorists. Let W. work out at the S.M.U. gym in Dallas, waiting for history to redeem him; Dick and Rummy are leaning forward into history, as they always do. Cheney is tawny with TV makeup; there’s no point taking it off. The gigs are nonstop, and he has a big Obama-bashing speech...

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama should appoint a woman to the U.S. Supreme Court to fill the vacancy created by the retirement of Justice David Souter. And she should be a liberal. The high court is top heavy with conservative justices. And there is only one woman, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, on the high bench. Obama’s choice will say a lot because Supreme Court’s decisions are the ultimate in our national life. Republicans are itching for a fight over the nominee, despite the fact that they had their way for too many years and worked to tip the court to the...

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama’s 100 days in office have not shaken the world, but he has been compelled to focus on the legacy bequeathed by former President George W. Bush: the worst economic slump since the Great Depression and two wars. White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, avoiding any credibility-destroying urge to praise his boss with ridiculous extravagance, gives the president a "B-plus" on his report card. "What the president has achieved is something we’re proud of," Gibbs said, adding: "There is room for improvement." Probably the biggest change Obama has brought about is the country’s new hopeful spirit,...

Shock and shame is the only way to react to the latest revelations of the Bush administration's brutal interrogation of suspected terrorists. As the world now knows, torture techniques -- approved by President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld -- were exposed in four memos released by the Justice Department under a court order obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union. Much as President Obama wants to move on and to forget the unsavory history of the preceding administration, he has to face up to its ugly reality. The Bush administration's legal memos...

WASHINGTON -- White House spokesman Robert Gibbs and President Barack Obama share the same trait: They both are very cautious when speaking with reporters. Gibbs measures his words hesitantly between some "ums" and "ahs," before voicing carefully selected words in response to a reporter’s question. As White House press secretary he is in the bull’s eye every day at televised news briefings, which may explain why he appears most comfortable with the reporters for wire services and TV networks he schmoozed with on the campaign trail. In a position where many predecessors have blown their tops out of frustration or...

WASHINGTON -- Words count, as President Barack Obama once said. Words spoken truthfully count even more. The president's triumphal eight-day six-country overseas tour, ending with his emotional visit to U.S. troops in Iraq, will go down in history as an opportunity for us to collect Obama's words and save them in our computers so we can match them with the administration's future actions. It's refreshing to hear words of optimism, courage and determination aimed at solving long-standing problems and threats. As the president said in Turkey, "If we don't reach high, then we don't make progress." So let's firmly assign...

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama seems to be more interested in propping up Wall Street than saving the car companies and the auto workers in Detroit. He displayed his "get tough" side when he laid down the law to General Motors and Chrysler, whose restructuring plans had displeased the White House auto task force. The president gave the car makers a choice of coming up with tougher plans or face bankruptcy. GM was given 60 days to produce a plan for Obama, who has never ran a company, and Chrysler was given 30 days, with a threat to end its...

It takes a lot to motivate the American people but they are hopping mad over the bonus payments to Wall Streeters from their tax money. I haven’t seen this much "people power" since the grass-roots protests against the Vietnam War riled the nation. This anger is highly justified, but it hasn’t slowed the Obama administration’s peculiar drive to bailout Wall Street by buying banks’ toxic assets (bad loans and mortgage-related securities) to the tune of possibly up to $2 trillion dollars to stabilize the banks and to jump-start the credit industry. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner Monday unveiled the plan amid...

WASHINGTON -- It’s unlikely that the United States will ever live down the shame of torture during the Bush-Cheney administration. It’s history now and all the piety and wit of those former U.S. officials responsible for this horrendous chapter cannot wipe out a word of it. Mark Danner published in the New York Review of Books excerpts of a leaked report by the International Committee of the Red Cross on CIA interrogation techniques used at secret U.S. "black site" prisons abroad and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The Red Cross report is based on Red Cross interviews in 2006 with 14 "high...

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama is making a big mistake in escalating U.S. troop strength in Afghanistan, where he already has acknowledged he doesn’t believe victory is possible. We should ask: What are we doing there seven years after the 9/11 attacks by the al-Qaida network? Historically, the country has lacked a strong central government and has been governed by locally strong tribal leaders and warlords. Al-Qaida was able to take advantage of this loose structure and turn Afghanistan into the plotting ground for the terrorists who struck the Pentagon and the World Trade Center in New York. But what...

WASHINGTON -- Can Americans face the truth about the Bush administration’s abuse of power? I believe so, but clearly President Barack Obama and some Democratic lawmakers think they can’t. Or possibly they don’t want to be bogged down in a search which could be viewed as vindictive against the former regime. Too bad. Obama -- a former constitutional law professor -- has ruled out a look backward, claiming that any review of possible illegalities by Bush and his coterie would lead to "politics that have made Washington dysfunctional." Picking up on the last Bush mantra that we should move "forward,"...

Here is some good news and some bad news. I'll give you the bad news first. I was on a panel of smart, pleasant men and women last week, discussing the economy and, in particular, how it is affecting people selling vehicles with tires and wheels. I told the audience that the Federal Reserve, which has unlimited power to print money, had a program called the Term Asset Backed Lending Facility (TALF) that would help dealers restock their showrooms. I said I knew it hadn't started yet but I thought it would start soon. A gentleman on the panel --...

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama was recently accused of being too much of a downer about the economy. Well, he certainly made up for that this week with his highly optimistic "yes-we-can" campaign-style speech to Congress. "We will rebuild, we will recover and the United States will emerge stronger than ever," Obama declared. "It is time for America to lead again." His upbeat remarks in a 52-minute State of the Union-style address to a joint session of Congress frequently brought the lawmakers to their feet as they roared their approval. The nationally televised event put the changing face of America...

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama is already back-tracking on some of his high-road campaign stands and is copying some of former President George W. Bush’s dubious policies. A couple of weeks ago the Obama administration invoked the controversial state secrets act in the case of Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian native, and four other detainees. They claimed they were victims of the Bush administration’s rendition program under which terrorism suspects were secretly taken to other countries where, they say, they were tortured. The Bush administration’s position has been that the case should be dismissed because even courtroom discussion of their treatment...

BILL O'REILLY, HOST: In the "Back of the Book" segment tonight: part two of my interview with Whoopi Goldberg. Our BillOReilly.com poll asked if I should apologize to Helen Thomas for making fun of her last week. Almost 80,000 folks voted. Ninety-three percent say no apology is necessary. Well, Ms. Goldberg disagrees with that. [VIDEO AVAILABLE AT LINK; LIABILITY WAIVER MAY BE REQUIRED]

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama should stop trying to win over Republican lawmakers in Congress. He has turned the other cheek -- and they slapped that, too. Since winning the November election, Obama has been trying to change the ways of Washington -- a goal that may prove more elusive than he originally thought. He was in hot pursuit of bipartisanship by socializing with the members of the GOP, inviting them to the White House, trying to sell them on his economic recovery plan -- but he struck out. No Republican member of the House and only three GOP members...

RUSH: I got an e-mail. This is from Susan in Virginia Beach. "Dear Rush: You are my professor. I am indebted to you for the knowledge that you have given me. You've always told us that you would tell us when it was time to panic. I'm starting to wonder how we are going to get our country back from these revolutionaries. Is it time to panic?" No. 'Cause panic doesn't accomplish anything. But when we come back from the break, I'm going to tell you how to get the country back. I'm going to tell you how it will...

Overlooked in coverage of Tim Geithner’s and Tom Daschle’s unpaid taxes is the $70,000 that Minnesota Democratic senatorial candidate Al Franken has admitted to owing in back taxes, interest, and penalties. Last April, the California Tax Franchise Board revealed that Franken owed the state $5,800 in taxes, fines, and penalties because he did not file returns in 2003 through 2007. Franken then admitted that he owed more than $50,000 in back taxes to 17 states.Franken blamed everything on his accountant of 18 years, saying he failed to report the income from the comedian’s celebrity appearances and speeches in those states...

“Nobody is perfect” was the not-so-profound observation of White House press secretary Robert Gibbs over the past several days as he tried to fend off criticism of the tax troubles of three top appointees. One of the three -- Timothy Geithner -- survived congressional and public scrutiny and was confirmed as secretary of treasury. But former South Dakota Sen. Tom Daschle -- who made a bundle in speaking fees and giving advice to health-care companies after he was defeated for re-election -- felt compelled to bow out from his nomination as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services...

Committee Chairman Howard Dean said Monday that he’s looking forward to one party controlling all aspects of government, despite GOP charges that it would be a disastrous Nov. 4 outcome. “Republicans had a chance to rule. They failed miserably. I think it’s time to give the other party a chance,” Dean said on MSNBC. Republicans recently warned there would be grave consequences for the country if Democrats were in charge of both chambers of Congress and the White House. At a rally in Ohio, for instance, GOP presidential nominee Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) said he would provide a balance to...