Ethan Bronner at the NYT online reports that Israel is shutting foreign correspondents out of Gaza altogether.

Israel claims that its Gaza attacks are precisely targeted. War being war and human beings being human, that's unlikely to the vanishing point, but at least it's an empirical claim that's in principle falsifiable. That's where journalism comes in. The Israeli claim cries for on-the-ground verification--especially on a day when at least 30 Palestinian refugees are dead in or near a UN school where they took refuge, and Israel claims that the attack was justified in that "an initial investigation suggested its forces had responded to mortar fire coming from the school."

So let's see what an independent press says, right? Wrong, according to the Israeli government. Here's Bronner:

Daniel Seaman, director of Israel's Government Press Office, said that "any journalist who enters Gaza becomes a fig leaf and front for the Hamas terror organization, and I see no reason why we should help that."

Bronner adds:

Foreign reporters deny that their work in Gaza has been subject to Hamas censorship or control.

But never mind, in the eyes of the Israeli government. "Objectively," foreign reporting from Gaza serves Hamas. This theory has the totalitarian look all too familiar in fascist and Stalinist annals.

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William Kristol's penchant for certainty fails him this morning. Here are a few sentences from his NYT column, helpfully annotated by me:

"Israel could well succeed in Gaza....the Israeli leadership seems aware of the mistakes -- political, strategic and military -- it made in Lebanon. That doesn't mean it won't make them all over again." "So far as one can tell, the Gaza operation seems to have been well-planned and is being methodically executed, in sharp contrast to the Lebanon incursion. Barak has also warned that the operation could be long and difficult, lowering expectations by contrast with the Israeli rhetoric of July 2006."

The expectations are being lowered by Kristol now. The generous view is that he is belatedly mindful of some of his earlier enthusiasms. For example, on the subject of Iraq (h/t: David Corn):

"No one believes the inspections can work" (September 15, 2002).

A war in Iraq "could have terrifically good effects throughout the Middle East" (September 18, 2002).

"We should not fool ourselves by believing that inspections could make any difference at all" (September 19, 2002).

On the risk of sectarian war after a US invasion of Iraq: "We talk here about Shiites and Sunnis as if they've never lived together. Most Arab countries have Shiites and Sunnis, and a lot of them live perfectly well together" (March 1, 2003).

"Very few wars in American history were prepared better or more thoroughly than this one by this president" (also March 1, 2003, not one of his better days)

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Longtime State Department Middle East specialist Aaron David Miller on the outlook there, and the test for Obama:

Despite efforts to sound reassuring during the campaign, the new administration will have to be tough, much tougher than either Bill Clinton or George W. Bush were, if it's serious about Arab-Israeli peacemaking. The departure point for a viable peace deal--either with Syria or the Palestinians--must not be based purely on what the political traffic in Israel will bear, but on the requirements of all sides....

Israel has every reason to defend itself against Hamas. But does it make sense for America to support its policy of punishing Hamas by making life unbearable for 1.5 million Gazans by denying aid and economic development? The answer is no.

In 25 years of working on this issue for six secretaries of state, I can't recall one meeting where we had a serious discussion with an Israeli prime minister about the damage that settlement activity--including land confiscation, bypass roads and housing demolitions--does to the peacemaking process.

This last paragraph is especially shocking. Not surprising but shocking.

"Hamas legislators won a democratic majority in elections four years ago."

"Eighteen months ago, Hamas took over the Gaza Strip in a coup."

I was just saying to a friend that the White House seemed vacant. But in truth, it remains much worse than vacant. The long national nightmare, which is far more than a national nightmare, has 18 days left to run, and Israel is taking advantage by striding into Gaza while the delusional American president is a cynic-in-chief flashing the green light. The long, abysmal, wretched Bush years are ending not with a bang but the sort of thump, thump, thump you used to hear when a phonograph needle got stuck.

And while Israel seems to have veered into attempting to uproot delusional Hamas from its position as the government of Gaza--leaving Bronner, for one, in doubt that they have any idea, or care, who would run Gaza without them--the government of the United States is cheerleading its way onward to "seek[ing] an enduring peace," in Bush's words, via an onslaught of Old Testament proportions. All the berserkers in charge no doubt believe that the desert they are making is deserving of the name "peace"--once they're done with the crucial business of Holy War.

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My initial reaction to Obama's Rick Warren announcement was horror.

After what seems like weeks of intense back-and-forth, but in fact is only a day's worth, I'm still appalled. It's one thing to invite the adversary into the tent the better to defeat him with a smile--neutralize him, in colder terms--but it's quite another to give him a throne, even if a purely symbolic throne. Warren's political interventions are mostly terrible (AIDS and environment are the exceptions). The argument that this was crass political calculation--triangulation, as another president once said--comparable to FDR making nice to segregationists and Stalin, falls afoul of the fact that this overture to Warren was unnecessary. To get the New Deal, FDR really did have to make deals with the racist devil. To defeat Hitler, FDR really had to ally with Stalin. It's history: get used to it. But I've yet to see a single argument to the effect that Obama's invitation to Warren accomplishes a single practical thing, let along that it was necessary. So I take it as an ugly brush-back: a gratuitous slap at feminists and LGBT's. I hope it's ill-considered, impromptu, but suspect it's actually one of a series--bridge-building to the right on principle.

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One thing to admire about Barack Obama is his willingness to name big problems bluntly: for exampe, energy (wasteful overuse, overloading the ecosystem) and health care (a problem of costs as well as insurance company ripoffs), to name two. It goes without saying that clarity about first principles comes as an enormous relief after the brain-dead, plutocracy-gilding drivel that has spewed out of the White House for the last eight years.

The savvy Lorelei Kelly has a valuable piece up at Huffington Post on the huge missing argument in Washington. What, she asks, is the point of a military budget that accounts for "approximately 54% of discretionary spending" not including war spending? You read that correctly--leave out Iraq and Afghanistan, and the military still take more than half all discretionary spending. That staggering figure does include "plenty of permanent earmarks like missile defense and nuclear weapons." Talk about whole herds of large beasts in the room.

This is not to say that the country can afford to go without intelligent strategy. But "America has not had a real security strategy since the end of 'containment' and the Cold War in 1991," she writes. It's long past time for a rethink of the purpose of military spending. Sticking the label "national security" on gigantic, automatic expenditures clarifies nothing. Meanwhile, on the right, big spenders are insisting that 4 percent of GDP constitute a floor for military spending. (These big spenders call themselves "conservatives." Perhaps Rick Warren might apply himself to the Purpose-Driven Military Budget.)

But in keeping with the new philosophical mood, Kelly is also practical, and tough on what she calls The Lefty Chorus, which "may be right on priorities, but its rhetoric still looks backward for inspiration." Instead of beating the drums for butter over guns, she argues,

A much more effective strategy for the Left will be to make tradeoffs within the defense budget this year and not try to shift money around between domestic and defense spending. Take on missile defense and the F-22, but at the same time, stand up for military families, genocide prevention, body armor, Foreign Area Officers. Take on the imbalance in our policy that hands the military far too much responsibility. This is a great opportunity for the Left to gain much needed legitimacy in this debate. Don't blow the common ground that exists out there! Quit pitting the Air Force against the Department of Education. That argument doesn't work. It never has.

The discussion is long overdue. I don't expect to see it on the Sunday shows or major op-ed pages, but isn't this one thing the blogosphere is for?

Before you get too worked up about all the ways Obama is selling out (before he's moved into the White House) read this from Dick Cheney's favorite columnist and leap:

Obama was quite serious when he said he was going to change the world. And now he has a national crisis, a personal mandate, a pliant Congress, a desperate public -- and, at his disposal, the greatest pot of money in galactic history. (I include here the extrasolar planets.)

It begins with a near $1 trillion stimulus package. This is where Obama will show himself ideologically. It is his one great opportunity to plant the seeds for everything he cares about: a new green economy, universal health care, a labor resurgence, government as benevolent private-sector "partner." The first hint came yesterday, when Obama claimed, "If we want to overcome our economic challenges, we must also finally address our health care challenge" -- the perfect non sequitur that gives carte blanche to whatever health-care reform and spending the Obama team dreams up. It is the community organizer's ultimate dream....

With the country clamoring for action and with all psychological barriers to government intervention obliterated (by the conservative party, no less), the stage is set for a young, ambitious, supremely confident president -- who sees himself as a world-historical figure before even having been sworn in -- to begin a restructuring of the American economy and the forging of a new relationship between government and people.

Don't be fooled by Bob Gates staying on. Obama didn't get elected to manage Afghanistan. He intends to transform America. And he has the money, the mandate and the moxie to go for it.

[H/t: Dean Baker]

Charlie Gibson on ABC's World News Tonight: The cholera outbreak in Zimbabwe stems from the fact that the country is "paralyzed by political infighting."

There's a tyrant, Robert Mugabe, who wrecked the country, murdered opponents with impunity, drove his opponent into exile, and still came in second in the first round of presidential voting. There's an opponent who, after brutal repression, withdrew from the second round, calling it a "violent sham." Since then, under international pressure, he has scrambled, with indifferent success, to negotiate some leverage. The resulting situation, in the view of ABC News, is characterized as "political infighting."

And I'm the queen of Bavaria.

The estimable Steve Fraser has a piece worthy of note up at Tomdispatch. Not the part that grumbles indiscriminately about Obama's prospects for good deeds on the basis of nothing but the fact that his looming appointments have experience in the government. I too am disturbed that no one directly representing labor is included among the councils of economic advisers, but December is a bit early, I think, to haul out the big guns and declare that, in foreign policy, for example, we confront what he calls "an "Obama-Clinton-Bush (the father) foreign policy establishment." Give the guy a few weeks in office, for Chrissake, before consigning him to the selloutocracy.

But to the subject of Fraser's more constructive side:

A real democratic nationalization of the banks -- good value for our money rather than good money to add to their value -- should be part of the policy agenda up for discussion in the Obama era. As things now stand, the public supplies the loans and the investment capital, but the key decisions about how they are to be deployed remain in private hands. A democratic version of nationalizing the financial system would transfer these critical decisions to new institutions created by the Congress and designed to pursue public, not private, objectives. How to subject the flow of credit and investment capital to public control ought to be on the drawing boards if we are to look beyond the old New Deal to a new one.

Or, for instance, if we are to bail out the auto industry, which we should -- millions of jobs, businesses, communities, and what's left of once powerful and proud unions are at stake -- then why not talk about its nationalization, too? Why not create a representative body of workers, consumers, environmentalists, suppliers, and other interested parties to supervise the industry's reorganization and retooling to produce, just as the president-elect says he wants, new green means of transportation -- and not just cars?

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From Mike Allen at Politico (pardon my italics):

NBC News plans to name David Gregory as moderator of "Meet the Press," infusing one of television's most prized franchises with a sharp edge leavened by a youthful style and versatility, according to network executives.

Gregory, 38, celebrated his 30th birthday -- complete with cake -- aboard George W. Bush's presidential campaign plane, the assignment that solidified his stature as a network rising star.

Eight years on, Gregory has not distinguished himself for independent thought, though a certain grumpiness won him an easy reputation for such among people who think that a birthday cake on a campaign plane is what solidifies "stature." See here for an interesting item from the Columbia Journalism Review. Here are some questions I raised about Gregory's acumen in August. Here he was his penetrating question of Sen. John Thune (R, SD) at midnight after Sarah Palin's St. Paul speech: "Senator [John] Thune, was a star born here tonight with Sarah Palin?"

I try not to rush to judgment. I'm trying. Trying.

From Roger Cohen on today's NYT site, a timely recommendation:

I think Olmert's words should be emblazoned on the wall of Hillary Clinton's eighth-floor State Department office: "We must reach an agreement with the Palestinians, meaning a withdrawal from nearly all, if not all, of the territories. Some percentage of these territories would remain in our hands, but we must give the Palestinians the same percentage elsewhere -- without this, there will be no peace."

Asked if this included a compromise on Jerusalem, Olmert said, "Including Jerusalem."

He also declared, "I'd like to know if there's a serious person in the state of Israel who believe that we can make peace with the Syrians without, in the end, giving up the Golan Heights." Those words should go up on Clinton's wall, too....

Getting to...a two-state deal at, or close to, the 1967 borders will require concerted U.S. involvement from day one of the Obama administration. Its tone should be one of tough love, with the emphasis on tough.

Time's Mark Halperin has found his moral compass. According to Alexander Burns at Politico, he's decided that

"media bias was more intense in the 2008 election than in any other national campaign in recent history."

"It's the most disgusting failure of people in our business since the Iraq war," Halperin said at a panel of media analysts. "It was extreme bias, extreme pro-Obama coverage."

If the quote is accurate, Halperin overlooks the Swift Boat coverage of 2004 and the Bill Ayers-fest. According to Burns' piece, the sole example of bias that Halperin gives is the comparison between a "vicious" NYT slash-and-burn job on Cindy McCain compared to their puff piece on Michelle Obama.

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Yesterday's maladroit WP headline "Some in Arab World Wary of Clinton; One Issue: Whether Probable Secretary of State Would Be More Hawk Than Dove," mischaracterizes the Michael Abramowitz piece it adorns. It isn't till the 20th paragraph that a single Arab is quoted, and then it's one Palestinian characterizing other Arabs:

Amjad Atallah, who formerly served as a legal adviser for the Palestinian negotiating team in peace talks with the Israelis, said the prospective Clinton nomination is being watched warily in the Arab world, given her unstinting support for Israel in recent years and hawkish comments on Iran. Some worry that her selection is a possible indicator that Obama may not be as aggressive as Palestinians hope in pushing for a peace deal.

"Nobody has a negative opinion of Senator Clinton, except maybe that her opinions are closer to the neoconservatives than they might wish," Atallah said.

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Conceding, McCain paid tribute to African-Americans, and honored Obama for--having defeated him.

Everyone is calling him gracious--on MSNBC, Keith Olbermann and Rep. John Lewis, for example. I suppose he was. What he couldn't bring himself to do: compliment Obama for the way he conducted himself; for any of his talents; for any ideas; for his character.

Beneath the velvet, it was faint praise. A bitter night for Sen. McCain, to be sure.

Peruvian shamans check in. I won't spoil this by saying whom they prefer.