Fareed Zakaria, on his GPS, the new bright star of CNN TV, had two guests from Europe on his program on Sunday, July 27, 2008 - the writers Bernard Henry Levy, known in France simply as BHL, and Josef Joffe, the editor of Die Zeit.

GHL said flatly, were Obama to run for President of the EU he would get at least 85% of the vote. The Europeans see in him the joint embodiment of the two best figures in recent American history - MLK and JFK - and propelled by a very reasonable mix of realism and idealism. Bringing his impressions to a closer set of images - he sees in Obama someone who has the potential of leading from a mix of the Neocons with Kissinger.

Joe Joffe thought that this week showed Obama as a canvas on which the Europeans projected what they want for America - that is how they want to see it. He also said that McCain, known to the Europeans, has vanished nevertheless from the media in Europe, as he thinks happened also in the US. “He has lost the battle of storytelling’ - he said.

GHL added that in France “we would not elect a President from a minority - so we dream of America.”

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 http://www.nypost.com/seven/07272008/new…

OBAMA’S SECRET RESCUE MISSION
SEEKS TO FREE US MOM’S KIDS FROM PALESTINIAN ‘CAPTIVITY’

By GINGER ADAMS OTIS, New York Post, July 27, 2008

Barack Obama carried out a secret assignment during his global tour last week.
While talking about the Middle East peace process in the West Bank Wednesday, the presumptive Democratic nominee slipped a note to Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad.
The private message: Help an anguished Chicago mother get her daughters back.

Obama detailed the plight of Colleen Bargouthi, 36. She says that for the last year, her four daughters have been held in the Palestinian territories, made to wear headdresses and schooled in Islam by their Muslim father, Yasser Shibli.
Obama asked Fayyad’s help in Colleen’s fight to get her girls home after their Palestinian dad blocked them from returning from what was to be a six-week family trip to his hometown of Ramallah on the West Bank.
“According to Colleen, [her husband] hit her, kept her as a virtual prisoner in her in-laws’ home and menaced her with guns,” the note reads.
The husband promised he “would return the girls if she went home and found a job and a place for the family.
“Yasser Shibli Bargouthi has since told Colleen that her daughters will never be allowed to leave to return to their mother. I would ask that the minister of justice look into this case.”
Obama also asked the US consul general in Jerusalem, Jacob Welles, to investigate and work with Fayyad.
Colleen had taken her case to the Chicago media and met with Obama’s camp. But she was unaware of his efforts until contacted by The Post.
An Obama staffer called Colleen Thursday saying that Fayyad had vowed to look into the situation.
“I can’t believe it. I am so amazed and pleased,” she said.
Colleen could never have imagined the turn of events her life has taken. She was Colleen Davis when she met Yasser, a grocery-store manager, in 1993 through a friend while she worked as a waitress at Midway Airport.
He was a Muslim and she a Baptist, but he told her it was not an issue. She made her religious beliefs clear to his clan and got their blessing before the two married in a Christian ceremony 15 years ago.
Six months later, they traveled to Ramallah and she was welcomed into the family. “I always told him that I was a Christian and would remain one, and that any children we had would be raised Christian,” she says.
The couple settled in a Chicago suburb with her son, Ricky, from a previous marriage and had four daughters, Emily, 11, Hannah, 8, Amanda, 6 and Sarah, 5.
Colleen was a stay-at-home mom and her husband became manager of a cellphone store.
The couple bought a house in 1999 but sold it when they couldn’t make the payments.

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OPINION in The New York Times, Sunday July 27, 2008.

How Obama Became Acting President.

by: Frank Rich, The New York Times

Frank Rich writes about how Barack Obama has become “acting president,” and raises questions about John McCain’s “fitness to be president.”

It almost seems like a gag worthy of “Borat”: A smooth-talking rookie senator with an exotic name passes himself off as the incumbent American president to credulous foreigners. But to dismiss Barack Obama’s magical mystery tour through old Europe and two war zones as a media-made fairy tale would be to underestimate the ingenious politics of the moment. History was on the march well before Mr. Obama boarded his plane, and his trip was perfectly timed to reap the whirlwind.
He never would have been treated as a president-in-waiting by heads of state or network talking heads if all he offered were charisma, slick rhetoric and stunning visuals. What drew them instead was the raw power Mr. Obama has amassed: the power to start shaping events and the power to move markets, including TV ratings. (Even “Access Hollywood” mustered a 20 percent audience jump by hosting the Obama family.) Power begets more power, absolutely.
The growing Obama clout derives not from national polls, where his lead is modest. Nor is it a gift from the press, which still gives free passes to its old bus mate John McCain. It was laughable to watch journalists stamp their feet last week to try to push Mr. Obama into saying he was “wrong” about the surge. More than five years and 4,100 American fatalities later, they’re still not demanding that Mr. McCain admit he was wrong when he assured us that our adventure in Iraq would be fast, produce little American “bloodletting” and “be paid for by the Iraqis.”
Never mind. This election remains about the present and the future, where Iraq’s $10 billion a month drain on American pocketbooks and military readiness is just one moving part in a matrix of national crises stretching from the gas pump to Pakistan. That’s the high-rolling political casino where Mr. Obama amassed the chips he cashed in last week. The “change” that he can at times wield like a glib marketing gimmick is increasingly becoming a substantive reality - sometimes through Mr. Obama’s instigation, sometimes by luck. Obama-branded change is snowballing, whether it’s change you happen to believe in or not.
Looking back now, we can see that the fortnight preceding the candidate’s flight to Kuwait was like a sequence in an old movie where wind blows away calendar pages to announce an epochal plot turn. First, on July 7, the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, dissed Bush dogma by raising the prospect of a withdrawal timetable for our troops. Then, on July 15, Mr. McCain suddenly noticed that more Americans are dying in Afghanistan than Iraq and called for more American forces to be sent there. It was a long-overdue recognition of the obvious that he could no longer avoid: both Robert Gates, the defense secretary, and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had already called for more American troops to battle the resurgent Taliban, echoing the policy proposed by Mr. Obama a year ago.
On July 17 we learned that President Bush, who had labeled direct talks with Iran “appeasement,” would send the No. 3 official in the State Department to multilateral nuclear talks with Iran. Lest anyone doubt that the White House had moved away from the rigid stand endorsed by Mr. McCain and toward Mr. Obama’s, a former Rumsfeld apparatchik weighed in on The Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page: “Now Bush Is Appeasing Iran.”
Within 24 hours, the White House did another U-turn, endorsing an Iraq withdrawal timetable as long as it was labeled a “general time horizon.” In a flash, as Mr. Obama touched down in Kuwait, Mr. Maliki approvingly cited the Democratic candidate by name while laying out a troop-withdrawal calendar of his own that, like Mr. Obama’s, would wind down in 2010. On Tuesday, the British prime minister, Gordon Brown, announced a major drawdown of his nation’s troops by early 2009.
But it’s not merely the foreign policy consensus that is shifting Obama-ward. The Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens has now joined another high-profile McCain supporter, Arnold Schwarzenegger, in knocking the McCain nostrum that America can drill its way out of its energy crisis. Mr. Pickens, who financed the Swift-boat campaign smearing John Kerry in 2004, was thought to be a sugar daddy for similar assaults against the Democrats this year. Instead, he is underwriting nonpartisan ads promoting wind power and speaks of how he would welcome Al Gore as energy czar if there’s an Obama administration.
The Obama stampede is forcing Mr. McCain to surrender on other domestic fronts. After the Democrat ran ads in 14 states berating chief executives who are “making more in 10 minutes” than many workers do in a year, a newly populist Mr. McCain began railing against “corporate greed” - much as he also followed Mr. Obama’s example and belatedly endorsed a homeowners’ bailout he had at first opposed. Given that Mr. McCain has already used a refitted, hand-me-down Obama campaign slogan (”A Leader You Can Believe In”), it can’t be long before he takes up fist bumps. They’ve become the rage among young (nonterrorist) American businessmen, according to USA Today.
“We have one president at a time,” Mr. Obama is careful to say. True, but the sitting president, a lame duck despised by voters and shunned by his own party’s candidates, now has all the gravitas of Mr. Cellophane in “Chicago.” The opening for a successor arrived prematurely, and the vacuum had been waiting to be filled. What was most striking about the Obama speech in Berlin was not anything he said so much as the alternative reality it fostered: many American children have never before seen huge crowds turn out abroad to wave American flags instead of burn them.
Mr. McCain could also have stepped into the leadership gap left by Mr. Bush’s de facto abdication. His inability to even make a stab at doing so is troubling. While drama-queen commentators on television last week were busy building up false suspense about the Obama trip - will he make a world-class gaffe? will he have too large an audience in Germany? - few focused on the alarms that Mr. McCain’s behavior at home raise about his fitness to be president.
Once again the candidate was making factual errors about the only subject he cares about, imagining an Iraq-Pakistan border and garbling the chronology of the Anbar Awakening. Once again he displayed a tantrum-prone temperament ill-suited to a high-pressure 21st-century presidency. His grim-faced crusade to brand his opponent as a traitor who wants to “lose a war” isn’t even a competent impersonation of Joe McCarthy. Mr. McCain comes off instead like the ineffectual Mr. Wilson, the retired neighbor perpetually busting a gasket at the antics of pesky little Dennis the Menace.
The week’s most revealing incident occurred on Wednesday when the new, supposedly improved McCain campaign management finalized its grand plan to counter Mr. Obama’s Berlin speech with a “Mission Accomplished”-like helicopter landing on an oil rig off Louisiana’s coast. The announcement was posted on politico.com even as any American with a television could see that Hurricane Dolly was imminent. Needless to say, this bit of theater was almost immediately “postponed” but not before raising the question of whether a McCain administration would be just as hapless in anticipating the next Katrina as the Bush-Brownie storm watch.
When not plotting such stunts, the McCain campaign whines about its lack of press attention like a lover jilted for a younger guy. The McCain camp should be careful what it wishes for. As its relentless goading of Mr. Obama to visit Iraq only ratcheted up anticipation for the Democrat’s triumphant trip, so its insistent demand for joint town-hall meetings with Mr. Obama and for more televised chronicling of Mr. McCain’s wanderings could be self-inflicted disasters in the making.
Mr. McCain may be most comfortable at town-hall meetings before largely friendly crowds, but his performance under pressure at this year’s G.O.P. primary debates was erratic. His sound-bite-deep knowledge of the country’s No. 1 issue, the economy, is a Gerald Ford train wreck waiting to happen in any matchup with Mr. Obama that requires focused, time-limited answers rather than rambling.
During Mr. McCain’s last two tours of the Middle East - conducted without the invasive scrutiny of network anchors - the only news he generated was his confusion of Sunni with Shia and his embarrassing stroll through a “safe” Baghdad market with helicopter cover. He should thank his stars that few TV viewers saw that he was even less at home when walking through a chaotic Pennsylvania supermarket last week. He inveighed against the price of milk while reading from a note card and felt the pain of a shopper planted by the local Republican Party.
The election remains Mr. Obama’s to lose, and he could lose it, whether through unexpected events, his own vanity or a vice-presidential misfire. But what we’ve learned this month is that America, our allies and most likely the next Congress are moving toward Mr. Obama’s post-Iraq vision of the future, whether he reaches the White House or not. That’s some small comfort as we contemplate the strange alternative offered by the Republicans: a candidate so oblivious to our nation’s big challenges ahead that he is doubling down in his campaign against both Mr. Maliki and Mr. Obama to be elected commander in chief of the surge.

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OPINION In The New York Times, Friday July 25, 2008.

Bush’s Puppets. { or Quo Vadis Stephen Johnson? Did You Forget Your Federal Oath To Have a Non-Partisan EPA? }
by: Bill Becker, Climate Progress*

According to Bill Becker of the Presidential Climate Action Project, EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson has neglected his federal oath to “well and faithfully discharge the duties” of his office by repeatedly allowing the Bush White House to manipulate environmental decisions and undermine action necessary to address climate change. (Photo: Getty Images)

EPA administrator Stephen Johnson neglects his federal oath.
Some of us had high hopes for Stephen Johnson when President Bush appointed him in March 2005 as administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Johnson was not a former oil-industry lobbyist or Halliburton executive. He was a career civil servant who had been with the federal government for 24 years. He was a scientist, not a political hack, and he had served under both Democrat and Republican presidents.
I could relate, although my federal career was the reverse of Johnson’s.
I started as a political appointee under President George H.W. Bush, then served the next 15 years as a careerist at the Department of Energy. During that time, I learned that there are a lot of good feds out there - people who work hard and take risks for what they believe is in the public’s best interest. It requires backbone at times to resist improper political pressures and to carry out the oath of office that federal employees take, promising to “well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.”
It now appears that Johnson is not fulfilling that oath. There’s new evidence that he has allowed the White House to usurp his duty to enforce one of the nation’s most important environmental laws, the Clean Air Act. Under the Act, it is the Administrator of EPA, not the president, who is the decider on enforcement issues. The president does not have the legal authority to dictate what those decisions will be.
But that’s not the way the game is played in this Administration. From time to time, we get a glimpse back stage to see that President Bush, Vice President Cheney and their deputies are pulling the strings in a show of raw petro-politics, the law and the contrary advice of experts notwithstanding.
One such glimpse came this week from former EPA official Jason Burnett — an admitted and unrepentant Democrat. Burnett told Congress that Johnson allowed the White House to overrule him on California’s request for a waiver under the Clean Air Act. The waiver would have allowed the state to implement its own standards for greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles, in excess of those set by the federal government.
The Clean Air Act specifically allows California to be more aggressive than the federal government on matters like this, so long as the Administrator grants a waiver. Once California is given the go-ahead, other states are allowed to adopt its standards. Seventeen states indicated they would adopt the California standard for vehicle emissions once Johnson signed the waiver.
Instead, Johnson denied the request in February 2008 after sitting on it for nearly three years, an unusual outcome given that EPA had approved all 50 of California’s previous waiver applications over the last 40 years.
The denial was Johnson’s right under the law, assuming it was his decision and was based soundly on the criteria established by the Act. But Burnett says that Johnson originally intended to grant the waiver, believing it was justified until he was overruled by the White House.
As Robert Sussman of the Center for American Progress has pointed out, this is not the first time that Johnson has pushed key environmental decisions into EPA’s black hole or has overruled the recommendations of his former colleagues among the agency’s scientists and professional staff. Sussman documents other decisions by Johnson that raise “disturbing questions about his ability to carry out the spirit and letter of the nation’s environmental laws and his acquiescence in a White House political agenda seemingly bent on blocking the agency from taking action compelled by court decisions and long-standing Clean Air Act precedents.”
The most significant of these has been EPA and White House stalling tactics on climate action since the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling last year that the agency has the authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. To trigger the regulatory process, all Johnson has to do is to declare that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare - an obvious conclusion based both on the Court’s decision and on an overwhelming body of scientific evidence.
Nevertheless, 16 months after the Supreme Court ruling, EPA announced earlier this month that it would not proceed with regulation while Bush is still in office.
But back to the California waiver: Last January, Johnson told a congressional committee under oath that “I made the decision” to deny California’s request. Burnett’s latest testimony indicates otherwise. When a House subcommittee asked Johnson for the real story last May, he refused to talk about his conversations with the White House, claiming executive privilege.
In case there has been any doubt, Burnett’s testimony supports the case that public officials such as Johnson (along with the parade of other Administration officials who have recently declared executive privilege or acute amnesia) are merely puppets of the West Wing, even when Congress has delegated them direct responsibility to administer the law.
And in case there has been any doubt, the plot of the puppet-show was made transparent by other Administration decisions in recent days. One lifted the ban imposed by Bush’s father on offshore oil production. In another, just announced, the Department of Interior released draft rules to pave the way for oil shale production on public lands in the West. Congress has placed a moratorium on final oil-shale rules, but the moratorium is scheduled to expire on Oct. 1. Interior Secretary Dick Kempthorne is quoted as saying he’ll move swiftly to make the rules final when the moratorium expires.
Oil shale production would be a disaster of several dimensions. It is extremely energy and water intensive, and its use would be another major setback to the goal of reducing the nation’s carbon emissions. Oil shale production would divert precious water from Western cities and farms, creating another fuel-or-food problem, and sink more money and time into another questionable carbon-intensive resource that will make meaningful climate action more difficult and expensive, if not impossible.
There’s no mystery here. The White House is blocking action on climate change while setting the stage for the oil industry to feed America’s addiction to that carbon-intensive fuel for many years to come.
With only six months left on stage, the puppet masters are hard at work. It’s a disappointment that someone like Johnson, who has made public service his career, is allowing his integrity to be destroyed by a president who shows little regard for him, the nation’s long-term welfare, or the law.
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 * Bill Becker is executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project, an initiative to help the next President of the United States take decisive action on global warming and energy security in his or her first 100 days in office.