World Affairs - Politics & Opinions, page 5.

Daniel Kurtzer, a former U.S. mediator and ambassador to Israel and Egypt who served both Democrat and Republican presidents, took a more skeptical view. He said it's "not understandable why we would now have them sit in separate rooms and move between them."

"I have been disappointed this past year with the lack of boldness and the lack of creativity and the lack of strength in our diplomacy with respect to this peace process. We have not articulated a policy, and we don't have a strategy," Kurtzer, who advised Obama's presidential campaign, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week.

Folks whose stomachs turn at the mere sight of Liz Cheney, whose only claim to fame is a genetic connection to the former Vice President of the United States, waited for this day to come. At last Liz Cheney revealed herself to be the bottom-feeder we all suspected her to be.

Liz runs a think tank (for lack of a more fitting phrase) called Keep America Safe. Her organization issued a video which I refuse to soil my blog with by embedding. You can find it here. Bottom line is Liz's premise is that Justice Department employees who once defended al Qaeda suspects are somehow al Qaeda sympathizers. Marc "Torture" Thiessen now an editorial writer for the Washington Post had this to say:

If lawyers who once sought to free captured terrorists are now setting U.S. policy when it comes to the release of Guantanamo detainees, moving terrorists to the United States, trying senior al-Qaeda leaders in civilian courts, and whether to give captured terrorists Miranda rights, then, as Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) put it, the public has "a right to know who advises the attorney general and the president on these critical matters."

via Marc A. Thiessen – The ‘al-Qaeda seven' and selective McCarthyism – washingtonpost.com.

All I can say is Marc is an incredible dumbass. Lawyers don't seek to "free captured terrorists", they seek to make sure that suspected

March 9, 2010 - Beginning on April 5^th, the next big bank bailout to be paid for by taxpayers will launch. The official name it has been given by the Obama administration is the Home Affordability Foreclosure Alternative (HAFA) program. Unofficially, it can be referred to as Cash of Keys. The program is being paid for by taxpayers and it provides money to mortgage servicers and to troubled homeowners. But the biggest beneficiaries of the program are likely to be lenders who are getting bailed out a second time. The only real difference this time is that the government is attempting to disguise the program as something else.

The basic premise behind HAFA is totally different from other government programs which are designed to try to keep troubled homeowners in their houses. In fact, HAFA is all about getting those same people out of their houses quickly; either through a short sale or a deed-in-lieu.

For the unindoctrinated, a short sale happens when a home owner sells their property for less than they owe on it. A deed-in-lieu is when the homeowner signs over their property to the bank without going through the foreclosure process.

Under HAFA, everyone involved in the foreclosure process will get paid. Banks who hold the first mortgage on a property will receive the bulk of the proceeds from a short sale, but will not be the only beneficiaries. These same banks will receive a $1,000 payment from the government for agreeing to the short sale.