President Obama will sign spending bill despite earmarks, top aides say
by Philip Elliott | The Associated Press
Monday March 02, 2009, 6:18 AM
President Obama will sign spending bill despite earmarks, top aides say
President Barack Obama will break a campaign pledge against congressional earmarks and sign a budget bill laden with millions in lawmakers' pet projects, top administration officials said.
Obama budget chief Peter Orszag and White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel signaled that the president would hold his nose and sign the $410 billion spending bill.
Orszag said: "We want to just move on. Let's get this bill done, get it into law and move forward."
Said Emanuel: "That's last year's business."
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This is long, but too valuable not to present.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Wednesday blasted Israel's plans to demolish Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem as a violation of its international obligations and "unhelpful" to Middle East peace efforts.
"Clearly this kind of activity is unhelpful and not in keeping with the obligations entered into under the 'road map'," Clinton said, referring to the long-stalled peace plan.
"It is an issue that we intend to raise with the government of Israel and the government at the municipal level in Jerusalem," she added at a joint news conference with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
Clinton said she planned to take up the issue with the incoming Israeli government, which is expected to take office in the coming weeks.
Israel has in recent days issued orders for the demolition of 80 Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem it says were built illegally.
But Palestinians say they cannot receive proper building permits from Israeli authorities, and the planned demolitions are means to assert Israel's control over the disputed city.
Clinton also displayed strong public support for Abbas. "The Palestinian Authority is the only legitimate government of the Palestinian people," she told the news conference.
The Palestinian president has steadily lost support at home, particularly
after a year of inconclusive peace talks with Israel. At the same time, his Islamic militant Hamas rivals, who seized Gaza from him in 2007, are widely seen as emerging stronger from Israel's recent military offensive against them.
Abbas, meanwhile, was expected to ask Clinton to push Israel to freeze West Bank settlements and open Gaza's blockaded borders.
Senior Abbas aide Saeb Erekat said the Palestinian leader was seeking a tougher U.S. stance toward Israel and would raise specific Israeli construction projects in Jerusalem with Clinton.
"The main point is that the Israeli government needs to accept the two-state solution and ... that it stop settlement expansion," Erekat said, hours before the meeting.
Abbas was also expected to tell Clinton that the Palestinian Authority would not agree peace negotiations unless Israel agreed unequivocally to a two-state solution, Saleh Rafat, a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization's Executive Committee.
A day after pledging the new Obama administration would always protect Israel's security, Clinton delivered a message of support for
Abbas' Palestinian Authority and repeated that the U.S. was committed to the establishment of a Palestinian state.
During her visit to Ramallah, Clinton met briefly with young Palestinians studying English, and announced a U.S. initiative to help poorer Palestinian students attend four-year Palestinian universities and give grants to other Palestinians to attend U.S. schools.
"For a Palestinian state to be prosperous, accountable to its people and be able to live up to its obligations in the international community, it has to have more people who can do the job in the 21st century," she said.
The Palestinians are watching closely for signs of change in U.S. policy toward their conflict with Israel. Even Palestinian moderates were disappointed with the previous administration's failure to take Israel to task for accelerated construction of Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
Clinton: 'Economic peace' is futile without diplomacy
Clinton was critical on Tuesday of the "economic peace" plan of Prime Minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu and said that an economic initiative without a political solution had no chance to succeed.
During a meeting with Defense Minister Ehud Barak the Secretary of State said that Israel must do more to open the border crossings into the Gaza Strip to larger amounts of humanitarian assistance so that civilians there could get some relief. She also appealed for a broadening of the list of items that it considers "humanitarian aid," and called the humanitarian situation there problematic.
Last week Haaretz reported that messages had been relayed from senior U.S. officials signaling the Secretary of State was angered by the delays in the flow of humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip and the apparent obstacles that defense officials here raised over the types of goods that they considered essential to minimize civilian suffering.
During her meeting with Netanyahu, Clinton said that it is important for Israel to consider whether the closing of the crossings may be more harmful than it is useful.
In addition to her meeting with Barak, Clinton also met with President Shimon Peres, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, Benjamin Netanyahu and outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
Check this out.
The Israeli Jerusalem Municipality is still continuing its colonization policy in East Jerusalem in the form of demolishing Palestinian homes under the pretext of building without a permit. Obtaining such a permit is close to impossible as it is forbidden for the Palestinian resident while it is easily obtained by the Israeli colonist. Israeli occupation authorities make their utmost to create hurdles and obstacles to make life impossible for Palestinian Jerusalemites. The goal is to attain its overall goal and objective of making Jerusalem without any Palestinian presence in it and making it purely Jewish. The situation is expected to get even worse after the winning of the racist Nir Barakat in the recent municipal elections. He ran on the promise to build a new colonial neighborhood between the French Hill and Anata under the pretext of “solving the housing crunch for Jewish university students and the newly-wed.”[1] He also made it clear that he was proud of the backing of MK Avigdor Liberman who is known of his anti-Palestinian stances and his continued campaign to ethnically clines everything that is Arab.[2]
As part of the municipal campaign, Israeli occupation bulldozers carried out, without any prior warning, a vicious demolition campaign against Palestinian building in East Jerusalem as four houses and a wedding hall were demolished leaving at least 26 Palestinians homeless. These demolitions raised the number of Palestinian structures demolished in Jerusalem since January 2008 until the end of October 2008 to 65 Palestinian homes. The total number of demolished rooms is 183 rooms while its total area reached 7,170 m2. More than 392 Palestinians have become homeless including 234 children whose only guilt was that they are Palestinians who were denied permits by a municipality that cannot resist devouring Palestinian lands in Jerusalem.
All Americans should be concerned about this issue and write Obama and the present administration in support of our efforts to end this travesty and give all support possible to the Israeli Human Rights Movement. One can understand, though not accept, third world countries and the horrors that go on in them, when there is no stable government elected by the people. The Israeli government is not third world, and yet it have been allowed by the International Community to continue eating up the West Bank and destroy Gaza while they are at it, not to mention the cavity searches at checkpoints and brutality of Israeli soldiers in the occupied territories that the Palestinians are made to endure by this supposedly civilized people. Why isn't this all in the world news more, and hardly ever in the US network news services?
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