Thank GOD Bush is finally gone.

Hope Obama measures up to our hopes for a better future, but it's a rough road ahead.

It appears that there was a collective sigh around the world as the Bushie's finally left Washington. People wanted nothing to do with them.

Obama has to measure up to many people's hopes ---in the US and around the world----"To the Muslim world: we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect." That expresses a policy of seeking to mend the most damaged of America's international relationships; a policy based on "mutual interest and mutual respect", despite America's stance on Israel being unlikely to shift significantly.

The following words in Obama's inauguration speech that spoke of a "return to these truths" of the American experiment referred to, and quoted from the political pamphlets Thomas Paine:

"So let us mark this day with remembrance, of who we are and how far we have travelled. In the year of America's birth, in the coldest of months, a small band of patriots huddled by dying campfires on the shores of an icy river. The capital was abandoned. The enemy was advancing. The snow was stained with blood

At a moment when the outcome of our revolution was most in doubt, the father of our nation ordered these words be read to the people: let it be told to the future world … that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive … that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet (it)."

That is from Paine's The American Crisis. So Obama goes back to Paine's pamphlets that were written from the heart of the Revolutionary movement

On Israel Gary, the (West Bank) Palestinians are claiming they got the first Presidential call of the ME round. If it's true, that's quite a diplomatic statement.

But no call to Hamaseven though they agreed to a true.

Did you see the pictures of whole neighbourhoods in the Gaza being levelled? Utter devastation.

I reckon that the Palestinian Authority Authority crowd of Abbas is has become the client state of Israel.

Obama has moved to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay within a year and immediately end the CIA torture of terrorism suspects.

Good news.

He said nothing about Israel lifting the seige of Gaza.

Gary Obama has called on Israel to open its borders with Gaza to allow humanitarian aid and commerce.

I would be delighted to see the USA rejoin the human race.

Mars08
Steve Brodner's judgement in The Atlantic about the governance of Bush administration is spot on:

he governed with a fine disdain for democratic and legal norms—stonewalling congressional oversight; detaining foreigners and U.S. citizens on his “inherent authority”; using the Justice Department as a political cudgel; ordering officials to ignore statutes and treaties that he found inconvenient; and persisting in actions, such as the Iraq War, that had come to be deeply unpopular in Congress and on Main Street.

Brodner asks, why was Bush able to behave so badly for so long without being stopped by the Constitution’s famous “checks and balances”?

He suggests that some of the problems with the Bush administration have their source not in Bush’s leadership style but in the constitutional design of the presidency.