Israel announces new appeasement talks with Syria.

On a more serious note, there’s this passage in the McClatchy article …

“I think it’s the biggest game in the region,” said Paul Salem, director of the Beirut-based Middle East Center of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

…

Salem, who recently spent time in Damascus talking to negotiators involved in the talks, said there is a growing unease among some Syrian leaders about the influence of Iran in the Middle East.

“Peace between Syria and Israel would cause a serious rupture in the Syrian-Iranian relationship as it would represent a fundamental parting of the ways,” said Salem. “And it would also cut off Iranian influence into Lebanon and Palestine.”

Reaching a peace deal with Israel that led to a return of the Golan Heights could also give Syrian President Bashar Assad a critical success to rebuild his power and influence in the region.

“He needs the Golan as a cornerstone of a new beginning,” said Salem, who was in Ankara on a fact-finding mission.

Hillary has $6.7 million in cash on hand for use in the primary — but she’s more than $19 million in debt ($8 million if you subtract out her personal loans to the campaign).

After much soul-searching and thought, in today’s episode of TPMtv, Lanny Davis agrees to be inducted into the Fox News Liberal Media Bias Cult …

High-res version at Veracifier.com.

House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) tightens the reins on the we-can’t-even-win-red-districts NRCC.

I see that Linda Douglass has signed on with the Obama campaign. So I thought I’d share this little snippet of personal trivia about the morning I met Linda way back 31 years ago.

This was in June 1977, when I was a mere stripling. Early one morning I was lying in my bed, floating between sleep and consciousness, when out of the corner of my eye, through the window to my left, I heard the roar and, in a flash, saw a twin engine plane careen across my view and explode in a massive ball of flames into the anonymous drywall and stucco two story apartment building immediately next to mine.

I shot up and in a moment saw this surreal image of two half naked people getting out of bed in what a moment ago had been their apartment surrounded by smoke and flame, clearly too much in shock to realize that dressing was not a high priority. The whole thing was maybe 15 feet in front of me. Before I could take stock of any of this my mother ran into the room to see if I’d been blown up too. And in a moment we were running. Mainly just out of the house and away from the fire. And then somehow instantly we were out on the sidewalk where all sorts of mayhem was breaking loose and soon there were fire trucks and a man running out of the building on fire.

This was the real thing, a terrible tragedy for the people immediately involved. Five people died in the plane. Four were injured on the ground. It even made the national news as one of those one day — it happens to other people — stories on the nightly news. Here’s a reference to it I found on the web — Walter Cronkite’s short news segment. And Linda Douglass who was a local TV reporter there to cover it for which local affiliate I can’t remember. She interviewed my dad.

From the JTA …

The diminishing fortunes of the Bush administration and the resurgent fortunes of Hezbollah may be behind the surprising announcement that Syria and Israel are renewing peace talks.

The announcements Wednesday by the two countries, which said Israel and Syria would launch talks in Ankara under Turkish auspices, came despite longstanding U.S. opposition to talks with Syria.

The news garnered only tepid endorsement from the Bush administration.

“We were not surprised by it, and we do not object to it,” said Dana Perino, the White House spokeswoman. “We hope that this is a forum to address various concerns we all have with Syria — Syria’s support of terrorism, repression of its own people.”

With Bush nearing the end of his term in office, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert might have felt emboldened to shuck off Bush’s longstanding resistance to outreach toward Syria, analysts said.

“This demonstrates that what has kept things back is the United States,” said Steve Spiegel, a professor of political science at UCLA and a scholar at the Israel Policy Forum. Bush’s “leverage is not as great — Bush has seven-and-a-half months left.”

For the last week it’s seemed that Sens. Clinton and Obama were adhering to their tacit truce, continuing the primary campaign but avoiding the harsh exchanges that make later party unity a dimmer and dimmer prospect. Clinton particularly had deescalated her rhetoric. Then we have a speech like Sen. Clinton’s yesterday in Florida in which she compared the controversy over seating the Florida and Michigan delegates to the Florida recount debacle and many of the great voting and civil rights battles of the 20th century. She is of course also claiming that whatever the delegate count, she leads in the popular vote and that that is what really counts. Never mind of course that even if you count Michigan and Florida she’s still not ahead in the popular vote without resorting to tendentious methods of counting.

I’ve always assumed, as I think most people have, that once the nomination is settled the Florida and Michigan delegates will be seated. And I can see if Sen. Clinton wants to embrace this issue to claim a moral victory even while coming short of her goal of the nomination. As things currently stand, seating them would still leave Sen. Clinton behind in delegates.

But Sen. Clinton is doing much more than this. She is embarking on a gambit that is uncertain in its result and simply breathtaking in its cynicism.

I know many TPM Readers believe there is a deep moral and political issue at stake in the need to seat these delegations. I don’t see it the same way. But I’m not here to say they’re wrong and I’m right. It’s a subjective question and I respect that many people think this. What I’m quite confident about is that Sen. Clinton and her top advisors don’t see it that way.

Why do I think that? For a number of reasons. One of her most senior advisors, Harold Ickes, was on the DNC committee that voted to sanction Florida and Michigan by not including their delegates. Her campaign completely signed off on sanctions after that. And Clinton was actually quoted saying the Michigan contest didn’t count. Michigan and Florida were sanctioned because they ignored the rules the DNC had set down for running this year’s nomination process.

The evidence is simply overwhelming that Sen. Clinton didn’t think this was a problem at all — until it became a vehicle to provide a rationale for her continued campaign.

Now, that’s politics. One day you’re on one side of an issue, the next you’re on the other, all depending on the tactical necessities of the moment. But that’s not what Clinton is doing. She’s elevating it to a level of principle — first principles — on par with the great voting rights struggles of history. There’s no longer any question that she’s going to win the nomination. The whole point of the popular vote gambit was to make an argument to super-delegates. And that’s fine since that’s what super-delegates are there for — to make the decision by whatever measure they choose. But they’ve made their decision. The super delegates are breaking overwhelmingly for Obama. They simply don’t buy the arguments she’s making.

As Greg Sargent makes clear here. There are very good reasons to think Sen. Clinton won’t take this to the convention, even as today she suggested she might. But that’s sort of beside the point.

What she’s doing is not securing her the nomination. Rather, she’s gunning up a lot of her supporters to believe that the nomination was stolen from her — a belief many won’t soon abandon. And that on the basis of rationales and arguments there’s every reason to think she doesn’t even believe in.

Late Update: In this post I originally said that Sen. Clinton had “numerous” quotes saying the disputed primaries wouldn’t count. On closer inspection, the only quote from her directly seems to be the one about Michigan not counting.

Pro-torture figures in the Administration steamrolled anyone who raised objections.

As Greg Sargent reports at TPM Election Central, Tim Griffin is the RNC’s new hire as the opposition researcher on Barack Obama.

Griffin has a colorful past as the RNC’s director of opposition research in 2004. Here’s some video of Griffin in the RNC war room on the night of one of the Bush-Kerry debates. Griffin’s memorable line that night was that his crew of oppo researchers created the ammunition for the Bush campaign to fire. “We make the bullets,” Griffin is overheard saying.

But Griffin didn’t achieve notoriety until his role in the U.S. attorney purge scandal was revealed. After leaving the RNC, Griffin went to work in the White House as an aide to Karl Rove. With help from Rove and White House Counsel Harriet Miers, the then-34-year-old Griffin was installed as the U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of Arkansas in December 2006.

A total of nine U.S. attorneys were ousted to make room for naked partisans like Griffin or to remove prosecutors considered too independent by the Republican political operatives in the White House and DOJ. As the extent of the purge became known and it became clear that unqualified Griffin would never be confirmed on a permanent basis by the Senate, he withdrew is nomination. Last June, he tearily declared that public service was “not worth it,” sometimes crying as he said he had no plan to return to politics.

What a difference a year makes.

Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson was just asked in a conference call whether Obama’s nomination would be “counterfeit” if Michigan and Florida’s delegations are not seated in the way the Clinton campaign is insisting on. Greg Sargent has the run-down of Wolfson’s response here.