Obama's True Colours?

In a move not made under any previous US administration, the Internal Revenue Service has seized and sold 7,000 acres of the reservation assigned under Treaty to the Crow Creek Sioux people.
The Tribes exist on their reservations as residually-sovereign independent nations, denied normal human rights by successive decisions of the Supreme Court of an alien country - the USA.
Tribes are not normally taxed by the US [most Americans do have vague memories of 'no taxation without representation'] because the Tribal Territories are not part of the USA. Tribes are taxed on their dealings with the US economy and its citizens; but this taxation had not previously been applied to the Crow Creek Sioux.
President Obama recently applied his usual rhetoric to a gathering of the 'Native American' peoples.
This subsequent incident shows the operational irrelevance of his verbosity: as the Palestinians have found in his acceptance of ongoing Israeli settlement in the West Bank and East Jerusalem after his Cairo speech and accompanying verbiage about an absolute stop on settlements.
Words are cheap.

Abbas or Bust?

The announcement by Palestinian President Abbas that he will not stand for election in January is, in effect, an announcement of deferment of the next test of democratic opinion among the Paleastinian people. Abbas' paymasters in Washington boobed disastrously when they persuaded him to soft-pedal in his reaction to the UN Report on 'War Crimes' in Gaza - while Israelis were extending settlements in the West Bank and expropriating householders in East Jerusalem - and his pretension to be the 'least-worst' option for his people became untenable. His prompt volte face reduced his standing still further, and his subsequent meeting with Secretary of State Clinton was immediately followed by her visit to Israel in which she was reported to have confirmed that the US would take no action to deter the settlements and expropriations.

Abbas should perhaps begin now on his next career as an US chat-show host; following in the footsteps of the defeated Sitting Bull who appeared in the nineteenth-century equivalent: Buffalo Bill's Circus. Why should I draw that particular analogy? The answer lies in the Levantine Lozenge accessible via this site.