The political outcomes of the Gaza war are yet to be entirely decided with any degree of certainty. However, the obvious political repositioning which was reported as soon as Israel declared its unilateral ceasefire promised that Israel’s deadly bombs would shape a new political reality in the region.

In the aftermath, Hamas can confidently claim that its once indisputably ‘radical’ political position is no longer viewed as too extreme. “Hamas” is no longer menacing a word, even amongst Western public, and tireless Israeli attempts to correlate Hamas and Islamic Jihadists’s agendas no longer suffice.

Hours after President Obama’s speech to a joint session of Congress, the New York Times printed the news that he plans to gradually withdraw “American combat forces” from Iraq during the next 18 months. The newspaper reported that the advantages of the pullout will include “relieving the strain on the armed forces and freeing up resources for Afghanistan.”

The president’s speech had little to say about the plans for escalation, but the few words will come back to haunt: “With our friends and allies, we will forge a new and comprehensive strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan to defeat Al Qaida and combat extremism, because I will not allow terrorists to plot against the American people from safe havens halfway around the world. We will not allow it.”

Obama didn’t mention the additional number of U.S. troops -- 17,000 -- that he has just ordered to Afghanistan. But his pledge that he “will not allow terrorists to plot against the American people” and his ringing declaration, “We will not allow it,” came just before this statement: “As we meet here tonight, our men and women in uniform stand watch abroad and more are readying to deploy.”

A number of bad ideas and virulent trends in American life converge, it seems to me, in the unfolding scandal in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., known as “kids for cash.”

The blurring of the line that separates profit from state, especially since the Reagan era, has had a far more devastating effect on American values — indeed, on the very notion that anything besides a good financial buzz even has value — than the blurring of that more famously wobbly line that separates church from state. What’s been going on in the Luzerne County judicial system over the last five or six years illustrates this with a raw jolt.

Two juvenile court judges there, Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan, were recently arrested for setting a new standard in entrepreneurial corruption: taking payoffs — $2.6 million since 2003 — in return for sending youngsters accused of petty offenses (fighting, shoplifting, lampooning an assistant principal on MySpace) to private prison facilities, sometimes for preposterously extended stays.

When US envoy to Afghanistan, Richard Holbrooke met with Afghanistan’s ‘democratically’ installed President Hamid Karzai in Kabul on February 14, he may have just learned of the historic significance of the following day. February 15 commemorates the end of the bloody Russian campaign against Afghanistan (August 1978-February 1989).

Those who are seeking reform of the woefully inadequate health care system have a new and powerful ally that aims to put the bulk of the country’s registered nurses behind a drive to guarantee decent health care to all Americans.

The drive will be led by an alliance of three of the largest nurses’ unions, the United American Nurses – National Nurses Organizing Committee. It’s an AFL-CIO affiliate formed recently by the California and Massachusetts Nurses Associations, which have members in six states, and the Maryland-based United American Nurses, with members in 12 states.

The alliance represents 150,000 registered nurses. That’s only a very small part of the nation’s 2.5 million RNs, but an extensive organizing drive planned by the alliance in conjunction with its drive to improve health care is certain to unionize growing numbers of nurses and bring other nurses’ organizations into the alliance.

That is likely to spur organizing drives by the nine other unions that represent RNs, as well as moves to coordinate the unions’ efforts to get better treatment for nurses and their patients. They want to ultimately