Hope.

The president elect is getting an earful from just about everybody these days, not surprisingly. (His impossibly lame successor is now fully occupied with patching his own image. More on this later.) Surely the O-man won't mind hearing from one more stranger, one more time. Let's find out. Here are a few more things to bug him about.

Somalia. Our government has been pumping cash into the Ethiopian regime for years, despite (or perhaps because of) their poor record on human rights, and in 2006 we assisted them in the invasion of Somalia, throwing that sorry nation into another tailspin of chaotic bloodletting (more than a decade of which it had only recently extricated itself from). Apparently the Bush administration had a problem with Somalia's ruling Council of Islamic Courts, claiming it was run by Al Qaida operatives - a claim that had about as much credibility as the White House's claims about Saddam Hussein's bin Laden ties. (I'm not talking fancy neckwear, here.) Between the indiscriminate violence of the Ethiopian military, U.S. air strikes, and resurgent warlordism, as many as 10,000 Somalis have died in the last two years as a result of this invasion.

Our strategic interest in the horn of Africa stems from the early days of the Iranian revolution, when the Carter administration was looking for a replacement for Washington's close ally in the region, the Shah. They found one in Somalia's dictator at that time, Mohammed Siad Barre, whose corrupt regime received hundreds of millions of dollars in aid from the Reagan/Bush I administrations before collapsing of its own torturous weight in the early 1990s. The Council of Islamic Courts was not a Jeffersonian democracy, but it was better than the chaos that had prevailed in Somalia after our long "assistance". (Not an unusual result - think Afghanistan; think Haiti...) That is too valuable a piece of real estate, apparently, for us to relinquish, sitting so conveniently just across the Gulf of Aden from the Arabian Peninsula. Our imperial hooks are still in that carcass. Obama needs to pull them out.

Haiti. Speaking of Haiti. This is the coup that was. (Venezuela is the coup that wasn't.) In 2004, with the support of Bush and the crew, a bunch of thugs drove President Aristide from power and into exile, the U.S. obligingly flying him (unbeknownst to the Haitian leader) to the Central African Republic, an amazingly remote nation that apparently owed us a favor. Four years later, Aristide lives in exile in South Africa as his nation struggles to regain its footing under the nominal leadership of Rene Preval, who presides while Washington holds a gun to his head. Time for this outrage to stop. Haitians want Aristide to return - let it happen.

Tell Obama what you're thinking at http://change.gov/ - rumor has it they read the posts. We'll see.

Bushcapades. While his minions work feverishly to wreck everything they didn't get around to wrecking in the last eight years, Bush has been making the rounds, giving talks (inspired by bacon boy Karl Rove) to patch up his well-deserved bad image. Bush's vision of the middle east was criticized for being too "idealistic", per the president. Not the first word that comes to mind.

luv u,

jp