By SALLY C. PIPES, Wall Street Journal

Barack Obama will effect your level of Healthcare

People are policy. And now that President-elect Barack Obama has fielded his team of Tom Daschle as secretary of Health and Human Services and Melody Barnes as director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, we can predict both the strategy and substance of the new administration’s health-care reform.

The prognosis is not good for patients, physicians or taxpayers. If Mr. Daschle meant what he wrote in his book “Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis,” Americans can expect a quick, hard push to build more federal bureaucracy, impose price controls, restrict medicines and technology, boost taxes, mandate the purchase of health insurance, and expand government health care.

By Silla Brush, The Hill

Farm Workers for Obama

President-elect Obama will likely make several tough decisions on immigration policy during his first few months in office, even if he postpones wide-ranging reform until later in his first term.

Obama will be under pressure from interest groups to review or drop several administrative policies aimed at curbing illegal immigration, which President Bush enacted after he failed in 2007 to persuade lawmakers to pass broad legislation that would have put millions of immigrants on a path to citizenship.

“I think immigration is shaping up to be an issue that he is going to face a consensus of pressure,” said Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum. “There is no reason a number of administrative actions can’t be put into place in the first 100 days.”

By The American Spectator

Questions Remain about Obama and Hamas

The Obama campaign, which has had problems in the past with its perceived — sometimes inaccurately — support of Palestinian interests over America’s best ally in the Middle East region, Israel, didn’t do itself any favors two weeks ago with pro-Israeli and mainstream Jewish groups.

That’s when Obama’s Jewish liaison, Dan Shapiro, along with several foreign-policy and Middle East transition team members, sat down with about 29 representatives of Jewish organizations. The difference: several high profile Israeli peace organizations were given prominent play at the meetings. Those groups included: Peace Now, the Israel Policy Forum, J Street, and Brit Tzedek.

Not invited to the meeting — under the guise of a “scheduling conflict” — was Malcolm Hoenlein, head of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, a middle of the road Jewish coalition group that has traditionally taken a lead role in setting up coalition meetings with national political figures.

By The Economist

The next president is already making his mark on America’s cities.

DELMAR BOULEVARD is an arterial road running through some of the poorest and richest, and most racially divided, neighbourhoods of St Louis, Missouri. Some city aldermen are now trying to rename the street after Barack Obama before he takes office.

St Louis is not alone in its efforts to stick Mr Obama’s name on public property. Opa-locka, in Miami-Dade County, Florida (one of the most dangerous cities in America), plans to rename one of its avenues after the next president. A Long Island elementary school in Hampstead, New York, recently changed its name from Ludlum to Barack Obama after students organised a campaign. Another Long Island school thought of doing the same until parents intervened. One in Portland, Oregon, is still considering it.

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By Frank Gaffney, The Washington Times

Will Obama change?

Presidents have discovered that the surest way to make history is by playing against type. The paradigmatic example occurred in 1972 when anti-communist Richard Nixon decided to go to Red China. Liberal Democrat Bill Clinton is remembered for helping to “end welfare as we know it” some two decades later.

We should all hope Barack Obama too will recognize the need for a role reversal by deciding early that – despite his campaign promises and past predilections – he must strengthen, not savage, our national security posture.

BY LYNN SWEET, Chicago Sun-Times

If you did not know the back story, you would not fully appreciate Rep. Rahm Emanuel’s resignation letter to Gov. Blagojevich, who is the subject of impeachment proceedings in the Illinois House, for, among other reasons, trying to auction off President-elect Barack Obama’s Senate seat.

Emanuel, first elected to the House in 2002, formally announced Monday he would end his House career Jan. 2 to join the Obama administration as White House chief of staff. He was the fourth ranking Democrat in the House, given the post after he ran the political operation that won back control of the House for Democrats in 2006.

He informed residents of his 5th Congressional District, anchored in Chicago’s North and Northwest Side neighborhoods, with robo calls on Monday. Emanuel is on a long-planned vacation to Kenya, Uganda and Zambia, traveling with his wife, Amy, their three children and friends.

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By Ray Long and Jeff Coen, Chicago Tribune

Blagojevich is Railroaded to Protect Obama

Blagojevich’s lawyer Ed Genson bemoans his inability to call witnesses.

Heading toward a decision on the ultimate political sanction, members of a House impeachment committee Monday rejected complaints by Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s attorney that he was battling “shadows” in his fight to keep the disgraced governor in office.

Criminal attorney Edward Genson was given the floor for nearly three hours to argue the legislative hearing was unfair because his attempts to call witnesses were denied and lawmakers had not defined their standard for impeachment. At one point an exasperated Genson asked “Isn’t anyone here going to stand up for the governor?”

By Patrick Buchanan

Unwilling to control its fighters, who fired scores of missiles into Israel at the end of their six-month ceasefire, Hamas gave Israel the provocation it needed to deliver a savage blow to the Palestinian enclave in Gaza.

Saturday was the bloodiest day in the history of the Palestinian people since being driven from their homes in the War of 1948. One thousand were killed or wounded, as the Israeli Air Force conducted over a hundred strikes — on graduation ceremonies for Hamas fighters, police stations and storage sites for rockets.

About Israel’s right and duty to defend its border towns, there is no dispute. When Hamas permits Gaza to be used as a launch pad for rockets, it must expect retaliation. Nor can Hamas claim some right to dictate the limits of that retaliation.

By PHILIP ELLIOTT, Associated Press

Obama struggles at Golf and Bowling

President-elect Barack Obama thought he’d put the bowling jokes behind him. Not likely.

On the golf course Monday, a woman waiting at the 18th green reminded Obama of his disastrous bowling during the presidential campaign. It was an unwelcome reminder for Obama, whose golf game during a 12-day vacation has been just as troublesome.

“That was pretty good, right?” Obama said to cheers as he finished a round of golf near his $9 million rented vacation home near Honolulu.

The woman sitting on a nearby wall shouted, “Better than your bowling.”

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