Yep, Check The Date Again

This just in...

Today in Washington, White House Press Secretary Dan Abrams announced the itinerary for President Kerry’s five-day trip to the Middle East during his morning briefing. The president will travel to Jerusalem to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority head Mahmoud Abbas to sign the long-negotiated treaty stipulating that the Palestinians will renounce terrorism against the state of Israel and assist a U.N. peacekeeping force in disarming Hamas. In return, Israel will end its occupation of the Palestinian territories and pull back from all territorial gains achieved in its 1967 war against Egypt.

Other stops on the president’s tour include Iraq, where a delegation including Saddam Hussein and other Shi’ite mullahs, installed into office as part of a U.N.-brokered power sharing arrangement, have complied fully with weapons inspectors and human rights activists to achieve full transparency in revealing that country’s biological, chemical and nuclear weapons capabilities as well as reform of its courts and prisons.

In response to a question from the press, Abrams reminded everyone that Hussein’s prison sentence for humanitarian crimes was mitigated in a controversial move by The Hague due to the inability to reconcile Sunnis elements in Iraq with the governing Shi’ite majority, for the purposes of allowing Hussein to join the governing coalition. Hussein’s freedom is contingent upon the achievement of the following benchmarks by Iraq’s government, formed approximately three years ago: a distribution of oil wealth deemed to be equitable by the U.N. oversight board, the implementation and participation of the majority of Iraqis in free elections, and the reduction of that country’s child mortality rate and upgrading of disease prevention methods in compliance with recommendations from the International Red Cross.

Also from Washington, Vice President John Edwards is expected to announce today a new private-government partnership with the Gates Foundation that will launch programs assisting college students dropping out from school due to financial hardship as well as inner-city public libraries seeking funds to develop, maintain and eventually expand Internet access. Tomorrow, the vice president will fly to New Orleans to participate in a ceremony marking the end of the reconstruction of the Ninth Ward, completed with funds from an endowment dedicated to fighting poverty in the U.S.

In other news, former president George W. Bush is currently being treated in a Crawford, TX hospital for as-yet-unspecified injuries sustained in a brush-clearing accident. This is the third such occurrence over the last two months; no word on the president’s long-term prognosis. A representative from his library noted that this will postpone his planned upcoming visit to former Vice-President Dick Cheney at the federal prison camp in Nellis, Nevada where Mr. Cheney is serving a 20-year prison sentence for conviction on charges of money laundering, tax evasion and conspiracy to defraud U.S. and international governments.

I know, we can only wish.