Abbas's Palestinian Authority has just announced elections for the fall. If Obama has any hope that the leadership circle around Abbas, including Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, will make a strong showing in this vote, he had better come forth with a plan very soon. And the administration should quietly (but firmly) urge Israeli leaders to release Marwan Barghouti from prison and restart informal discussions with him about the outlines of a plan, using the Olmert-Abbas talks as a starting point. If we have learned anything from Egypt, it is that when people say "things cannot go on like this" things eventually don't.

A final (preemptive) word about my forthcoming article in Sunday's New York Times Magazine, appealing to President Obama to present an American plan based on the Olmert-Abbas talks.

Obama knows very well that when Abbas finally met Netanyahu last year, the Palestinian president proposed that he and Netanyahu begin where he (Abbas) and Olmert left off, and that Netanyahu rejected this out of hand. ("No way," Netanyahu said, or so Abbas told me.)

Why then should Obama present a plan that the Israeli government is bound to dismiss? Isn't this setting up the American administration for a diplomatic failure?

No way.

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Amidst all the attention on Egypt's inspiring assertion of the democratic yearning, a little noticed article in the Guardian outlined the stark forces that may bring revolutionary change to autocratic regimes around the world.

The US fears that Saudi Arabia, the world's largest crude oil exporter, may not have enough reserves to prevent oil prices escalating, confidential cables from its embassy in Riyadh show.

The cables, released by WikiLeaks, urge Washington to take seriously a warning from a senior Saudi government oil executive that the kingdom's crude oil reserves may have been overstated by as much as 300bn barrels - nearly 40%.

As I noted last week, rising prices of food and fuel are the tinder that needs only a match to create the revolutionary moment we are seeing this morning in Cairo. If indeed the Saudi potentates have vastly overstated their oil reserves, then the era of cheap energy from hydrocarbons is over.

According to the cables, which date between 2007-09, Husseini said Saudi Arabia might reach an output of 12m barrels a day in 10 years but before then - possibly as early as 2012 - global oil production would have hit its highest point. This crunch point is known as "peak oil".

Husseini said that at that point Aramco would not be able to stop the rise of global oil prices because the Saudi energy industry had overstated its recoverable reserves to spur foreign investment. He argued that Aramco had badly underestimated the time needed to bring new oil on tap.

Peak Oil has two effects. Rising prices fuel civil discontent and at the same time reduce the power of the autocrats that control Saudi Arabia, Iran, Venezuela, Russia and the other Petro-States, as the world moves towards new sources of power from the sun, wind, nuclear and hydrogen.

Egypt and Tunisia are just the beginning. The communication revolution will quickly spread this contagious freedom agenda. The Glenn Beck's of the world that wanted us to stand with Mubarak are on the wrong side of history. We had better get ready for a "Year of Living Dangerously", because this revolutionary moment is just getting started.

AOL's buyout of the Huffington Post has prompted fierce debate among progressives. I don't have much to add to this debate. It's great that the outstanding reporters who are on the paid staff may reach an even larger audience as a result of this merger. It would also be good if some of this windfall is shared with unpaid free lance reporters who helped to build audience.

As someone who warned of both the stock and housing bubbles, I have to wonder if AOL will be able to profit from this investment. After all, at the peak of the stock bubble AOL famously persuaded Time-Warner, the largest media companies in the world, to sell itself for virtually nothing (i.e. AOL stock). It looks like AOL may be repeating Time-Warner's mistake as Facebook's success seems to be generating bubble-type prices in anything remotely related to social networking.

But there are more important questions at stake here, specifically the support of creative work in the Internet Age. The basic problem is that we no longer have a working model for supporting creative work.

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Republicans aim to end all "job-killing regulations" -- especially those that, according to House Speaker John Boehner, are "strangling" business with detailed requirements over health, safety, the environment, corporate governance and finance.

Here's another instance of where the White House's attempt to preempt Republican rhetoric (the President said last week his administration would root out all nonsensical and inefficient regulation) ends up legitimizing it -- and reframing the public debate around an issue that's hardly central to what ails America.

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Egyptians are still in the streets. There is violence in some parts of the country. The demands for Mubarak to go are still echoing through Tahrir Square.

And Vice President Soleiman seems to be scrambling to find the point of equilibrium between the ego of his former (and current) master, Hosni Mubarak, the broad Egyptian establishment which I think is still very much on the sidelines hedging their bets, and the people on the streets who are genuinely diverse and broken up into a great number of frustrated political factions.

The problem in the equation is that what we are seeing Egyptian political incumbents offer deals to the Opposition, some of which is organized and some in great disarray, but the incumbents still have the power, determine who is or isn't in the room and generally still control the pivots of power and the instruments of force available to the state.

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In the category of right wing retreads, guess what's near the top of the agenda for the House Foreign Affairs Committee under its new Republican management. Did you guess witholding the dues our country pays to the big bad anti-American United Nations (subject of a January 25 hearing)? No? Well, it does have an eccentric pet peeve feel to it, to be sure. Not to mention serious tone-deafness about the United States' international image. But some Republicans just loooove to beat up on the UN, can't hardly help themselves.

In all seriousness, though, this is an issue that highlights a genuine contrast of perspectives. Those who support or oppose witholding America's share of the UN budget represent distinct ways of looking at the world body -- and the US international role, for that matter.

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"We can, and we must, work together," the President told the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Tuesday. "Whatever differences we may have, I know that all of us share a deep, abiding belief in this country, a belief in our people, a belief in the principles that have made America's economy the envy of the world."

Really? I've been watching (and occasionally trying to deal with) the Chamber for years, and all I know is it has a deep, abiding belief in cutting taxes on the wealthy, eroding regulations that constrain Wall Street, cutting back on rules that promote worker health and safety, getting rid of the minimum wage, repealing the new health-care law, fighting unions, cutting back Medicare and Social Security, reducing or eliminating corporate taxes, and, in general, taking the nation back to the days before the New Deal.

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Representative Jane Harman (D-CA) is resigning her House seat in favor of succeeding Democratic foreign policy icon Lee Hamilton as the next president of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

For Harman personally, this may be great news.

The job running the Wilson Center is one of the premier foreign policy/national security spots in Washington, and I think Jane Harman has a balanced understanding of the realist and idealist forces swirling around many of the key problems facing the US and the international system today.

But I am a bit disheartened on other fronts by her likely departure from Congress.

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Third Way, the Wall Street oriented think tank, is apparently feeling newly emboldened now that one of its board members, Bill Daley, is President Obama' chief of staff. Last week it sent out an "infographic" that purported to show why Social Security needed to be fixed.

The punchline was its warning of a $44 trillion shortfall in Social Security over its 75-year planning horizon. Referring to "trillions" of dollars over some long future horizon is a good way to scare people, but not to have serious conversations on the budget or Social Security. It would be much more meaningful to people to describe the projected shortfall as a share of future income. This number, 0.6 percent, can be easily found in the Social Security trustees report. Of course that is not quite as scary.

In honor of Third Way's Wall Street ties, CEPR compared the projected Social Security shortfall to the $66 trillion that could be raised over the next 75 years through a financial speculation tax. That also makes the Social Security shortfall seem considerably less scary.

"The dramatic events of the recent period make it necessary for us to take the Israeli-Palestinian conflict off the regional agenda," Shimon Peres told the 11th annual Israeli security conference yesterday. "We must do this as soon as possible because the conflict is being exploited to the detriment of all sides."

Here are the makings of a peace plan--a preview from next Sunday's New York Times Magazine, providing the definitive account of what came out of Abbas' and Olmert's 36  meetings. Our only hope is an American president willing to embrace their achievement, bridge the small gaps, and rally the world to an American package.

Current events in Egypt and Tunisia have the entire region and beyond glued to their television sets. The all-too-spoken-about Arab street has risen, seemingly from the dead. But while it is satisfying to see a dictatorial head of state being ousted by his own people, it is far too early to rejoice.

What we are witnessing is the removal and replacement of leaders, not an upgrading of the political systems that allowed someone like the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak to remain in power for 30 years and then have the audacity to position his son to succeed him, while the Egyptian people sank into deepening poverty. Unrest across the region will force these reactionary regimes to make some minimal changes, such as introducing term limits, which should have been done decades ago. But these knee-jerk legislative changes are solely aimed at persuading the demonstrators to go home.

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The Republican vote to repeal the new health care law is purely symbolic. But there's one provision of the law that Republicans are likely to try to defund, and they may have the public with them on this. It's the so-called "individual mandate" - the requirement that everyone purchase health insurance, or pay a fine. According to a recent poll, 60 percent of the public opposes it. They just don't like the idea of government telling them they have to buy something.

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