Today’s widely anticipated meeting between President Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki was abruptly canceled. CNN suggests that it “was put off to Thursday after a U.S. memo cast doubt on al-Maliki’s ability to deal with the sectarian warfare in Iraq.” Bush counselor Dan Bartlett put that speculation to rest with this clear explanation:

BARTLETT: The President is going to have a bilateral and dinner with the King of Jordan. Since the King of Jordan and Prime Minister Maliki had a bilateral themselves, earlier today, everybody believed that negated the purpose for the three of them to meet tonight, together, in a trilateral setting. So the plan, according to — since they had such a good, productive bilateral discussion, was just for the President to deal with bilateral issues and other issues with the King this evening in a dinner setting, and then the meetings set for tomorrow will still take place as scheduled.

Is that clear? No? Ok, here’s more Bartlett:

QUESTION: The King and the Prime Minister had a meeting, but the Prime Minister hasn’t seen the President since he got here, and the President changed his schedule to come here for this meeting.

BARTLETT: The President requested the meeting. This was the President requesting the meeting with the Prime Minister. And the substantive meetings on Iraq — look, they were not going to be doing a full detail discussion in a trilateral setting about Iraq and the future of Iraq and the strategy anyway, that just wouldn’t be appropriate. So it was going to be more of a social meeting anyways. But the fact that they had already had a good meeting together, felt like it negated the purpose to doing so. And the President and Prime Minister Maliki will have a very robust and lengthy dialogue tomorrow morning.

So the President flew to Jordan to have a “social meeting” with Maliki, which Maliki decided not to attend. There’s nothing more to it. That should put all the speculation to rest.

This plan floated by Andy Stern sounds like a damn good idea to me. As a health care idea it’s really only “okay” — the real virtue is that it potentially leverages an okay health care policy idea into what could be a fantastic civil society building idea. An effective political system depends, to a large extent, on the existence of meaningful organizations in society that aren’t strictly political advocacy groups. Organizations like that — unions, churches, gun clubs — have the capacity to take people who aren’t “political” sorts and make them see that politics is interested in them even if they aren’t interested in politics. The combination of declining unionization rates with the collapse of other sorts of membership organizations (Kiwanis and Rotary Clubs and so forth) has played a large role in bringing about the current state of corporate domination of the political system. This is the sort of thinking that could turn things around.

UPDATE: Stern mentions this in the course of an interview with Campus Progress.

will present its report on December 6, Reuters reports.

and rape and pillage directed against civilians are at ‘a horrific level,’ United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour said on Wednesday.” “In a separate news conference, outgoing U.N. emergency relief coordinator Jan Egeland said tens of thousands of people driven from their homes have been dying from hunger and disease in a crisis that was growing worse by the day.”

The White House says President Bush’s talks with Iraqi Prime Minister al-Maliki have been “put off until Thursday,” Fox News reports.

“Using money, weapons or its oil power, Saudi Arabia will intervene to prevent Iranian-backed Shi’ite militias from massacring Iraqi Sunni Muslims once the United States begins pulling out of Iraq, a security adviser to the Saudi government said on Wednesday.”

says Carlos Espinosa, spokesman for Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO), who stands by his earlier comments comparing Miami to a “Third World Country.” Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) called Tancredo’s comments “disappointing” and “naive.”

Speaking with CNN reporter Hala Gorani in Dubai today, former Secretary of State Colin Powell said Iraq’s violence meets the standard of a civil war and thinks President Bush needs to acknowledge that. According to Gorani’s report, Powell said if he were heading the State Department right now, he would recommend that the Bush administration adopt that language “in order to come to terms with the reality on the ground.” Watch it:

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“Sources close to outgoing Maj. Leader Bill Frist tell the Hotline that Frist has decided not to run for President,” Hotline reports. “He will make a formal announcement this afternoon, the sources said.”