Obama, like Bush and Clinton, puts off embassy move to Jerusalem

President Obama and his family did the traditional lighting of the White House Christmas tree Wednesday on the Ellipse. That same day he continued the more recent, lower-key tradition, begun by Bill Clinton and followed by George W. Bush, of approving a waiver every six months to legislation that calls for the government to begin moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

The 1995 measure, passed overwhelmingly by the House and Senate, contains a temporary opt-out provision if the president feels it's important to put off the move "to protect the national security interests of the United States." Bush would sign it but say that he remained committed to beginning the process of moving the embassy. Obama, who signed his first waiver this summer, didn't talk last week about his commitments.

So the trucks continue to stand by, waiting for the certain next waiver.

Who's deserving?

Speaking of Obama, don't forget! Tonight at midnight is the deadline for entries in the Loop Nobel Charities Contest to help the president figure out who deserves -- or at least could use -- a piece of the $1.45 million Nobel Peace Prize check he's picking up in Oslo this week. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Obama would give the money to charity, but there are a lot of choices. As Loop Fans know, the IRS, specifically Internal Revenue Code Subsection 74(b), provides in these cases that he can direct the Nobel committee to give the money to charities with no tax consequences.

Submit your suggestions for recipients of Obama's donations (maximum two per entrant) to nobel@washpost.com. Entries may be for real charities or not-so-real ones, or maybe a combination. One suggestion just came in saying that Obama should give some of the money to "Notre Dame -- to help them finally find a decent football coach."

(We'll include winners from each category.)

Remember, to be eligible, you must include a phone number -- work, home or cell -- so we can contact you. Good luck!

Need a nice donkey pin?

"Before I became a diplomat," then-Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright said in a 1997 speech at then-Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms's center at Wingate University, "and had all my partisan instincts surgically removed -- I was a Democrat."

She began getting them back after she left the State Department in 2001. Last year she campaigned for Hillary Rodham Clinton and then for Obama. And now there are no more common-ground chats like the one she gave in 1997.

"I believe in diplomacy," she wrote last Monday in a fundraising e-mail for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, "but sometimes actions speaker louder than words."

"Tea-partiers and other ultraconservatives are pushing the Republican Party perilously far to the right," Albright wrote. "They are committed to making sure our president fails -- and to regaining control of the U.S. Senate." No surprise there.

"We face a choice," she wrote. "We can allow the right-wing radicals to reverse the long overdue progress we have made in the past year, or we can fight back." So, she continued, "make a donation of $5 or more to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee." Best of all, you get "20 percent off items at the DSCC Store."