TOO MUCH TO HANDLE – AT 8:59 P.M. ET:   We feel President Obama's pain at having to cut a few hours of sightseeing from his Latin American schedule to travel to another country on his visitors' tour, the United States.  Some suggest he may have a role to play here.

With eyes focused on Libya because of our military action there, we may be ignoring an equally important eruption, the rebellion in Yemen.  Yemen is critical because it is home to some of the most active Al Qaeda groups.  We have an ambassador there, but no policy, as Fox points out:

The Obama administration, after helping to orchestrate a U.N.-backed military intervention in Libya, is facing pressure to do more to prepare for the potential collapse of the government in another Mideast country, Yemen -- but U.S. officials admit they are doing little more than watching at this point.

Though Yemen President Ali Abdullah Saleh has already offered to step down by the end of the year, anti-government demonstrators still swell the streets of the capital Sana'a as the government declares a state of emergency.

Yemen's parliament is now giving Saleh, who has led the country since 1978, even broader powers to arrest opponents and censor media coverage as he faces growing opposition to step down immediately.

Yemen is a central ally of the U.S. government against Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The group, along with its operational planner, the American Anwar al-Awlaki, the first American on the CIA's kill or capture list, are now considered a greater threat than Usama bin Laden's network in Pakistan.   And one U.S. lawmaker suggests that chaos in Yemen could result in a worse terrorist breeding ground than Afghanistan.

COMMENT:  There are times in history when we had a real president, not someone from the Make Believe Ballroom.  Yemen can turn out to be more critical to our safety than Libya, yet the U.S. is just "watching." 

And regarding Libya, there are now so many cracks in the "coalition" participating in military action against the country that we wonder what actually will be done, and how effective it can be.  President Obama proudly says that we will turn over "leadership" of the coalition by Saturday...but we still don't have a command structure in place.  In other words, there's no one there who can play the leadership role.

This isn't exactly change we can believe in.  I would love to be a fly on the wall of a foreign ministry of friend or foe, as diplomats discuss this man Obama, and his abysmal failure to develop coherent policies, or to lead.  The Chicago City Council would have been a nice spot for him.

March 23,  2011