No doubt attempting to fan the flames of an imagined Clinton-Obama feud, the top story currently on the Drudge report screams: “What is she up to? Hillary Skips State of Union.”

Answer: Attending two important national security related meetings in London--a trip that was sanctioned by the President. The Washington Post reported on January 27:

Seems there's an important international meeting Wednesday in London on battling radicalization in Yemen, and then another, long-planned conference there Thursday on development and security in Afghanistan.

Once the Wednesday meeting was “locked in,” we were told, the State Department and National Security Council staffs agreed that Clinton had to be in London. These are both big administration priorities. Key allies will be gathering there to discuss Yemen, an uber-concern of late, especially since the Christmas Day airplane bombing attempt.

And everyone who's anyone -- including maybe the neo-Soviets and the Chicoms and possibly even the Iranians -- will be there to talk about Afghanistan.

Clinton laid out the situation in a meeting last week with Obama, and he agreed that she should go.

Nonetheless, some on the right have taken Drudge's bait and run with speculation that there's a riff between Clinton and Obama and that Clinton may be angling for a run at the Presidency in 2012. Case in point, on Fox News' America's Newsroom, after positing that Clinton could be considering a 2012 run, co-host Martha MacCallum echoed Drudge in reporting, “People who follow politics closely ... think that might be a little odd that she wasn't at the State of the Union address. Next thing you know she's saying she doesn't necessarily serve two terms as Secretary of State, and they wonder if everything's OK between Hillary Clinton and the president.” Despite later noting the purpose of Clinton's trip and acknowledging that it seemed like a “legitimate” reason for Clinton to miss the State of the Union, MacCallum went on to say “it does raise some questions about how she'll sort of game out the political scene” and pushed her guest, Douglas Schoen, to speculate if there was “anything that would make her change her mind about the possibility of running against him?”

UPDATE:

Fox Nation has also taken the bait by asking, “What's Hillary Plotting” and linking to an article on Clinton's absence from the State of the Union address:

And, just in case it wasn't obvious what Drudge was trying to suggest in trumpeting that Clinton missed the State of the Union, Drudge is now linking to Peter Roff's U.S. News & World Report blog post, which asks the question: “A Hillary Clinton Primary Challenge to Obama in 2012?” From Drudge: