The Never-Ending Jersey Corruption Beat
We've got a new featured pol on the TPM Jersey Corruption Beat today: Bob Menendez. Brian Murphy's got the story.
Shocking, Tragic
A Republican aide was on the phone with late Missouri State Auditor Tom Schweich just before he killed himself. He told her about his outrage over a whispering campaign about his religion, threatened to kill himself and then handed the phone to his wife. Seconds later, Schweich's wife Kathy said, "He shot himself!"
Third Israeli Poll: No Help For Bibi
I mentioned yesterday that the first two post-Speech polls out of Israel showed a modest bump for Prime Minister Netanyahu — neither the no-effect Zionist Camp/Labor was hoping for or the big bump Likud wanted. Now we have a third poll and it shows no effect at all.
Welp
"Despite a small minority of Democrats and Israeli reporters seeking to curry favor with Obama, Netanyahu's speech to Congress elicited overwhelming support."
Israel Hayom (Israel Today) is the money-losing free news daily which Sheldon Adelson set up in 2007 mainly to support Benjamin Netanyahu. In Israel it is often mocked "Bibiton" (The Bibi News, roughly). But through a mix of being free and popular it rocketed to being the most-read news daily. Netanyahu's opponents — not unreasonably — complain that the entire thing is a massive campaign/propaganda contribution to Netanyahu. In any case, I was looking at its English language version today and here's the 'deck' for their lead article on the site ...
Things Getting Weird
Budget crises affect people in weird ways. A top Brownback aide who is now a key lobbyist/advisor on the outside and apparently being investigated by the FBI went off on a Topeka Model UN coordinator for purportedly disrespecting the governor in her model UN speech.
Backstory
Netanyahu said Iran would develop its first atomic bomb by 1999 in 1991.





