LecternGate Goes from Strength to Strength!

OnlyKevin Movement takes flight in the House!

More from PodiumLecternGate: It seems rather quaint at the moment. But I wanted to flag to your attention that the blogger/FOIAer/gadfly/lawyer, Matt Campbell, who has close to singlehandedly made the podiumlecterngate into the story it is, has now unearthed pretty incontrovertible documentary evidence of document tampering by the Office of the Governor in Arkansas. Specifically, a representative of the office tried to get a state employee to change document to match the Governor’s cover story.

I want to reiterate what I wrote two days ago in my first post about the current conflict in Israel. If you’re looking for information on the coordinated Hamas attacks in southern Israel I recommend this Twitter list of (mostly) English language news sources from Israel, if you’re on Twitter. The Times of Israel, the English language version of Haaretz and Ynet are also good. Obviously there are many good sources of information. This isn’t meant to be exhaustive. These are some of the first places I go when I’m looking for the latest information.

With a story like this we’re not going to break new information. I see our role as helping sift through the flurry of new details and the often-chaotic stream of information we’re seeing.

A few times I mentioned the WSJ article which reported a series of secret meetings in Beirut in which Iran and Hamas planned the attack on Israel and Iran authorized it. I noted that there was significant and credible pushback on the article, which appeared to rely on Hamas sources. Since then I’ve seen a pretty lopsided chorus of doubts about the report. The relevant governments seem skeptical, at least publicly. And most people with significant area expertise seem skeptical about the report itself as well as various details within it.

One issue that is increasingly coming into focus is the claim that Egyptian intelligence warned Israel, specifically warned Prime Minister Netanyahu, that something big and bad was coming from Gaza. Just what kind of warning we’re talking about, the timing, details has been fuzzy over the last 24 hours. But at least the claim is coming into focus. Ynet is reporting that ten days before the attack the Director of the General Intelligence Directorate of Egypt, Abbas Kamel, called Netanyahu and warned “something fierce will happen from Gaza”. Netanyahu, according to this report, reacted in a nonchalant fashion and said the IDF had its hands full with events in the West Bank.

Needless to say, this claim is going to loom over everything that is unfolding. The Prime Minister’s office has officially denied the report. But I suspect a huge amount will turn on the specifics of just what is being alleged and denied. Is the PM’s office denying any conversation took place? Are they disputing the specifics of the warning? Even the quote I printed above must be one handed from Arabic to Hebrew and then into English. So we shouldn’t get too focused on the words in that quote.

Item 1: The WSJ published a much discussed article describing the Hamas attacks as coordinated with and authorized by Iran in a series of meetings in Beirut. The article appears to have been sourced entirely to Hamas representatives/officials. I would suggest great caution about these claims. Just because Hamas officials tell the Journal something doesn’t mean it’s true. What’s more, lots of people who know the region and know Iran suggest a lot of caution. To be clear, the point isn’t that this couldn’t be true, or partly true. But it would be an error to treat it as fact based on this one report.

One big mystery about today’s events in Israel, which I alluded to in the previous post, is how exactly Israel was caught quite this unprepared. An attack of this scale required very large numbers of people to be read into the preparations if not the operational planning for the attack. Israel has long had a dense network of informants and collaborators in the territories. That’s layered over with signals intelligence and various forms of surveillance. And yet Israel appears to have been caught totally unawares and unprepared. It’s not just that they didn’t know something like this was happening today. They don’t seem to have known that an operation of this scale and audacity was even being considered.

That’s an intelligence failure that’s hard to overstate.

For more on the last day’s events in Israel, I recommend the sources and the list I noted in the post immediately before this one.

The following are just some best guesses on my part and what I would call guidance in where to find the best information and how to think about what is unfolding.

The first point is that Israel has been in a state of political paralysis and stalemate for the better part of a year. Both leaders of the opposition have now offered to join an emergency national unity government for the duration of this conflict. I’ve seen people saying maybe this is how Netanyahu finally puts his political problems behind him because of national unity in the face of war. Alternatively, that the opposition leaders are being craven in offering to join.

If you’re looking for information on the coordinated Hamas attacks in southern Israel I recommend this Twitter list of (mostly) English language news sources from Israel, if you’re on Twitter. The Times of Israel, the English language version of Haaretz and Ynet are also good. This is one of those moments when I need to remind people that often when we don’t cover something that doesn’t mean we don’t think it’s important. Often it’s because we have nothing unique to add. If you’re just waking to this, what happened overnight (US time) in southern Israel is dramatically different from the occasional rounds of rocket fire from Gaza we’ve seen over the last couple decades. The initial reports are still chaotic and incomplete. It’s unclear how much has or will happen in other areas. But the gist is that in addition to rocket fire Hamas was able to launch a big and highly successful operation in which it infiltrated large numbers of paramilitaries into many Israeli towns in the South of the country, mostly but not only in the areas bordering Gaza.

These fighters went into these Israeli towns lighting homes on fire, killing at least dozens of civilians, wounding hundreds and taking a still unclear number of civilians and soldiers hostage. Some appear to have been taken back into Gaza. Some are now part of active hostage situations within those Israeli towns as the IDF streams into these towns in force. Hamas is claiming to have captured “high level” IDF officers. But as yet there have been no details or solid confirmation of that.

As I write the latest numbers are more than 100 killed in Israel and more than 800 wounded. Reports suggest about twice each of those numbers in the Israeli retaliation which followed the attack according to Palestinian authorities, though both sets of numbers should be seen as tentative and almost certain to rise.

Something funny is happening. A bit out of the blue the country’s big media organizations have started noting something peculiar. Ex-President Trump’s rhetoric has grown increasingly violent over the course of 2023 with an escalating round of threats against his perceived political enemies. Those messages go out loud and clear to his supporters. But they’re either muted or ignored by much of the mainstream press which has focused on discussions about President Biden’s age, Kamala Harris’s experience and popularity and the like. This isn’t a new observation. We’ve noted this dynamic repeatedly, as recently as a couple weeks ago. But suddenly the bigs themselves are noting it.

One thing that is becoming clear from the tip sheets is that at least some GOP conference members are waking up and smelling the coffee on Jim Jordan’s record from that college wrestler molestation scandal.

To refresh your memory: Before Jordan got into politics he was an assistant wrestling coach (1987-1995) at Ohio State. He claims he didn’t know the team doctor was sexually molesting team members. But apparently it was an open secret and a number of team members from the time claim Jordan knew. They go on TV and say it.