For years the top generals in the IDF have agreed that Israel can handle withdrawing to the 1967 borders in military terms. But PM Netanyahu says that’s impossible because those borders are not defensible. It’s an amazing level of denial, intransigence and self-destructiveness on display today — something the pre-statehood and early statehood Zionist leadership was seldom so vulnerable to. Read More
Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA): When I said last week that I was going to vote for the House GOP’s plan to abolish Medicare what I really meant was I was going to vote on it — and I have no idea yet which way I’m going to vote.
John Lithgow gives a dramatic reading of Newt Gingrich’s epic poem of a press release on Colbert’s show. Greatest thing ever: Watch.
Newt to Limbaugh: Hey, you know all that trouble I got myself in for calling the Paul Ryan’s budget “right-wing engineering”? Funny thing is I wasn’t even referring to Paul Ryan!
Limbaugh to Newt: “Well then what did you apologize to him about?”
Cornyn blames Dems for GOP’s successful filibuster of Goodwin Liu.
“The Mississippi River will always have its own way; no engineering skills can persuade it to do otherwise.” —Mark Twain
Relying primarily on the comment of one New York financier made to the Wall Street Journal, Republicans have begun floating the notion that if the failure to raise the debt ceiling means the U.S. government misses a few interest payments on its debts, it won’t be that big of a deal. So we checked in with the ratings agencies to see what they thought of this. Short answer: It would be a BFD.
Our look back on the first seven days of the Gingrich candidacy in pictures:
WARNING: Since Newt has retracted much of what he said this past week, clicking the above link may expose you to multiple “falsehoods.”
Beyond his erratic and intemperate personality, Newt Gingrich has always been burdened by a grandiose self-image in which he is a gallant figure standing athwart history. Narcissism among politicos is hardly a rare disease, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it channeled through a flack in as pure a form as Newt’s press secretary Rick Tyler does today, defending Newt from the gravest of all existential threats–political reporters:
The literati sent out their minions to do their bidding. Washington cannot tolerate threats from outsiders who might disrupt their comfortable world. The firefight started when the cowardly sensed weakness. They fired timidly at first, then the sheep not wanting to be dropped from the establishment’s cocktail party invite list unloaded their entire clip, firing without taking aim their distortions and falsehoods. Now they are left exposed by their bylines and handles. But surely they had killed him off. This is the way it always worked. A lesser person could not have survived the first few minutes of the onslaught. But out of the billowing smoke and dust of tweets and trivia emerged Gingrich, once again ready to lead those who won’t be intimated by the political elite and are ready to take on the challenges America faces.
Armed sheep with cocktail napkins would have overcome a lesser man than Newt.