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Israel goes to the polls today for the 5th time in three years. The general consensus is that ousted PM Benjamin Netanyahu is more likely than not to be able to form another even harder-right government. (More on that later.) But it’s by no means a certain thing. Basically they’re still in the same deadlock space they’ve been in for years. The only question is whether one side or another manages to get 61 or 62 votes to form a narrow majority coalition.

But one thing is notable: turnout is running much higher than recent elections. It’s currently running more than 6% over the last election, the highest turnout since 1999.

To understand the last six years and the years going forward you have to get your head around this stuff …

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Tom Barrack, a onetime private equity executive and fundraiser for Donald Trump, traded his access to the then-president for investments from the United Arab Emirates, a U.S. prosecutor said on Tuesday during closing arguments in Barrack’s foreign agent trial.

I’ve written several posts about Twitter and new boss Elon Musk recently. I’ll probably be writing more. I realize that for those of you who aren’t on Twitter this might seem like an odd or perhaps even annoying focus. This is a political news site, Josh. Why are you going on about Twitter? At one level, I’ve always followed the rule of letting my interests drive my writing focus at TPM. But I don’t write about my ideas about medieval history or my estimation of the new Charlie Watts biography. Here I write about things in the broadly political domain. And Musk’s absurd but consequential Twitter adventure is right at the center of the bigger political issues that animate our age.

One simple note about the polls, especially if you’re a poll obsessive. There’s little question that trends have moved in a GOP direction since mid-October. But there is an important caveat to this. In key Senate races around the country, the polling zone has been absolutely flooded over the last couple weeks with partisan GOP polls. In some cases, I mean literally polls fielded by GOP committees or organizations. In other cases I mean polls like Rasmussen or Trafalgar which may be nominally independent but are clearly partisan and routinely have poll results more friendly to Republican candidates.

After yesterday’s Proud Boys rally in Hialeah, Rubio canvasser Christopher Monzon appeared at a GOP event in Miami Springs today during which he gave a fiery speech with numerous new details about the allegedly politically motivated attack he suffered a week ago. Remember that in the initial report to police he didn’t mention any political remarks at all. Now they said “F**k Marco Rubio,” along with threatening to kill Monzon for being a Republican.

The Herald also has more details about the father of one of the attackers who apparently tried to break up the fight. According to the Herald he also introduced a limp today that he didn’t have yesterday.

Basically every eyewitness or contemporaneous police report makes it fairly clear that this was a street fight of some sort that Monzon and Rubio are now making into a kind of GOP martyrdom story.

It is a relatively minor part of the overall story. But one lingering question is just how the police got to the home of Speaker Nancy Pelosi as quickly as they did. Was it a call to 911 or a triggered house alarm? According to this article from The San Francisco Chronicle, Paul Pelosi called 911 and then left the call open, allowing the dispatcher to hear at least part of what was transpiring in the home after David DePape had broken in.

There’s more with the Rubio canvasser attack story.

Sunday night two men assaulted Rubio canvasser Christopher Monzon. Rubio went on Twitter the next day claiming it was a politically motivated attack. But Monzon did not say anything like that in the police report of the incident and only began making the claim after Rubio did. Attention has also focused on the fact that Monzon has a long history with racist and antisemitic extremist groups, including being one of the alt-righters at the Charlottesville “Jews will not replace us” rally in 2017.

Today Rubio angrily attacked the press for “smearing” Monzon’s past, claiming that Monzon had “rejected” his past extremism. But today he was the guest of honor at a Proud Boys rally organized to support him.

“I’m going to clear my name,” Monzon told The Miami Herald in a brief impromptu interview at the rally.

As we go into the weekend, a few updates on the overnight attack at the Pelosi home in San Francisco.

The Russo-Ukraine war has spurred a vast and sustained increase in energy prices and threatens possibly severe shortages of heating fuel this winter in Europe. The United States, while committed as a matter of policy to a clean energy transition, is nevertheless pressing various global producers to ramp up production of oil and gas. But the newly released annual World Energy Outlook report from the International Energy Agency suggests these present crises mask a more profound and lasting impact.

In short, the Ukraine war looks likely to become an inflection point accelerating the global energy transition. As the energy sector publication Energy Intelligence summarizes the report, the 2022 crisis is driving three main effects: “an accelerated energy transition, the end of Russia as the world’s pre-eminent fossil fuel power costing Moscow some $1 trillion in revenues to 2030, and an end to what has been a golden age for gas.”

You can read the executive summary of the report here.

I want to return to this issue of the Ukraine letter that the Congressional Progressive Caucus released and then hastily disavowed. This can seem like an insider story with a mix of staff-member disagreements, endangered leadership ambitions and just some old-fashioned whodunnit. We’re not at all above covering those stories. But there are some really important issues at play beneath the superficial controversies.

One close to dominant view of this is that the letter itself wasn’t very controversial. It was just ill-timed (right before the election, after on-going Ukrainian battlefield successes), poorly managed and the Washington Post article that broke the story portrayed it as a break with administration policy when it really wasn’t. (Here’s one good overview of the whole controversy.)

There’s a bit of truth to this. But I think it’s basically wrong. The overview I linked to above says it’s an example of how constricted the current policy debate about Ukraine is. Again, I think that’s wrong. We’ll come back to that in a moment.