Ex-U.S. Senator John Danforth (R) was the political mentor of Missouri State Auditor Tom Schweich (R), who committed suicide last week. In his eulogy today at Schweich's funeral, Danforth called out John Hancock, head of the state GOP, for the anti-Semitic whispering campaign which preceded Schweich's death.

Pelosi says she's "saddened" by Netanyahu's "condescension" toward the United States.

I've written at great length about this speech, in anticipation of it, and about the Israeli election, to which it is inextricably connected. If you step back, it is amazing that this even happened. A foreign head of state gave a speech to the US Congress explicitly criticizing and trying to block the diplomacy of a sitting U.S. president. Having said all that, what about the speech itself?

Earlier this morning we published this story about how AIPAC had invited Steve Emerson to this year's conference even after he'd gotten in all the trouble a few weeks ago for his bogus claims about Birmingham, England ("totally Muslim") and no-go zones in Paris - statements which led the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom to call him an "idiot" and which he himself later apologized for. The piece triggered a blizzard of amazing emails from Emerson in which "challenge[d]" us to publish the questions below and which I am actually eager to publish.

I've used bold to add emphasis to the good parts.

You won't want to miss this.

Bear in mind while you watch this that over the last three weeks Netanyahu's poll numbers and those of his party have been slipping.

11:30 AM: It would be interesting to watch this speech with subtitles which detailed the specific ways in which each point Netanyahu makes is misleading or simply false.

11:32 AM: A key point Netanyahu is making is that the Iranian "break out" phase will be short and that Israel believes it will be shorter than U.S. intelligence believes it will be. Remember that we now know Netanyahu specifically and repeatedly misstated what Israel's intelligence agencies were telling him about the Iranian program in his 2012 speech to the UN.

11:37 AM: BECAUSE IT'S NOT POLITICAL!!!: Netanyahu's campaign site livestreams speech and harvests campaign email lists.

There is a fascinating new study out the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences pointing to a connection between the slow story of climate change and the Syrian Civil War, which of course is the setting out of which ISIS and the current regional war war emerged. Connecting climate change to such a charged on-going event will of course drive attention and controversy. But what is equally interesting to me is the much more uncontroversial claim that in addition to the regional movement of the Arab Spring and the on-going refugee crisis spurred by the Iraq War, the 2007-2010 was destabilizing the Syrian regime out of our view (at least most of us who don't follow these matters closely.)

Extremist cleric Franklin Graham warns that "radical Islamists" are advising President Obama and "advising various levels of government ... they hate Israel and they hate Christians, and so the storm is coming."

In an interview yesterday with Reuters, President Obama points out that virtually nothing Benjamin Netanyahu has said about Iran or the nuclear negotiations has turned out to be true ...

Anshel Pfeffer has this right. The aim of today's speech is to keep Benjamin Netanyahu as Prime Minister. Notably, though he still has the best shot at forming the next government, Netanyahu personally and his party have slipped in the polls over the last two weeks. Notably, Netanyahu's top political advisor, Ron Dermer, who currently serves as Ambassador to the US, was in Jerusalem for the last ten days advising on the speech and Netanyahu's reelection campaign during one of the tensest period between the two countries in decades.

5 Points on that Missouri politician's suicide which came amidst an anti-Semitic whispering campaign.