At a moment when incumbents around the world are being shunted aside, he is triumphant. With his bullet-proof majority, he has a chance to turn himself into the historic figure he has always yearned to be.

And it traces what it says is Netanyahu's appeal to U.S. audiences:

He appeared regularly on Nightline and became the Israeli-American It boy–confident, handsome, fearsomely articulate in virtually accentless English. Every suburban Jewish mother had a crush on him.

[...] Read more»

–Reporter William Broad has an article (5/21/12) on the state of nuclear inspections in Iran, particularly the military facility at Parchin. Broad tells readers about the "proposed inspection of a building that the agency suspects Iran used in testing explosives that can trigger a nuclear blast."

People following this story know that the facility in question is at the heart of the case against Iran. When the International Atomic Energy Agency released a report last November that finally detailed some of the allegations against Iran, much of the corporate media focused on this question of Iranian detonation research that, according to some, could only have nuclear weapons applications. So it was interesting to see Broad put it this way:

Nuclear experts say that a blast chamber–if it exists inside the building–may have been used for conventional military research or perhaps even to study the synthesis of diamonds, a popular field of study when the site was said to have been built.

There were experts questioning the dominant interpretation of the IAEA's evidence as soon as the report was released. But you could hardly spot that in the media coverage. [...] Read more»

Obama has drawn criticism for failing to offer more forceful leadership. He established the Simpson-Bowles commission but declined opportunities at key moments to push and prod for its consideration and enactment.

There's an odd syntax here that reflects some slippery thinking. Grammatically, "its" in the second sentence seems like it would refer to the Simpson-Bowles commission, but that would be nonsensical. You're presumably supposed to think it means the commission's plan, but that's a trick–there was no plan passed by the commission as a whole. Instead, the co-chairs, Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, came up with their own plan that they were unable to get the required supermajority of the committee to sign off on.

Balz wants you to think that doesn't matter–that there was a plan involving Simpson and Bowles, and it got the support of 11 of the 18 committee members, so that's pretty much the Bowles-Simpson commission's plan, right?

Well, no–actually, it matters a great deal that it didn't get the 14 votes it needed to be adopted by the commission. [...] Read more»