Hunker Down With History  —  The greatest mistake Israel could make at the moment is to forget that Israel itself is a mistake.  It is an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims …

updated below—  —  President Bush took time out from the G-8 Summit to grope German Chancellor Angela Merkel.  I'm not kidding.  It boggles the mind.  —  Via Mash (by the way, great get!), we get photos via a friend of his in Germany.  Mash debuted his guest post on on North Korea this past Sunday …

Israeli General Says Lebanon Offensive Will Last Weeks  —  JERUSALEM, July 18 — A top Israeli general said today that Israel's offensive in Lebanon would last another few weeks, and he said that the use of large numbers of ground forces had not been ruled out.

Times to Reduce Page Size and Close a Plant in 2008  —  The New York Times is planning to reduce the size of the newspaper, making it narrower by one and a half inches, and to close its printing operation in Edison, N.J., company officials said yesterday.  —  The changes, to go into effect …

G.O.P. Senator Resisting Bush Over Detainees  —  WASHINGTON, July 17 — Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina often plays the contrarian, the conservative Republican willing to poke a stick in the eye of the White House.  —  Now Mr. Graham is playing an even higher-profile variant of that role …

U.S. citizens remain in dark about evacuation  —  Official: Operation costs more than available resources; 64 have left so far  —  A French toddler is carried over a fence by relatives as they wait Monday with hundreds of other French citizens near their embassy in Beirut to be evacuated from Lebanon.

Iran to Hizbullah: Curb attacks on Israel  —  Arabic language newspaper reports Iran was warned by European country that Israel is ready to attack targets in Syria in campaign to liquidate Hizbullah; Tehran sends foreign minister to Damascus to demand Hizbullah curtail attacks against Israel

Transformation's Toll  —  "Grotesque" was Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's characterization of the charge that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was responsible for the current Middle East conflagration.  She is correct, up to a point.  This point: Hezbollah and Hamas were alive and toxic long before March 2003.

Where Is The "Netroots Left" On Israel?  —  Missing in action.  —  First a bit of background.  The so-called Netroots Left, led by Markos Moulitsas of the popular Daily Kos, wants to be a player in American politics.  As a test case, the Kossacks are throwing their weight behind political …

Bush Set to Use First Veto on Stem Cell Bill  —  Despite Divided GOP, President Says He Will Not Ease Restrictions on Federally Funded Research  —  Since his inauguration in 2000, President Bush has gone out of his way to avoid an overt confrontation with Congress.

NOT EQUAL:  —  At Tapped, Matt Yglesias writes that Hezbollah's rocket strikes, as compared with Israel's bombing of Lebanon, are "equally indefensible."  Equally?  Hezbollah began the crisis with an act of war that included a cross-border incursion and a kidnapping.

IDF needs another week to alleviate Hizbullah threat  —  Forty to fifty percent of Hizbullah's military capability has been destroyed in the six days of the IDF counter-attack following last Wednesday's Hizbullah raid in northern Israel, The Jerusalem Post has learned.

The Democrats' Unreligious Fringe  —  Republicans kowtow to the religious right, but Democrats have their own pesky religious voting bloc: the secular left.  —  A FEW WEEKS AGO, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama gave a speech to a group of liberal Christians in which he called on his fellow Democrats …

CALLING ALL RIGHTIES: DIGG THIS  —  Thanks to my wonderful web guy, Mark Jaquith, you'll notice a new feature at the end of every post that I started including over the weekend.  It says "Digg This."  If you click on it, it'll take you to Digg, the hot user-powered content site that now has a Politics section.

Boehner sees difference in coffin TV ads  —  Inside Washington  —  WASHINGTON - House Majority Leader John Boehner, R-West Chester, called on Democrats last week to pull a TV ad that shows images of flag-draped caskets of U.S. soldiers, calling the spot "outrageous."