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 …

Bush Gropes Germany's Merkel  —  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.

NYT to cut paper size and close plant  —Text+NEW YORK (Reuters) - The New York Times Co. (NYT.N: Quote, Profile, Research) plans to narrow the size of its flagship newspaper and close a printing plant, resulting in the loss of 250 jobs, the company said in a story posted on its Web site late on Monday.

Why the Left Is Furious at Lieberman  —  A blogger's blast at the embattled Connecticut senator.  Hint: It's not just Iraq.  —  SOME TIME AFTER having lunch in Iraq with the junior senator from Connecticut, Time magazine Baghdad bureau chief Michael Ware told an interviewer …

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 …

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.

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.

The Democrats' message dilemma  —  WASHINGTON — It was a bit startling the other morning to hear Sen. Charles Schumer of New York — the garrulous poster boy of Democratic liberalism — intone that New Deal Democracy is over.  But also, he added just as surprisingly, so is Reagan Republicanism.

Military-Style Assault Kills Dozens in Iraqi Marketplace  —  BAGHDAD, July 17 — Masked attackers with heavy machine guns mounted on pickup trucks slaughtered at least 40 people in a crowded market area south of Baghdad on Monday, hurling grenades to blow up merchants at their counters …

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 …

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.