Comment on Hagel counters critics as confirmation hearing begins

“You can’t govern by shooting yourself in the head every day.” — Newt Gingrich, quoted by Politico, offering advice to Speaker Mike Johnson.

“Explosions echoed over an Iranian city on Friday in what sources described as an Israeli attack, but Tehran played down the incident and indicated it had no plans for retaliation – a response that appeared gauged towards averting region-wide war,” Reuters reports. “The limited scale of the attack and Iran’s muted response both appeared to signal a successful effort by diplomats who have been working round the clock to avert all-out war since an Iranian drone and missile attack on Israel last Saturday.” The BBC reports that Iranian state TV featured an analyst who downplayed Israel’s involvement, instead blaming “infiltrators from inside Iran” for the drone attack.

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“House Republicans took a critical step late Thursday night toward bringing up the long-stalled foreign aid bill for Ukraine and Israel, after being forced to rely on Democratic votes to move a plan to consider it out of a key committee and onto the floor,” the New York Times reports. “The 9-to-3 vote in the critical Rules Committee was an early step in the convoluted process the House is expected to go through over the next couple of days to approve the $95 billion aid package.

“Reince Priebus is the rare person who has successfully navigated the Republican Party both before and after Donald Trump seized control of it in 2016,” the Wall Street Journal reports. “The former Republican National Committee chairman, Wisconsin GOP chairman and White House chief of staff is now deploying his diplomatic skills to raise roughly $70 million for the national convention here in July.

“Russia has ramped up military production by replenishing stocks of standard weapons and ammunition and probably can sustain its onslaught in Ukraine for at least the next two years, analysts say — a sobering assessment for Kyiv, which is short on weapons and soldiers and losing ground on the battlefield,” the Washington Post reports. “While the Kremlin is struggling to expand capacity and to develop modern arms that could improve its army’s battlefield performance, it has capitalized on its overwhelming advantage in numbers of soldiers, its ability to arm them with old but reliable weaponry and a willingness to endure heavy casualties.”