We begin today with Aaron Blake of The Washington Post wondering what the GOP majority in the House will do now to get a Speaker elected not that Jim Jordan jumped out and then back into the race for House Speaker.

Thursday brought one of the most embarrassing episodes yet in the GOP’s arduous 16-day quest to find someone — anyone — who can get the votes to be House speaker. With the realization that that might not be possible at this juncture apparently setting in, Republicans set about forging a temporary fix that seemed potentially agreeable to much of the House: giving acting speaker pro tempore Patrick T. McHenry (R-N.C.) more power to conduct vital business while everyone figured out a longer-term solution. [...]

That Jordan would even attempt something so haphazard and immediately doomed speaks to the fact that he’s running out of ideas. And he’s surely not alone in that distinction.

To be sure, there are very understandable reasons this wasn’t workable, personal feelings about McHenry aside. Some opposed the idea of a temporary speaker on constitutional grounds. Some Jordan opponents probably feared this could keep his bid alive, by giving him a couple months of McHenry potentially working with the Democrats (whose votes would help install him) to run against. And you can bet more than a few Republicans viewed this, correctly, as the capitulation to Democrats that it would be. [...]

Apparently the old, unworkable dynamics were preferable to that potential new dynamic. The problem is that the old ones are going nowhere and probably just became more unworkable.

Thanks to Greg for subbing on short notice yesterday!

Peter Baker of The New York Times notes that when President Biden was asked a question on Air Force One about the House Speakership fiasco, Dark Brandon jumped all the way out (as noted by Kerry Eleveld).

President Biden was on his way back from a high-stakes diplomatic mission to Israel on Wednesday night when a reporter on Air Force One asked him if he had any thoughts about Representative Jim Jordan’s predicament in the House.

“I ache for him,” Mr. Biden said, putting his hand on his heart.

Really?

“Noooo,” he said with a laugh.

No sympathy there. “Zero,” he said. “None.” [...]

As much of a struggle as it was for Mr. Biden to work across party lines with Kevin McCarthy when he was speaker, a Jordan speakership would be a nightmare in the view of the president’s aides. Mr. Jordan, dubbed a “legislative terrorist” by former Speaker John A. Boehner, a fellow Republican, has long preferred bomb throwing to deal making and could push for Mr. Biden’s impeachment, government shutdowns and other moves at odds with the White House.

Mr. Biden has resolutely refused to comment at any length about the chaos in the House, sticking by the old view that it is up to Congress to determine its own leadership, not the executive branch. Still, he has alluded to his attitude before. When Mr. Jordan jumped into the speakership race a couple of weeks ago, Mr. Biden said he would work with whoever won. “Some people, I imagine, it could be easier to work with than others,” he said, “but whoever the speaker is, I’ll try to work with.”

David Graham of The Atlantic examines how Sydney Powell’s guilty plea in the Georgia RICO elections case against Number 45 (and 18 co-conspirators) might shape the overall case.

First, the plea simplifies the Chesebro trial. Powell and Chesebro had asked for speedy trials, rather than waiting a few months for a more standard trial. Though both are attorneys, their roles were very different. Powell, flashy and drawn to animal prints and chunky jewelry, became a household name in the weeks after the election because she often spoke to the press about the election scheme, though her role seems to have been mostly lower-level and operational. Chesebro, by contrast, was little known and had no public profile but worked closely with John Eastman and other lawyers on the broad contours of the paperwork coup. [...]

Second, Powell’s plea moves forward the Coffee County portion of the racketeering case. According to prosecutors, the conspirators arranged to unlawfully access and copy data from voting machines in the Southeastern Georgia location. Powell is the second person to plead guilty to involvement there, following Scott Hall, an Atlanta bail bondsman who copped a plea in September. Their testimony may help prosecutors target Jeff Clark, a little-known Justice Department official who attempted to lead a coup inside the department, getting Trump to appoint him acting attorney general, and to convince state legislatures to overturn election results. (He has pleaded not guilty.) [...]

Third is the question of how other people accused in the case might react to Powell’s plea. Prosecutors likely hope that it might convince some of the lower-level defendants to conclude that their chances of beating the rap are low but also that cooperating now might produce favorable terms. Agreements to testify would, in turn, presumably make it easier to mount a successful case against the biggest names in the case—Trump, of course, as well as the attorneys Eastman and Rudy Giuliani, and former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. A trial for these defendants likely won’t occur until next year.

David E. Sanger of The New York Times analyzes last night’s Oval Office address by President Joe Biden about the wars in Ukraine and Israel.

Throughout the speech, Mr. Biden toggled between the two crises, making the case that if America does not stand up in both conflicts the result will be “more chaos and death and more destruction.” That argument reflects his certainty that this is the moment he has trained for his entire political career, a point he often makes when challenged about his age.

His sense of mission explains why, at age 80, he has in the past eight months visited two countries in the midst of active wars. But at the same time he has married his public embraces with private cautions to American allies, while carefully keeping American troops out of both conflicts — so far. He seems determined to prove that for all the critiques that the United States is a divided, declining power, it remains the only nation that can mold events in a world of unpredictable mayhem.

“When presidents get into their sweet spot you usually see and hear it, and in the past few weeks you have seen and heard it,” said Michael Beschloss, the historian and author of “Presidents of War,” which traces the rocky history of Mr. Biden’s predecessors as they plunged into global conflicts, avoided a few, and sometimes came to regret their choices.

Whether Mr. Biden can bring the American population along, however, is a more unsettled question than at any moment in his presidency, and was the backdrop of his Oval Office address.

Lawrence Freedman of The New Statesman studies some of the reasons for intelligence failures.

Intelligence failures happen when pieces of information that should be picked up are not or are picked up and then misinterpreted. If they are interpreted correctly but not acted upon then it becomes more of a policy failure. When Israel was caught out by the Hamas attack of 7 October this was both an intelligence and policy failure. Despite the famed professionalism and tenacity of Israel’s intelligence agencies, they did not notice signs of the coming attack by the Palestinian militants, and despite the equally famed security focus of the government, it was complacent about the situation in Gaza. This was not the first time the country had been caught out, in different circumstances but for similar reasons. Fifty years earlier, on 6 October 1973, Israel was surprised as Egyptian and Syrian forces embarked on a sudden offensive and broke through its defensive lines.

Perhaps still the most fateful and studied example of a successful surprise attack is the Japanese strike against the American Pearl Harbor naval base on 7 December 1941 that opened the Pacific War. In a landmark study, the historian Roberta Wohlstetter introduced the thought that the problem was not a lack of information – the Americans were after all reading Japanese diplomatic and military traffic – but that those bits that in retrospect warned of trouble to come were lost in the background “noise” of masses of material that turned out to be irrelevant. [...]

This is why the problem facing intelligence analysts is often described as one of “joining the dots”: seeing a pattern in disparate pieces of information that point to the danger ahead. This is always going to be a difficult exercise because the information is often incomplete, ambiguous, contradictory and confusing. To make sense of it all analysts need a working hypothesis – we can call it a “construct” – against which the incoming evidence will be tested, and its reliability judged. If the construct is too strongly held, the risk is that only information that fits with it will be highlighted, while that which does not is disregarded...

Haaretz Editor-in-Chief Aluf Benn looks at the specific reasons for the Israeli intelligence failure to foresee the brutal attack by Hamas on October 7.

This was the mission planned by the Hamas commanders, the mission for which they trained, armed and equipped their people, as they collected intelligence for the operation and identified the time when Israel’s alertness would be particularly low, at the end of the holidays. They kept their extensive plans from leaking and pulled off a perfectly executed deception: The Israel political and military leadership, from Benjamin Netanyahu on down, was convinced that Hamas was deterred and mainly focused on economic growth and not preparations for an invasion.

Hamas’ military build-up was not kept completely out of sight. Its terrorists trained right out in the open, in broad daylight, and the Israeli side that was monitoring this activity saw infantry units being built and training for combat in Gaza.

But the IDF assumed that the Hamas elite force was being built to fight the IDF, Nukhba versus Golani, and interpreted it as a sign of Hamas becoming more establishment and transforming from a terrorist organization into a regular army. Israel failed to grasp that the confrontation with the IDF would only be a secondary mission, while the main effort would be a mass slaughter of civilians in their homes and at a large outdoor event, all through the area, and all at the same time.

Israeli intelligence and the IDF was working with very wrong “constructs”, more or less...which doesn’t remove Hamas’s responsibility.

Georg Fahrion, Christoph Giesen, and Christina Hebel of Der Spiegel look at the alliance between Beijing and Moscow.

Moscow, for its part, is making no attempt to play down its close ties with China. On the contrary, having the world's second-largest power on its side is an invaluable asset for Russia. At most, Moscow officials would like to avoid giving the impression of increased dependence on Beijing, even if the facts clearly speak a different language.

Xi and Putin stage their summits to look like meetings of equals. And the two autocrats appear to get on quite well. Putin addresses Xi as his "dear old friend," who in turn has called Putin his "best friend." They have awarded each other honorary doctorates from their respective alma maters and – on the periphery of international summits – celebrated birthdays together on several occasions: in 2013 in Bali over vodka and sausage, and in 2019 in Tajikistan with ice cream. [...]

But beyond their similar backgrounds, they share an overarching political goal: that of breaking U.S. dominance. Russia and China see themselves as pushing back against Washington's "pursuit of hegemony," while "the friendship between the two countries has no limits, there are no 'forbidden' areas of cooperation." That's from the text of a joint statement from February 4, 2022, adopted shortly before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, when Xi received his guest of honor Putin for the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Beijing.

Finally today, in spite of the overall results of the Slovakian parliamentary, Lubos Palata of Deutsche Welle locates a very bright light in the those elections.

Before the election, the anti-corruption OLANO party of former Prime Minister Igor Matovic had joined forces with a number of smaller parties to form the OLANO and Friends coalition.

When all the votes were counted, it had come away with almost 9% of the vote and was the fourth-largest grouping in parliament. This was far more than most polls had predicted in the run-up to the election.

Another surprise was that a record six Roma had been elected to the 150-seat Slovak parliament. Four of the six belong to OLANO and Friends; two to the largest opposition party, Progressive Slovakia. [...]

Straight after the election, the Slovak police investigated whether electoral fraud or bribes had been behind the phenomenal results. There have in the past been attempts to buy Roma votes.

However, over two weeks after the election, no evidence of such fraud has been presented.

Matovic called the allegations absurd. "We just ran a good campaign," he told Slovak media.

Everyone try to have the best possible day!