A shooting occurred in Phoenix while, Mark Kelly, the husband of former Congresswoman Gabrielle Gifford, testifies at a Senate hearing on ending gun violence.

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“Speaking is difficult but I need to say something.” Provided by her PAC, Americans for Responsible Solutions.

Via: facebook.com

From the Americans for Responsible Solutions Facebook page:

It will be hard. But the time is now. Be bold. Be courageous. Americans are counting on you" - Like and share Gabby Giffords' handwritten testimony at the Senate Judiciary Committee on gun violence. Join her and Mark Kelly by texting SOLUTIONS to 90975

UPDATE: The Washington Post reports that the note was actually written by Giffords' speech therapist, contrary to what was earlier reported in this article.

h/t The Atlantic

The InterMountain Christian News gets a question.

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The likely Democratic Senate candidate opposed ObamaCare, supported the Iraq war, and considers himself pro-life. Remember, this is Massachusetts.

Source: wcvb.com

Will the next Democratic Senator from Massachusetts be a pro-life, Iraq War-supporting, ObamaCare-fighting Congressman who once opposed an assault weapons ban and gay rights?

That's what seven-term Democratic Massachusetts Congressman Stephen Lynch is hoping as he reportedly prepares to announce his candidacy on Thursday.

Lynch is betting that his social conservatism — far to the right of his toughest likely primary opponent, Congressman Ed Markey — will win over moderate Democrats in the state. But as the member routinely identified as the most socially conservative of the Massachusetts delegation (including former Republican Senator Scott Brown) he could have trouble even winning in a statewide general election, let alone a Democratic primary.

Lynch voted to ban partial-birth abortion along with his solid pro-life voting record, and says of ObamaCare on his website it says "he believes that the health care reform law, passed in 2010, is critically flawed in that it does very little to reform the current fee for service system." Lynch reiterates his support as well for "true health care reform."

"Coming off this epic 2012 election where reproductive rights were a prominent issue, that could hurt him. That's one thing Markey's going to highlight in this primary," said Mary Anne Marsh, a Democratic strategist in Massachusetts, who added, "He's conservative for Massachusetts, but for the state senate, state rep, and Congressional districts he's run in, he's not."

Lynch voted to authorize the war in Iraq in 2003 and was the only member of the House of Representatives from Massachusetts to vote in favor of a 2006 Republican resolution opposing a timeline for the withdrawal or redeployment of U.S. troops from Iraq.

He has also flip-flopped from his past opposition to an assault weapons ban. He now says he "fully supports President Obama's reasonable gun control recommendations," including re-instituting "limits on military-type assault weapons, high capacity magazines and armor piercing bullets while we expand and improve background checks."

But while a member of the Massachusetts state legislature Lynch voted against an assault weapons ban saying "let's not get sidetracked by feel-good legislation."

Lynch has been noted for his turn around on gay-rights. He opposed partner benefits and hate crimes legislation sponsored by gay-rights groups while a state Senator.

When Lynch first ran for office in 1994 and was successfully elected to the Massachusetts House he challenged his opponent that year as "the conservative candidate."

Lynch hit his opponent for supporting the request of a gay and lesbian group to march in the St. Patrick's Day parade in Boston saying it showed "a lack of leadership from the office of the state representative" according to local news reports.

Lynch added his opponent support them because he "was reluctant to incur criticism from the liberal media."

Despite his center-right record, Marsh said many in Boston consider him a real contender.

"Never underestimate Lynch. He's won every race he's ever been in," she said.

A spokesman for Markey's campaign did not return a request for comment on Lynch's conservative positions.

Rosie Gray contributed to this report.

A preview of his big speech next week?

Sen. Rand Paul appeared on conservative talk radio host Bryan Fischer's show on Wednesday and denounced a conservative foreign policy that he views as "over-the-top aggressive."

Asked how he would "evolve and adapt" the Republican party, Paul said, "One of the things that I think really may scare away some people is sometimes our discussion of foreign policy is about, oh, well we need to bomb this country, or no, I would bomb them before you would, or I would bomb them the day before yesterday, or I would bomb them into oblivion."

"I don't think that's necessarily a conservative point of view," Paul said. "That sort of over-the-top aggressive foreign policy doesn't have to be really a conservative or constitutional point of view but it scares some people away from our party."

Paul called for a party that emphasizes "strong national defense as a deterrent to war, but not eager for war" and said it was important that "we don't appear to be the party that's eager for war."

"That's what I mean by evolving."

Paul is due to give a foreign policy speech at the Heritage Foundation next week, where he "will discuss his vision of a foreign policy that respects the plain language of our Constitution, the legal powers of Congress and the proper duties of the Commander-in-Chief."

"Senator Paul will map out a foreign policy vision in which America can better avoid never-ending conflict and protracted commitments," according to Heritage's copy.

The language Paul used on Fischer's show seems to gesture toward what he'll say in his speech.

Paul has been attempting a rapprochement with more hawkish members of his party lately, meeting with neo-conservatives and visiting Israel, a country he and his father have been accused of insufficiently supporting. But his comments on Fischer's program show a reluctance to go the full neo-con.

Later in the interview, Paul touched on immigration reform, and made a proposal: "Each year we vote on a report, a report comes back and it lists five or six things they have to measure at the border, how many people are getting across, how many we're sending back, that kind of thing."

"The problem has been that in the past when they did [immigration reform] under Reagan, they traded amnesty for security at the border," Paul said.

The NRA's top executive Wayne LaPierre thought it was “reasonable” in 1999. The NRA's now come out against gun-free zones.

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A longer version of LaPierre's remarks.

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“We've gone from a Senate that passed DOMA over my objections to one that just welcomed its first openly gay senator,” Kerry said. Sens. Boxer, Feinstein & Wyden joined Kerry in voting against DOMA in 1996.

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WASHINGTON — Sen. John Kerry said goodbye to the Senate Wednesday, taking time to note the progress made on LGBT issues during his time in Congress.

"We've gone from a Senate that passed DOMA over my objections to one that just welcomed its first openly gay senator," Kerry said of the 1996 vote for the Defense of Marriage Act.

Kerry's departure itself is a milestone of sorts. When the U.S. Supreme Court agreed Dec. 7 to hear Edith Windsor's challenge to DOMA's provision banning federal recognition of same-sex couples' marriages, six sitting senators had voted against DOMA when the Senate voted on the bill in 1996.

Kerry's departure Friday will leave only three people remaining in the Senate who voted against the bill in the Senate.

California Sens. Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein and Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden are the remaining three senators to have opposed the bill since its original passage.

Several senators who voted for DOMA in 1996 have since reversed their position on the issue, but only 14 senators — all Democrats — opposed the bill in the heat of the 1996 election when the possibility of Hawaii same-sex couples being able to marry prompted the bill's quick movement through Congress.

When the Supreme Court announced it was taking the case, six of those longtime LGBT supporters remained. That number is now cut in half. In addition to Kerry's departure, Sen. Daniel Inouye, who died Dec. 17, and Sen. Daniel Akaka, who retired at the end of the last Congress, had also voted against the bill, no longer remain in the Senate.

ALSO: One current senator, Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, voted against DOMA as a House member in 1996.

Obama wants bill passed by the end of June.

Image by Isaac Brekken / AP

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama pledged to put "everything" behind immigration reform in an interview with Spanish-language broadcaster Telemundo on Wednesday.

Speaking to José Díaz-Balart, Obama laid out his time frame for fixing the nation's immigration system a day after he embraced a comprehensive reform agreement reached by a bipartisan group of senators over the weekend.

"I'm hopeful that this can get done, and I don't think that it should take many, many months," Obama said. "I think this is something we should be able to get done certainly this year and I'd like to see if we could get it done sooner, in the first half of the year if possible."

"The issue here is not so much technical as it's political," he said. "It's a matter of Republicans and Democrats coming together and finding a meeting of the minds and then making the case."

But Obama said no matter how difficult it may be, he will put the full weight of his office into realizing immigration reform.

"I can guarantee that I will put everything I've got behind it," he said. "We're putting our shoulder to the wheel. I'll be talking about it. We've now got a majority of Americans who are supportive of comprehensive immigration reform. And, you know, I will do everything I can to make sure that we align public opinion with — Congressional votes so that I can actually get a bill on that — on that desk to sign."

Obama also restated his belief in the need for a comprehensive plan to address gun violence, saying there needs to be "a unified, integrated system" to keep guns out of the hands of those who would do harm.

"I mean what is absolutely true is that if you are just creating a bunch of pockets of gun laws without having sort of a unified, integrated system — for example, of background checks, then it's going to be a lot harder for an individual community, a single community, to protect itself from this kind of gun violence," he said. "That's precisely why we think it's important for Congress to act."

Asked whether Chicago's epidemic of gun violence despite having some of the toughest gun laws in the nation proves the National Rifle Association's point that gun control doesn't deter violence, Obama objected.

"Well, the problem is is that — a huge proportion of those guns come in
from outside Chicago," he said.

Obama also sat down with Univision anchor María Elena Salinas Wednesday to discuss his immigration proposals.

Cyberwar and Bjorn Lomborg at Georgetown. A former student is “disgusted” by the nomination process.

Before he became President Obama's Secretary of Defense nominee, Senator Chuck Hagel was a professor at Georgetown's School of Foreign Service for three years.

Image by Jason Reed / Reuters

April 6, 2010, 2000 hours. A memo headlined "BREAKING NEWS" goes out to students in the Georgetown University classroom of Professor Chuck Hagel.

"An unknown entity has conducted a cyber attack on Bank of America and Wells Fargo, affecting several parts of the nation's financial infrastructure over the course of the past two weeks," the alert says.

Credit cards had been hacked, ATMs were failing, and pension and mutual companies were experiencing computer malfunctions "so severe" that they'd be down and out of operation for more than a week, with $1.3 billion in deposits at stake.

It's a scenario that Hagel — the former Senator and current nominee for Secretary of Defense, who has taught geopolitics for the last three years at Georgetown's School of Foreign Service — outlined in a series of memos to the 25 or so students in his undergraduate course "Redefining Geopolitical Relationships." There was, of course, no cyber attack on Bank of America or Wells Fargo — it was a simulation exercise — but Hagel provided detail granular enough that the story may as well have been real.

"Analysts believe these attacks will shatter faith in the stability of the financial system," Hagel wrote in a memo shared with BuzzFeed by his teaching assistant. "Citizens are loosing [sic] trust in all parts of the U.S. financial system and foreign speculators are making a run on the dollar. Although it is unclear who is behind this attack, initial reports indicate this was several years in the making."

For two weeks, students played the role of government official — instructed by Hagel to read the alert, draft a public statement ("You may choose not to make a statement," Hagel was careful to add), write a one-page strategy memo, and prep for three "in-person meetings," to be acted out in the classroom in real time: a principals committee meeting at 1615 hours; a U.N. Security Council meeting at 1650 hours; and a briefing to the president at 1745 hours. Hagel not only outlined the simulation schedule by the minute — and always in military time — but went so far as to identify the theoretical participants of each meeting.

The only country mentioned in the scenario description is China, although the memo doesn't specifically suggest the cyberattack comes from the Chinese.

The cybersecurity simulation project — a central feature of Hagel's course in spring 2010 — was one of the more serious strands of a classroom that could just as easily be relaxed and playful, according to the senator's former students and his teaching assistant, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Those who knew him at Georgetown remember Professor Hagel, whose confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee begins early Thursday morning, as resolute in his own views on foreign policy and dedicated to his classroom at a level unusual for most lawmakers who take on stints as visiting professors. Hagel's three years at the university — where, his teaching assistant said, "he came to it really naturally" — offer an unfamiliar look at the worldview, and personality, of the man who might soon be in charge of the world's most powerful military operation.

Hagel, for one, had a bevy of classroom pastimes, many of which involved costumes or betting. He and his teaching assistant would dress up for Christmas — he in a Santa hat, and she in antlers. Hagel would also come to class on Halloween in costume — a tradition he kept during his years in the Senate. (In 2007, he wore a Joe Biden mask and a "Joseph Biden for President" T-shirt to a Senate Foreign Relations Committee meeting that Biden was chairing.)

During basketball season, Hagel set up a March Madness bracket for the class, and when the 2010 midterm elections were underway, Hagel challenged his graduate students to predict the outcome of the House and Senate races, promising the winning student a reward. One member of the class, according to an article in Georgetown's student newspaper, asked that the prize be a special visit from President Barack Obama. What the class got instead was Hagel's former aide, T.J. Birkel, dressed as Obama, and bottles of Federalist Zinfandel wine.

"He had a lot of humor," said his teaching assistant, who remains close to Hagel. (He still calls on her birthday, she noted.) "You're talking about 25 students each semester. He didn't have to mentor them, but he always made time."

Hagel, his students said, made himself available for individual meetings during office hours, and he graded every paper himself by hand.

"He never had his [teaching assistant] do it," said Natalia Saraeva, a grad student who took Hagel's class during her final year at Georgetown. "And he always provided comments. I was impressed by his level of dedication."

Hagel, a Republican from Nebraska, retired from the Senate in 2008 after serving two consecutive terms. He landed the Georgetown gig in February 2009, and started work on crafting one course for grad students in the fall, and another for undergrads in the spring. Hagel chose geopolitical relationships as his focus, and with the help of his teaching assistant, wrote a syllabus aimed at examining the 21st century as a period of transition that is "shifting geopolitical centers of gravity and is recasting geopolitical influences as the world experiences an unprecedented diffusion," as stated in the syllabus for Hagel's first-ever course in the fall of 2009.

The texts included the senator's own book, America: Our Next Chapter, as well work by mainstream figures like Fareed Zakaria and Thomas Friedman, and by more esoteric ones, including the founder of the private intelligence service Stratfor, George Friedman.

Hagel's course material spanned an incredibly wide range of topics — from poverty and health; to climate change; to oil and gas; to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; and to whether the "perceived division," as Hagel's syllabus put it, between East and West is even "real."

"We were very interested in looking at the ways that government service and military service and the private sector were all coming together and shaping geopolitical relations," said Hagel's teaching assistant. "He believes that to see things clearly you have to understand a multitude of factors."

The syllabus may offer a few hints as to Hagel's worldview, and it is composed largely of critics of the neoconservatives and hawks with whom Hagel broke bitterly during the George W. Bush administration. Along with Zakaria and Friedman, who have generally backed what they view as Obama's pragmatism and efforts at engagement, Hagel had his students last fall read Joseph Nye's Soft Power, a book that makes the case that neoconservatives rely too heavily on military power in diplomacy.

Also on the 2012 reading list was "Environmental Alarmism, Then and Now," an essay by Bjorn Lomborg, who is best known for arguing that the risks of global warming are overstated and for highlighting the potential economic damage from attempting to combat it.

One even clearer clue to Hagel's views — and one reason he meets some of his most intense opposition from those who fear cuts to America's massive defense spending — is the figure who permeated both the undergraduate and graduate courses: former President and five-star General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Hagel, who fought in Vietnam, would be the first Secretary of Defense to have seen combat as an enlisted soldier. The senator even kept a large portrait of the former president, painted for him by his brother, in his office at Georgetown. In his book, Hagel wrote that Eisenhower is the man he'd "put up on my Rushmore."

And in his class, the Senator assigned his students Eisenhower's 1961 farewell address, in which the president first named — and denounced — "the military-industrial complex."

When Hagel taught his first semester, Obama was just settling into his first year in office. "We had a lot of robust conversations about the Afghanistan war," the teaching assistant remembered. "He had us think about what we would be doing in the president's shoes. He seemed very plugged into what was going on in the administration."

Hagel, though, was careful not to force his views on his students. "He would usually try to present things evenhandedly, and then present his opinion at the end of class if he did at all," said Michael Karno, one of Hagel's former undergraduate students. "But he didn't talk about the hot-button issues that everyone's focusing on now," he said, adding that Israel and Iran were not topics discussed frequently in class.

(The conservative Washingon Free Beacon attacked Hagel Wednesday for including readings from center-left figures including Peter Beinart and Zbigniew Brzezinski, whom it described as "anti-Israel.")

Hagel was less reticent, however, to reminisce in class about trips he had taken as senator, recalled his assistant. "He told me stories about meeting people like Hosni Mubarak and Moammar Gadhafi, and how personalities shape policy," she said. "He would say that if we're taking about what we're going to do in Libya, then you have to understand the personality on the other side of the table."

When Hagel did express his views to the class, it was clear they didn't "fall in line with one party or another," remembered Will Magioncalda, another undergraduate student.

"He's not a guy who's playing the political game," he said. "He would never express his thought on things in terms of a political party, just in terms of what was right."

Magioncalda, though, does remember times when the senator would openly criticize the Bush administration's handling of the Iraq War, an issue on which the senator has long been outspoken. "I went into the class knowing he was a moderate Republican senator," said Magioncalda, "but I didn't realize he'd actually criticize someone who has been the leader of his party for eight years."

When it came to his students' essays — there were four each semester, together totaling about 7,000 words in length — Hagel would tell his class, "I don't care if you agree or disagree with me. You just need to back up your statements."

But Karno describes the first essay he wrote for Hagel as just short of disaster. In the five-page paper, which asked students to "reflect" on the class material, Karno made the argument that America's economic spectrum should be what he called "the right mix of socialism and capitalism." Hagel, said Karno, bristled at the idea. "Using the word 'socialism' was something he seemed very uncomfortable with, which is probably true of most people who have served in office," he said.

Karno got a C+ on the paper. "There were parts of the paper that were questionable, and it wasn't my best work," said Karno, "but I got a little hot and bothered about the grade. Like, who is this guy giving me a C+ on a paper with such a broad topic to begin with?"

Karno went to Hagel's office hours and debated the paper with him point by point. After they'd gone through the last paragraph on the last page, Hagel turned to his student and said, "You know, not everyone would have the guts to come in here and debate this, so I'm gonna raise your grade to a B."

Hagel's teaching assistant remembers that same willingness to engage with students when he didn't agree with them. "He'll sit there and debate you," she said.

Asked what they thought of the controversy surrounding Hagel's confirmation, his former students voiced surprise and disappointment. "I'm a little disgusted by how politicized it all is," said Magioncalda. "I'm Jewish and a big supporter of Israel. I don't remember us talking about that issue in class, but there's no indication that he is anything but a strong supporter of Israel."

Hagel's teaching assistant added that Hagel was "the farthest thing from an anti-Semite," she said. "I think it's really a shame that somebody with such a record of service to their country is being called names that."

"He brings civility back into politics," his assistant added. "And he just has a fierce fire in his belly about doing the right thing for America. That's the bottom line."

Documents from Senator Hagel's classes at Georgetown University

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Conservative senator quotes conservative blogger. Old-school reporter fights back.

Senator Jim Inhofe cited a blog post by conservative Washington Post bloggerJennifer Rubin during the confirmation hearing for Secretary of Defense nominee Chuck Hagel on Thursday, setting in motion a public argument on Twitter.

Inhofe, who called Rubin a reporter, cited a blog post of her's about Hagel. Shortly thereafter, Post reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran took issue with Rubin's work on Twitter, saying that Rubin "is NOT a WaPo reporter."

His words brought into sharp relief something that has divided the Post newsroom for several years: Late to the internet and struggling to maintain its status as a top-tier news outlet, the Post turned to high-profile, often partisan bloggers, led by the liberal policy wonk Ezra Klein, to generate traffic and buzz. But the outlet's unfamiliarity with the online news environment quickly showed: Their first conservative blogger was fired in a plagiarism flap, and the second, Dave Weigel, was let go after Post management learned — apparently to their surprise, if not to his actual readers' — that he wasn't a movement conservative.

The newsroom, meanwhile, has bemoaned that the mixture of slant and partisanship has dented the newspaper's reputation for fairness and neutrality, a claim the opinionated bloggers reject.

Greg Sargent, the Washington Post's liberal blogger, tweeted in defense of Rubin: "Don't agree w/@jrubinblogger on much, but being an 'opinion blogger' doesn't necessary render your reporting invalid."

Asked for reaction to the incident, Rubin said "It is welcome news that U.S. Senators read the Post so carefully, especially the reported blogs which break news, obtain interviews, and ask hard questions many news reporters don't or won't" in an email.

Rubin's work has drawn criticism in the past for her open support of Mitt Romney during the presidential election, which some critics saw as a bad reflections on the Post's down-the-middle brand. But she does break news from time to time, as does Sargent; Rubin scored exclusive interviews with Romney, Ann Romney, and others over the course of the election, and Sargent has driven the news cycle before with stories about the Wisconsin recall, Romney's tax returns, and other issues.

"Jennifer Rubin is an opinion writer on the editorial page. She is not a reporter in the newsroom," said Kristine Coratti, a spokesperson for the Washington Post.

The state's political class gathered in Washington to drink and speculate about the scandal-scarred Senator. “These are nameless, faceless allegations — you should find out who that is,” says Menendez.

Image by AP

WASHINGTON — At the New Jersey Chamber of Commerce "Walk to Washington" dinner — an annual pilgrimage of about 900 of the state's political to-dos to the nation's capitol — the boozed-up talk of the Marriott Wardman Park hotel bar Thursday night was centered on the Democratic junior Senator Bob Menendez and the alleged prostitution scandal in which he now finds himself entangled.

According to a report in the Miami Herald, a West Palm Beach eye doctor with close ties to Senator Menendez was raided by the FBI for being "suspected of providing free trips and even underage Dominican Republican prostitutes to U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez," according to the article.

(The report comes months after a Daily Caller piece that featured video interviews with two women from the Dominican Republic who said Menendez had paid them for sex.)

Menendez — who had been scheduled before the scandal broke to deliver a speech at the event, along with New Jersey's other U.S. senator, Frank Lautenberg — kept his commitment to speak. His remarks, about nine minutes long, focused almost exclusively on Hurricane Sandy and did not make even passing reference to the reports of his impropriety.

The senator was, in fact, all but mum on the accusations from the moment he entered the Marriott to the moment he ducked out, chased all the while by a bevy of reporters before scrambling into an elevator that took him and an entourage to the basement of the hotel.

At the start of the night, when Menendez entered the Marriott ballroom shortly before dinner was scheduled to begin, he was followed down the hall by a handful of reporters. In response to questions about the allegations, Menendez referred the group to "comments released through my office."

"These are nameless, faceless allegations — you should find out who that is," he added, heading into the ballroom.

Menendez's nearly silent appearance at Chamber of Commerce gathering did not quell the speculation among eventgoers, who gathered after dinner in the hotel bar to knock back well drinks and glasses of red wine.

One cameraman for a New Jersey television station remarked, "We all came here for him, didn't we?"

"He must have known every alley and back door in the Senate," said one Capitol Hill aide, who noted that he had not seen Menendez wandering the halls at all in the days since the Miami Herald story broke.

One N.J. political operative said that the story didn't become "a thing" until the report this week of the FBI raid. "When it was that weird Daily Caller video, it was whatever," said the operative. "Now, he's going to have to figure some way to put this to bed."

Menendez was more often the butt of every joke in the bar — "Did they have to be underage too? Couldn't he have found some nice 16-year-olds?" — than a subject on which informants could actually trade information. "I didn't even know about this until this morning when I read the [Herald] article," said one operative in the hotel lobby. "No one knows anything."

A former state official mulling around the hotel bar expressed disbelief that the senator was actually guilty of the allegations. "He's dumb, but he's not stupid," said the Chamber guest.

In a statement released Wednesday, Menendez's office said the doctor now at the center of the scandal, Dr. Salomon Melgen, has "been a friend and political supporter of Senator Menendez for many years," read the statement. "Senator Menendez has traveled on Dr. Melgen's plane on three occasions, all of which have been paid for and reported appropriately. Any allegations of engaging with prostitutes are manufactured by a politically-motivated right-wing blog and are false."

Menendez, while at the dinner, was seated on stage between Ralph Izzo, director of PSEG Power, and Tom Bracken, the president and CEO of the Chamber of Commerce, who was seated next to Governor Chris Christie. Ushered on stage as soon as he arrived at the Marriott, the senator appeared on good terms with his political friends and colleagues on the stage, shaking hands and giving hugs to those around him.

Senator Lautenberg weighed in on the issue hours before the Chamber of Commerce event began, telling a reporter from the New Jersey Star-Ledger, "If there are infractions as they are reported, it's too bad."

But Thursday night at the event, Lautenberg and the other speakers present — including New Jersey Governor Chris Christie — remained silent on Menendez and the allegations.

New York's mayor and its mascot.

Image by JP Yim / Getty Images

Edward Irving Koch, the mayor who steered New York City out of a desperate fiscal crisis and forged a new, middle class governing coalition, died of congestive heart failure Friday morning at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, his spokesman told the Associated Press. He was 88.

Koch, New York City's dominant political figure of the 1980s and the architect of what remains its governing political coalition, stayed politically relevant through his long political twilight, courted aggressively by figures including Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama for his role as a proxy for pro-Israel Democrats willing, but not eager, to cross party lines.

But Koch's later years of quips, movie reviews, and presidential politics remain secondary to his central legacy, which is in New York's City Hall. Tall and gangly with a domed, bald head and a knowing smile, Koch was New York's mayor and its mascot from 1978 to 1989. Through three terms, he repeated one question like a mantra: "How'm I doing?" At first, the answer was clear to observers who had watched the city slide toward bankruptcy: exceptionally well. Koch managed New York back from the brink, drove hard bargains with municipal unions, cut jobs where he had to and reduced taxes where he could. He presided over a boom in Manhattan, and spent his new revenues on renewing the south Bronx.

But as the Koch administration moved its third term, the mayor lost his momentum. As Wall Street boomed in the 1980s, Koch took advantage of the new revenues to double New York City's budget and offer tax breaks to real estate developers. But the largesse couldn't buy him friends: he clashed with black leaders and his old allies among Manhattan's liberal democrats. New York became famous for its racial tensions and rising crime. He courted the Democratic Party bosses of Queens and the Bronx only to be tarnished by the corruption scandals that surrounded them.

"Koch had a very good first term and helped pull the city out of its doldrums, and he had a certain sense of the excesses of liberalism," Cooper Union history professor Fred Siegel said. As time wore on, however, "he had no vision of how to run the city," Mr. Siegel said.

Koch himself put it differently. "I consider myself to be a liberal with sanity," he told the New York Sun (for which this obituary was written, and which ceased print publication four years before his death) during an interview at his midtown office in 2002.

While Mayor Koch's vision may not have been apparent to all, the real drama of his career was that his political journey away from his base in Greenwich Village reform Democratic politics and into the arms of middle class, mostly white, Catholic voters in the outer boroughs and Manhattan real estate developers. By the fall of 1987, his former supporters at the socialist review Dissent would publish a special issue "In Search of New York" with an article titled, "When Koch Was a Liberal."

But where his old friends saw betrayal, Mayor Koch saw an ideology that emerged as early as one Sunday in 1971, when he visited the site of a planned public housing project in Forest Hills, Queens. Koch was then a Democratic congressman from one of the nation's most liberal districts, which included Greenwich Village and the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The Queens project was part of the expansive program pushed by Mayor John Lindsay, and would have brought about 4,000 poor people on public assistance to the middle class, heavily Jewish neighborhood.

Local residents said the project would destroy the neighborhood, Koch surprised his allies in Manhattan by agreeing with them. He later called that declaration "my Rubicon."

"I have always been much more moderate than my supporters," Koch told the Sun three decades later.

Born in 1924 in the Bronx to Jewish immigrants from Poland, and raised in Newark, New Jersey, Edward I. Koch came to politics gradually. After graduating high school at the age of 16, he enrolled at City College of New York and lived with his parents at their new home in Ocean Park, Brooklyn. Koch never graduated college, however; he was drafted in 1943, and served in France, Belgium, Holland, and Germany. Koch served on the front lines, but later wrote that "the saddest personal moment of the entire war" came when, as Hitler's army retreated into Germany, a sentry in his unit shot and killed one of their own men.

After the war, Koch returned to New York and enrolled directly in New York University Law School. By 1952 he had his own law practice and had moved from volunteer positions at the Flatbush Jewish Center to politics in earnest. Captivated by the speaking style of Adlai Stevenson, who was running for president against Dwight Eisenhower, Koch joined the Stevenson campaign. He became a stump speaker: during his lunch hours, Koch recalled in a memoir, he would head out from his Wall Street office to stand on a chair at the corner of Broad and Nassau streets to praise Stevenson.

By 1963 Koch was active in Greenwich Village Democratic politics, and he made headlines across the city when he beat Tammany Hall boss Carmine DeSapio in a tight election for democratic district leader, a low-level position within the party.

As a local politician and a city councilman, Koch made his name in the fight to break the hold of an old guard of Manhattan Democratic Party leaders. But after heading to Washington in 1969, he began to develop the foreign policy views that he would later promote from the mayor's bully pulpit, fighting to free Soviet Jews and to end the war in Vietnam.

Koch was elected mayor in 1977 on the slogan: "After eight years of charisma" – Lindsay – "and four years of the clubhouse" – Mayor Abe Beame – "let's try competence." The city needed a good manager, Koch argued. Lindsay's big spending and Beame's inability to bring the size of government back under control had produced a fiscal situation so dire that New York City could no longer borrow money.

By the time Koch took office, the city's failure to balance its budget had put it in a kind of state-administered trusteeship, with the Emergency Financial Control Board making decisions usually reserved for mayors. Koch sought and won federal assistance, stopped the growth of city spending, and between 1978 and 1983 cut 7,000 city jobs.

"He was a very strong fiscal leader, and he led the city out of the fiscal crisis with great dexterity and resolve," Diana Fortuna, former president of the Citizens Budget Commission said. "But it became harder to keep fiscal discipline as his administration went on and times got better."

Despite his earlier criticism of Mayor Lindsay's expensive projects, Mayor Koch in 1985 announced his grandest project of all: a five year plan to solve the city's perpetual housing crunch and revive its most dilapidated neighborhoods. The plan would become a "ten year plan" and cost $5.1 billion – more than 80% of it financed by the city – and was "the most expansive and extensive city housing program in American history," New York University real estate expert Michael Schill said.

The program succeeded on its own terms during and after the Koch era, rehabilitating about 183,000 units of housing and reviving neighborhoods, notably the South Bronx, that some city planners had recommended leaving for dead. A debate continues over the ten year plan's cost-effectiveness, though Mr. Schill said his research shows that the program's benefits had spilled over into surrounding neighborhoods, driving up property values and resurrecting whole sections of the city.

Despite the success of that program, Koch's third term began badly. In January 1986, a scheme to defraud the city's Parking Violations Bureau became public. The Queens Democratic Party boss Donald Manes and his Bronx counterpart Stanley Friedman had created a company that immediately and inexplicably won a lucrative contract with the bureau. Manes committed suicide that year, and Friedman was convicted on federal bribery charges. And while Koch was not personally implicated, he considered both men friends and had initially come to their public defense. He had won his first election running against the "clubhouse" represented by Abe Beame, but this was clubhouse corruption at its worst. The scandal shook the mayor so badly, he later claimed, that he considered suicide himself.

The year 1986 ended for Koch as badly as it had begun. One Saturday night in December, a group of white teenagers in Howard Beach, Queens, attacked three black men whose car had broken down nearby. They chased one man onto a highway, where he was hit by a car and killed.

Koch had alienated black leaders from the start. He had attacked the politicized administrators of federal anti-poverty money as "poverty pimps" and stood openly against affirmative action programs. He had been quoted musing that "the black community is very anti-Semitic" and "whites are basically anti-black." In his first term, he had closed an under-used Harlem hospital over the vocal protests of black leaders.

But in his first two races, Koch had proven popular among black voters, and in the 1985 Democratic primary he won about as many black votes as a black rival. The Howard Beach killing helped set the stage for New York's first black mayor, David Dinkins, to defeat Koch in the 1989 Democratic primary on a platform of racial reconciliation.

After twelve years as mayor of New York, Koch had nowhere to go. His run for governor in 1982 had foundered when he was quoted in Playboy disparaging farmers and suburbanites. His mantle in New York City politics, and the coalition of Jewish and white catholic voters who had kept him in office was inherited by Republican politicians – first Rudolph Giuliani, whom Koch crossed party lines to endorse in 1993, then Michael Bloomberg, for whom he was a stalwart ally.

But despite battling his successors, first Dinkins, and then Giuliani (Koch published a collection of newspaper columns titled: "Giuliani: Nasty Man" in 1999), he remained a vital figure in New York's political scene. He spent the 1990s repairing his relations with black leaders like the Reverend Al Sharpton and he became a nearly unavoidable presence in New York's print and broadcast media. From 1997 to 1999 he served as "judge" on the television show "People's Court."

Mayor Michael Bloomberg named a bridge to Queens after him, a choice he appreciated.

"There are other bridges that are more beautiful, like the GW or the Verrazano, but this more suits my personality cause it's a workhorse bridge," he told WNYC. "I mean, it's always busy. It ain't beautiful but it is durable."

Koch spent his final as a partner at a pair of Midtown law firms, first Robinson Silverman Pearce Aronsohn & Berman and then Bryan Cave. His office wall, during that 2002 interview, was covered with medals he'd received from kings of Spain, Sweden, and the Netherlands and other royals. To his right were a scroll in Hebrew and English issued by the Jerusalem City Council declaring him "Guardian of Jerusalem."

And Koch's final political identity came from his intense support for Israel. He campaigned for George W. Bush in 2004, and endorsed President Obama in 2012 only after a personal appeal from the president on the sidelines of a United Nations gathering; he later criticized Obama's approach to the region anyway.

Koch leaves no children. He never married, and determinedly left his sexual preference publicly ambiguous. In the last of his many memoirs, published in 2000, Koch wrote his own epitaph: "He was fiercely proud of his Jewish faith. He fiercely defended the City of New York and he fiercely loved the people of the City of New York."

"For most people in New York, Koch is the mayor," New York University Professor Mitchell Moss said back in 2002. "Rudy may be 'America's mayor,' but Koch will always be New York's mayor."

Correction: An earlier version of this article stated the incorrect year in which Koch won about as many black votes as a black rival.

This obituary was reported for the New York Sun, and is printed here with the permission of its editor.

It always comes down to the “unknown substances.” And a couple of cherries.

WASHINGTON — Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has a message for all you bourbon aficionados out there: Put it in a Manhattan, or you're doing it wrong.

In a wide-ranging interview with Yahoo News, the Kentucky Republican refused to take sides in the state's age-old bourbon brand war but did reveal he's partial to the classic Manhattan cocktail, which he called a "terrific drink."

On more serious topics, McConnell bluntly warned that immigration reform will need to include a strong guest worker program if Republicans are to support it and said he has "great skepticism" about the ability of new gun control laws to have any effect on attacks like last year's Sandy Hook massacre.

The full interview can be found here:

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There's no shame in Geraldo's political game. “I'll be here every Friday, until as such time as it's no longer legal.”

ICYMI, Geraldo Rivera is wondering out loud on his radio show if he should run for the U.S. Senate in 2014. Yes, everyone's favorite chair catcher wants to lead "a new vitalization of the Republican Party" along side Chris Christie in New Jersey, and he's not shy about how he'll keep himself on the conservative voter's radar until he decides:

FOX & FRIENDS HOST STEVE DOOCY: I've got a question for you: If you do run for Senate, though, you can't be on TV or the radio?

GERALDO: Well, you know, the Senate race is still a good year away, Steve. So I've got some time to hone a message, get around -- you know, ride my Harley to all parts of the Garden State.

STEVE: If you do run, you have to come back to the couch here to make your official announcement.

GERALDO: Well, I'll be here every Friday, until as such time as it's no longer legal.

Why not? It worked for Al Franken:

On his final Al Franken Show, he announced that he is running to reclaim the seat that Sen. Paul Wellstone ... Regular listeners (and I'm one of them) had expected this announcement for more than a year. There was a time, early in his move from Manhattan to Minnesota last January, when he was interviewing every progressive candidate in the Land of 10,000 Lakes. Lately, we knew Franken was serious about running because, when guests would start dissing Coleman on the air, he would change the subject. He knew that FCC laws forbid a declared candidate from having his own radio show.

Rep. Pete King shows up for an old friend facing charges.

A New York congressman quietly sat in on a friend's local trial in an alleged abuse of power, a source in Nassau County told BuzzFeed Friday.

King's spokesman confirmed that the veteran Long Island politician sat in the gallery at the trial of William Flanagan, a former second deputy police commission who is fighting conspiracy and misconduct charges in an alleged coverup of a friend's son's burglary.

"Bill Flanagan is a close personal friend and I worked very closely with him on Homeland Security issues when he was with the Nassau County Police Department," King spokesman Kevin Fogarty told BuzzFeed.

Prosecutors charge that Flanagan and two former colleagues sought (unsuccessfully) to help the young man avoid charges for stealing $11,000 from his Bellmore in 2009.

King worked as a Nassau County prosecutor before seeking public office.

There was always something fishy about it.

One of the photos that Iranian state TV released of the monkey that allegedly went to space and came back alive.

The Times of London reported Friday that Iran's claim to have successfully shot a clearly terrified monkey into space — and of having retrieved the monkey alive — are likely false.

The Times notes that the monkey that was trotted out at the post-launch press conference was "manifestly a different creature" than the one pictured in the photos released right after the alleged flight. Plus, the flight was never televised on state TV, and videos released later of the rocket "appear unconvincing."

The likely explanations are either that the original monkey died during its flight and Iran didn't want to admit it, or that the flight never happened at all.

Space experts cast doubt on Iran's claims in interviews with BuzzFeed earlier this week and floated the idea that the incident was simply a cover for missile testing.

"It's possible they're lying about it. It would be kind of a bold lie to make," said James Oberg, a retired rocket scientist and NBC News space consultant.

Clinton set a new record for travel for a Secretary of State. Friday is her last day at the State Department.

South Korea

Image by Pool / Getty Images

Croatia

Image by POOL / Reuters

Bulgaria

Image by POOL / Reuters

Cambodia

Image by Getty / Getty Images

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He did a “fine job,” say Press Secretary Jay Carney.

WASHINGTON — White House Press Secretary Jay Carney blasted some Republican Senators for the way they questioned Chuck Hagel, President Barack Obama's nominee for Secretary of Defense, Thursday.

"The news clips that have dominated TV reporting on this...largely represent badgering by questioners over issues like why did you disagree with me over Iraq?" he told reporters Friday at the White House.

Carney said Hagel did a "fine job," adding ""he conducted himself appropriately and well," under questioning.

Carney also expressed surprise that they devoted so few questions to the war in Afghanistan, invoking Sen. John McCain's infamous comment about keeping U.S. troops in Iraq for 100 years, adding "instead they wanted to relitigate the past."

Hagel's performance was widely panned by the political class, with multiple stumbles and a dour and passive demeanor that displeased even some supporters of his nomination.

Long live political coverage at CNN. How Jeff Zucker's “out with the old, in with the new” strategy could remake the way the network covers the circus.

In just a few days, Jeff Zucker's CNN announced five major personnel changes and saw rumors of more to come spreading across the internet. All the excitement made one thing very clear: ZNN will not be the place for politics.

Longtime contributors James Carville and Mary Matalin are gone, supposedly for technical reasons; Erick Erickson is headed for a better platform at Fox News; and CNN regulars Donna Brazile and Roland Martin are said to be on the chopping block.

Politico's Dylan Byers highlights the new regime's move away from the Beltway:

"The changes are part of Zucker's larger effort to transform CNN from an old, tired, 24-hour breaking news channel into an entertaining, personality-driven network that no longer restricts the definition of news ... meaning more sports, more entertainment, more human interest stories — and, at times, less politics."

Zucker's success during the Today show's glory days always hinted at certain disappointment for political junkies wishing that the new CNN would provide some kind of alternative to the fun but partisan choices at Fox News and MSNBC.

Well, less politics doesn't mean no politics, and in CNN's case it could just mean different politics.

Make a game out of politics.

Pit one judgy, all-knowing host with supreme power over scoring against a quartet of opinionated camera-ready scribes just champing at the bit to test their political smarts and well-honed Twitter wit in front of the cameras. Limit play to four rounds, and give that host a mute button. What do you get? Well, you get a political version of ESPN's legendary sports game show Around the Horn. So what? (h/t: Chris Cillizza)

Now, for the core cast...

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