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RIYADH, Saudi Arabia–After a royal airport greeting, President Obama’s motorcade sped off to King Abdullah’s private farm, where the two are expected to have private meetings well into the night. The official diplomacy, however, was preceded by some brief and bland public remarks, marked primarily by the fact that Obama tried out a …

Well, sort of. This is perhaps the strongest sign yet that Republicans are reconsidering the wisdom of personal attacks on Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee. Or maybe, that Newt Gingrich is reconsidering the wisdom of sending out his every thought on Twitter.

My initial reaction was strong and direct — perhaps too strong and too

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President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor is not yet done with her first day of Senate courtesy calls and it’s already apparent that her visit has been tougher on Senate Republicans than it has been on her.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, and his members have gone out of the way …

I’m heading overseas for several weeks, into areas where blogging may not be possible or advisable. I’ll try to let you know where I am, and what I’m doing, when I get there. Meanwhile, Marty Peretz, the owner of The New Republic, offers his daily pearl, this time on the June 12 Iranian elections:

Anyway, it looks like Ahmadinejad will

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An update from me on the longest running battle for a U.S. Senate seat in 34 years.

Catherine Mayer, our Swampland correspondent in London, reports to us that they are at it again:

If there’s one lesson Robert Gibbs might draw from British politics, it’s that people doing his sort of job should guard against flamboyance. Tony Blair’s communications chief Alastair Campbell stepped back from a frontline press

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So that the timeline is clear:

On Monday, at about 11:30 a.m. EST, the U.S. State Department sent a warning to journalists traveling with President Obama, saying “journalists are expressly prohibited from leaving the hotel or engaging in any journalistic activities outside of coverage of the POTUS visit” during the upcoming visit to …

Salon’s Mark Benjamin, a former colleague who has been all over the Abu Ghraib story for years, gets a rather categorical denial from the Defense Department about the Daily Telegraph story last week, which alleged with minimal and apparently misconstrued evidence that the Pentagon has unreleased rape photos in its archives which …

Proving, once again, that politics tend to be personal. However, he does not back a federal law allowing it.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5jefmsqBG8&hl=en&fs=1]

(H/T our friends at C-SPAN)

UPDATE: Qorvis Communications, which represents the Saudi Government in the United States, emailed reporters Monday night with an statement saying the announcement of restrictions, which was sent from the State Department, is incorrect. The Qorvis email says that the Saudi Ambassador has said journalists can get visas and will be free to …

There’s a fair amount of twitching going on in the Middle East this week in advance of Barack Obama’s address to the Islamic world in Cairo on Thursday. Much of it has to do with the expectation that Obama will put some pressure on the Israelis to stop the expansion of illegal settlements on Palestinian territories. The Netanyahu …

Randall Terry, Operation Rescue:

George Tiller was a mass-murderer. We grieve for him that he did not have time to properly prepare his soul to face God. I am more concerned that the Obama Administration will use Tiller’s killing to intimidate pro-lifers into surrendering our most effective rhetoric and actions.

Father Frank Pavone, …

In the highly charged debate over abortion, nothing so stirs the moral ambiguities as the question of late abortion. As a pregnancy progresses closer and closer to viability–the point at which a fetus could survive outside the womb, generally thought to be around 24 weeks–even those who consider themselves pro-choice begin to have …