The New York Times reports: The two young men had woefully little in common: one was a wealthy Mormon from Michigan, the other a middle-class Jew from Israel.

But in 1976, the lives of Mitt Romney and Benjamin Netanyahu intersected, briefly but indelibly, in the 16th-floor offices of the Boston Consulting Group, where both had been recruited as corporate advisers. At the most formative time of their careers, they sized each other up during the firm’s weekly brainstorming sessions, absorbing the same profoundly analytical view of the world.

That shared experience decades ago led to a warm friendship, little known to outsiders, that is now rich with political intrigue. Mr. Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, is making the case for military action against Iran as Mr. Romney, the likely Republican presidential nominee, is attacking the Obama administration for not supporting Mr. Netanyahu more robustly.

The relationship between Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Romney — nurtured over meals in Boston, New York and Jerusalem, strengthened by a network of mutual friends and heightened by their conservative ideologies — has resulted in an unusually frank exchange of advice and insights on topics like politics, economics and the Middle East.

When Mr. Romney was the governor of Massachusetts, Mr. Netanyahu offered him firsthand pointers on how to shrink the size of government. When Mr. Netanyahu wanted to encourage pension funds to divest from businesses tied to Iran, Mr. Romney counseled him on which American officials to meet with. And when Mr. Romney first ran for president, Mr. Netanyahu presciently asked him whether he thought Newt Gingrich would ever jump into the race.

Only a few weeks ago, on Super Tuesday, Mr. Netanyahu delivered a personal briefing by telephone to Mr. Romney about the situation in Iran.

“We can almost speak in shorthand,” Mr. Romney said in an interview. “We share common experiences and have a perspective and underpinning which is similar.”

Mr. Netanyahu attributed their “easy communication” to what he called “B.C.G.’s intellectually rigorous boot camp.”

Michael Moran writes: Through the patriotic haze of an American political campaign year, it is tempting to believe our own hooey.

America is exceptional and not in decline, Barack Obama insisted in his most recent State of the Union address. Mitt Romney, his leading GOP rival, insists against the opinion of most economists that the US economy can achieve average annual growth of 4 percent a year and anyone who says otherwise is a defeatist.

In fact, both are dead wrong. Gravity does affect the US just like any other nation, and 4 percent average annual growth for a mature economy is a pipedream.

US power — measured in terms of its relative economic importance and its diplomatic influence — is slipping all over the planet. US influence was written off as irrelevant in Europe’s debt crisis, and is being chased out of the Middle East by popular consent and unhappy results on the Iraqi and Afghan battlefields. In Latin America, America’s “backyard,” Washington’s writ increasingly is displaced by Brazil, just as it has been checked by Russia in the post-Soviet “near abroad.”

The US is slipping in Asia, too, losing its position as the most important trading partner with Asian nations (we lost Australia, Japan, India and South Korea to China in that category since the Great Recession).

Yet, for all this, we insist on our exceptionally delusional self-image. With minor tweaks, the US continues to approach the world with the same basic assumption under Obama that it did under his notoriously blinkered predecessor: the belief that, in the end, Washington’s rule is law, and that a world ordered to benefit the United States will, by definition, benefit humanity. It is downright anti-American to think otherwise.

Rick Santorum, who wrested some momentum from Mitt Romney this week by winning primary contests in Colorado, Minnesota, and Missouri, likes to cast himself as something of an expert on Iran, which has arguably become the top foreign-policy issue in the campaign. From making clear that he’d take care of Iran’s nuclear problem if Tehran refuses to do so to warning of jihadists lurking in the Gulf of Mexico — he’s not shy about his obsession with the Iranian threat, or his hawkish stance.

In a November radio ad, for example, the Republican presidential contender asserted that he was the only GOP candidate discussing the Iranian threat. “Even Newt Gingrich said ‘no one has done more than Santorum to alert America to the dangers posed by Iran,'” the narrator crowed. Santorum’s campaign website boasts that he “has recognized the looming threat of Iran’s nuclear ambitions for nearly a decade — standing tall against both Republicans and Democrats who have discounted and dismissed the reality that this radical theocracy is intent on destroying Israel and Western civilization.” Forget “nearly a decade” — in Iowa, he told voters, “I spent ten years focused like a laser beam when I was in the Senate on the country of Iran.”

There may be no better window into Santorum’s views on Iran than his writings as a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC) — a position he held between losing his Pennsylvania Senate seat in 2006 and entering the presidential race in June 2011. He joined the Washington, D.C.-based think tank, which aims to apply the “Judeo-Christian moral tradition to critical issues of public policy,” back in 2007 to establish and direct the “America’s Enemies” program — an initiative that, unlike America’s adversaries, folded after Santorum’s departure, according to the EPPC. And, for Santorum, Iran was Public Enemy No. 1. “I know that I’m not the foremost scholar in the world, but I can offer a lot of ideas,” he told National Review as he settled in at the think tank.

So, just what were those ideas, and how do they compare to Santorum’s rhetoric on the campaign trail today? Under the disquieting rubric “The Gathering Storm,” Santorum penned roughly 40 articles on Iran during his EPPC stint, scrupulously aggregating news and commentary to paint a picture of the multidimensional Iranian threat facing the United States. Here’s a look at some of what Santorum had to say on the subject, in between posts on Latin American Regression, Extradition, and Alligators and Religious Freedom: A Pluralist Street with No Address in Saudi Arabia.

Gary Kamiya writes: The Republican strategy — loudly proclaiming one’s Christian faith, while attacking Obama as an agent of secular evil, if not actually Satan himself – is right out of the Fox News playbook. As the voice of the American far right, the ultimate undeclared super-duper-GOP-PAC, Fox News has embraced the cracked “birther” movement and generally done everything within its latitudinous definition of “fair and balanced” to portray Obama as a fake-Christian, foreign-born, America-hating Muslim. (Fox’s “War on Christmas” rants appear with such clockwork regularity at Christmastime that I use them as reminders to open my Advent Calendar.)

The only GOP candidate who has not openly pursued this strategy is the front-runner, Mitt Romney. Romney has avoided the subject because as a Mormon, his own Christian credentials are suspect. But as the ultimate political panderer and opportunist, he would play the Christian card if he could. Like all the GOP candidates, Romney has tried to paint Obama as an alien Other, elite, mysterious, malevolent – in a word, slightly satanic. And also like them, Romney presents his free-market, anti-government ideology as more “American,” and by implication more “Christian,” than Obama’s.

As someone who has spent many happy hours studying Christian theology, from Origen to Hans Kung, as well as modern scholarship about Jesus, I supposed I should be pleased by this eruption of holy fervor among the Republican candidates for the highest office in the land. But there’s just one little problem.

Jesus would have been appalled by the whole pack of them.

We do not know very much about the historical Jesus. But everything we know indicates that the carpenter from Galilee would not have been pleased to learn that this pack of coldhearted, sanctimonious, wealth-exalting politicians were claiming to be his followers.

I’m not saying that Jesus would have been a Democrat. Anyone who pretends to find support for specific political policies or ideologies in the Bible is delusional. Scholars cannot agree if Jesus was a social revolutionary, a tortured mystic, or something altogether different. Even what Jesus himself believed about the most essential aspects of what was to become “Christianity’ – a religion founded not by him, but by his disciple Paul of Tarsus — is unclear. As leading biblical scholar Bart Ehrman noted in “Jesus, Interrupted,” some of the most important Christian doctrines, including the divinity of Christ, the Trinity and the concept of heaven and hell, were not held by Jesus himself: They were added later, when the church transformed itself into a new religion rather than a Jewish sect.

Ehrman told me that the authors of the four Gospels portray Jesus in such contradictory ways that there is no intellectually honest way to reconcile them. Mark, for example, depicts Jesus as doubting and despairing on the way to the cross, while Luke portrays him as calm. Ehrman argues that such contradictory accounts can only be reconciled by creating, in effect, a bogus “fifth Gospel” that does not exist.

But having said all that, we still have the evidence of the Bible itself. And one does not need to believe in the infallibility of that document to see that the Jesus who is depicted in it was implacably opposed to authoritarianism, warmongering, contempt for the poor, exaltation of wealth, conformity, and sanctimoniousness – in short, everything the contemporary Republican Party stands for.

NBC reports Newt Gingrich’s leading backer, Sheldon Adelson, speaking in Israel in 2010, said:

I am not Israeli, the uniform that I wore in the military unfortunately was not an Israeli uniform, it was an American uniform, although my wife was in the IDF, and one of my daughters was in the IDF, and my two little boys — our two little boys one of whom will be bar mitzvahed tomorrow… hopefully he’ll come back [to Israel], his hobby is shooting and he’ll come back and be a sniper for the IDF.

“All we care about is being good Zionists, being good citizens of Israel, because even though I am not Israeli born, Israel is in my heart,” he said toward the end of his talk.

Sig Rogich, a veteran Republican operative who serves as Adelson’s government affairs consultant, when asked about Adelson’s comments said: “No one could possibly ever think that he is anything but a loyal American. He’s shown that time and time again.”
(H/t Ali Abunimah)

The New York Times reports: Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire casino executive keeping Newt Gingrich’s presidential hopes alive, has relayed assurances to Mitt Romney that he will provide even more generous support to his candidacy if he becomes the Republican nominee, several associates said in interviews here.

The signals from Mr. Adelson, whose politics are shaped in large part by his support for Israel, reflect what the associates said was his deep investment in defeating President Obama and his willingness to play a more prominent role in the Republican Party and conservative causes.

The assurances have been conveyed in response to a highly delicate campaign by Mr. Romney and his top Jewish financial supporters to dissuade Mr. Adelson from adding to the $10 million that he and his wife have given to a pro-Gingrich “super PAC,” Winning Our Future, that has been tearing into Mr. Romney through television advertising.

Several people who have spoken with Mr. Adelson over the past two weeks said he would most likely continue to help the group as long as Mr. Gingrich remained in the race. But, they said, he is concerned that additional deep-pocketed donors have not joined him. And, they said, his affection for and loyalty to Mr. Gingrich, who met with him here on Friday, have not blinded him to the reality that the nominating contest is tilting in Mr. Romney’s favor.

“Sheldon is committed to keeping him in the race as long as he wants to stay in,” said Fred Zeidman, a top fund-raiser for Mr. Romney and a longtime friend of Mr. Adelson. “But any time that Newt decides to get out of the race, he would devote his energy and money to the overriding issue, which is beating Barack Obama.”

Underscoring Mr. Adelson’s devotion to that larger cause, he was among the conservative political financiers on hand last weekend for the twice-yearly gathering of the billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch near Palm Springs, Calif., where the Kochs and their like-minded colleagues discussed their efforts to ensure Mr. Obama’s defeat.

Max Fisher writes: There are a number of very good reasons that the U.S. should want to keep Iran from getting a nuclear bomb: it would destabilize the already unstable Middle East, give Iran greater cover for adventurism abroad, provoke Israel and possibly Saudi Arabia, and increase the possibility of nuclear war. But one of those reasons is not, as Newt Gingrich put it at a recent event in central Florida, “If Iranians get nuclear weapons, they don’t have to fire a missile. They can just drive a boat into Jacksonville. Drive a boat into New York harbor.”

Iran is not going to park a nuclear-armed boat at the ports of Jacksonville, New York, or any other American city. There are a number of reasons why — I explain a few of them below — but what’s more important than the wrongness of Gingrich’s comment is the dangerous trend it represents.

Republican presidential candidates have been fighting to outdo one another on who can build Iran up as the scariest and most immediate threat. Mitt Romney named it the greatest threat since the Soviet Union, Herman Cain called for outright regime change, Michele Bachmann suggested they were dead set on sparking “worldwife nuclear war.” The politics of this are obvious and easy; the scarier you make Iran, the more likely voters are to prefer your confrontational rhetoric. People respond to fear, and it’s easier to understand “Iran is evil” than the complexities of why an isolated Iranian regime might seek nuclear capability and how they would use it. But this increasingly outlandish fear-mongering is dangerous in itself.

Imagine you’re a high-level Iranian official. All your adult life the only system you’ve known is Iran’s, which is nominally quasi-democratic but strictly authoritarian, a system where everybody gets in line behind the Supreme Leader, whose bidding is law. You hear reports that a prominent American official named Newt Gingrich, whom your advisers tell you could become the next American president, is playing up the threat you pose to the U.S. and openly contemplating a preemptive war against you. Do you respond by shrugging off his comments as meaningless campaign rhetoric that would probably not translate into policy, or do you start thinking about how to defend your country from this apparently erratic threat?

The Republican primary field’s exaggeration of the Iranian threat might make for good politics, but it misleads both Iranian leaders as well as U.S. voters, making both of them more likely to make bad choices. The U.S.-Iran relationship is complicated and dangerous enough without Gingrich or others disseminating bad information. People tend to behave irrationally and aggressively when they believe they are cornered. This is the situation that some Republicans are trying to portray, with violence as our only option. Iranian leaders may be increasingly perceiving that they are cornered as well (with plenty of help from whomever is killing those Iranian scientists), and according to a U.S. intelligence report, may see attacking the U.S. directly as an increasingly attractive defensive option. There’s a lot more than just campaign trail alarmism at play here, but with Gingrich and Romney doing seemingly whatever they can to hype the danger and terrify people, it certainly isn’t helping.

Fisher goes on to enumerate the reasons why Iran would not contemplate using a nuclear weapon against the United States. Neither, for similar reasons would it be likely to consider using nuclear weapons offensively against anyone else.

ABC News reports: The casino company run by the principal financial backer of Newt Gingrich’s presidential bid, Sheldon Adelson, has been under criminal investigation for the last year by the Department of Justice and the Securities Exchange Commission for alleged bribery of foreign officials, according to corporate documents.

In a separate civil lawsuit, a former executive of the company has alleged that Adelson ordered him to keep quiet about sensitive issues at the Sands casinos on the Chinese island of Macau, including the casinos’ alleged “involvement with Chinese organized crime groups, known as Triads, connected to the junket business.” The triads — Chinese organized crime syndicates — are allegedly involved in organizing high stakes gambling junkets for wealthy Chinese travelers.

In its filings with the SEC, Adelson’s company says it became aware of the investigation in February 2011 when it received a subpoena from the SEC requesting “documents relating to its compliance with the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.” The company said it “intends to cooperate with the investigation,” which it said may have been triggered by the allegations in the lawsuit by Steven C. Jacobs, a former Sands executive who says he helped run the Macau operation. The federal investigation was first reported last year by Las Vegas newspapers and the financial press.

In his regular op-ed, Fidel Castro writes:

I must note that, going by what everyone is saying, that the selection of a Republican candidate to aspire to the presidency of this globalized and far-reaching empire is, in its turn – I am serious – the greatest competition of idiocy and ignorance that I have ever heard. As I have things to do, I cannot devote any time to the subject. I already knew it would be like that.

Earlier this month Castro lamented that there isn’t a “robot capable of governing the United States and preventing a war which would put an end to human life.” Were the situation otherwise, he wrote:

I am sure that 90% of U.S. citizens registered, especially Latinos, Blacks and a growing number of those in the middle class, the impoverished, would vote for the robot.

Matthew Rothschild writes: Newt Gingrich must know he’s on to something. After being criticized as racist for calling Barack Obama the “food stamp President,” Gingrich kept on calling him that Saturday night after winning the South Carolina primary.

Gingrich said that though some of the elite media don’t like to hear it, “President Obama is the most effective food stamp President in American history.”

And he repeated the “food stamp” term two more times, including when he said: “If you want your children to have a life of dependency and food stamps, you have a candidate. It’s Barack Obama.”

Gingrich understands that this coded language helped him enormously in South Carolina, so he’s not discarding it. He’s doubling down on it.

And he’s throwing in hints of anti-Semitism along the way.

“The centerpiece of this campaign is American exceptionalism versus the radicalism of Saul Alinsky,” he said. And he repeated Saul Alinsky’s name two more times.

Now, not many people listening to that speech knew who Saul Alinsky was. (He was a community organizer who wrote several books, including Rules for Radicals.) But what they could easily figure out was that he’s some Jewish guy, someone not “American” like they are.

Justin Elliot reports: A significant portion of the seed money that created Mitt Romney’s private equity firm, Bain Capital, was provided by wealthy oligarchs from El Salvador, including members of a family with a relative who allegedly financed rightist groups that used death squads during the country’s bloody civil war in the 1980s

Bain, the source of Romney’s fabulous personal wealth, has been the subject of recent attacks in the Republican primary over allegations that Romney and the firm behaved like, in Rick Perry’s words, “vulture capitalists.”One TV spot denounced Romney for relying on “foreign seed money from Latin America” but did not say where the money came from. In fact, Romney recruited as investors wealthy Central Americans who were seeking a safe haven for their capital during a tumultuous and violent period in the region.

Like so much about Bain, which is known for secrecy and has been dubbed a “black box,” all the names of the investors who put up the money for the initial fund in 1984 are not known. Much of what we do know was first reported by the Boston Globe in 1994 when Romney ran for U.S. Senate against Ted Kennedy.

In 1984, Romney had been tapped by his boss at Bain & Co, a consulting firm, to create a spin-off venture capital fund, Bain Capital.

A Costa Rica-born Bain official named Harry Strachan invited friends and former clients in Central America to a presentation about the fund with Romney in Miami. The group was impressed and “signed up for 20% of the fund,” according to Strachan’s memoir. That was about $6.5 million, according to the Globe. Bain partners themselves were putting up half the money, according to Strachan. Thus the Central American investors had contributed 40 percent of the outside capital.

Today’s Zaman reports: The Turkish Foreign Ministry on Tuesday slammed US presidential hopeful Rick Perry for his remarks in which he questioned Turkey’s NATO membership and called Turkish leaders “Islamic terrorists,” saying the statements are groundless and inappropriate.

The ministry said in a statement released on Tuesday that Turkey strongly condemns Perry’s remarks and said those who run as candidates for a position like the US presidency, which requires the utmost responsibility, are expected to have “more information about the world” and be more careful in their statements.

Perry, the governor of Texas, said in a debate with other Republican contenders in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, on Monday that Turkey was a US ally in the past, but not anymore. “Obviously when you have a country that is being ruled by what many would perceive to be Islamic terrorists, when you start seeing that type of activity against their own citizens, then, yes, not only is it time for us to have a conversation about whether or not they belong to be in NATO but it’s time for the United States, when we look at their foreign aid, to go to zero with it,” Perry claimed.

“Turkey became a NATO member when Mr. Governor was two years old,” the statement said in reference to Turkey’s becoming a NATO member in 1952. “It is one of the countries that has contributed much to the transatlantic alliance and will continue to be so. Turkey is among the countries that are on the front line in fighting terrorism. It holds the co-chairmanship of the Global Counterterrorism Forum [GCTF] with the US,” the statement further said in response to Perry.

In response to Perry’s accusations against Turkish leaders, the Foreign Ministry added that Turkish leaders are well-respected not only in the US, but in Turkey’s region and the world. Noting that Perry’s “unfortunate” opinions are not backed by Republican Party grassroots, which was revealed by weak support for him in recent polls, the statement said this shows the “common sense of the US voters.”

Paul Krugman writes: “And greed — you mark my words — will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the U.S.A.”

That’s how the fictional Gordon Gekko finished his famous “Greed is good” speech in the 1987 film “Wall Street.” In the movie, Gekko got his comeuppance. But in real life, Gekkoism triumphed, and policy based on the notion that greed is good is a major reason why income has grown so much more rapidly for the richest 1 percent than for the middle class.

Today, however, let’s focus on the rest of that sentence, which compares America to a corporation. This, too, is an idea that has been widely accepted. And it’s the main plank of Mitt Romney’s case that he should be president: In effect, he is asserting that what we need to fix our ailing economy is someone who has been successful in business.

In so doing, he has, of course, invited close scrutiny of his business career. And it turns out that there is at least a whiff of Gordon Gekko in his time at Bain Capital, a private equity firm; he was a buyer and seller of businesses, often to the detriment of their employees, rather than someone who ran companies for the long haul. (Also, when will he release his tax returns?) Nor has he helped his credibility by making untenable claims about his role as a “job creator.”

But there’s a deeper problem in the whole notion that what this nation needs is a successful businessman as president: America is not, in fact, a corporation. Making good economic policy isn’t at all like maximizing corporate profits. And businessmen — even great businessmen — do not, in general, have any special insights into what it takes to achieve economic recovery.

Why isn’t a national economy like a corporation? For one thing, there’s no simple bottom line. For another, the economy is vastly more complex than even the largest private company.