While the chattering class is waiting for the Newt Gingrich bubble to burst, the Daily Beast’s Michael Medved says he could be more viable than expected. Gingrich’s presumed weaknesses could end up being strengths. For example, his moderate immigration stance serves to draw a contrast with Mitt Romney’s flip-flops on the issue. And his struggle with marital fidelity “resembles a bigger slice of the public that hopes to overcome problematic pasts for wholesome fresh starts.” Finally, while both Gingrich and Romney have changed positions over time, “Newt’s flip-flops look like pragmatism in service of governance, while Mitt’s look like opportunism in pursuit of votes.” 

As coverage shifts from the Penn State scandal to Syracuse molestation charges, pundits will be looking for a new Paterno-esque villain to aim outrage at. Deadspin’s Tom Scocca has a suggestion: “So far, if there’s a Joe Paterno in [this] case ... it would seem to be ESPN.” The first alleged victim told his story to the sports network eight years ago—and the network did nothing about it. Why suddenly report it now? Scocca is cynical: “The network was beaten badly on covering the Penn State scandal, and here it had another potential abuse story gathering dust.” 

Are occupiers the new obstructionists? That’s what conservative columnist Marc Thiessen says in today’s Washington Post column, blaming the movement’s ideological stubbornness for the failure of the deficit-reduction supercommittee. While liberals like to cast antitax crusader Grover Norquist as the villain of the congressional negotiations, in reality Republicans showed they were willing to part from “no new taxes” orthodoxy to get a deal. Democrats, on the other hand, were obsessed with raising taxes on the rich—a key tenant of the Occupy belief system. If you’re looking for the real enemies of compromise, “look no further than the encampments of Zuccotti Park.” 

If your local Occupy protest is looking a bit weary, here’s some news to get them rearing: in July 2008, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson met with a group of elite hedge-fund managers and outlined for them a scenario in which the government placed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in conservatorship—material nonpublic information that the hedge funds could then use to their advantage. “I think he was downright pathological in giving inside information to his old Wall Street buddies,” writes Reuters’s Felix Salmon, noting an earlier meeting in June 2008 between Paulson and the Goldman Sachs board. “Paulson was giving inside tips to Wall Street in general, and to Goldman types in particular: exactly the kind of behavior that ‘Government Sachs’ conspiracy theorists have been speculating about for years. Turns out, they were right.”

The craziness of the GOP primary is driving center-right pundits to fits. Last week former Bush speechwriter David Frum diagnosed the party as having “lost touch with reality,” and now Foreign Policy blogger Daniel Drezner came out as a “RINO.” “There's good, solid partisanship—a vital necessity in this country—and then there's unadulterated horseshit. Too much of the GOP's rhetoric on Obama reads like the latter to me.” New York’s Jonathan Chait watches columnist Michael Gerson squirm. “He’s a useful stand-in for the mindset of Republicans who share a loyalty to their party but lack a deep attachment to its right-wing platform. When confronted with a relatively straightforward description of the party’s agenda, he instinctively recoils—not at the agenda, but at the description itself.”

The anniversary of Wikileaks’s cable dump last year is spawning reflections of how the awkward revelations changed the game of international diplomacy. In the journal Democracy, Jonathan Spalter argues that they were a much-needed chance to rethink the expansive secrecy of U.S. relations. “It has become one of the great ironies of our time that while the United States has one of the most open societies in the world, its diplomatic activities and the technology infrastructure that support them still remain among the world’s most secretive and siloed.” Spalter says the secrecy makes the U.S. government increasingly out of touch with citizens who are used to an open-source world.

With Germany driving the European debt crisis to the brink by refusing to bail out Greece, New York Times columnist Joe Nocera makes his case for amoral pragmatism when it comes to international fiscal policy. Germans have hesitated to help Greece because they believe the fiscally reckless country needs to learn a lesson—even though a bailout would be mutually beneficial. In essence, Germans are “allowing their sense of righteousness to get in the way of sensible policy.” No, it’s not fair to Germany, “but if we ... can’t stop obsessing about what is fair, we’re never going to get out of our current messes. The only thing that should matter is what works.”