Portraits of British prime ministers are two a penny over at the National Portrait Gallery. Of course they are. This institution is all about the creation of pleasing sets of this and that, and this is one of the most important sets in the great game that we used to fondly call The Establishment.

These are the (all but one) men who have helped to make this country what it is, for better or for worse, beginning with Robert Walpole, our first Prime Minister, who is depicted, standing, by Sir Godfrey Kneller in about 1710, a Whig in a wig, and a splendid velvet coat, cheeks rouged, posturing, self-preening. Pompously gay as they come. Or perhaps not.

Most of the major portraits are to be found on the first and second floors of the old gallery - Grey, Disraeli, Gladstone, Churchill.... These are all formal acts of portraiture, officially sanctioned and paid for, here to set off dignity, decorum, clout. Many of them, face-forward or in profile, are close to life size, and they hang in such a way that we often have to lift our heads up slightly in acts of - perhaps rather unwilling - homage. All this is perfectly calculated, these portraits and their staging here, as if in the decorous solemnity of a country house that just happens to have snuck in behind the boisterous blare of Trafalgar Square, just as Van Dyke's great portraits of the Stuarts - soon-to-be-headless Charles, for example, rampant on a horse to lift him up and out of his own miserable stature - or Holbein's, of the Tudors - massy, spread-legged Henry - were calculated to show off the men of steel upon whom, in the end, we could depend.

China's Defense Ministry on Friday issued a strongly worded statement criticizing Japan's plans to increase defense spending, accusing Tokyo of turning up the temperature on regional tensions.

Amid ongoing territorial tensions between Beijing and Tokyo in the East China Sea, Japan this week announced a five-year defense plan that has attracted an uncharacteristically outspoken response from China.

China "resolutely opposes" the five-year defense plan adopted by Japan on Tuesday, Defense Ministry spokesman Geng Yansheng said in a statement posted on the ministry's website.

Tokyo is attempting to sell a so-called "proactive pacifism" under the pretext of safeguarding national security, Geng said. Japan "continues to deny its history of World War II aggression, challenge the post-war order, and harm the feelings of the people of those victimized nations," he said.

Israeli occupation authorities opened up dams to the east of Gaza city on late Friday.

Eyewitnesses said many residential areas and farming land east of Gaza city were flooded when the Israeli authorities opened up the dams.

The residents of the area appealed to the concerned authorities to intervene before sewage water completely submerge their properties.

Earlier on Friday, Chairman of Government's Disaster Response Committee Yasser Shanti said the Israeli authorities opened up dams just to the east of the border with the Gaza Strip earlier in the day.

As the end of the year approaches, President Barack Obama is suffering the worst approval rating at this point in a two-term presidency since the Nixon administration.

According to a new Washington Post/ABC News poll, Obama's approval rating stands at 43 percent, an 11-point drop from the same point last year. The poll found that 55 percent of Americans disapprove of the president's performance, a sharp rise compared to 42 percent last year.

What's more, Obama's approval rating is even lower than President George W. Bush's at this point in his presidency. By the end of Bush's fifth year in office, roughly 47 percent of Americans approved of his performance, four points more than Obama currently enjoys. Of all post-World War II presidents, only President Richard Nixon faced worse numbers at this point in his second term - a brutal 29 percent thanks to the damaging Watergate scandal.

We're Number One... In Obliterating Wedding Parties

The headline -- "Bride and Boom!" -- was spectacular, if you think killing people in distant lands is a blast and a half. Of course, you have to imagine that smirk line in giant black letters with a monstrous exclamation point covering most of the bottom third of the front page of the Murdoch-owned New York Post. The reference was to a caravan of vehicles on its way to or from a wedding in Yemen that was eviscerated, evidently by a U.S. drone via one of those "surgical" strikes of which Washington is so proud. As one report put it, "Scorched vehicles and body parts were left scattered on the road."

It goes without saying that such a headline could only be applied to assumedly dangerous foreigners -- "terror" or "al-Qaeda suspects" -- in distant lands whose deaths carry a certain quotient of weirdness and even amusement with them. Try to imagine the equivalent for the Newtown massacre the day after Adam Lanza broke into Sandy Hook Elementary School and began killing children and teachers. Since even the New York Post wouldn't do such a thing, let's posit that the Yemen Post did, that playing off the phrase "head of the class," their headline was: "Dead of the Class!" (with that same giant exclamation point). It would be sacrilege. The media would descend. The tastelessness of Arabs would be denounced all the way up to the White House. You'd hear about the callousness of foreigners for days.

And were a wedding party to be obliterated on a highway anywhere in America on the way to, say, a rehearsal dinner, whatever the cause, it would be a 24/7 tragedy. Our lives would be filled with news of it. Count on that.

But a bunch of Arabs in a country few in the U.S. had ever heard of before we started sending in the drones? No such luck, so if you're a Murdoch tabloid, it's open season, no consequences guaranteed. As it happens, "Bride and Boom!" isn't even an original. It turns out to be a stock Post headline. Google it and you'll find that, since 9/11, the paper has used it at least twice before last week, and never for the good guys: once in 2005, for "the first bomb-making husband and wife," two Palestinian newlyweds arrested by the Israelis; and once in 2007, for a story about a "bride," decked out in a "princess-style wedding gown," with her "groom." Their car was stopped at a checkpoint in Iraq by our Iraqis, and both of them turned out to be male "terrorists" in a "nutty nuptial party." Ba-boom!

A fast-moving corruption inquiry into the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan widened Saturday with the arrests of two sons of ministers, the general manager of state-owned Halkbank, and 13 others in connection with allegations of corruption and bribery.

The arrests came a day after 49 people, including the mayor of an Istanbul district, were referred to court for arrest. The suspects are accused of various corruption charges including bribery, gold smuggling and violating zoning laws.

The government has responded with its own counterstroke, dismissing 14 more high-ranking police officials as it continues to purge the state of those it believes are pushing the investigation, which Mr. Erdogan and his top party officials consider a plot.

President Vladimir Putin said Thursday that National Security Agency surveillance is necessary to fight terrorism, but added that the U.S. government must "limit the appetite" of the agency with a clear set of ground rules.

Putin's comment was surprising support for President Barack Obama's administration, which has faced massive criticism over the sweeping U.S. electronic espionage program.

The Russian leader was speaking at his tightly choreographed annual press conference, a televised affair that stretched on for just over four hours and attracted hundreds of journalists from Russia's far-flung regions to a giant hall in a central Moscow business center.

The Kremlin sees the event as key in burnishing Putin's father-of-the nation image. Some journalists held signs - or in one case a stuffed polar bear mascot for the Winter Games in Sochi - in an effort to get called on for a question that could get special attention for their region.

Putin, a 16-year KGB veteran and the former chief of Russia's main espionage agency, said that while the NSA program "isn't a cause for joy, it's not a cause for repentance either" because it is needed to fight terrorism.

He argued that it's necessary to monitor large numbers of people to expose terrorist contacts. But "on political level, it's necessary to limit the appetite of special services with certain rules," he said.

The National Security Agency arranged a clandestine US$10 million contract with computer security power RSA that allowed the spy agency to embed encryption software it could use to infiltrate the company's widely used products, Reuters reported.

Revelations provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and first reported in September showed that the NSA created and perpetuated a corruptible formula that was ultimately a "back door" into encryption products.

Reuters later reported RSA became the lead distributor of the formula, installing it into a software tool known as BSAFE that is widely used to boost security in personal computers and other products.

Unknown then was the $10 million deal that set the NSA's formula as the default method for the security measure - in which random numbers are generated on a key for access to a product - in BSAFE, according to Reuters' sources. Though the sum of money for the deal seems low, it represented over a third of revenue the relevant division at RSA had made the previous year, according to security filings.

Republicans don't give a rat's ass about working-class Americans, but they want you to think they do.

During an appearance on MSNBC's Morning Joe today, Wisconsin Congressman Sean Duffy told host Joe Scarborough that Republicans need to change their messaging so they can connect to people "trying to move up the economic ladder."

"We have to actually take our message to where people are at," Duffy said. "We have moms that can't pay the utility bill, dads who can't pay the mortgage. How does our conservative ideology and philosophy actually help lift them out of the place that they are today and move them up the economic ladder? ...We don't do a good job of presenting that message, and we have to change how we're doing it."

This is the core of the problem Republicans face - there is nothing in the Republican Party's platform that actually helps people move up the economic ladder. The Republican Party's platform only helps you when you're already rich, so messaging doesn't mean anything when your policies are designed to screw working Americans and enrich the billionaires.

The Republican Party's philosophy really just boils down to two basic ideas: tax cuts for the rich and social safety net cuts for everyone else. None of these ideas do anything to help America's working class. In fact, they actively make it harder for working people to, as Congressman Duffy put it, "move up the economic ladder."

Let's start out with taxes. The idea that cutting taxes for rich somehow helps everyone has become a religion of sorts for many people on the right. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush put cutting taxes for rich people at the center of their agendas, and to this day many people in the conservative movement still believe that cutting taxes for rich people is the only way to grow the economy and build a middle-class. Those conservatives have even repeated this lie so often that a surprising number of everyday Americans believe the same thing about tax breaks for rich people.

But Republican tax breaks for the rich don't help everyday people - they hurt them.

The conservative American attorney who was awarded a partial victory against the United States National Security Agency in federal court on Monday claims that the NSA began harassing him since he filed suit.

In a memorandum released on Monday by US District Court Judge Richard Leon, lawyer Larry Klayman was told he could have an injunction against the NSA's bulk telephone data collection program pending the results of a federal appeal.

Klayman had sued the NSA and the US government at-large within hours of news breaking in early June that the government had compelled major telecommunications company Verizon and presumably others for the metadata - or basic call records - pertaining to millions of Americans on a regular basis.

Judge Leon wrote in his decision that during a November 18 preliminary injunction hearing, he asked Klayman if he or any of his co-plaintiffs had any "basis to believe that the NSA has done any queries" involving their phone numbers.

"I think they are messing with me," Klayman told the court, according to Judge Leon's memorandum from Monday.

Klayman told the court that "he and his clients had received inexplicable text message and emails, not to mention a disk containing a spyware program," Leon wrote (page 39 below).