The difference is that mushrooms grow on manure and are useful while pundits are not useful.

Sever Plocker, infamous for other ravings, calls Netanyahu the loser. If Netanyahu continues as PM, as expected, then Plocker will turn out to be the loser! Plocker adds: "Likud –a tired party with a detached leader – was defeated". Hilarious! Replace Likud with Labor and the sentence makes sense! Plocker, as always, is delusional. Plocker and his comrades are the kind of people who fervently and sincerely believe that giving land, machine guns, rockets and helicopters to Yasser Arafat and to Osama bin Laden will produce... peace! Truly delusional! The People have just voted AGAINST the delusions of Oslo. Plocker is the "tired old" party that is on the way out!

his representation. He lost 11 seats. That is a loss and a major miscalculation. Can we trust him to decide what to do about Iran?

Frankly my dear, if this was my last name, I'd change it to something else: there are so many nice-sounding names in the phone book.

I AGREE WITH THE AUTHOR. I THINK THAT THE MIDDLE CLASS IS THE LARGEST PART/CATEGORY OF THE ISRAELI PEOPLE NOW. IT IS LOGIC THAT THE MIDDLE CLASS ALSO IS THE LARGEST PART OF THE ISRAELI ELECTORATE, WITH THE MOST VOTERS, WHO VOTED IN THE LATEST ELECTIONS IN ISRAEL SO OF COURSE THEY WON IN A DEMOCRATIC WAY.

This piece was a bit hysterical and exaggerated. True, there was a decline in Likud strength. But at the end of the day Prime Minister Netanyahu remains in power. Hopefully he will now tackle some of the problems he has done little about i.e. Housing, the 'sharing the burden' issue. But presenting the past election as a defeat for him is simply not right. A defeat would mean his no longer being Prime Minister.

In contrast to what Sever Plocker thinks, Likud Beiteinu won the national election. It is now forming a government. My last sentence leads me to a second correciton for Mr. Plocker. It isn't the Netanyahu regime that Mr. Plocker wanted to see the end of. Rather it was the Netanyahu led government that Mr. Plocker had had enough of. By the way, I wonder who Mr. Plocker thinks could have stewared the Israeli economy better than the last Netanyahu government.