Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is speaking this morning to Grover Norquist’s weekly powerhouse gathering at Americans for Tax Reform of conservative associations, think tanks, and political operations.
The Center for a New American Security is taking a novel approach to thinking about climate change. CNAS — and particularly its CEO Kurt Campbell — are leading a consortium of think tanks and philanthropies in a planned simulated war game exercise on the consequences of climate change.
For those interested and nearby, the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs’ “Policy Innovations Group” will be hosting a panel discussion on blogger ethics on April 3rd in New York over lunch. They are calling it “Cyberethics: The Emerging Codes of Online Conduct” but I like the title “Blogger Ethics” better.
Barack Obama has said that “Washington is the place where good ideas go to die.” I have to agree with him in part that the ideas industry in Washington and the public policy field in general tends to be risk-averse and more comfortable with policy-retreading than policy-innovation.
I don’t have a crush on Barack Obama — though a slug of my friends do. Here’s the latest on the political crush front from Obama Girl: I only wish I had met Amber Lee Ettinger last year and had gotten her to try out “Hagel Girl” first. History might be different today.
“Radical centrists” and dead armadillos have a lot in common. They are sometimes whacked in the middle of the road. In fact, my friend and New America Foundation co-founder Michael Lind originally proposed that New America choose a mascot of an “armadillo with a yellow stripe across it.
The first edicts that late-in-the-day Hillary Clinton Campaign director Maggie Williams issued to her staff as Patti Solis Doyle was heading out the door were: 1. Be respectful of your fellow staff members — generous in spirit, positive, constructive. 2.
Ronald Reagan thought acting was great prep for the presidency. And recently, Ben Affleck told me that he saw some obvious similarities between DC and Hollywood while here shooting his next film, State of Play. But Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are taking “staging” to a new level.
My colleague and friend Anatol Lieven published a no-punches pulled critique of John McCain’s foreign policy and national security probabilities in the Financial Times today, titled “Why We Should Fear a McCain Presidency.” Lieven makes a point I did recently: McCain used to be considered “an old-style conservative realist.