BIG Af-Pak Debate in White House and New York Today

Today, Barack Obama is spending nearly all of his day in briefings related to Afghanistan and Pakistan. While many Members of Congress are invited to the briefings, you and I are not.
Today, Barack Obama is spending nearly all of his day in briefings related to Afghanistan and Pakistan. While many Members of Congress are invited to the briefings, you and I are not.
(Riz Khan anchors the Riz Khan Show on Al Jazeera English. This “Note” is part of a series of posts that personalities from Al Jazeera have been sharing with readers of The Washington Note.) New York is going into rehab – to use an increasingly popular term.
Cherie Blair, Founder of the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women, was kind enough to give me a few minutes at the 2009 Clinton Global Initiative to talk about her partnership with Hani Masri and the Tomorrow’s Youth Organization in Nablus, Palestine.
This in from a friend: Theresa Poulson, one of the NJ.com reporters was covering a conservative event here in D.C. today in which Michael Steele, GOP chairman, was the featured speaker. She was the only reporter there. Steele interrupted his speech to announce that Chicago had lost and Rio had won the 2016 Olympics.
I had an excellent discussion with former German Green Party Chairman and new European Parliament Member Reinhard Bütikofer and his European Parliament colleague Claude Turmes this past week on what Europe was expecting from the US and President Obama at the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference. A short exchange is posted ab
Congressman Aaron Schock is a highly reasonable, intelligent, balanced Republican Member of Congress — and though I have only met him twice, I was impressed with how he conducted his conversations and views in DC cocktail policy chatter — particularly at an MSNBC party where Rachel Maddow was tending the bar.
The International Olympic Committee has just voted that Chicago has been eliminated from consideration as the 2016 host for the Olympic Games. An end to the Obama effect? In about an hour you can watch the announcement live of the 2016 host here. I’m betting on Rio.
There is a great meeting going on right now in Washington sponsored by the Atlantic Monthly, the Aspen Institute and the Newseum. The meeting is called “First Draft of History.
This New York Times piece makes the economic case on why the 2016 Olympics fit Brazil’s needs and bid more than Chicago, Madrid and Tokyo. But more broadly and thinking ahead, Brazil is a key component of the BRICs group — Brazil, Russia, India, and China.
Tonight, some time between 9 and 10 pm EST (and then again between 11 pm and midnight) during the Rachel Maddow Show — not sure of time just yet — I’ll be chatting with Rachel about America’s foreign policy plate. We may be on McChrystal, Petraeus & Afghanistan.