By Steve Clemons

(Dordogne where Martin Walker is avoiding Joe Biden and where Bruno, Chief of Police is set; photo credit: Don Frood) My recent vacation mates in Italy — including Helene Cooper who covers the White House for the New York Times and Elise Labott who covers Hillary Clinton and the State Department for CNN — would…

Landrum Bolling, former President of the Lilly Endowment and Earlham College, has put together a collage of commentary from four outstanding American foreign policy giants. They are former President Jimmy Carter; former Secretary of State and Treasury James A. Baker; former National Security Adviser to Presidents Ford and George H.W.

This is a guest post by a colleague and TWN regular Richard Vague Handling the Economic Crisis – A Report Card If we really want to have enduring, muscular economic growth, then where’s the enhanced support for the truly cutting edge things that will make that happen? Repatriating telemarketing jobs from the Philippines and textile…

Here is a brilliant take by James Pinkerton in a special Politico online forum on the failings of the Obama administration so far when it comes to turning this economy around: Obviously the “stimulus” was a a dud–and the rate that things are going, the next “stimulus,” too, will be a dud.

My colleague Jon Weinberg has posted a provocative piece about Vice President Joe Biden’s comments about Israel and Iran. Weinberg debates how much of a faux-pas Biden’s comments were — and I think that this general line of attack against Biden’s statement is off the mark.

I just stopped at an internet cafe in Perugia, Italy and watched this short Al Jazeera clip done by my friend Clayton Swisher who is apparently embedded with US troops in Afghanistan. One of the most interesting lines in the clip is a comment that chasing the Taliban is “like chasing ghosts.

A reader just forwarded me this New York Times clip on the “confession” of Mohammad Ali Abtahi, an adviser to former Iran President Khatami who has also been an important and talented blogger.

This is a guest note, exclusive to The Washington Note, by James P. Pinkerton — a contributor to the Fox News Channel and policy blogger. Pinkerton is also fellow at the New America Foundation, and contributing editor at The American Conservative magazine.

I woke up in Rome, Italy this morning — the 4th of July — to the very surprising news that Alaska Governor Sarah Palin was resigning her position at the end of the month. I don’t know whether this is a July 4th gift — or a warning of a nationally divisive presidential run.

This is a Tehran dispatch from an anonymous student in Iran who has been blogging for The Washington Note and other sites and publications, including the New York Times, as “Shane M.” The dispatch that follows appeared in Salonand at Juan Cole’s Informed Comment. A clip from Tehran Dispatch: Basijis Hang Around, Do Nothing. ….