By Steve Clemons

Second Lietenant Sandy Tsao is being discharged from the military for informing her chain of command that she is gay.

The Washington Note‘s publisher will not be at the WHCA Dinner this year as he’ll be traveling, but the blog will be represented by others in the field. But I just got a bit of an odd first.

I am planning visits to all of the “surplus countries” in the next couple of weeks. On Monday and Tuesday, I will be in Berlin speaking at one of the sessions of the “online forums” of the Transatlantic Dialogue sponsored by the Friedrich Naumann Foundation. And then on May 18th, I’ll be in Beijing.

Barack Obama has appointed a hyperactive director of faith-based initiatives, Josh DuBois, and sees little problem continuing the blurring of church and state that George W. Bush and Bill Clinton initiated in their terms.

Quite a number of serious and informed observers predict a spike in mass casualty violence hitting this week in Pakistan.

Kevin Nealer was a Fulbright professor of trade law & policy and is Guest Lecturer at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. Markets generally take a “Stop them before they kill again!” approach to Democrats and trade policy.

I’m still in Doha, and Dennis Ross was here in Qatar yesterday meeting government officials and discussing America’s course on Iran. Now, there are denials from the Iranian press that Dennis Ross and two other senior government officials, including Puneet Talwar of the National Security Council, are planning a journey to Tehran.

Universities, think tanks, defense contractors, insurgent groups and new media operations all seem to be leaning towards Doha. Part of George Patton’s own 3rd Army Division is based near Doha. Al Jazeera is headquartered in Doha.

Joe Klein has written one of the best 100 day nutshell reviews of the Obama administration’s performance I have read. Klein’s take squares almost perfectly with a piece I have coming out in the next few days in World Politics Review — not there yet though.

Joseph Margulies in the Los Angeles Times offers anyone who wants to defend the Bush administration’s embrace of torture a chilling retort. His bottom line: the administration sold out the values Americans cherish most to torture not a kingpin in the al Qaeda network, but a clerk. Margulies writes: First, they beat him.