By Steve Clemons

Over the course of a week I will be hosting and moderating an online salon discussion on terrorism in conjunction with Mark Goldberg of UN Dispatch. The questions and prompts will cover everything from defining the scope of the threat to root causes to the most effective counterterrorism tactics within a broader strategy.

Damn! I missed a meeting at the Center for Strategic and International Studies yesterday with three of my favorite national security thinkers — David Ignatius, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Brent Scowcroft.

Julia Watson has a terrific food and restaurant blog eat Washington that I have been checking up on frequently. I’m not intimidated by much, but I do find that I get nervous thinking about cooking — and even more rattled actually doing it, particularly when other humans are involved.

Law of the Seas Treaty advocate Caitlyn Antrim took this shot of the Air Force Memorial from her Arlington home at dawn one recent morning.

I’ve been offline for a day or so working behind the scenes on a number of fronts that I can’t be all that specific about. For Jane Mayer fans, I’m pleased to see that her book is again at #6 on Amazon. More soon — promise.

Former Senator and McCain campaign co-chairman Phil Gramm has been a pain in the back end for McCain economic policy chief Douglas Holtz-Eakin for a very long time.

Gavin Sheridan is a great and talented blogger in Ireland. Yesterday, he celebrated his 6th “Blogiversary.” He has me beat by two years and some change.

Elisabeth Bumiller’s New York Times piece yesterday describing the national security and foreign policy advisory network in the Obama campaign has sent off strange shock waves in the blogosphere and in Washington. This article, I think, is a misfire. Some data show that there are somewhere between 70 and 100 million blogs in the world….

This beautiful pic was sent in from a reader of The Washington Note in Zanzibar.