By Steve Clemons

Friday morning (tomorrow) I will be hosting a media/blogger conference call with financier and philanthropist George Soros at 10 am EST.

I’ve asked Leo Hindery to spend some time with us at the New America Foundation today. It’s a brown bag deal — but I’ll provide the sodas and cookies (though I’m on a diet).

Yesterday, I had coffee with a former three-star general who has outed himself as a political conservative in his post-military life. Joining us was a former conservative member of Congress, a conservative CEO, a top tier conservative organizer, and a conservative pundit. I discussed the Iraq War, Israel/Palestine, Afghanistan/Pakistan, nukes, and Cuba with them.

Frank Gaffney stands out as one of the leading original card-carrying Scoop Jackson Democrats who joined up with Ronald Reagan in tackling to its inglorious end the former Soviet Union — or at least that is the narrative that many Scoop Jackson-employed neoconservatives like to tell. Gaffney is an indefatigable advocate of Israel’s Likudist aspirations….

Ouch! Barack Obama’s spokesman Bill Burton just sent out a release of his own reaction to John McCain’s war-mongering criticism of Senator Obama that the latter has no experience in national security and warfare. Well, frankly, I’m impressed with Burton on this one.

Joseph Loconte offers a spirited defense of John McCain’s foreign policy and national security positioning in a piece that ran today in the Weekly Standard. I liked his essay because Loconte articulates the fault line that runs through conservative circles on foreign policy.

Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton struggling against each other for every superdelegate, every pending state primary, every vote is the best thing America has had going for it in some time on the “global public diplomacy” front.

(Title: Blue Lake; Photo credit: Crede Calhoun – VisionQuestStudios.com) I have been completely off-line since Friday afternoon — taking some time to visit a rental property I have in the Allegheny Mountains at Deep Creek Lake. I needed to get the place ready for spring and summer rentals.

A chunk of TWN readers live in the Northeast corridor and enjoy the events I help organize and chair at the New America Foundation, but they complain that I don’t give enough notice some times.

Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation, has challenged Nation contributors Jeremy Scahill and Naomi Klein with misreading the tenor of the magazine’s endorsement of Obama. Her main point is that despite suggesting editorially that he is the best candidate, The Nation‘s endorsement is not full-throttled and highlights serious concerns about him.