By Steve Clemons

Greetings readers. Well, have to get back to monitoring again. I have just banned a couple of prominent commenters — sorry, but just had to.

Yesterday I received the distressing news that the father of blogging in Iran, Hossein Derakshan (aka Hoder) — the young person who had helped create the on-ramps for hundreds if not thousands of bloggers inside Iran as well as inspiring Iranian-Americans around the world to express themselves — failed to secure an appeal of a…

I did this short interview yesterday with ‘Karl’ outside a very good conference organized by the State Department and US Embassy to Austria in Vienna titled “Blogs and Bullets: How the New Media Shape Political Action.” More soon from Vienna.

Today from 9:30 am until about 12:30 pm, The Atlantic will be hosting a forum in the US Senate on the costs and opportunities of a national infrastructure bank. The sessions follow after the extension — and the meeting will stream live here.

Greetings readers. For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been a bit slower posting — and I just wanted to express my deep thanks to all of you to allow me the space to make some shifts in the way my professional life is organized.

Today, I received alerts that three friends had taken new positions. National Security Network Deputy Director Joel Rubin is no longer with the National Security Network, a great organization that is smartening Dems up on foreign policy.

This morning in Zurich, I am chairing the “Terrorism and Counterterrorism” panel of the International Security Forum 2011 which is organized in partnership with the Geneva Centre for Security Policy.

For those of you following President Obama’s trip to Ireland, the UK, France, and Poland, here is the opener of a piece I just wrote for the BBC on the need for US-UK Relations to get an update and reset.

Theodore Roosevelt’s words on Presidents and the critical importance of avoiding ‘yes men’ and getting unvarnished counsel and critique: The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants.

(Chester the Turtle, lives in Chester River, Chestertown; photo credit: Andrew Oros; click image for larger version) I love cities — but love nature too, and this very big Maryland snapping turtle crawled up into my back yard recently, dug itself a big hole for the next generation of turtles in our river and creek,…