By Steve Clemons

At about 12:40 pm today EST, I will be doing an interview on NPR’s new “Bryant Park Project” show on the subject of the APEC leaders meeting in Australia.

Given the complicity between the Executive branch and the military industrial complex in feeding at the trough of the treasury, I’m not sure that there has ever been much “objectivity of voice” among the military leadership — but perhaps the myth itself was useful.

This seems important, constructive and unusually non-partisan: The Federal Election Commission announced today that it has unanimously resolved two complaints alleging that Internet blog activity is subject to Commission regulation, finding that the activity is exempt from regulation under the media or volunteer exemption.

My old Senate staff colleague, Nuclear Regulatory Commissioner Ed McGaffigan, died Sunday. McGaffigan, who was fighting melanoma, was a tenacious truth-teller in his public service work — and an incredible father, from what I saw at a distance.

While I’m not with Hillary Clinton when it comes to her US-Cuba policy (and actually not with any of the candidates on all of their views. . .

First of all, this is excellent news. Second of all, it will be interesting to learn the back story. There are three other Iranian-Americans still being detained, so there is still room for very bad things to happen in the relationship.

James Fallows and I are both still in utter disbelief about what appeared in the New York Times yesterday regarding Bush’s comments to biographer Robert Draper that he really didn’t know much about why his policy on keeping the Iraqi military intact was reversed. From the Times report: Mr.

(photo credit: Dan Rosen) George W. Bush may be in Baghdad today, but that won’t change the realities on the ground in Iraq.

This is off topic, but I enjoyed watching this YouTube video of 1,500 plus CPDRC inmates of the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center, Cebu, Philippines mimic Michael Jackson’s Thriller video.

Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings — Heinrich Heine (1821) I hadn’t paid much attention to the growing "banned books" problem in American schools and libraries, but I saw an ad on a Chicago train yesterday and dug in a bit.