By Steve Clemons

This is unofficial, but word is that Senator Richard Lugar has called a hearing about John Bolton’s confirmation status for next Thursday. More later.

Both sides in favor and opposed to John Bolton being confirmed by the U.S. Senate in this Congressional Session are drawing their battle plans. TWN and Bolton Watch are big parts of the picture.

NEW YORK–I’ve just seen two reports about absolutely looney Bush administration steps in Iraq and Lebanon that have more to do with public relations management than they do, in either case, with “on the ground realities.

Today, TWN is heading to New York after a successful planning retreat in Pittsburgh. Planning to hear George Soros this evening speak about his new book, The Age of Fallibility: Consequences of the War on Terror at a meeting hosted by Eric Alterman and The Century Foundation.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will head to Israel end of this week. Let’s just hope that she’s not going to ask to lead a tank brigade herself and that she actually is going to finally push Israel, Hezbollah, and Hamas to stand down.

The costs of America’s invasion and occupation of Iraq have tied up a staggering amount of resources that could have otherwise been deployed to great and necessary purposes elsewhere — at home and abroad.

(This is a guest post by Daniel Levy, policy director of the Geneva Initiative; Tel Aviv, Israel and as of Thursday this week the new Fellow and Director of the Middle East Initiative at the New America Foundation and Century Foundation) 10 Comments on the Current Crisis in the Middle East by Daniel Levy Comments…

Kenichi Ohmae, one of Japan’s better known elder futurists, once wrote a best-seller, Borderless World — which thought through what eventually became known as globalization and the integration that has come to some corners of the world with the information age.

General Wesley Clark, who I have no doubt would be managing matters in the Middle East with far greater skill and attention than our incumbent President, made a blunt nudge at Senator Joe Lieberman on Friday. Clark was blogging about the 2006 Elections on DailyKos.

George Will has sent to his client list a most amazing article — appearing in tomorrow’s Washington Post — that is a full-throttle attack on The Weekly Standard. Will blasts The Weekly Standard five times in his short, 770-word piece.