By Steve Clemons

One probably has to be addicted to the soap opera that is Japanese politics to get the laugh I did out of the news that Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party wants to drop “Liberal” from its English-language name.

Tom DeLay once joked at a DC dinner I attended that the only conservative he saw preparing to run for president was Hillary Clinton. He unveiled a bunch of political signs that said “Hillary and the Hammer in 2008.” So, we should all watch out.

I have not been able to confirm a key point in this methodical and carefully ordered account by Jason Leopold of Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation of the Valerie Plame Wilson leak that states that the government investigator “is now preparing the paperwork to present a grand jury outlining the charges against Rove in hopes of securing…

Ever been to Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland? It’s a great place, founded in 1782 in part by George Washington who was on the Board of Visitors and contributed to the school’s original endowment.

This won’t read like Faulkner, but I think it’s important to compare three passages written by serious analysts documenting the pathway and decision-making chronology leading up to the Iraq War. Journalist Bob Woodward, former British Ambassador to the U.S.

Hayden Peake is curator of the Historical Intelligence Collection at the CIA, and he recently wrote this fascinating review of a compilated set of intel-related books. I know some TWN readers are intelligence agency groupies, and I thought that this might be of interest to you.

I received the email note that follows from Stephen Walt last night in response to my post yesterday about whether he was being demoted or not. I think Walt’s views and account of his situation are level-headed and make sense and coincide with Kennedy School Dean David Ellwood’s account, published here on TWN yesterday.

I am going to obscure the names in the vignette I’m about to share to protect folks who don’t deserve harrassment. Once I had a brilliant young fellow at the New America Foundation, now a prominent national journalist, who wrote about the subject of “hero inflation” in America.

What follows is an email sent to me by former State Department Chief of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson. Col.

How did America become great? Some would argue that it was indeed great before restless explorers, settlers seeking economic opportunity, and persecuted religious victims and others migrated here — and I get that point.