By Steve Clemons

We learned in the last U.S. presidential election that one has to tiptoe carefully through exit polls, which are often wrong and distracting, but this news out of the Palestinian election rings true to me. If anything, the Palestinians may even perform better than figures being released because of the cohesiveness of their party list….

I really like Bartlesville, Oklahoma — a small town there just 35 miles north of Tulsa.

General Wesley Clark is going to keynote a conference my New America Foundation team and I are putting together on the Real State of U.S. Foreign Policy 2006, and this will take place on Monday, January 30th in the Senate (Senate Dirksen G-50) from 9 a.m. until 1:45 p.m.

Last Friday, TWN reported that Paul Wolfowitz was engaging in personnel appointment strategies that were beginning to smell of partisan cronyism.

I have not been there yet but have been assured that Cafe Sappore is a nice place to hang out, grab a coffee, and discuss political stuff or anything folks want to know about Oakley the Amazing Weimaraner (without NSA eavesdropping). I’m going to be there between 3:30 and 4:00 p.m.

Chris Nelson of the Nelson Report runs one of the single best daily US-Asia policy and national security issues analysis letters in Washington. Normal beings can’t subscribe, and it’s not available on the web.

The Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Committee on the Present Danger, two front organizations in the neoconservative network, will try and move a “military strike” against Iran a notch closer tomorrow. Monday morning, 9:30 a.m., in SC-6 of the U.S. Capitol, war-profiteer and former CIA Director R.

Oakley really does not want me to leave town again. But I must. For those of you who are in the San Francisco Bay area, TWN is planning a trip out there tomorrow, arriving in the morning. I return to Washington on Wednesday.

Jim VandeHei, White House Correspodent for the Washington Post, gave a nice plug to TWN on Friday in the Post‘s daily online political discussion. In the early part of discussion, a reader asked VandeHei what sources he uses to “get his news”: Baton Rouge, La.

Paul Wolfowitz, architect of America’s failing foray into Iraq as Rumsfeld’s former Deputy at the Pentagon, now heads the World Bank and finally seems like his true self is coming out of the closet.