By Steve Clemons

The C.V.

Howard Kurtz has a very long column today profiling Jeff Gannon/James Guckert. Most of what Kurtz writes on is the excellent investigative work of John Aravosis, but he makes some other important points.

I had a minor intellectual skirmish a few years ago with Tadashi Yamamoto. We were arguing about whether Japanese civil society had matured to a level to be considered a genuine democracy.

I have to admit that I feel awkward and uneasy posting comments about Jeff Gannon, his role as a shill for the White House, and his alleged extracurricular activities as a gay-sex hustler.

When I was more youthful, less cynical, and thought that some of the world’s most severe problems could be solved if every American just gave a dime, or a quarter, or a dollar, I had no idea how expensive fixing some of the world’s problems could be. George W.

I am sorry to see that my pal Grant Aldonas has fallen out of the rumour mill on who might be the next U.S. Trade Representative. Chris Nelson of the Nelson Report gives a glimpse of the latest jockeying, both for USTR and the next Director General of the World Trade Organization.

I have posted in the past several items on the question of forced anthrax vaccinations among our military ranks. What I have found interesting in this debate are the lengths that DoD civilian leaders are willing to go to obfuscate for and hide from Congressional oversight what the key intelligence is that justifies these vaccinations….

My friend and colleague Peter Bergen is headed back from Saudi Arabia’s first international terrorism conference in Riyadh. He writes: In the sprawling desert city where Osama bin Laden was born almost half a century ago, last week the Saudis held their first international counterterrorism conference.

Josh Marshall gave me the nudge to start my own blog and then moved off to New York where he has been ferociously battling Bush’s Social Security privatization campaign. But though I talk to Josh a lot, email him, and do a lot of instant messaging, I haven’t actually seen him in a while.

Something is up in Asia. North Korea finally, overtly acknowledges it has nuclear warheads — and Japan announces it wants to cut what it spends supporting U.S. forces on its islands. Japan apparently plans to tell the U.S.