By Steve Clemons

I HAD THE PRIVILEGE OF WORKING WITH ROBERT KAPLAN for a couple of years when he was a Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation.

JAMES K. “JAMIE” GALBRAITH HAS A LEVEL-HEADED REVIEW of the ongoing debate about voting machines, spoiled ballots, and provisional ballots. He works through the numbers on voter turn-out and rejects most of the claims of those who believe that Kerry won the election after all.

ON 9 SEPTEMBER 2004, FOREIGN PURCHASERS OF U.S. TREASURY BONDS failed to show for a routine auction. And as reporte by Los Angeles Times‘ David Streitfeld: “Thoughts of panic flickered out there,” said Sadakichi Robbins, head of global fixed-income trading at Bank Julius Baer.

TODAY, I WAS CAUGHT OFF GUARD BY 126 NAMES AND FACES OF SOLDIERS who had died in Iraq from September 5th to November 4th that appeared in the Washington Post. These soldiers are from all over the nation, mostly from small towns.

WHEN I SPOKE AT THE LEADERSHIP RETREAT OF SANDIA NATIONAL LABS earlier this week, I stated that while I was a guy who gravitated towards the pragmatic rather than the ideological and towards the sensible rather than the extreme, I felt that it was best to do whatever I could to get both the Republican…

MICHAEL POWELL’S FEDERAL COMMUNICATIONS COMMISSION is becoming an engine of censorship; a destroyer of a dynamic, innovation-rich IT ecosystem; a supporter of new telecommunications monopolies; and an advocate of civil society-stifling media concentration. Saving Private Ryan has just been pulled from airing on ABC affiliates.

I HAVE JUST BEEN GUT-PUNCHED BY THE NEWS that a dear friend and intellectual soul mate over the last several years, Iris Chang, was found dead in her car near Santa Clara, California.

THIS NOTE ON ATTORNEY GENERAL-NEXT AL GONZALEZ in from Chris Nelson, who writes the action-packed Nelson Report: . . .the very first new nomination in the Second Bush Administration seems carefully calculated to send a message to everyone…we won, we can do anything we want.

AT THE END OF THIS WEEK, GARANCE FRANKE-RUTA AND I will have an online discussion debating whether Howard Dean would have been a better Democratic presidential candidate than John Kerry. This will be posted on the American Prospect‘s website. She’s with Kerry, and I believe Dean could and would have beaten Bush.

I HAVE BEEN UNABLE TO BE ON LINE OVER THE WEEKEND and today because of family obligations, travel, and a conference in the mountains outside of Santa Fe. Tomorrow I’m speaking at a retreat sponsored by Sandia National Weapons Laboratories about the impact of the election on national security strategy.