Category: General

I saw this pic this morning in a friend’s Facebook photos. This game is housed for future generations to glance at over at The National Museum of American History. Intriguing and spooky at the same time.

Patchwork Nation is a fascinating, ongoing monitor of 11 different community types in the United States. As I understand it from one of the blog proprietors, Dante Chinni, Patchwork Nation which is based at the Christian Science Monitor has established a broad set of criteria sensitive to all sorts of economic and life shifts.

My colleague and friend Robert Wright, who is now launching The Progressive Realist, kind of comes off in person as a hybrid of Anthony Perkins and Garrison Keillor — but focused in a folksy but serious way on America’s as of late unenlightened and reckless foreign policy course.

New looks to government websites do not necessarily portend better foreign policy. But that said, the State Department’s just revealed new website looks great. It looks more high energy and seems to telegraph “engagement.” I like it.

Jim Lobe has just confirmed that outgoing Special Assistant to President George W. Bush and Senior Director for Near East and North African Affairs and Deputy National Security Adviser for Global Democracy Strategy Elliott Abrams will be joining the Council on Foreign Relations team in February.

(photo credit: Jon Taplin’s Blog) In the book, America and the World: Conversations on the Future of American Foreign Policy, which is an April-May 2008 rolling conversation between former national security advisers Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft with Washington Post national security columnist David Ignatius, Brzezinski says this: I think it was too bad that…

I found the video above on the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit YouTube Channel. I can’t get the sound to play, but the text on the screen says it all.

This is a very strong and important CBS segment by 60 Minutes correspondent Bob Simon. that looks in a serious way at the prospects for a two state solution between Israel and Palestine. The primary interviewee in the piece is former candidate for Palestine president Moustafa Barghouti. It’s well worth watching.

I occasionally write for the CNN.com website and just noticed that Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry is now doing so too. In a great piece applauding President Obama’s early executive orders to move forward vigorously the closing of Guantanamo, Kerry outlines what the failure to respect human rights means for national security.

I just received a press note from the Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt Institute encouraging me to watch and listen to the comparison above of Barack Obama’s rhetoric and that of Franklin Roosevelt. I did.