Category: General

They are up to it again. I just received a disgusting email from John Kerry’s swiftboat stalker, John O’Neill.

Katrina vanden Heuvel, Jane Hamsher, Juan Cole, Gore Vidal, Robert Greenwald, Matt Stoller and others headline a letter to be delivered to Barack Obama before the Democratic National Convention. To some degree, the letter appeals to Obama to be Obama, the one we saw during the primary and not some faded or compromised version.

Some think former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle may be a dark horse to be Barack Obama’s vice presidential running mate. Most of the rest of the DC chattering class thinks that Daschle will be Obama’s White House chief of staff. Both fine jobs.

Richard Holbrooke triggers incredible passion, some of it negative, among foreign policy professionals. He’s a Democrat, but many don’t understand why he’s not a Republican. Dems, some argue, are supposed to be about achieving moral goods in the world along purist pathways of good behavior and enlightened intentions.

Life long Republican and granddaughter of Ike, Susan Eisenhower, said today on an Obama campaign conference call featuring campaign manager David Plouffe and herself that while she truly regrets it, the direction John McCain has been pressured to go is showing that “the Republican Party is running out of ideas.

Recently, I hosted Grover Norquist speaking about the Republican party and conservative movement, and indirectly what he saw as the continued constraints on Democrats.

Richard Vague is a conservative businessman disgusted with the party he has belonged to for a very long time. He was the Founding CEO of the former First USA Bank which ran at the time the largest credit card operation in the United States. He later started a group called AmericanRespect.

Last night, Turkey’s staunchly secular Constitutional Court decided against throwing out the ruling, moderately Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP). The decision, which cut Prime Minister Erdogan’s party’s public financing in half and warned it to abide by Turkey’s strictly secular constitution, averted a potential political crisis.

After watching the video interview I did with Palestinian Initiative leader and former Palestinian Authority presidential candidate Mustafa Barghouti on Obama’s “World Without Walls” speech, former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote me a note. He said: steve — that discussion with [Barghouti] is humiliating for any decent American who values human rights….

“Hi, I’m Mike Bloomberg” said Mike Bloomberg as I stood next to him and another chap at the Lincoln Center’s “Mostly Mozart” fundraising benefit last night. The Mozart performance was accompanied by some ‘melancholy Mahler’, and the evening was terrific.