I really like Tommy Sowers — and while I normally don’t post appeals to support this Congressman or that, I couldn’t help it in this case. Sowers, a former Special Forces officer who did deployments in Kosovo and Iraq, was also a new media and politics instructor at West Point.

I recently had the opportunity to participate in a small dinner with CENTCOM Commander General David Petraeus and his wife Holly. These sorts of discussions are nearly always off the record — but the fact that they happened is not off limits.

Kevin Sullivan’s Real Clear World is aggregating some thoughtful commentary on Iran on 22 Bahman, the anniversary of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Washington Note also started the day with a great essay by Shane M.

of the great blizzard-caused government shutdown in Washington, we are all beginning to go a bit crazy. We have apparently surpassed all records now — beating the snow blitz of 1888-89 for the amount of snow the DC region has experienced during a season. And we have more on the way on Monday.

(This picture was taken by Shane M. in Tehran on Bahman 22 in 2009. Shane writes about the pic: “I’m always interested in the folks found that are found around a spectacle. I asked these guys if I could take a picture and they readily agreed. The flower was his idea.

All the snow we have had piled on in Washington reminds me of my days as a kid living at Eielson Air Force Base, Alaska — near Fairbanks. We had massive walls of snow then — but we are getting there in Washington.

Former US Congressman Charlie Wilson has died at age 76. Wilson was a 12-term Member of the US House of Representatives representing Texas’ 2nd District. Wilson’s strong advocacy of US support of mujahadeen in their quest to repel Soviet forces in Afghanistan were the subject of the book and movie “Charlie Wilson’s War”.

The pic to the left was taken by a friend who is the head chef at the Italian Embassy and whose igloo is just down the street from mine. The second from a friend and Washington Note reader in Northern California.

At the highest levels of the US military, a quiet discussion is going on about putting in place a legal framework that would permit the US government to strip American citizenship from terrorists.

This is a guest note by Simon Johnson, former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund and co-founder of The Baseline Scenario. Johnson is also a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, and a member of the CBO’s Panel of Economic Advisers.