(Matt Damon speaking about expanding the activities of Water.org to Haiti in the opening plenary meeting of the 2009 Clinton Global Initiative.) Bummer.

(Riz Khan anchors the Riz Khan Show on Al Jazeera English. This “Note” is part of a series of posts that personalities from Al Jazeera covering the international events in New York and Pittsburgh will be sharing with readers of The Washington Note). My face saved me. For once I was grateful.

Word has leaked out that going into his “trilateral” with Palestine President Mahmoud Abbas and Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Obama was flustered and upset with their lack of progress with each other. Obama is — angry — in a somewhat cool-headed Obamaesque way.

After a very long security sweep of the Sheraton Hotel & Towers conference space, I finally made my way in to get credentialed for the Clinton Global Initiative, opening this afternoon with a powerhouse panel chaired by the 42nd President of the United States, Bill Clinton.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy My chat tonight on America’s Afghanistan engagement and General McChrystal’s plea for a new strategy or more troops with Keith Olbermann on Countdown. Bottom line — Things are not well in Kabul or 1600 Pennsylvania.

She is tactful about it, but in the exchange below between Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and The News Hour correspondent Margaret Warner, Clinton suggests that McChrystal is only one of several voices on Afghanistan strategy but that his views are not definitive, and that there are many other decision points.

I am heading up to New York now to participate in the Clinton Global Initiative and to check up on the UN General Assembly drama.

Parag Khanna is a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation and author of The Second World: How Emerging Powers are Redefining Global Competition in the 21st Century. Many Americans will struggle this week to sort out all of the summits that have become the hallmark of the late September news landscape.

I won’t pull a Joe Wilson in response — but I will suggest that President Obama either doesn’t understand how Nikita Khrushchev “defined” JFK at the beginning of his term or he is stretching things to sidestep an interesting question on the networks this morning.

This morning, Barack Obama appeared on five different networks — speaking about the economy, health care, and Afghanistan. But in his exchange on CNN’s “State of the Union with John King“, President Obama articulated a softness on the imperative of job creation that is disconcerting.