I am about to fly off to Germany and had to miss the celebrity-edged White House Correspondents Association dinner last night because of commitments out of town — but sounded like a lot of fun.

Second Lietenant Sandy Tsao is being discharged from the military for informing her chain of command that she is gay.

The Washington Note‘s publisher will not be at the WHCA Dinner this year as he’ll be traveling, but the blog will be represented by others in the field. But I just got a bit of an odd first.

I am planning visits to all of the “surplus countries” in the next couple of weeks. On Monday and Tuesday, I will be in Berlin speaking at one of the sessions of the “online forums” of the Transatlantic Dialogue sponsored by the Friedrich Naumann Foundation. And then on May 18th, I’ll be in Beijing.

Barack Obama has appointed a hyperactive director of faith-based initiatives, Josh DuBois, and sees little problem continuing the blurring of church and state that George W. Bush and Bill Clinton initiated in their terms.

Washington has been stuck in a free trade agreement rut for some time now, and the situation has been exacerbated by the economic crisis and fears that further trade liberalization will mean sending taxpayer stimulus dollars overseas.

That most famous and frustrating of oceans treaties looks to be back on the Senate agenda. Again. The momentum is building. Scott Borgeson at the Council on Foreign Relations released a report last week that comprehensively makes the case for U.S. accession to the Law of the Sea Convention.

(Photo Credit: BBC) Katherine Tiedemann is a Program Associate at the New America Foundation/American Strategy Program. Ahmed Rashid, a venerable Pakistani journalist, has an op-ed in today’s Washington Post in which he argues that the United States should remove its conditions from the 5 year, $7.5 billion aid package we have proposed giving to Pakistan….

Quite a number of serious and informed observers predict a spike in mass casualty violence hitting this week in Pakistan.

Kevin Nealer was a Fulbright professor of trade law & policy and is Guest Lecturer at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. Markets generally take a “Stop them before they kill again!” approach to Democrats and trade policy.