This is a guest post by Amjad Atallah, Co-Director of the New America Foundation/Middle East Task Force. The Israeli elections are not really over.

Today at 2:30 pm, there is a very interesting forum, or I should say a “roundtable”, that Committee Chairman John Kerry and his staff have organized on the national security and foreign policy implications of the financial crisis.

The Atlantic Council is an organization whose energy and impact have largely followed the trajectory of the transatlantic relationship. For many years, when that relationship was driven by the clarity and purpose of the Cold War, the Atlantic Council was strong, active, and had significant impact.

Just found this site, FinancialStability.gov. Suffice it to say that the Obama art crowd hasn’t gotten to work on this site yet. . .but if you didn’t get enough of Tim Geithner’s market-disappointing speech today, you can read or watch it again here. More soon.

That’s Buddy on the roof. It’s warmer there. Oakley the Amazing Weimaraner is on the left and Annie the kid sis is on the right.

Tonight, I toasted Senator Frank Lautenberg when I learned that he had sent President Barack Obama a letter asking that the media no longer be blocked from greeting, reporting on, and photographing the returning flag-draped caskets of American service men and women killed in combat abroad.

My New America Foundation colleague Daniel Levy, who is in Tel Aviv and voted today, is quoted in the segment below and offers two take-aways from the results of Israel’s elections, the winner of which is still being sorted out and will be disputed no matter the outcome.

In June 2008, I asked Flynt Leverett — former top Middle East analyst and policy practitioner at the CIA, State Department and George W. Bush’s National Security Council — what he thought the next President of the United States should do “on day one” when it came to the nation’s foreign policy priorities.

I spent about 20 minutes with Neal Conan on NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” today discussing Israel’s elections and why I’m ready for Netanyahu to lead Israel’s government — either because he’ll find his mature, Nixonian, do-a-deal, makeover side — or because he’ll be so flamboyantly destructive of Israel’s and America’s interests that he’ll finally…

It’s always wise to read up on what one’s supposed global and ideological rivals are writing and thinking. Along this line, for example, I think that reading Karim Sadjadpour‘s fascinating expose on Iran Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is essential reading.