Ronald Lauder, the driving force behind New Yorkers for Term Limits, says he opposes an amendment to the term limit laws to allow three terms. He says he only agreed to a one-time exception for this mayor at this moment.

I have a friend, Roee, who just sent me moving personal commentary of his own thinking about sin and atonement in the context of spending time with a Chinese immigrant family in San Francisco. I am not going to post his piece — but it did remind me that Yom Kippur starts tonight.

First question is on the economy. Both Obama and McCain are doing well in responding to a person’s query about what to do with the average family being undermined by current economic conditions. John McCain and Obama both started to walk around and try to talk to the audience.

I’ll be live-blogging the debate tonight — at home where I’ve been lounging a bit, still recovering from a night of too many pomegranate martinis with Israel/Palestine peace pusher Daniel Levy and a journalist I can’t mention.

Streaming Video by Ustream.TV Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett will outline their thoughts on a “U.S.-Iran Grand Bargain” today at 12:00 noon EST at the New America Foundation. I’ll be chairing the session. The article titled “The Grand Bargain” that accompanies today’s event can be read in the latest issue of the Washington Monthly….

John McCain’s sudden 360 180 (sorry, rushed) on the Law of the Sea Convention has come up before here. Despite ten years of energetic support for U.S. accession to the Convention, things changed last October without any explanation. McCain attempted to justify this on principle, though it fell transparently flat.

Streaming live video by Ustream One of the nation’s leading progressive economists, James K. Galbraith, will be speaking today about his new book, The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too, at the New America Foundation from 12:15 pm to 1:45 pm EST.

The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood is one of the most positive but emotionally destabilizing and unusual personal memoirs I have read in many years.

Faith Smith is a Research Associate at the New America Foundation. Yesterday a top Iranian diplomat announced that Iran would stop enriching uranium if it was guaranteed a regular supply for their power stations.

Spin room chatter last night was rather predictable.