Some insiders close to Barack Obama tell me that I will hear definitively who the VP choice is before the campaign sends out its “text message” to the nation about who the vacationing candidate decides on. Who knows if they’ll come through. I’d pretty much settle on hearing who Obama definitively does not select.

Dimitri Simes, President of the Nixon Center, will be paired with former Ambassador to the United Nations Richard Holbrooke on the News Hour tonight. Margaret Warner will moderate a discussion that I think may be one of the most hard-hitting encounters framing the Russia-Georgia conflict and its implications for the US, Europe, and NATO.

This is a very interesting show I did yesterday with Warren Olney of KCRW’s “To The Point” which airs across the nation on most top tier national public radio stations.

At 4:56 in this 9 minute clip from Countdown with Keith Olbermann, New America Foundation Geopolitics of Energy Initiative Director Flynt Leverett offers grown-up commentary on the presidential campaign responses to the Georgia-Russia War.

(Senator Chuck Hagel, Steve Clemons, and International Peace Institute Chair Rita Hauser) In the next day or two, the Obama campaign will unveil a new web site as part of its BarackObama.com franchise to lure in dissident members or former members of the GOP.

I just received the near final draft of the Democratic Party platform (pdf here) — and I have to say that it gave me goosebumps, the good kind.

This is a guest post by Nixon Center President Dimitri K. Simes that was written for joint publication at The Washington Note and National Interest.

I’ll be joining a discussion hosted by Warren Olney of “To the Point” on the Georgia-Russia conflict this afternoon just a short bit after 3 pm EST. I think that one can listen live over the internet at the above link — just click “live” at about 3 pm EST and 12 pm pacific time….

In the Times of London, Anatol Lieven reminds that South Ossetia and Abkhazia had been in the center of turmoil between Georgia and Russia and their own assertions of independence in 1918 and then again in 1991, when the Soviet Union disintegrated.

Belgravia Dispatch‘s Gregory Djerejian publishes one of my favorite blogs. He wrestles issues down to their core and exposes the idiocy and nakedness of the foreign policy arena’s blunderers. Today he writes about the Georgia-Russia conflict and comes out largely where I do. He writes: A few quick points, in no particular order.