I don’t usually plug organizational promotions, but this is just a bit too cool to keep to myself. Hopefully candidates for office — especially Congressional candidates, who don’t have large bureaucracies or pools of advisors to educate them — will take this quiz and do well.

I’m in Portland, Maine, heading back through Boston tomorrow to New York on Tuesday. Between apartment hunting, work and traveling, I’ve finally had a free second to take a peek at the latest of the promising presidential transition-related initiatives, this one launched by the power players at the Connect US Fund.

Former Senator and McCain campaign co-chairman Phil Gramm has been a pain in the back end for McCain economic policy chief Douglas Holtz-Eakin for a very long time.

Gavin Sheridan is a great and talented blogger in Ireland. Yesterday, he celebrated his 6th “Blogiversary.” He has me beat by two years and some change.

Elisabeth Bumiller’s New York Times piece yesterday describing the national security and foreign policy advisory network in the Obama campaign has sent off strange shock waves in the blogosphere and in Washington. This article, I think, is a misfire. Some data show that there are somewhere between 70 and 100 million blogs in the world….

This beautiful pic was sent in from a reader of The Washington Note in Zanzibar.

Katherine Tiedemann is a Program Associate with the New America Foundation’s Nuclear Strategy & Nonproliferation Initiative.

(Obama Does Brown but Not Brussels) I’m strongly supportive of Barack Obama’s announced plans to spend some quality plane time with Senators Chuck Hagel (R-NE) and Jack Reed (D-RI) on a trip to Iraq.

It comes as little surprise that Fred Kagan, Kimberly Kagan, and Jack Keane offer a glowing assessment of the political and security progress in Iraq in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal op-ed “The New Reality in Iraq.

A number of TWN readers and I recently received an email note from the British Embassy in Washington notifying us that an “embassy blog” was being conceived and wanted to ask us our thoughts on the enterprise. I wrote back right away saying cheers, tally-ho, and all that, great idea, a big bold move forward….