I’ll be spending most of the day on Sunday flying back to the United States after a couple of eye-opening weeks in Asia. But a hat tip to the 99-year old Michael DeBakey who just passed away and who did change the world with his pioneering work on heart transplants and bypass operations.

I’m over in Hong Kong with a crazy schedule and round of meetings — but rumors, good ones, still reach me. The latest — which I wholeheartedly endorse — is that Senator Chuck Hagel may be on the verge of endorsing Barack Obama for President.

I made a bad mistake at a wedding not too long ago — in Big Fork, Montana. I was sitting next to the sister-in-law of the bride who had to give a toast, something with flourish and some punch.

Will write more soon. Off to Hong Kong today.

There has been a ton of interest among the people I have met in China over the last ten days in the US presidential elections.

Supporters of the surge give many reasons for the dramatic and real reduction of violence in Iraq over the past 16 months. These range from the rise of the Sahwa movement to General Petraeus’s new counterinsurgency strategy to the newfound independence of Nuri al-Maliki’s government, backed by strengthened Iraqi Security Forces.

The monstrous Hotel Rossiya — Europe’s largest hotel with 3,200 rooms — was demolished in 2006. My Muscovite friends tell me that when it was taken down, every building within a half-mile was immediately overrun with cockroaches. Gross. Two years earlier, the Moskva was taken down to make room for a new Four Seasons.

After I moved my stuff out of D.C. last month, I stopped at a small gas station in New Rochelle, NY to fill up my truck before returning it. I didn’t realize that it was all full-serve until the attendant ran out to me.

One of my good friends in Dem foreign policy circles is Rand Beers. He constantly makes sense to me and seems (thus far) immune from some of the insecurities I often see among Dems who are trying to posture on defense and security issues.

Former Senator Jesse Helms may have died today in a mortal sense — but the brand of pugnacious nationalism that he seeded in America’s contemporary politics lives on in his former legal adviser John Bolton, Dick Cheney and others. We will be battling Helms as an ideological force for decades to come.