Many thanks to Ambassador Lucky Roosevelt, Chairperson of Blair House Restoration Committee and the former and longest-serving Chief of Protocol for the United States, for inviting me to a terrific semi-annual Blair House “thank you reception” for donors. The event featured Jill Biden and drew many of DC’s elites, particularly from earlier generations.

The one real news and public policy commentary show that Jon Stewart has never been able to credibly spoof is the PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.

This is a guest post by Caroline Esser, a research associate with the New America Foundation’s Bernard L. Schwartz Fellows Program.

For those following the evolving challenges in US-Pakistan post-bin Laden relationship, I share a slice of a thought in this clip with Jim Sciutto on ABC’s World News with Diane Sawyer. My basic point is that Pakistan is a nation we can’t extract ourselves from without high costs.

My colleague and former research assistant Brian Till has published a great new book, titled Conversations with Power: What Great Presidents and Prime Ministers Can Teach Us About Leadership. In a few minutes, I’m conducting a conversation with the presidential and prime ministerial conversationalist. Should be fun.

My friend Meir Javedanfar alerted me to this shocking video clip of traffic in “Tohid Tunnel” in Tehran. According to the commentary depicting accident after accident, 70,000 cars pass through the tunnel daily. More than 400 cars violate traffic laws in the tunnel each day.

I may be a bit late to this story of the Brooklyn-based Jewish Ultra-Orthodox newspaper, Der Tzitung, photo-shopping Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Obama Counter-Terrorism Adviser Audrey Tomason out of the White House photo of the President’s national security team watching the zap bin Laden operation, but geez — this is pretty bad.

Paul Krugman has a powerful slap at the emerging narrative that America’s working families and average citizens wanted something for nothing and thus precipitated the economic disaster of recent years. Instead, Krugman shows what powerful interest groups can do.

The kind of discrimination against Muslims — in this case on Delta Airlines — is going on all around the country. In this case, two Imams dressed in traditional outfits were removed from a Delta flight by the captain. The irony here is that they were flying to a conference on religious tolerance.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Ranking Member Richard Lugar (R-IN) supports substantial drawdown of US troops in Afghanistan.