For those TWN readers in the area — and I just met two — I will be at the Starbucks in Westwood, California for the next few hours. It’s a great, sunny day here. Jodie Foster’s The Brave One is playing at one of Westwood’s posh old line movie houses next door.

The recent Pew Global Attitudes Project survey, which revealed both a deficit in US leadership as well as a growing international concern over the global environment, afforded the US a unique opportunity to address both for the price of one.

Today in New York UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon has convened a historic special session with more than 70 heads of state in attendance to solely discuss and focus on the issue of perhaps the largest global challenge and collective action problem we face today — the issue of climate change.

Just caught this. Politico‘s Kenneth Vogel suggests that Mitt Romney’s silence about the Blackwater killings in Iraq may have something to do with the fact that: The top counterterrorism and national security adviser to Romney’s presidential campaign is Cofer Black, vice chairman of Blackwater USA.

(Laurie Rubiner, Legislative Director in the Office of Senator Hillary Clinton) Hillary’s foreign policy team has some of the mega-stars in the national security business. She has Madeleine Albright, Richard Holbrooke, Sandy Berger, Wesley Clark, William Perry, and a good number of their acolytes — but her counselors are about as top-heavy as George W….

Last weekend, Henry Kissinger wrote a syndicated op-ed defending the President’s position in Iraq but qualified with a critical point: The second and ultimately decisive route to overcoming the Iraqi crisis is through international diplomacy. Today the United States is bearing the major burden for regional security militarily, politically and economically.

Iraq throws out Blackwater. America keeps employing them and has Blackwater stay. Someone in the White House press corps be sure to ask Bush about that “Rule of Law” thing. (I know. . .Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Haditha, illegal wiretaps. . .). I’m in Denver now — flying to Los Angeles.

My former boss, Senator Jeff Bingaman, did not vote with others to condemn MoveOn.org‘s recent ads attacking David Petraeus. Bingaman votes his conscience — and sometimes that is a lonely exercise.

Tomorrow at noon Pacific Time, I will be on with Warren Olney of KCRW’s To The Point. I think that the show runs live at 3 pm in DC — and then is replayed at 9 or 10 pm.

I think not, at least not in the way that those asserting that Bush will bomb Iran have been arguing. I make my case in a piece titled “Why Bush Won’t Bomb Iran” that ran as the lead on Salon.com yesterday.