Over the next week, starting tomorrow, I’m going to be hiking with journalist Jim Lobe and some other pals in the Cascades mountains on a working, walking retreat.

This is a hilarious video interview with super-blogger Matthew Yglesias who just didn’t get the treatment he deserves at YearlyKos. Then I did a video interview talking about my encounter with Peter Beinart over what we’d tell the next President about U.S. foreign policy if we had five minutes.

General Wesley Clark delivered a humdinger of a speech this morning in Chicago at YearlyKos. There’s much to it — and he puts the target for the failure in Iraq not on the military, nor on the Congress, nor other participants in this mess other than President George W. Bush.

I just arrived in Chicago super early this morning and will be speaking in two Yearly Kos Convention panels today.

Over the last day and a half, I’ve been connecting with folks in the military, in intelligence, from the Department of State on the American side of the equation, as well as chatting with some well-placed Brits and even Iraqi government officials, and a good passle of journalists in order to kick the tires of…

I just got a fascinating note in my inbox from Mark Goldberg, who writes regularly for UN Dispatch and the American Prospect. Since he’s not planning on writing this up himself, I’m going to post his note in full. It’s worth a read.

I want to congratulate the governments that worked through the UN Security Council to pass Resolution 1769 on Tuesday.

We are expanding our team. Sameer Lalwani will be joining us as a regular commentator at the The Washington Note. Sameer is a policy analyst with the New America Foundation’s American Strategy Program concentrating on the geopolitics of the Middle East and South Asia.

Jim Lobe has written a terrific response to the stridently arrogant oped, “Britain Cannot Have Two Best Friends,” by John Bolton in yesterday’s Financial Times.

(New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg outlines PlaNYC proposals) In the coming days, the U.S. Government will make a critical decision that has the potential to change America’s standing in the world: whether to approve a $537 million grant that will help make New York City the first environmentally sustainable megacity in the 21st century.