It would be no great feat of punditry to suggest that John Edwards is running as an outsider in this year’s campaign. Some thought that Edwards, who has held no office since the 2004 election, would struggle to stay relevant.

The New Yorker‘s Jane Mayer has an extremely important piece in the 13 August edition of the magazine titled “The Black Sites: A Rare Look Inside the CIA’s Secret Interrogation Program.

Jim Lobe brilliantly chronicles a key point of tension between various AEI stakeholders — on one hand a group of firms who help fund the place and are mostly focused on government deregulation and on the other, those who have helped shape and drive a neoconservative War in Iraq and national security strategy.

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.