I’m at the Hyatt Regency this morning at a conference jointly sponsored by the Center for American Progress and the Century Foundation. The topic? “America in the World.” Madeleine Albright kicked things off this morning. A couple of takeaways: – Secretary Albright has long proposed that the U.S. is the “indispensable nation.

(Ahlam Ahmed Mahmoud al Al-Jabouri; photo credit: Marc Perelman) The Forward correspondent Marc Perelman has a moving and important profile in Salon of Ahlam Ahmed Mahmoud al Al-Jabouri who is now an Iraqi refugee in Syria.

This morning I dropped by the launch of ONE Vote 08, a campaign to raise the profile of global poverty and health in the presidential elections. The ONE Campaign has done a remarkable job raising the profile of these issues generally over the past few years, and in a bipartisan way.

Pete Pace is out, and it’s good for the country.

I spent my morning meeting kids at Barnard Elementary School in D.C.’s Petworth neighborhood. I talked a bit about the problems I care about and learned a good deal about the problems they see as relevant to them.

President Bush just appointed former Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman to serve a five-year term on the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council. Mehlman wins a few points in my book for trying to expand the reach of the Republican Party and perform genuine outreach to minority communities.

I’ve just spent a morning meeting the dynamic and extremely impressive Mayor of San Francisco Gavin Newsom — followed by a talk I gave (but can’t report on) in the most famous lion’s den of movement conservatives about the positives and negatives of President Bush’s foreign policy efforts.

And the word is 30 months in prison and a fine of $250,000. Obstruction of federal investigations is serious. I do feel somewhat badly for Libby in this — as he’s clearly taking much of the heat for this to protect Cheney, who many think should be paying the fine and doing the time.

Applied Materials, the largest semiconductor equipment manufacturer in the world is getting into the business of clean technology and clean energy.

One of the things that few people know about James Wolfensohn is that when he served as Special Emissary of the Quartet in Palestine/Israel matters, Wolfensohn put his own private money on the table to help fund infrastructure and to help Palestinian businesses ship strawberries to Europe.