Last August, Dan Froomkin published this interesting visual of the real West Wing floor plan — and a roster of who sits most closely to the President of the United States on a daily basis.

Ahmed Chalabi has surfaced after a long period of silence in Iraq. He appeared at a news conference to announce that some of those “purged” from government positions have been allowed back into Iraqi government staff jobs. This is a couple of years too late in my view — but it’s a start.

Congratulations to Charles Ferguson and Alex Gibney — whose extraordinary important new film, No End in Sight was among those recognized with a prize at the closing festivities of the Sundance Film Festival.

A close friend of mine, Nobuo Tanaka, is the Executive Director-elect of the International Energy Agency. I didn’t know much about the agency until I flipped through its website and found quite a number of useful resources on global energy use and climate change related data.

The Gulf States with Saudi Arabia in the lead are scrambling to figure out what to do if American power in the Middle East continues to dissipate. One of the tools in their tool kit is to quietly over-supply crude oil into the global market and knock prices down.

A friend sent me this interesting Los Angeles Times article on Barack Obama’s ability to bridge right and left when he ascended to the editorship of the Harvard Law Review. But then I went to Obama’s pre-campaign site and then looked at Hillary’s pre-campaign site. These are technically “exploratory committee” websites.

(Bushehr Nuclear Reactor facility) Over the last two years, Iran has played a shrewd diplomatic hand. It has negotiated with the Europeans and continued to do business deals with China and Russia.

I haven’t posted a follow up piece on the broader parts of the President’s State of the Union Address — beyond this foreign policy essay — and I haven’t posted on Senator Chuck Hagel’s impressive and courageous leadership on the Iraq War Resolution this week, as well as Senator Biden’s leadership — because I have…

President Bush 41 has given a number of speeches this past year — one recently at the Germany Embassy — but in lots of other places where he goes out of his way to praise the team of people he had around him, particularly Brent Scowcroft, James Baker, and a few others.

This was a nice surprise yesterday. The Washington Note received a terrific write-up in the new Hill newspaper, Politico that has hired so many high-powered DC political writers away from the Washington Post and other publications — including John Harris and Jim VandeHei.