Vice President Cheney has come out of the shadows to defend his role as hardliner-in-chief in the so-called “war on terror.

It’s taken a bit of doing. I flew into Chicago. Connecting flight to Cedar Rapids was cancelled. Told there were no more flights until tomorrow. Rented the last car they had available for a one-way trip to Iowa City. Drove four hours.

When I recently met Mohammed Khatami, Iran’s former President, one of the first things he said was no one more than Iran applauded the fall of Saddam Hussein and the routing of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Truth in advertising. I consider myself a friend of Eli Lake. He’s a hard-working journalist whose sympathies are with the neoconservatives, but he doesn’t let them get away with vapid thinking or positions that are completely beyond sensibility.

(Oakley the Amazing Weimaraner is going to miss his traveling dad) Marwan Kraidy of American University and I are going to be spending time in Iowa and Wisconsin the next couple of days.

The first ever public assembly of ALL candidates to succeed Kofi Annan as UN Secretary General will shortly be announced. (Well, TWN is actually announcing their event before they are. . .

This is seriously interesting — and just demonstrates how rich the blogosphere can be. A reader of The Washington Note who is in the UAV business was watching a YouTube video of an F16 flying with the “Hunter UAV payload.” I recommend you turn your volume down when you watch the clip.

I had no idea that one of the proliferating political fundraiser ideas out there was getting a bunch of progressive, liberal, democratic, and occasionally dissident Republican voices to offer recipes for cookbooks.

The following is Senator Lincoln Chafee’s letter to Condoleezza Rice, implying in the first paragraph that if a vote had been held on September 7th, Bolton would have received a “no” vote from the Senator. The pdf of the letter is here.

Several well-placed sources close to the Bolton nomination process have reported to me that the Bolton confirmation process is now dead. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is “highly unlikely” to reconsider Bolton’s confirmation again as things now stand. One insider reported, as far as the Committee is concerned, “we consider the confirmation over. It’s dead.