(Flynt Leverett on the “News Hour with Jim Lehrer”) In August and September, I will be helping to organize two major national policy forums — one which will take place in Colorado and the other in the U.S. Senate — roughly titled “Thinking the Unthinkable on Iran”.

Click here to read the “confidential messaging memo” from House Majority Leader John Boehner on all the good stuff that Republican Congressman should “tout” about America’s progress in Iraq. I guess Texas swagger is back.

I’m normally a calm guy. There are few times when I get so angry that I want to put my fist through a wall, but not learning from one’s errors in matters of peace and war and life and death is one of them.

Today at 3:30 pm at the New America Foundation, I will be chairing a session with former Republican political strategist and author Kevin Phillips whose book American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century garnered enormous attention this past year.

I’m headed back to DC from a very interesting evening in New York where I got to hang out for a while in the plush and exotic “The Core Club” — an ultra-chic watering hole for people who have seriously large monetary endowments. (The Core Club’s official site is here.

Europe seems to have been caught giving a nod and a wink in the dark to the CIA policy referred to in media circles as ‘extraordinary rendition’. Fourteen European states colluded with the CIA in secret US flights ferrying terror suspects around the world, according a report published last week by Europe’s human rights watchdog….

Well, nearly. I’m back in the country and about to talk with Brian Lehrer on New York’s public radio network at 10 a.m. Eastern this morning.

As Robert Borosage, co-Director of the Campaign for America’s Future, argues in The Nation’s current issue, “the current rage in center-right Democratic circles is to resuscitate Harry Truman, substitute bin Laden for Stalin and jihadism for Communism, and summon America to a new global struggle.

“I think the jury is still out on WMD.” — Rep. Curt Weldon (R-PA) Weldon, responding to challenger Joseph Sestak, retired Navy admiral, is taking faith-based reality to new highs (lows). Check it out: Delco Times.

Whether you’ve seen Al Gore’s film or not, you probably know by now that the carbon-based energy system we built last century is royally messing up our planet’s built-in thermostat — promising all kinds of nasty consequences unless we kick our response into high gear.