Sometimes I just want to write quick-blip reactions to stuff I see out there. Here are some things that caught my attention on the way back from Mexico City today: 1.

Recently, I wrote that “if all things remained equal“, if Karl Rove was indicted in Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation of the Valerie Plame Wilson outing case, Bush’s numbers would fall to 28%.

I’m participating in a conference in Mexico City titled “Prospects for US-Mexico-Cuba E-Engagement” sponsored by the LBJ School of Public Affairs at UT Austin, the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies, and ITAM.

(President George Bush and his pal, former CIA Director Porter Goss) One of the enduring passions of President George H.W. Bush has been the study of national security intelligence and the institutions that support a central intelligence structure inside a liberal democracy. That is right up there as one of President Bush’s dad’s biggest hobbies….

I will be getting into Mexico City late tonight and am returning to Washington on Saturday. I do have TWN readers in Mexico — quite a number of them — but don’t know where they are located. So email me if interested in a blog politics coffee session either Friday afternoon or Saturday morning.

Richard Armitage co-chaired with former Secretary of Defense Harold Brown my very first Council on Foreign Relations study group when I moved to Washington in the mid-1990s. He’s an interesting man — tied deeply into Japan affairs. But truth in advertising — Armitage and I have very different views of Japan’s path to normal nationhood….

The Quartet New York meeting, including its commitment to creating a mechanism to re-start Palestinian assistance, could mark the re-emergence of this international foursome (US, EU, Russia, UN) as a force in Middle East peace.

(European Parliament Member Cem Oezdemir) Recently, I wrote about an important interim report that was issued by a Temporary Committee of the European Parliament investigating the complicity of European governments in illegally collaborating and cooperating with the CIA on secret enemy combatant detention centers and clandestine rendition-related flight traffic.

House Speaker Dennis Hastert is seriously confused about who scores gains and who loses if Michael Hayden is confirmed as successor to Porter Goss as Director of Central Intelligence.

On May 9, 1950, French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman suggested the banding together and rationalization of Western European coal and steel production. This was the spark of the incremental intertwining of sovereignty, currencies, and aspiration into what is now the European Union. The 9th of May is now memorialized as “Europe Day“.