The New York Times has run three letters today in response to Michael Lind’s and my recent op-ed, “How to Lose the Brain Race.” My friend Dean Baker, Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and a new blogger at “Beat the Press“, sent one of the three published responses.

I’ve received some flack from TWN readers about part of last night’s gathering with Legal Advisor to the Secretary of State John Bellinger being on the record — and part off.

I have been a bit crazed today assembling a dinner discussion that will take place tonight with John Bellinger, Legal Adviser to the Secretary of State.

When I moved to Washington in the fall of 1994, I got to know the then Ambassador from Turkmenistan to the United States. Turkmenistan had been part of the former Soviet Union, and after it became its own country and set up its Embassy in Washington, few paid much attention to Turkmenistan or its Ambassador….

(American flag flying at La Marcha in Washington, DC; photo credit: Alexander Steffler) I’m still trying to get my head around the concept of an “Open Thread” which some who comment on this blog have encouraged me to provide on occasion.

Michael Lind and I have an article in the New York Times this morning challenging Senator Dianne Feinstein’s and the U.S. Congress’s tilt on immigration policies, particularly her wrong-headed position in creating yet a higher hurdle than already exists for foreign students entering the United States.

Nir Rosen, a fellow at the New America Foundation who is also affiliated with the American Strategy Program which I direct, has just published a Robert Kaplan-esque treatment in the Boston Review of what he sees unfolding in Iraq.

Currently, there are a couple of U.S. government officials who have been charged, prosecuted, and/or ordered to serve prison time because they were involved in leaks of national security information.

I am moderating a session tomorrow from 12 noon until 2 p.m. at the new America Foundation in Washington with Daniel Levy, who is the Israeli version of a “Texas Twister” on the Israel-Palestine debate.

I was writing a post on Cynthia McKinney’s theatrics, but the news has been gushing in that President Bush authorized the “leaking” of secret information to the media. From my quick review, the most authoritative and I think the first writer to break the news was Joshua Gerstein at the New York Sun.