I am in Los Angeles this morning and was drawn to two op-eds that ran in today’s Los Angeles Times, one by Richard Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations and the other by journalist Robert Fisk, Middle East correspondent of Britain’s The Independent.

The Washington Note was the first to get out the news that Douglas Holtz-Eakin was leaving his post to accept a position at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Anne Gearan’s interesting piece on Condi Rice yesterday got me thinking about what structurally is enhancing or constraining the Secretary of State’s success.

Merry Christmas & Happy Holidays! Oakley and I wish you a fantastic holiday weekend. I’m working with my new Apple Powerbook and appreciate all of the advice from knowledgable Mac practitioners. While Oakley has the blue ball, it seems that my powerbook does have the blue tooth — so many things are possible.

Greetings and happy Friday TWN readers. I just bought a new Apple Powerbook G4 to move me into 2006, and this is a real departure from the Dell Inspiron I had which had two hard disks and four keyboards go out on me in 20 months.

Besides holiday gift shopping, which I still do too much of on foot rather than on-line, I have been digging into as much detail as possible on the so-called “Bush Bombing Memo” that recounts George Bush’s conversation with UK Prime Minister Tony Blair about bombing Al-Jazeera‘s headquarters.

I have to admit that I have not spent a lot of time thinking about the succession scenarios in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, currently headed by John Negroponte.

(photo credit: The Australian) Many analysts of President Bush’s speech on Iraq last night noted that he has stopped insisting that things could hardly be better in Iraq and that victory was around the corner. He acknowledged high costs of America’s Iraq effort and slightly flirted with realism.

Although I have yet to read a full transcript of tonight’s BBC interview with Colin Powell, a report on the former Secretary of State’s comments tracks with Lawrence Wilkerson’s impressions of a Rumsfeld-Cheney cabal at the White House.

I returned a few days ago from Israel, and it became very clear to me that both Israeli and Palestinian politics are on the verge of major tectonic shifts.