I’m at a foreign policy conference in Kauai today that is going to preempt my posting anything until tonight — but I will be back later today with thoughts on America’s revived bravado vs. China.

With all of the recruiting our military services do among our country’s youth — it is outrageous that the Motion Picture Association of America would try and bar youth from seeing Gunner Palace.

I posted a comment the day before yesterday on a New America Foundation sponsored screening that I helped host (with my colleague Jenny Buntman) of Gunner Palace. There were some interesting folks in the audience, including the mother of one of the memorable characters in Michael Tucker’s documentary.

Glen Fukushima has just been announced President of Airbus Japan. This is huge, earth-shaking news for US-Japan trade types.

A good friend at a local news bureau just shared with me his office’s standard letter for requesting a “hard pass” for access to the White House press corps.

SPC Stuart Wilf is a character that I’m going to have a hard time forgetting. He was one of the soldiers profiled in the documentary, Gunner Palace, soon to be released across the country. He’s from Colorado Springs — and might be President someday.

I just knew that if I posted my travel plans, interesting items would surface. I just learned that the RAND Corporation, one of the biggest think tanks in the world with more than $175 million in annual revenue, has an operation in Doha, Qatar called the RAND-Qatar Policy Institute.

One of the intimidating parts of writing a blog is that if one is lucky, lots of people read it — and those people are scattered pretty far around.

(Feb. 28, 2003 WH press conference on C-SPAN) Eric Boehlert has this piece in Salon that pulls together some super-sleuth reports proving that Jeff Gannon/James Guckert had access to White House press briefings before Talon News was even up and running. Someone helped this guy.

The other day, I was moved by this Colbert King column that made the link betweeen the W.E.B. Du Bois-led civil rights movement at Niagara Falls 100 years ago and the pursuit of equal rights for gays and lesbians and the legalization of same-sex marriage.