Thanks to all of you who signed the Gunner Palace petition requesting that the Motion Picture Association of America revise its “R” rating of the film to “PG-13”. This is a big win for Michael Tucker who shot this documentary and the soldiers whose story he helps tell in their words.

I am just wrapping up an interesting conference in Kauai sponsored by the BMW Foundation which assembled about 50 alumni of the foundation’s various young leaders programs over the last decade. We had a bunch of Russians here, Germans, Chinese, Americans, and some individuals from Singapore, Canada, the Netherlands, and India. Fascinating group of people….

A few weeks ago, I happened to be included at a dinner at the home of the Deputy Chief of Mission of the Singapore Embassy, Susan Sim, who invited a small handful of people together to toast a mutual friend.

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.