My friend and colleague Peter Bergen is headed back from Saudi Arabia’s first international terrorism conference in Riyadh. He writes: In the sprawling desert city where Osama bin Laden was born almost half a century ago, last week the Saudis held their first international counterterrorism conference.

Josh Marshall gave me the nudge to start my own blog and then moved off to New York where he has been ferociously battling Bush’s Social Security privatization campaign. But though I talk to Josh a lot, email him, and do a lot of instant messaging, I haven’t actually seen him in a while.

Something is up in Asia. North Korea finally, overtly acknowledges it has nuclear warheads — and Japan announces it wants to cut what it spends supporting U.S. forces on its islands. Japan apparently plans to tell the U.S.

Note to TWN Readers: I’m not a funny guy, and I tell jokes badly.

These almost sound like John Grisham titles — but they are respectively the new London Review of Books article ‘title’ on the future of the Supreme Court I recommended a few days ago — and mention of the author, Bruce Ackerman. It’s a very instructive and important article. Here is the link.

$720 billion for that drug benefit through 2015? The cost was already too high at $400 billion.

I like this thoughtful, long expose by Marty Sieff on what Dean’s takeover of the Democratic Party helm means for Hillary Clinton’s political life. I’m much more of a believer in Dean than most of my friends on both sides of the aisle (and even those in the middle).

The London Review of Books will soon publish one of the best pieces I have read on the politics of the next Supreme Court appointments. Bruce Ackerman basically takes a subtle, game-theoretic approach to thinking through the likely set of choices Bush might make and considers how Democrats and progressives should respond.

When Senators Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) and Jon Corzine (D-N.J.) and Representatives Harold Ford (D-Tn.), Thomas Petri (R-Wis.), Patrick Kennedy (D-R.I.), and Phil English (R-Pa.) are all on the same bill in this humorless Congress where bipartisanship is rare, we should probably see what’s drawing them together.

Chris Nelson’s Nelson Report is just too good not post in its near entirety. (I will not italicize for easier reading) He gives Condi credit on her quick action on the Israeli-Palestinian standoff, but then slams her on Iran and the administration’s absence of strategy regarding nuclear non-proliferation. Chris Nelson hits all the buttons: ***2….