Last night, I read through an interesting set of papers prepared by the left-lurching Institute for Policy Studies. One of the papers, the titles of which I don’t have with me here at my neighborhood Starbucks (but will post later), was about the “true costs of the Iraq War.

Iraq Prime Minister Allawi knows his town and cautioned a handful of red and blue state senators to move out of harm’s way near the window of his own office. This appeared in today’s Washington Times: Nowhere is safe Sen.

I can think of dozens of highly placed Republicans who could have been constructive participants in the secret Kofi Annan counseling session. Warren Hoge disclosed the December 5 meeting today in a New York Times report. If anyone hears who leaked the story to him, let me know.

Frank Rich captures the point I have been trying for some time to make.

A TWN reader just directed my attention to a very clever roster of New Year’s resolution wishes that ran as the lead editorial in today’s Los Angeles Times.

Josh Marshall has an interesting post today on asset-building. He is praising Harold Ford, Jr. (D-TN-9) for his work on an asset-building effort called the “ASPIRE ACT.

My new year would be somewhat happier if President Bush became a magnanimous leader who committed himself to doing whatever it took to build national and global trust and to decrease fear in the world. Probably won’t happen.

Since Christmas night, when I first heard of the massive earthquake off of Indonesia and that several hundred people might have been killed by a massive tsunami, I have watched the numbers climb.

Here is an interesting write-up by Hamid Mir, a well-known Pakistani journalist and editor who has interviewed Osama bin Laden four times. Mir was also speaker at the Al Qaeda 2.0 Conference that I recently helped organize with colleague Peter Bergen and Karen Greenberg, Executive Director of the NYU Center on Law & Security.

I have been through a number of scary earthquakes, including two relatively big ones in Los Angeles, a couple in Tokyo and one in Alaska. But nothing compares to a 9.0 quake.