RON ASMUS HAS AN INTERESTING OP-ED IN THE WASHINGTON POST today. Early in his article, he writes: The president proposes something that generations of U.S. diplomats and soldiers fought to prevent and that our adversaries sought unsuccessfully to achieve: radical reduction of U.S. political and military influence on the European and Asian continents.

CNN’S LOU DOBBS IS REPORTING ON THINK TANKS each night this week. He is looking at which tanks are most influential and why — as well as looking at the question of whether non-transparent funding is inappropriately using think tanks to push various agendas. His show is called “Thought Leaders.

WESLEY CLARK AND RICHARD HOLBROOKE ARE MAKING A MISTAKE in their criticism of President Bush’s military realignment plan. Clark went the farthest in a DNC arranged conference call, by saying that the proposal “will significantly undermine U.S. national security.

JOSH MARSHALL AND KEVIN DRUM HAVE BOTH ADDRESSED KERRY’S IRAQ WAR resolution problem — and I don’t really want to pile on.

AFTER 9/11, THERE WAS SO MUCH ANGER AND DEMAND FOR REVENGE that raising questions about how and why a group of highly educated, middle class mostly Saudis would be willing to sacrifice their lives and inflict such horrific damage on America was considered to be unpatriotic.

“THE NEOCONSERVATIVE MOMENT” BY FRANCIS FUKUYAMA is an important new essay in the latest edition of The National Interest. The link only provides an excerpt — but a subscription to this magazine is a cheap price to pay to read what may be the beginnings of a civil war among neoconservatives.

JIM PINKERTON GETS CREDIT for pointing out a fascinating and, one would think, conflicting set of references in the latest Memorandum to Opinion Leaders by the Project for the New American Century‘s Gary Schmitt.

JOSH MARSHALL DOES NOT NEED REFERRALS from my site. I owe him a great deal for giving the world some notice of what I’ve been doing. That said, I really like his post today exploring the ethics of journalistic discretion about sources.

THE IRS SHOULD DISENFRANCHISE CHURCHES that comply with the Republican National Committee’s requests to turn over parish rosters and contact information. The blurring of the lines between the religious and the secular didn’t start with the Bush administration, but they have certainly taken this to new heights of sophistication and systemization.

TO GET TO MY SMALL VACATION CABIN at Deep Creek Lake, Maryland — right at the very tip of the Maryland pan handle and bordering West Virginia and Pennsylvania, I drive through the Allegheny mountain town of Cumberland, Maryland.